AI-Enhanced Continuing Professional Development: A Cross-Sector Thematic Synthesis

Artificial intelligence is transforming continuing professional development (CPD) across education, healthcare, workplace learning, and professional services. However, scholarly literature on this topic remains fragmented across sector-specific conversations. This paper presents a thematic synthesis of 29 purposively selected scholarly studies published between 2021 and 2026. Because the corpus was supplied for review rather than retrieved through an independent database search, the study is framed as a thematic synthesis rather than a PRISMA-style systematic review. After screening for duplicates and non-research documents, the final sample was analysed through descriptive coding and thematic synthesis. Four interdependent findings emerge. First, AI-enhanced CPD is increasingly personalised, feedback-rich, and competency-oriented, particularly in teacher development and clinical training. Second, these gains depend critically on psychological mechanisms — including professional beliefs, self-efficacy, motivation, and identity — that determine whether adaptive feedback drives genuine practice change or mere compliance. Third, these psychological conditions are shaped by relational and organisational infrastructure, including coaching, leadership, social capital, and communities of practice, explaining why similar tools yield sustainable development in some settings but only episodic experimentation in others. Fourth, trust, governance, explainability, and privacy function as upstream design constraints, not downstream compliance considerations, as poorly governed AI directly undermines the agency and relational conditions underpinning the other three findings. The review concludes that AI performs best as a complement to human judgement, reflective practice, and collaborative learning. Accordingly, the paper proposes the Capability–Agency–Relational Support–Ethics (CARE) framework as a diagnostic and propositional tool for designing and evaluating future AI-enhanced CPD initiatives.