Shadow L&D and the Sovereign Learner: OEB Announces Patrik Hedljung for its Corporate Learning Plenary Session

Every generation of workplace learning has had its blind spot, and every generation has called it something different. In 2016, researchers were tracking a quiet insurgency of self-directed learners bypassing the LMS for Google and YouTube. A decade on, with generative AI sitting in every employee’s pocket, that insurgency has a name, Shadow L&D, and OEB 2026 is putting it centre stage.

The conference’s corporate learning plenary in Berlin this December will ask a question the profession has spent a decade avoiding: what happens when we stop treating the sovereign learner as a risk to be managed and start treating them as a resource to be worked with? It’s a fitting companion to OEB’s wider 2026 theme of Sovereign Learning, which examines how education and organisations can strengthen human agency rather than quietly erode it as intelligent systems take on more of the thinking.

Joining the conversation is Patrik Hedljung, AI Catalyst at Scania, the Swedish commercial vehicle manufacturer navigating one of the more demanding transformations in European industry. Patrik’s career began in HR and leadership development before pivoting into IT and, more recently, into a role with a deceptively simple brief: closing the gap between AI as a personal shortcut and AI as an organisational muscle that Scania can rely on collectively, not just in pockets.

That distinction sits at the very heart of the plenary’s argument. Hand a team of thirty people the same powerful AI tool and, left to their own devices, you can just as easily end up with thirty separate sprints heading nowhere near each other, each one faster, none of them aligned. Hedljung’s work at Scania lives inside that tension daily. Rather than mandating tools from the top down, he has built his approach around identifying the influencers and early adopters already embedded within teams, then using their credibility to spread adoption organically. It is, in effect, an attempt to make Shadow L&D visible and useful rather than driving it further underground, treating the behaviour not as something to police, but as intelligence about where the organisation’s real learning needs lie.

He has been candid, too, about what doesn’t change even as the technology accelerates. Scania’s priority, he has said, is not to reduce headcount but to help the same team produce more and better, a reminder that behind every AI adoption curve sits a workforce watching closely to see whether the shift is being done to them or with them. It is precisely the choice the OEB plenary wants to interrogate: collaboration versus control, sovereignty versus centralisation, and whether L&D can finally learn from a decade of ignoring what its own workforce has been telling it.

Hedljung will be one of several voices on stage, each bringing a different vantage point on the same fault line. OEB isn’t promising a tidy consensus. It’s promising practitioners who have each watched the sovereign learner emerge from inside their own organisations, and who have too much invested in the outcome to settle for easy agreement.

The corporate learning plenary takes place at OEB 2026, running from 2 to 4 December at the InterContinental Berlin.