The Doing Business in Bentonville Podcast
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The Doing Business in Bentonville Podcast
Ep. 92 - AI-Powered Learning: The Last Mile of Workforce Training
What happens when you combine cutting-edge AI with proven learning science? Sasha Seymour, a former UNC basketball walk-on turned entrepreneur, reveals how his company Learn to Win is revolutionizing workforce training across industries.
The traditional approach to training—passive slide decks, outdated manuals, and knowledge stuck in subject matter experts' heads—simply doesn't deliver results in today's rapidly evolving workplace. Learn to Win's AI-powered platform transforms static content into interactive learning experiences that dramatically accelerate time-to-productivity while reducing costly errors and turnover.
Sasha shares remarkable success stories from diverse environments: how Nolan Transportation Group cut onboarding time from six weeks to two while reducing new hire churn by over 30%; how Michigan Football used the platform hours before winning their national championship; and how manufacturing teams at Ping Golf maintain consistent quality standards across global facilities in multiple languages.
With over $34 million in funding and clients ranging from the Seattle Seahawks to the Department of Defense (where they're certified for secret-level training), Learn to Win is addressing what Sasha calls "the last mile" of training—the critical, company-specific knowledge that can't be purchased off-the-shelf.
Perhaps most fascinating is how advances in AI are transforming the company's capabilities. Soon, training leaders will simply provide source documents and desired outcomes, with AI handling everything from content creation to competency validation.
As workforces become increasingly deskless and distributed post-COVID, this approach to knowledge transfer represents not just an improvement on traditional methods, but a fundamental reimagining of how organizations build and maintain competitive advantage through their people.
Ready to transform how your team learns critical knowledge? Discover how AI-powered active learning could revolutionize your training approach.
Welcome to Season 2. Doing Business in Benville with the Whisker and Warehouse Warriors, harvey, you got to remember. Yeah, there we go, the big W and Harvey. First question before we introduce our guest is in all honesty, do you ever think we'd make it to a Season 2? I need you to really reach deep down and figure that one out.
Speaker 2:For our thousands of fans out there that were filing their way into my inbox. Thank you for the love, Absolutely. We knew there was a season two baked into season one.
Speaker 1:I mean, listen, I was with you at the airport and somebody came up and goes that's harvey williams from the whisker warehouse warriors, can I get an autograph? And I go, wow, like this, we were in china. I mean like the global landscape. I mean sasha, I'm making a hundred percent of this up, of course.
Speaker 3:I mean I was honored to get the invite to the whiskey warriors, uh well, I don't know what was the name. You guys were doing a w signal.
Speaker 1:I didn't know what to do all right, sasha, if it was the whiskey warriors, we'd be all. It's the whiskered like. Notice the beer, the whiskered, the whiskered. I didn't get the invite for that. I shaved yesterday and you didn't come prepared, you, you, you were whisker less, but any uh, any proprietors of whiskey out there like to sponsor us?
Speaker 2:we'll change the name. Give us a call.
Speaker 1:We'll change the name. We'll be the whiskey warriors. I mean I'd happily do that if somebody, like if jim beam, wanted to come in and and be our sponsors. Harvey, right, I mean we could retire from plug and play and be full-time podcasters jim jack.
Speaker 3:If you're listening, uh, and you have supply chain problems, give us a call I mean if, if, if you gave me the data I mean I could pass it along to our marketing team Maybe you could be the Learn to Win Whiskey Warriors.
Speaker 1:That's a great segue. It's got a lot of Ws in it. It's a great segue. So, sasha, we're excited to have you kick off Season 2, the CEO and founder of Learn to Win and I do have to comment, and you did pay me to comment on this, but we are finishing the March Madness season here and you got your North Carolina hoodie on, or I can't tell if that's a quarter zip, but you did play basketball for them, right? I mean, not only do you have a great brand and a great business, which we'll cover, but you're a D1 college basketball athlete, which is part of the reason why I like you so much.
Speaker 3:Yeah, a. I was a walk-on for the tarheels in 2014 to 2015, which was a phenomenal life experience for me. I was a long time tarheels fan growing up. My dad went to carolina, uh, and so I always grew up watching the tarheels and it was a childhood dream come true to make the team um so from a basketball perspective it's always tricky, uh, because people hear that I played for north carolina and think that I'm like michael jordan.
Speaker 3:I have to counsel them that I'm like somewhere between like the baddest dude at the ymca, like I, I will, I will come in and and dominate on your rec league, but I'm not like, uh, I'm not an nj over here.
Speaker 1:I pick you up on my team for pickup any day of the week. Um, who were the? Who were the notable uh nba players that were on the team with you at the time?
Speaker 3:Yeah, let's see, harrison Barnes was a year ahead of me at Chapel Hill. I didn't play with him directly, but he obviously played in the NBA for quite some time. Let's see the years that I played. So in 15 was when I graduated. The real stars were Marcus Page, bryce Johnson, that crew, the real stars were Marcus Page, bryce Johnson that crew.
