Carlsberg takes supply chain training in-house with AI video

Carlsberg Group is one of the world's leading brewery groups, brewing beer and other beverages enjoyed across more than 150 markets globally. Its Integrated Supply Chain, headquartered in Switzerland, runs the brewery network, procurement, and end-to-end planning that turns raw materials into finished products for millions of consumers every day.

Inside that organization sits the Integrated Supply Chain Academy, a learning and development function training brew masters, operations engineers, procurement teams, shop floor operators, and change agents across every region Carlsberg operates in. And it's where Synthesia first took root at Carlsberg — introduced as part of the Carlsberg Excellence programme's AI and digitalisation initiatives, with a clear aim: to simplify how the ISC Academy builds and delivers training.

Industry Context

In Fast-Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG), supply chain transformation never stops. Standards evolve, safety practices shift, strategies change, and a global workforce needs to absorb new ways of working at the pace the business sets.

For Carlsberg's Integrated Supply Chain, spanning brewery operations, procurement, and logistics across 150+ markets, that means training has to land everywhere, in every language, fast.

The Challenge

For years, Carlsberg's L&D function depended on external agencies for any video that mattered: safety, strategy, change management, instructional content. The model worked, but came with three compounding problems.

The first was cost. Every shoot started with the same conversation about budget.

"Normally you wouldn't approach any agency if you didn't have at least €10K in your pocket per video, and it can easily go up to €15K or €20K." — Polina Ananina, Senior Manager Integrated Supply Chain Group Capabilities at Carlsberg

The second was permanence. The moment a process or standard changed, the video became a sunk cost.

"There are some nice videos we shot eight years ago. They're completely outdated now. They were so nice, and it's a complete pity we can't edit them anymore." — Polina

The third issue was tooling. Employees across Carlsberg with the deepest operational knowledge were rarely the ones with time or design skills to turn it into video. To scale training across a global supply chain, L&D needed a tool anyone in the business could pick up. Something accessible, intuitive, and quick to use.

The Solution

Since 2023, Carlsberg has used Synthesia to build training, onboarding, and communications content in-house, starting inside the Integrated Supply Chain Academy and spreading across the business from there.

The workflow is straightforward:

• Drag and drop a PDF and let the AI Assistant scaffold the structure
• Build the video in Carlsberg's branded template, with colors, logo, and layout already configured
• Generate in English, then translate into the languages each market needs
• Distribute via SCORM, SharePoint, or a direct video link

"My favourite thing is to use the Carlsberg template and drag and drop a document, usually a PDF, and see what the system pulls from it. The AI Assistant gives you an initial structure, so you're not starting from zero." — Polina

100+ creators strong across Carlsberg

What started inside the Integrated Supply Chain Academy quickly spread to other functions. In under two years, more than 100 employees from across the business have built content in Synthesia, with adoption still growing.

"It was fun. People were able to create quite a lot of videos on their own, without the heavy design skills that used to be required to make a training attractive." — Polina

The Results

A redirected agency video budget

Three external shoots a year, the conservative baseline, used to mean a minimum of €30,000 in agency fees before anyone counted translation, edits, or revisions. That doesn't sit on Carlsberg's P&L anymore. And the constraint it created, having to justify whether a topic was "important enough" to film, is gone with it.

"Synthesia has unleashed the potential for us. We're not restrained by budget anymore, or thinking 'is this important enough to film a video on?'" — Polina

In-house localization across European and Asian markets

Translating an e-learning used to mean hiring a second external supplier on top of the original production. That cost layer is now gone. Carlsberg generates content in English and adapts it for every market its supply chain runs through.

"Before, we paid external agencies to translate every e-learning. Now we don't have this problem anymore." — Polina

Use cases that have spread far beyond supply chain training

What started in Polina's team has become a way for teams across Carlsberg to communicate: shop floor onboarding for new hires, one-point safety lessons, procurement training that touches teams well outside procurement, change management content when strategy shifts, and promotional videos that live on SharePoint for anyone in the business to watch.

"From shop floor onboarding, to procurement training, to promotional videos we drop on SharePoint, the whole organization watches the videos created with Synthesia." — Polina

What's Next

Two years in, the biggest change Synthesia has brought to Carlsberg, in Polina's view, isn't a feature or a workflow. It's that the people creating content across her organization no longer treat it as a chore.

"Synthesia has completely changed our ways of working. I actually get excited about creating the training, because it's significantly better than creating yet another PowerPoint that no one will read. Training with Synthesia is far more engaging" — Polina Ananyina

From the shop floor to the boardroom, anything Carlsberg wants to teach next is theirs to build.