Having spent over 30 years in industrial automation and manufacturing, I’ve observed first-hand one perennial challenge: keeping audiovisual training content current and relevant. It’s something that companies grapple with day after day. Despite acknowledging its importance, many organizations eventually give up and settle for content that quickly becomes outdated.
Why is maintaining up-to-date audiovisual training so difficult? Let’s unpack this challenge and review potential ways to overcome it.
The Problem: Continuous Product and Process Changes
In technology, manufacturing, and industrial maintenance sectors, continuous improvement isn’t optional. It’s essential for growth and survival. The speed of innovation accelerates every year; product lines expand, components update, processes improve, and features evolve. Each change, whether minor or major, demands corresponding updates to training materials.
Yet updating audiovisual content traditionally requires significant investments. Between scripting, filming, editing, and distributing updated videos, even small changes become costly, slow, and cumbersome. Businesses regularly face tough choices between resource-intensive updates or tolerating inaccurate, outdated training content.
Unfortunately, delaying or avoiding updates creates significant downstream issues—poor onboarding, increased errors, frustrated support teams, dissatisfied customers, and overall reduced efficiency.
Real-Life Impact of Outdated Audiovisual Content
Consider industrial equipment manufacturers and maintenance service providers: each new product variant, every software update, and even minor procedural changes must be communicated clearly to their teams and customers. If audiovisual training material isn’t current, confusion and inaccuracies lead directly to operational inefficiencies and increased support costs.
From my direct experience in more than 3,000 customer engagements, I know the critical difference timely, accurate audiovisual support can make. On the flipside, outdated or inaccurate training often undermines customer experience, productivity, and profitability.
Simply put, poor quality or outdated training materials are not just operational inefficiencies—they translate directly into lost competitive advantage.
Why Traditional Approaches Fall Short
Many companies have attempted traditional methods to manage audiovisual updates. Typical efforts include:
- Increasing Budgets & Resources: Hiring more people to manage training creation and updates—expensive, not scalable, and often still too slow.
- Reducing Video Complexity: Lowering video quality or granularity in an attempt to simplify updates. However, simplified content quickly loses its strategic advantage.
- Outsourcing Production: Contracting production agencies to handle updates, yet finding coordination slow, costly, and often impractical for smaller frequent updates.
None of these paths solve the fundamental issue efficiently—an efficient, cost-effective way of providing consistently updated audiovisual content at scale.
Can Automation Finally Solve This Problem?
In recent years, advances in generative artificial intelligence (AI) and automation technologies offer a strategic path forward. Automated audiovisual content creation can accomplish complex updates in minutes rather than days or weeks, drastically simplifying the updating process.
However, typical generative AI audiovisual tools still face significant limitations: they often fail to adequately understand context or document visuals like diagrams and charts. Without reliable context awareness, the resulting videos lack precision and trustworthiness.
To truly overcome audiovisual content challenges, we need automated solutions capable of:
- Understanding content deeply at a contextual level, capturing actual meaning—not just animating isolated text elements.
- Accurately interpreting document visuals, diagrams, and comprehensive tables, ensuring true-to-source accuracy without typical “AI hallucinations.”
- Instant updating of training materials whenever the underlying documentation changes.
The Avite.io Approach: Context-Aware Automated Audiovisual Content Generation
It was precisely this recognized gap—combined with my extensive industry experience—that inspired the creation of Avite. Rather than a superficial animation of texts, we built Avite’s AI-technology at Marble Hill Partner to deeply understand the context, structure, and visual elements embedded in training manuals and technical documentation.
In practice, Avite allows organizations to quickly and easily convert existing static PDFs into accurate, engaging, and interactive audiovisual training content in minutes or even seconds. Significantly, it removes the costly barrier to frequent updates and reliably places images, diagrams, and detailed visual elements into correct and meaningful contexts.
The result? Audiovisual content that’s accurate, timely, efficient, and scalable.
Real-world Benefits: Competitiveness through Audiovisual Automation
The business impacts of context-aware automated audiovisual technology like Avite can be considerable:
- Drastic reduction in production time (hours turning into mere minutes).
- Significant cost savings compared to traditional audiovisual production.
- Enhanced learner engagement and knowledge retention through shorter, accurate and context-driven content.
- Improved product onboarding and customer satisfaction through accurate and timely information.
- Decreased operational inefficiencies and lower support overheads.
Ultimately, removing the constant struggle of audiovisual content updates frees up organizations’ resources, creativity, and strategic focus—strengthening competitive advantage.
Looking Ahead: Embracing the Audiovisual Training Revolution
As audiovisual training demands continue to grow exponentially, manual processes will become increasingly unsustainable. Contextually accurate, AI-driven content automation is no longer just interesting to experiment with—it’s quickly becoming a business imperative.
If training and documentation teams fail to leverage new automation capabilities, they’ll likely find themselves continuously overwhelmed, losing ground to faster, more agile, and competitively minded organizations able to produce and refresh training content rapidly.
As someone passionate about pragmatic strategies and operational effectiveness developed over decades of experience, I genuinely believe intelligent audiovisual automation now represents one of the smartest competitive levers businesses can pull today.
At Marble Hill Partner Oy, we are committed and excited to lead this movement. Let’s continue the discussion together.
I’d very much like to hear your own experiences and thoughts. How are you managing your audiovisual content update process today? Can automation help you win the never-ending race?
About the Author
Aki Mäenpää is Founder and CEO at Marble Hill Partner Oy, with over three decades of experience in industrial automation, strategic business development, and multinational leadership. He’s also the Co-founder and Chairman of Viimatech Digital Oy, focusing on Industrial IoT solutions and digital transformation.