Speaker 3:In 16, we lost in the national championship to Villanova, which was a heartbreaker for me. I was in some game. Yeah, I was in Ireland at the time. I was playing here professional basketball and then studying on a Mitchell fellowship and I was actually traveling to Scotland. Uh, and I.
Speaker 3:The game was on at like three, 4. Am and I couldn't get the the wifi to work in the hotel that I was staying at. So I had to go across the street to steal the other hotels wifi, but I couldn't get in the building. So I was standing underneath the awning and, like the pouring rain, uh, listening to the game on my headphones and like this kind of scattered Wi Fi was like three, 4am and when ultimately, the Villanova shot happened, it was yeah, it was. It was one of the darkest moments of my life. It feels like an uncomfortable thing to say but it was really just a sad time, but then at 17, we won it all. And so you could say either from a from that perspective, either the team got much better as soon as I left, or there was just phenomenal senior mentorship uh I mean, well, glass half full.
Speaker 1:I mean it had to be because of your mentorship, right?
Speaker 3:I mean, that's the way I'm looking at it yeah, the guys who played on that team would be like joel berry, uh, justin jackson, theo pinson, uh, isaiah hicks, uh, really, really talented guys and really good people as well, too. I consider myself very fortunate to have been a part of it.
Speaker 2:Josh, has your doctor cleared you to play basketball yet after you blew all the ligaments in your knee?
Speaker 1:Yeah, sasha, I'm recovering from a meniscus and ACL tear and, at my elevated age, you guys are not quite there yet. I'm still one more month removed from from clearance to get back on the court. So, um, I was a scrappy point guard back in my day, sasha, but clearly not I can.
Speaker 3:I was like we've only met like once or twice and I could.
Speaker 1:I could see the grit, you know yeah, I was a, I was a take the charge guy, I'm a screen setter, I'm a, I'm a pick and roll feed in the post you really feel the work, kind of guy I can tell yeah, you give me an open three. I'll likely not throw up an air ball, maybe hit the rim a couple times, but yeah, those days are well well behind me pickleball and badminton from here on out for josh year on out so, harvard, we created our own icebreaker.
Speaker 1:Today, we talked about uh, sports with with sasha, but sasha, let's get into it like, learn to win, give us the, give us the overview of the company and and I want to start with like, why you founded this and what was the, the impetus for bringing this to life.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so maybe start with the overview itself. We're an AI training platform. Ultimately, our specialty is taking passive learning materials that may be in PowerPoint, pdfs, et cetera, or sitting in the brains of static matter experts. We have an AI tool that can very quickly convert that into active learning material, very similar to like a Rosetta Stone or Duolingo type of learning. That's backed by a lot of the latest in sort of underlying data science and learning science, and then we have an analytics suite to give you data and insight into what your teams are getting right and getting wrong, so you can very quickly adjust and change to fit those changing knowledge of what your teams know and what they don't know.
Speaker 3:We have raised a little over 34 million dollars. We're based in uh, california, plug and play. Where is one of our investors in our series? A shout out yep, yep, uh. We uh, let's see have over 100 different organizations that use our product across the spectrum from sort of uh, large fortune 500 organizations, several of them like four or five that are actually plug and play companies that plug and play introduced us to they're resolved one of their problems, um, to the department of defense. We've got about 35 different customers across the air force, space force, navy and marine corps. We're actually certified to do training up to impact level six so we can do secret level training on our software.
Speaker 3:Um, to professional sports teams uh, we actually signed the seattle seahawks yesterday, which was fun, wow, yeah, but we do. We do everything from nfl teams to the pg tour does all their training on our software. To last year when michigan football was, uh was using our, went on the national championship. They were actually using our tool three or four hours before game time, uh, which was a really fun national championship. They were actually using our tool three or four hours before game time, which was a really fun thing for me. They were actually our second customer and to watch them get to the point where they're using it right before a national championship game was really fun. So that's an overview of the company holistically. I think that's actually a pretty good segue into our kind of origin story as well too.
Speaker 2:So real quick. Are you training the refs as well? I think a lot of our listeners would like to learn how are we helping the refs?
Speaker 3:uh, it's a great question. We mostly focus on player training, uh, and then for the pga tour, we actually do all their volunteer training, uh. For, for the nfl, we actually have a initial pilot where we are starting to train some of their junior refs. So, uh, if, if you have issues with the referees, that is, uh, that is not not currently learned to win's problem, but hopefully we will be a part of the solution having, I'll say this, having seen some of the initial work we've started doing with the nfl, they have some really serious training programs for what they go through and it is not an easy job. So I know there's lots of folks who are like this guy should be better, that guy should be better. But these guys are super serious professionals and I have, from what I have seen, they take it really seriously.
Speaker 2:Well, it's part of the sport. Why make it better when you get all the controversy? Yeah, my little tin hat on Josh. There's a conspiracy. Keep the refs where they are don't put cameras on the goal post. There's a. Why put a sensor in the ball? Anyhow, I digress. Sasha, please continue. Yes, sasha, please continue.
