That’s a hard thing to say, and I mean it in the most constructive way possible.
Training officers work incredibly hard. The number of hours spent building slide decks, tracking compliance, chasing sign-in sheets, and trying to squeeze 40 hours of content into a department that only gives you 20 is genuinely exhausting. Nobody gets into training because they want to burn out. But somewhere along the way, the lecture became the default — and the default stopped working.
Here’s what I see in fire departments across the country: a 30-slide PowerPoint that could be a five-minute conversation. A two-hour hazmat class where firefighters are fighting to keep their eyes open by minute 45. A company officer who built something technically accurate, checked all the boxes, and watched it land like a rock in still water. No engagement. No retention. No behavior change on the fireground.
And then those same training officers blame the firefighters.
The Real Problem with Passive Learning
There’s a principle in adult education called the “Cone of Experience,” traced back to educator Edgar Dale. Whether or not you’re familiar with the research, you’ve probably felt the truth of it: people remember dramatically more of what they do than what they merely hear.
Firefighters are no different — except the stakes are higher. When we train passively, we’re not just producing bored students. We’re producing people who have technically sat through training on a topic but lack the neural encoding that comes from actually working through a problem. When the real incident arrives, that passive knowledge doesn’t activate the way practiced knowledge does.
The lecture isn’t inherently bad. Lectures can be powerful when they’re short, focused, and embedded in a larger learning experience that includes application. The problem is when the lecture is the learning experience — when we front-load information, hope for questions, administer a multiple-choice test, and call it trained.
That approach might satisfy a compliance checkbox. It doesn’t build competence.
Why Training Officers Default to Lecture
Let’s be honest about why this happens. It’s not laziness (usually). It’s math.
A training officer managing a department’s entire training program, including calendars, records, lesson plans, compliance documentation, live evolutions, skills verification, and doing so with maybe one other person on staff, or doing it solo on top of other duties, doesn’t have infinite bandwidth for curriculum design. The same is true for the company officer. Even when the responsibility is tied to a smaller group – a single company or station – the amount of free time doesn’t suddenly increase because the rank decreased.
Building an interactive scenario that engages multiple methods of learning takes time. It takes knowing instructional design principles. It takes the ability to translate content into exercises, tabletop scenarios, image-based activities, and discussion prompts. Many training officers were promoted because they were good firefighters and officers, not because they have a background in adult learning.
So, they build what they can build. They build slides. They add a video if they can find one. They hand out the PowerPoint slides. They do the best they can with what they have. The problem isn’t effort. The problem is time and tools.
What Changes When You Have a Force Multiplier
I’ve been spending a serious amount of time using AI to redesign training — not as a gimmick, not as a replacement for subject matter expertise, but as a force multiplier, a way to take back time, as a way for instructors who already know their content and need help building delivery that matches it. The results and student feedback have genuinely changed the way I think about what’s possible.
I’ve used this example a few times because it shows the biggest impact: Take a 314-slide presentation for a hazmat technician chapter. The content was solid but bloated, redundant, and relied exclusively on traditional lecture. The knowledge behind the original was legitimate. But 314 slides is only a lecture, not a contributing member of the program or course. It tells people things. It doesn’t build competence.
Using AI as a tool in the redesign, that course came down to 160 slides — not by cutting content, but by converting it. Information that was previously delivered as bullet points became group exercises. Terminology slides became image-based identification activities. Passive review became scenario-driven discussion. The learning objectives didn’t change. The delivery changed completely.
The time it took to do that redesign? A fraction of what it would have taken without AI.
Time: That’s what I want imstructors to understand. AI doesn’t know your department. It doesn’t know your hazards, your response district, your crew’s experience level, or your department’s training culture. You know those things. What AI does is take your direction and your content and help you build better delivery — faster.
It drafts lesson plan frameworks. It generates scenarios. It helps you turn an SOP into a tabletop exercise. It formats training calendars, program documents, and administrative tools that previously took hours or days.
The instructor is still the expert. AI is the accelerant.
The Decision Framework That Matters
Not every slide needs to become an activity. Not every piece of content translates cleanly to scenario-based learning. Part of what makes AI-assisted curriculum building or redesign work is developing judgment about when to convert content and what to convert it into.
There are roughly three decisions you’re making for any given block of content:
- Keep and tighten. Some information genuinely needs to be delivered directly. Regulatory frameworks, definitions with legal implications, incident statistics that frame the problem — these have a place in direct instruction. The question is whether they’re taking three slides to do the job of one.
- Convert. Procedural content — anything that describes a process, sequence, or decision — almost always performs better as a scenario, exercise, or demonstration than as a list of bullets. If the learning objective includes the word “apply” or “demonstrate,” lecture delivery is probably the wrong vehicle.
- Build from scratch. Sometimes the content exists but the activity doesn’t. Sometimes the lesson plan has a clear gap where firefighters need to practice a skill or work through a realistic problem, but nobody has built that exercise yet. This is where AI shines — generating scenario variations, building tabletop setups, drafting realistic incident narratives that anchor abstract content.
This isn’t a complicated process but it requires someone to actually decide, to be intentional, about how training is structured rather than defaulting to the slide deck that already exists.
The Expectations Aren’t Going Down
Here’s the uncomfortable reality for every training officer reading this: the volume of training demands is increasing. It’s always increased and it will continue to increase. New NFPA standards, updated hazmat guidance, and mental health and wellness requirements. Add documentation expectations that have expanded significantly in the post-accountability era and the industrial departments add layers of OSHA regulatory compliance on top of everything else.
No one is adding staff to meet those demands
That means doing more with what you have, or falling behind. And falling behind in training isn’t an abstract problem that might happen — it shows up as inadequate preparation, certification gaps, and eventually, someone getting hurt doing something they weren’t truly ready to do.
This is the environment where AI tools stop being an interesting option and start being a practical necessity. Not because AI solves everything. It doesn’t. But because training officers who learn to work with these tools will build better training in less time than those who don’t. The gap between them is only going to widen.
A Practical Starting Point
If you want to start applying this right now, here’s where I’d suggest beginning:
- Take one lesson in your current training inventory — ideally one you’ve delivered multiple times and know well. Pull out the learning objectives. Then ask yourself: what does a firefighter need to be able to do as a result of this training, not just what do they need to know?
- Take two or three of your purely informational slides and describe that content to an AI tool. Ask it to turn that content into a group discussion scenario, a case study, or a tabletop exercise. See what comes back. Refine it. Improve it. Make it yours.
That’s the workflow. Small, iterative, instructor-led. The technology does the lifting. You provide the judgment.
Your firefighters deserve training that builds real competence. Your schedule deserves tools that help you get there. Both things are available now — you just have to start.
For more AI actions you can implement today check out these fire service resources: