KONE x Synthesia

The challenge

KONE's technicians learn by doing, and the KONE Academy is built for exactly that: a working facility in Hanover stocked with real elevators, escalators, and doors, where trainees work the equipment alongside instructors who come straight from the field. These are master troubleshooters, and the hours spent with them on real machinery are the part of training no video can replace. That expert time was also what made training expensive: courses ran up to four days, so every session meant hotel nights, travel, and technicians off the field.

The bigger problem was how that scarce time got spent. Every group was mixed — newcomers, returning techs, veterans — so trainers burned in-person hours leveling the room before the real hands-on work could begin.

New-hire onboarding had a similar bottleneck. People were brought up to speed through live webinars on elevators, escalators, safety, and the rules of the job. The content was solid, but the format had a ceiling: a live session locks everyone to the same time and pace, and with ten people on a single call, there was no reliable way to confirm what had landed.

And some information couldn't wait for the next session. When a software change or a new tool had to reach field technicians quickly, email wasn't the right channel.

The shift

The fix wasn't to do away with the classroom — it was to protect what only the classroom could do. KONE now sets the baseline before anyone travels: the academy builds pre-learning videos in Synthesia and assigns them ahead of selected courses, so technicians arrive already on common ground. It began simply — Olaf took the PowerPoint decks trainers already used, brought them into Synthesia, and added an avatar to narrate what an instructor would have covered in the room, work he still does himself.

"Before Synthesia, everyone arrived at training from a different level, with no common platform to start from. Now they do the e-learning first, so we start a step ahead. We save up to a day — a day of capacity, a day of travel, a day of hotel cost." — Olaf Torney, Training Manager, KONE Academy

That first win opened the door to a bigger one. KONE took its entire onboarding for service technicians — once delivered through live webinars — and rebuilt it as eight self-paced modules covering a new starter's first three weeks, published in the company's global LMS. Around 250 new starters a year now work through the material at their own pace, then head on site with an experienced technician to put it into practice.

Reach matters as much as speed, because the academy serves all of DACH, not just Germany. Synthesia handles translation, so a video built in German can be localized into Swiss French with only minor edits — one person, one source, the whole region covered.

The next step is short update videos, five minutes at most, that put a software change or a new tool straight onto a technician's phone the moment it lands, with no waiting for the next session or an email.

The impact

"Now you can watch a training video on your phone in five minutes, right when you need it. We never had that before — and in the field, the response has been great."  — Olaf Torney

• 30% faster training video production on average, varying by project.
• Roughly 2x engagement from technical teams — more engaging formats that land even on tight deadlines.
• A day saved on multi-day courses — no hotel, no travel, no lost field time.
• Pre-learning at scale — ~2,500 employees across DACH now complete Synthesia e-learning before they arrive at the Academy, so face-to-face training starts from a shared baseline.
• On-demand support in the field — technicians pull up short instructional videos onsite whenever they need them, with five-minute field updates rolling out next.
• A scalable induction program — around 250 new starters a year are onboarded through self-paced e-learning modules.

Why it matters

For a maintenance business, every hour in training is an hour off the field — and the most valuable hours are the hands-on ones with an expert. Synthesia didn't replace those; it protected them. By moving the core training into AI video, KONE freed its expert trainers to spend in-person time on the practical work that genuinely needs a person and a machine in the room, while getting critical knowledge to technicians closer to the moment they need it.

Synthesia has become part of how KONE Academy trains its technicians — putting the right knowledge in the right hands, in the right language, at the right time.