Speaker 3:So I think the the athletics piece is maybe a good part to start with the origin story. So, uh, we mentioned at the start of this podcast that I was a walk-on for the university of north car. For me, absolute child's intrigue come true. And when I made, the team got handed this kind of giant three-ring notebook and called hey, go memorize this, this is going to be your playbook. And I remember taking it back to my dorm room at the time and my roommate at Chapel Hill was our student body president and Andrew's big focus and his big push as student body president was in changing the way that traditional learning was done at the university and he actually got a $10 million grant funded to change some of the styles of how they were teaching and some of his work that he worked on with a professor actually got featured in the New York Times for everything that they were doing and basically the concept behind it is pretty intuitive, but it's basically this idea of bringing active learning into the learning process. So ultimately, going from I professor, stand up and talk to you for an hour and a half and that's ultimately how you learn to much more of you get a little bit of information and then you might get a quiz question to test whether or not you actually understand that information, and then the instructor or the professor gets data into here's what you're getting right, here's what you're getting wrong so they can adjust their teaching methods accordingly. And you kind of repeat that process as you get a little bit more information. Then you work together in a group, you get a little information in the quiz question and the data behind it was really excellent. We're talking like 30 improvement and how it comes across the board for all kinds of students.
Speaker 3:And so Andrew and I said well, what if we could take some of those similar sort of ideas around how you train and how you learn and apply them to this world of highly competitive athletics where there's a really strong incentive to perform better and to win? And so that was the earliest sort of thought process for me and Andrew. He and I went to graduate school at Stanford together and ultimately launched the platform. While we were there, started with athletic programs and really honed a lot of other opportunities for how we could take this type of training and this type of methodology that we developed and apply it to the world of other places. So that's where we shifted from that to the US military, went from there into Fortune 500 companies and really saw the growth that we've seen today. And there's a lot longer story. Oh, it's great Working with the Department of Defense and all of those pieces, but that's the story in a nutshell.
Speaker 1:Josh, I have a clarifying question for you and the Fortune 500 companies. Is this platform meant for? Josh Safran starts a new job at Company A and this is your onboarding, or Josh Safran's with the company three to five years and I got promoted to a new job, or is it both? Both?
Speaker 3:So where we work with large organizations and large companies is what we like to call the last mile of training and learning. And so if there's two different types of knowledge that really drive performance in an organization, there's what we might call standard knowledge, and I'll give an example for a sales team. If I'm a sales team, I need to know how to speak confidently, effectively. I need to know sales 101. I need to know maybe the Sandler sales method, something along those lines, and that kind of information is really important for me to do my job well. But you can buy that off the shelf. You can get that from Coursera, you can get that from LinkedIn. Somebody has developed that somewhere in a really good format.
Speaker 3:Where we at Learn to Win tend to work is what we call this last mile of training and learning, and it's the stuff in your organization that you cannot buy off the shelf. Again, let's go back to the example of a sales team. You can't buy the differentiators between your product and somebody else's product from a Coursera. That cannot be purchased somewhere else. You can't buy here's how we use Salesforce in our particular way or our particular method off the shelf. You can't buy here's our unique value proposition or here's how you understand this particular industry off the shelf. It has to be developed internally and a lot of that information is sitting in PowerPoints, it's sitting in PDFs. It might be sitting in some sort of broader company corporate learning system that might house the information really well but isn't really designed to actually be an effective teacher of the information. And what we do a really really good job of at Word2win is we take that information and we can build it faster than anybody else can. We've got basically our AI tool that we've honed from years and years of working with the Department of Defense and other places to take that material, build it in our platform really quickly. We also do it in a highly secure way because we are accredited to do this up to impact level six with the Department of Defense. We put it in a format that makes it really easy for folks to learn. It's accessible on their cell phones or tablets, et cetera. We're working on a project where we're actually going to make it available in disconnected environments. So you're in a place where maybe there's a low connectivity Wi-Fi. We'll be able to do that Ideally in the next.
Speaker 3:I won't give product timelines on a podcast, but like ideally soon. And then this is the part that I think most of our customers are really excited about we spend a lot of time ultimately giving you data and insight into what actually moves the needle for your team and what are the things that they're understanding and not understanding, so you can very quickly address those gaps in their knowledge, things that they might be saying that are incorrect or might be causing mistakes or making you lose sales or, in the case of our manufacturing partners, might be causing mistakes down the line because somebody doesn't understand the process correctly, or might be causing them to leave their job because they're not performing well, because they don't feel confident in what they're doing. We give you those data and as analytics, and we are sort of working towards a future where we can sort of automatically create content that would actually address those gaps very, very quickly. Work with company.
Speaker 1:A. You're taking existing training materials that's sitting in a binder or in a PDF or PowerPoint, and then you're utilizing AI to automate the process. You're not building new content for them, You're not teaching how to do the training and creating content. You're taking existing content that may be a little bit more archaic and modernizing it for the workforce. Is that?
Speaker 3:fair. Yes, that's correct, Though there are some scenarios in which somebody may say, like we know we need to create this. Can your team help? And we do have a professional services team as well as partners that we work with that can help them actually build and create it. So we've built full academies for folks out of things that they're like. This is really important. This is really critical. We need somebody to create this type of academy for us and we will come in and actually do that. But the majority of the time we're taking pre-existing material they have that is not particularly effective and not getting the job done and is not outcomes driven and helping them get that training to the point where it is actually moving metrics that matter at their organization.
Speaker 2:So what's the message that's resonating when you're pitching this to a prospective customer? Are you saying like we're going to condense that time to productivity for a new hire that's coming onto the sales team? We're going to shorten that time it takes for them to reach quota, whether it's nine months normally. Usually our customers see it in the first three to six months. Is that the pitch? Or, like, how are you quantifying the ROI for your customers? Is that?
Speaker 3:the pitch or like how are you quantifying the ROI for your customers? Yeah, that's a great question, so I'll give. I'll give an example. We started working with Nolan Transportation Group. They're one of the largest freight brokers in the United States. They, when they hire sort of a new hire start class it might be 100 200 new sales reps that are coming into their organization. Prior to working with Learn2Win, they had I think it was a five-week, six-week onboarding process where they were bringing new sales reps in and putting them through their training how to be a freight broker, how to sell, what's the unique value proposition that they need, what is it is the freight industry, all those different pieces. And they were setting them out and their churn rate over the course of six months for those reps was something like 47, 48%. And then it was roughly taking. They track a metric that they call time to productivity, which is how long does it take for that new hire start class to become cash ROI passive? And for them it was about 13 months.
Speaker 3:We came in, we looked at what they were doing with their existing content. We took that material, we put it into our platform, basically creating into the most much more interactive sort of better learning science format. We started arming them with data so that they could say, okay, somebody is not understanding this. We can address that directly because we have data on what they're getting right and what they're getting wrong, and not only, maybe, what they're getting right and what they're getting wrong, but here's places where they might be getting something correct, but they're not actually confident in what they're doing, and so they might have guessed this multiple choice correctly, but they're not actually prepared to be able to step out and do the job well.
Speaker 3:And so we basically transformed the way they were doing that onboarding process that allowed them to say, okay, I think we can actually shorten this from six weeks down to two weeks. So they got people out in the field much faster. The churn rate of folks after six months dropped from 47% down to I know we did was 13% of 47, 34% over the six months, and then they took that sort of 13 month timeline and dropped that down to nine. Now you can't directly attribute all of that to learn to win. There were some things that they were doing as well as a part of it, but as a part of that sort of holistic change in the holistic process, we were able to actually move metrics that mattered for them, which is like time to productivity, churn rate and, ultimately, like sales numbers on the backend.
Speaker 1:Let me ask you a question, sasha. When we're sitting in Bentonville and we're focused on, obviously, walmart, tyson, jb Hunt here, but then every CPG's got offices here and the people are listening to this going, this is really cool, right? Because onboarding is always difficult and training is always difficult. Is the right point of contact somebody in the HR team, somebody that's leading a sales team? I mean, I'm sure the answer is all of the above, but who should we be pointing them to in these organizations when they're interested in your product?
Speaker 3:Yeah, almost all of the ones that we work with it's either a sales team, it's an operations or a manufacturing team team. It's an operations or a manufacturing team, or it's some sort of customer service or customer delivery team. So usually the folks who we work most directly with have some sort of angle or line responsibility around, like selling a product, manufacturing a product or making sure that the customers are happy. Usually, where they find a lot of value in our tool is our speed to be able to roll out, as well as our speed and flexibility, as well as the data that it gives them. Ultimately, we have great relationships with learning and development teams, but usually they're the ones who are overwhelmed with some sort of like large LMS system or LMS platform and can't really handle another thing.
Speaker 3:They're also not usually tied to the outcomes of whether or not you need to go. They're not tied to a sales number, if that makes sense, so they're less likely to be the right person, to be the right point of contact for us. So usually it's a sales leader, it's an operations leader, it's a customer success leader, and those are our primary use cases of sort of training a sales team faster, more effectively, making sure that your customer success team is well trained and reduces the number of errors that they have when they communicate with their customers about a particular product. Making sure that they're trained well and then basically manufacturing a particular tool and making sure that the process for doing that your folks know all the right procedures they need to follow to manufacture it.
Speaker 1:Harvey. So I've noticed I've asked two or three questions and I've never gotten great question from Sasha. You asked one question and Sasha said great question. So I'm feeling a little sensitive over here about my lack of ability to drive a great question. So there's a lot of pressure on you for what you're going to say next.
Speaker 2:I want to dive into the manufacturing use case and however much you can share Off the top of the brain, we can create a hypothetical if you want to. But we're getting pulled into more manufacturing use cases as plug and play. Our group Supply Chain really grew into supply chain and advanced manufacturing two years ago, 18 months ago. Let's say we're getting pulled into more advanced manufacturing, like two years ago, 18 months ago, let's say and so we're getting pulled into more advanced manufacturing environments in semiconductor and aerospace and defense, and that's great, but also the manufacturing environments for CPG, and so there's a wide range there. So what are some examples of how learn to win is getting dropped into a manufacturing environment, because all all the same problems around labor are true, irrespective of which industry you're in. Great question, harvey. Thank you, josh.
