Let me direct you to Synthesia.

Synthesia was founded in 2017 by a team of AI researchers and entrepreneurs from UCL, Stanford, TUM and Cambridge. Their mission is to empower everyone to make video content – without cameras, microphones or studios. Using AI, they’re here to radically change the process of content creation and unleash human creativity for good.

To help explain how Synthesia works, they created a case study via Conceptsales.

About Conceptsales

Conceptsales is a Dutch company that helps IT companies accelerate their commercial performance. As part of their offering, they create training modules for sales teams, using a blended learning approach.

With Synthesia STUDIO, the team has created an innovative training format that is essentially a blend of AI video + real video, packaged in a virtual customer situation. Quite cool. We spoke with Juri Pietersen, Managing Director at Conceptsales, who walked us through:

? the process of creating virtual customer situations with Synthesia STUDIO,

? some concerns they had about using AI video, and

? how they overcame them by testing it with real users.

The challenge

Working with one of the largest Dutch landline and mobile telecommunication companies, Conceptsales’ job was to create virtual customer experiences for training.You may be wondering what this actually means, so let’s demystify the expression first.

These are videos in which customers share their experiences with a sales team during their buying journey, supported by a sales perspective. Such videos are used to train sales staff and help them understand their customers better.

All well and good, but the process of filming real video experiences is … complicated. If you have ever produced a professional video, you probably know that. Writing scripts, finding actors, shooting footage, working with external partners — it’s a long, expensive and tedious job. The average time to create such a video: 3-4 weeks.

Conceptsales bumped into another problem. They approached real customers of their client and asked them if they would be willing to explain how they experienced the collaboration with the sales team during their buying journey. People were excited and ready to help and share their experiences — except for one part: They didn’t want to be on camera. ❌

So the Conceptsales team started thinking: “There has to be a better, more efficient solution to create these customer stories, because simply writing them down just doesn’t make the impact we need. So if possible, we should use video, but without having to film real people.”

That’s when Synthesia STUDIO came in handy: Instead of shooting real video footage, with Synthesia you can create videos directly from a browser. No cameras, studios and actors needed. You just choose your AI presenter, type in your script and your talking head video is generated in minutes.

Concerns about using AI video & the proposed solution.

They decided to propose this solution to the client, as this new approach to video creation would save time, resources and create equal impact as with real live video. But they had some concerns:

How will the AI videos be perceived? What will the client learners think of them? Will people know that the characters are not real?

So they came up with an interesting solution: They blended real video clips with AI video clips created in Synthesia STUDIO. During the customer case video, a sales representative responded to the information given by a customer. While the sales rep was a real person, the customer was actually an AI avatar (in Synthesia STUDIO, you can choose from 45+ diverse AI avatars and more than 60 languages).

“These videos explain what the customer’s buyer journey looked like from the customer’s perspective, and the customer is actually an AI avatar, not a real person. Then we added a sales perspective in the upper right talking head bubble. Basically, these are customer cases explaining a situation, challenge, or problem.

– Juri Pietersen, Managing Director at Conceptsales.nl ‍

‍What did they learn after doing tests?

✅ Not all responders noticed the actors weren’t real.

✅ They were curious about who these actors actually were.

✅ People were pleasantly surprised by this new type of training.

These reactions were a proof point to start using the new form of videos in other learning programmes — worry-free.

Key advantages of using Synthesia STUDIO

AI avatars instead of real people: the ability to make a presenter video with a customer story without having to film actual customers (who didn’t want to be on camera).

Speed: it takes less than an hour to create a video in Synthesia STUDIO, compared to traditional video production which can take up to 3-4 weeks.

Cost-efficiency: you can save up to 90% of the budget with Synthesia STUDIO, compared to traditional video production which can cost up to $4000 per video.

Keeping video content up-to-date: technology is changing rapidly, and updating a video with Synthesia STUDIO is a few clicks job.

“As the technology is changing rapidly, our training videos need to be updated often. With Synthesia, you can update learning materials very quickly. You just change the script,  generate a new updated version and put it online.”

– Juri Pietersen, Managing Director at Conceptsales.nl

Data-driven is 2020, AI-driven is 2022

Implementation of AI-generated video in training is just one of its many possible business applications. As the above example shows, AI is not only cost-effective but is also changing the way business is done.