Speaker 3:I thought it was an above average question. I wasn't going to say great question, but I was only going to say that, just because I didn't want to offend Josh.
Speaker 1:Regression.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah. Well, how about I use an example? That was an introduction from the Plug and Play team.
Speaker 1:Shout out.
Speaker 3:Yeah, shout out, shout out, plug and Play. But the Plug and Play team introduced us to Ping, the golf club manufacturers. Ping has this super intensive process for how they manufacture each club. Uh, it is like very intensive, it is very thoughtful, it is wildly more complex than I ever thought for ultimately creating a golf club and what they wanted us to be able to come in and do, and there's a limit to how much we're actually mid-pilot with them right now. So we're like a couple months in. We've seen some really exciting results.
Speaker 3:I don't want to get too far into like we've solved the problem for them, but results are very good and ultimately I don't want to get too much away around sort of what Ping does, but as a part of training folks on what that process is and making sure that it's both standardized and making sure that they both have that process documented really well and making sure that they can really quickly spot gaps when somebody doesn't know a particular part of the process, they basically have rolled us out of the tool but help with that initial training as well as continuous learning when some part of the process might shift or change or you think folks just might need a quick refresher on.
Speaker 3:Here's a particular part of it that might shift, et cetera. One of the fun things about the ping pilot is that they've actually got us rolled out, I think, in four different languages right now. Ultimately, we're going to have to be rolled out in like eight or nine because of all the different places that they manufactured these tools and they want to make sure that they've got really standard processes across all of the eight or nine manufacturing spots. So in process with them right now. We just rolled out that pilot, but I thought I'd bring that one up because it was an introduction from the plug and play team and has been really exciting to roll out.
Speaker 2:I swear this was not a planted question for all of our listeners. You got to trust the firm in this one.
Speaker 1:I didn't know. I didn't think about language. I didn't think about working with global companies. I'm sure that the PowerPoint or PDF that's been built is primarily in one language. You probably need to, in some of these global companies, translate these things into multiple different languages. I used to work for Colgate-Palmolive, a global company, huge presence in Latin America, Mexico. I didn't even think about that.
Speaker 3:That's probably a big part of what you guys do now. Yeah, I mean, it's one of the services that we offer. I wouldn't say it's our driving value proposition, but fortunately our AI tool can do a lot of that for the ending. And then we have a team of folks that can actually translate into five or six different ones. Sometimes we'll have to bring in outside partners if it's something we don't have experience in. We got nobody on our team that speaks Swahili, but the major ones we can mostly cover, given that at this point we've got a pretty strong presence across most of North America.
Speaker 2:So you guys are riding that nearshoring, reshoring wave. Companies are plucking factories out of, let's say, china or Vietnam and they're moving them to the US or Mexico. They need to drop a labor force in right away and they need to spin up rather quickly. Makes a ton of sense for where you guys slot in there.
Speaker 3:What's it like? One of the things that we're seeing as well is somebody will start using us for their US operation. Antigifrate is a great example of that. They'll start some sort of nearshoring, where they'll take folks from wherever they were before, pop them in South America or in Mexico somewhere, and then they need to use our tool to train those folks as well, to maintain consistency, and ultimately we just have to change the language on what we're delivering. But then it's a super easy rollout.
Speaker 2:That's all going a different direction. What's it been like to be a dual use company from the founder's perspective? Because it's in the air Everybody's from the investor side, the founder side, the commercial side. Dual use Can't get out of a conversation without talking about tariffs, AI or dual use, it seems like these days, but you guys have been trying to balance both for a while. What's it been like from just a strategy and keeping your focus and making sure the resources are dedicated towards both markets? And how are you juggling? Yeah, yeah, Great question.
Speaker 3:Josh, I was thinking it was a really good question, but I wasn't going to say it I was trying to figure out.
Speaker 1:What do I say to this one that doesn't upset Josh? Good job, I wasn't going to say it. I wasn't going to say it.
Speaker 3:So what's interesting is that we started pursuing the Department of Defense almost from the start. To give a little bit of the background context, I'm actually a reservist for the Navy. I got a direct commission six years ago to intelligence.
Speaker 3:Thank you for your service. Yeah, for the DoD, and I pretty quickly recognized that there were lots and lots of opportunities to take our pre-existing technology and apply it to the Department of Defense. So as early as our first year as a company, we started partnering with the DoD and we have been ultimately dual use really from the start. And what's funny is that, like I don't know, it's five, six years ago when we first started working with the Department of Defense, that was like not cool. In the venture world People were like the DoD is slow, it's bureaucratic, it'll kill your company. And we're like, yeah, but we think that there's a really big opportunity for us to solve here and we see the benefits of being able to build something that is battle tested within the department of fences environment and then apply that to the commercial ecosystem. Again, five years ago that wasn't cool, and now today everybody's like dual use. No way, that's awesome. It's like the first time we've been in like a hot sector where people are excited about it, which that's fun. But to your question from before, I think for us it has been a tremendous benefit, I think, because we are able to really test our platform in really cool environments within the department of finance and then take that same type of learnings that we get from that area and then apply them to similar, similar situations in the, the, the commercial ecosystem.
Speaker 3:So, like I'll give an example, one of our uh partners on the department of defense side is uh, one of the school houses, so one of the air force weather school houses, and they had a process where they're basically bringing in 900 folks, they're putting into this intensive process to train them to become uh all the things they need to know about the weather, and then sending them out to go become weathermen. And they had something like a I don't remember the exact percentage of their folks who they call the washback rate, but folks who failed or had to go basically back and retake the course. And they could calculate from an overall dollar amount how much it was costing them to make folks retake this course in terms of time, effort, energy, cost per diem, et cetera. And so we came in. We basically they had us with four or 500 sort of PDFs and PowerPoints, all the things that they were using to train their folks. Sort of PDFs and PowerPoints, all the things that they were using to train their folks.
Speaker 3:Our AI tool read all of it, built it into our platform in four to five weeks. So the AI did the first version. Then we had a team come in and basically do the second one. So originally it's scoped as like a 12 month product to build the content. So we dramatically shorten the time to actually get it out, end up delivering it to the students. We then arm the instructors with all the same data of here's what you're getting right, here's what they're getting wrong, here's how you can adjust your course. We ultimately take the washback rate. We cut it in half In the first year that our platform is rolled out. That saves them roughly like $2.7 million in terms of reduced costs from basically building and delivering our tool. And we were able to take that success and then apply it directly to sort of any other commercial onboarding Because we refined the tool here.
Speaker 3:We got a ton of data, what went right, what went wrong, way to build it for a secure infrastructure and then, when we were coming into sort of these large enterprises, we were able to say, okay, I see you have a similar problem. The cool house case study looks exactly the same as the onboarding case study for new hires. We already have a lot of experience in building this. We have already a secure platform and infrastructure. Let us apply the things we already know how to do to this particular instance. Now there are some things that come up that, let's say, are really valuable for the Department of Defense, that aren't valuable for our commercial customers, and you sometimes have to balance those product questions of like, well, are we going to integrate with this particular software that's only available in the DID? Are we going to integrate with this particular software that's only available for our commercial customers? But I think holistically it's been a real net positive.
Speaker 2:So for the founders that are listening, how do you allocate engineering resources? Do you have separate teams, or is your team focused on both but just it's an 80-20 rule or it's split up a different way? How are you guys approaching that from a resourcing perspective?
Speaker 1:That was just an average question. That was better than mine, but that one didn't hit the grade level. I've gotten out of the business of rating Harvey's questions.
Speaker 3:I'm going to leave that to Josh. I'm just going to assume that all his questions are great, as are yours, josh. They're all excellent and I'm not going to comment anymore. Uh, so we, the way that we think about it, uh, holistically is is in use cases. So let's take our like schoolhouse or our academy use case and that's for new hire onboarding.
Speaker 3:That use case, while slight differences, is the same for schoolhouses. It's the same for a new person coming in and learning their particular rate in the department of fence. It's the same for a new person coming in and learning their particular rate in the department of fence. It's the same for hiring a new life sciences or pharmaceutical sales rep and their at home study. It's the same as NTG Freight hiring their new person who needs to come and learn the freight industry.
Speaker 3:Like that Academy use case of onboarding somebody faster, more effectively, somebody faster and more effectively. It's different in terms of the length of time. It's different in terms of the material you need to know, but the key core pieces of it, of how do you transform the material really quickly, how do you get into the brains of somebody very effectively, how do you learn the ultimate folks with knowledge about where are the gaps in their understanding and how do you do that as quickly as possible to get them up to speed as fast as possible so they can be out and productive in their job as quickly as they can, is the same, and so we will pick that as like a use case and we will have our teamwork on that, agnostic of whether or not it is a Department of Defense problem set or whether it is a commercial one, and we have similar types of use cases that our engineering team work on, whether it's that or whether it's more of the sort of continuous training and onboarding or continuous training things that we have to do.
Speaker 3:That is much more like a new product gets rolled out or there's a new update to a particular system. The Fitzgerald McCain has a new, a new rollout, and you've got to train a lot of folks really quickly on how to use this particular DoD system. Like that's the same as a new product that gets rolled out. Uh, for a pharma company you've got to retrain everybody on what that is. Or like the conventional leds can't change, you go train. Like that's a different use case, but again it aligns very similarly between the two. Um, now there's certain things that we have to like carve out an engineering team on and have them focus on. That's really only for the one group. Like being able to deliver up to impact. Level six is helpful for our commercial customers, but they don't need that level of security most of the time. So that's like a DoD specific thing, but mostly we think about it as use cases.
Speaker 1:Sorry, I interrupted. I apologize, harvey, and it's going to go back to Sasha. It's interesting for me as I kind of peel back out a level. You know my job. I work with all of our corporate partners and one of the things that we hear on a regular basis is the workforce has changed so much post-COVID, specifically in the deskless workforce. So many folks now are trying to automate these entry-level jobs and things of that nature, which means upskilling and training folks to do higher-level jobs. And, boy, like it fits perfectly with what you are doing, right? It all kind of intertwines. It just makes a lot of sense that there's a need for this in pretty much every single company right now, based on what we just talked about around the workforce post-COVID.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that wasn't a question, but it was still a great. It was still a great answer. You can find it at wwwlearn2wincom. You can find it at wwwlearn2wincom. You can email me. It was an observation.
Speaker 1:I thought I'd lay that out there. It just kind of hit me. This all puts together perfectly with a great opportunity for you guys. So not a great question, but a great observation. Yeah, great observation.
Speaker 3:We have seen a huge boost. I mean, there's a couple of different things that have really helped us as a business. I think part of being a founder of a company is to work very hard, to care a lot about your team, to have a great idea, to be very gritty and resilient. A lot of those things come into it. There's also about being really lucky and having really great timing, and I think for us, the COVID world and shift to a more deskless workforce and all of the changes that came with it were a great opportunity for us to bring in a tool that could help people adapt to that very, very quickly. I think that the rise in AI has been phenomenal for us, mostly because, again, there's a lot of things you need to retrain folks on very quickly and B the way that AI has transformed our product in terms of our accuracy and our ability to be able to take pre-existing content and convert it into our platform, how we can arm folks to be able to build and create their own content, and it's a lot of the things that we're doing with sort of AI and analytics. A lot of the things that we're doing with sort of ai and analytics like we are very quickly shifting our product to being almost entirely ai oriented in a way that uh was just sort of not possible for us two years ago. Um, so it feels cool to be uh sort of on this kind of like. Don't want to be on the fortunate end of a timing perspective that ultimately, like I wish I was a sage and could have predicted that this would happen, but some ways you kind of be there to be lucky rather than smart, I also think from a from a dual use perspective to your point, harley, I think I think we we had a lot of conviction early on that there was an opportunity in the department of fence, both from my personal experiences, having gone through a lot of the dodD training cycles as well, as just a view of like this is a really big opportunity.
Speaker 3:They care a lot about outcomes. We training is incredibly important to the Department of Defense. If you're not fighting your training and some of the underlying thinking that we had about great power competition with Russia and China, like we could see that all happening and so we took a bet on it early on when folks said this wasn't a great idea and I think has just put us in a position where being dual use is now really cool. There's tons of opportunity in the space and we've already spent the time and energy to build relationships, have a platform that can do secure level training, have all the contracting vehicles to be able to work with the department of defense. It's just been a really great time.
Speaker 2:What's been the most recent inflection point for the business? Is it the advancement in AI tools that we've all seen in the past 12 months? Is it the dual use piece? What's been that moment where you guys, the founding team, looks back and says we hit this little mario kart star and we went?
Speaker 3:that way yeah yeah, um, and I think I really think the and this wasn't like a one moment in time, this was sort of like over the past couple of years, but I really do think that the advances in ai over the course of the past couple of years have made it possible for us to do things in the learning world and in the training world that, prior to a few years ago, was fantasy world. Ultimately, we will be in a position very soon where you will be able to take our platform and say all right, I am the training leader at Novartis, one of our customers on the life sciences side, and I need to be able to develop training for my new sales reps or my new MSLs, and it's on this particular drug that's getting rolled out. I want the Learn to Win tool to be able to read these documents pre approved, to be able to actually for our team to go work off of. I want them to build an excellent onboarding. I want it to make sure that it covers these five things. I want to make sure that it has these six competency levels that they are fluent on.
Speaker 3:These are really key outcomes for me and I want to make sure that it develops a drip process such that over the course of the next year, this information stays top of mind for them and I can be confident that, as a sales and training leader, that my team understands these six things that they need to communicate to a physician Go and the tool can actually build and create that. Are we there right now, today? No, but the pieces are in place for us to be able to do that and that sort of future world of both being able to really rapidly create this training material, be able to deliver it in a way that is sort of seamless and effective and to give you insight on what are the metrics that matter for your team and be able to change them and adapt them really fast. Like that's not something that would have been possible three years ago, like if we had imagined it, but like we couldn't actually do it and now we're in a world where we can actually work towards that and it's very possible.
Speaker 1:That's going to make sense. We're coming up on time Anything else that you want to cover that we didn't cover, and make sure you close with us with how to reach you, email address, website and other things so it was basically like anything else I want to cover yeah, anything else that we didn't hit on, anything else that you want to leave the audience with, and then let us know how to get in touch with you.
Speaker 2:Basically, the shameless plugs portion.
Speaker 3:Yeah well, I'll say a couple different things yeah, first, just uh always, always appreciative of the tremendous honor to be on the Whiskered Warriors podcast, despite the fact that I have no whiskers.
Speaker 3:I'll say thanks again to the Plug and Play team. You have been phenomenal investors in our company. We have, I think, at this point, five different relationships where you're either in a pilot or fully rolled out across an organization. That all started from folks who got introduced to us from the plug and play side. You saw a problem. You thought Learn to Win could solve it. You've made the connection and we are now actively rolled out across those organizations and I can go through them if it's helpful. But just really appreciate you guys.
Speaker 3:And I guess the last piece is that if you're listening to this and any of this sounded like a thing that we could help with whether it's some last mile learning or training problem would love to connect. And even if it's something where you're like, hey, this sounded really interesting and I'd love to work with you guys on how to come up with a solution. We love to co-develop things with our partners and our customers. Ultimately, what we need on your side is a commitment to really wanting to improve how you guys are doing training, teaching, learning, and we can sort of come up together with some really creative ideas, which we've done with customers in the past. So the way to reach me wwwlearntowincom. You can find me on LinkedIn, sasha Seymour. Email is just sasha at learntowincom. Anything else that'd be helpful? I can send you my Instagram or something To be clear.
Speaker 1:If somebody wanted to reach out to you for an introduction of Carter, kenny Smith, michael Jordan, antoine Jameson, like those, that's not what we're doing, right? We? We, we're not going to reconnect with some of the, the OGs and the legend. This is specifically for business, correct? Yeah, correct, correct, all right, just making sure, because I'd love to meet those people, but I also would rather spend time with you. I would too. They probably wouldn't recognize me, but I'd rather talk to you because the stuff that you're doing is revolutionary and it's. I don't want to speak for Harvey, but I know he wouldn't want to say how amazing the partnership has been with you guys and we're just hitting the ground with you. Harvey, anything you want to add there?
Speaker 2:for all those people that uh, recently tossed, shattered, wrapped around a stop sign pole, um, with your ping clubs, please remember a lot of care goes into manufacturing those clubs. So, josh, next time you get a little angry on the links, remember this conversation. I will. I will, but the more, the more you break your clubs, the more ping needs to manufacture more clubs, which is more times they need to rely on sasha for training their people how to make them.
Speaker 3:So actually I reverse my take, please smash I'm agnostic to club smashing here, the similar way that I'm agnostic to to smashing here. It's a different way that I'm agnostic to Harvey's level of quality of question.
Speaker 2:There, it's a Friday. Look it's. Ups and downs, highs and lows. Sasha, this has been awesome man, thank you. Thank you, sasha. Founders, please, if you want to get in touch with Sasha, if you want to talk about stuff we didn't get a chance to cover, like fundraising how how do you hire the right team to sell into the government versus commercial, because that's another podcast in and of itself. It can get nasty there. Let me know and then we can try to set up an opportunity for you to meet with Sasha, and that would be a good follow-up.
Speaker 1:Harvey at PNPTCcom. That's a shameless plug for you.
Speaker 2:That is a shame.
Speaker 1:I know how much you love emails flooding your inbox, I figured I'd throw that out there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I much you love emails flooding your inbox, I figure you throw that out there. Yeah, I prefer uh cash app venmo. There's a lot of other ways you can reach me on goodreads if you want to find me on goodreads. Sasha, what are you reading right now? Hold on, before we leave. Before we leave, sasha has a special place in my heart because he introduced me to the name of the wind, uh, and then subsequently wise man's fear, which is, hands down, probably the best fantasy in like a decade. Sadly, it's been a decade since he released the first book. We still don't have the third book yet. But what are you reading at this moment?
Speaker 3:so I read. I share a love for uh, for fiction novels, specifically fantasy fiction, king killer chronicles favorite ones in the world. If you haven't read them, absolutely wonderful. Um, I'll give two answers to that question. The first one probably three months ago, I finished reading the Sword of Kaijin by ML Wang. It's kind of like this Avatar, last Airbender world, but it was phenomenal. So that's my first one. The one that I'm actually reading today, if you want an honest answer, is the Mistborn series. I'm about halfway through the third one. Very excellent, not like Sword of Kaijin or Kingkiller Chronicles level excellent, but still very good.
Speaker 2:So that is on my nightstand at the moment the first Mistborn. Really they're good and the Lies of Locke Lamora, but I have not heard of the Sword of Kaijin.
Speaker 3:Dude, you've got to read Sword of Kaijin.
Speaker 1:It's so good, done easy. I'm gonna just like put those other two on the side. Josh, what are you reading? Uh, my, my, my educational level. I'm reading like people magazine, a little tmz, maybe you know. That's kind of focused for me. I got six kids at home. I don't have time to barely get six kids.
Speaker 3:You're in the bird scene bears, correct, yeah, correct, correct, correct. Yeah, my nephew's just got into captain underpants.
Speaker 1:So you got six kids. You read the Birdseed Bears, correct, yeah, correct, correct, correct.
Speaker 3:My nephew's just got into Captain Underpants, so that's what. I'm a big reader of that when I'm back in Greenville, North Carolina.
Speaker 1:I didn't think we'd get into Captain Underpants, Dan Apoc. This is why you never know where this is going to go. You never know where it's going to go.
Speaker 3:You shouldn't have brought me on if the captain underpants is going to come up.
Speaker 1:Thank you, sasha. A pleasure, continued success. We appreciate the relationship with you and thanks for making the time for us today.
Speaker 3:Yeah, appreciate it, harvey, and.
Speaker 1:Josh, bye, guys, bye.