Companies spent $21.9 billion on frontline training in 2023. That number is expected to climb to $46.7 billion by 2028. But despite that investment, only 44% of employees feel like their organizations invest in their development.
Organizations rely on their frontline teams to deliver for customers, protect the brand and keep operations running smoothly. But traditional enablement—classroom sessions and online courses—wasn’t built for the speed and complexity of today’s workplace. When support falls short, teams are left without the tools they need to perform, and customers feel the impact.
It’s time for a reset.
By applying new tools, you can take a more strategic path to frontline enablement. Eliminate waste, maximize limited resources and focus your efforts on solving the organization’s most important problems. Strike the balance between innovation and efficiency so you can keep up with change, meet stakeholder expectations and give your frontline the support they need to succeed.
Let’s take a closer look at your frontline enablement strategy to identify how you can streamline, strengthen and scale to deliver better outcomes for your people and your business.
Train faster and reduce labor spend
Frontline workers complete a lot of training they don’t actually need. Why?
- Courses are assigned to check compliance boxes.
- Stakeholders overload programs with too much information.
- Employees are grouped incorrectly, leading to misassigned content.
This leads to wasted labor hours, slower ramp-up times and disengaged workers.
Every employee is different. Many bring experience and skills with them on day one. So why make everyone sit through the same training?
Give employees a chance to show what they already know. A quick knowledge check lets them skip unnecessary topics and focus only on what they still need to learn. This gets them on the job faster while reducing labor costs. If they don’t pass the assessment, they complete the full training. Then use reinforcement activities to make sure the important stuff sticks and no one guesses their way through training.
The result? Companies that adopt this approach train employees up to 4x faster and cut training-related labor spend by as much as 76%—all while maintaining confidence that workers are truly job-ready.
That’s time better spent helping customers and moving the business forward.
▶️ Find out how to boost frontline knowledge retention with daily reinforcement
Drive consistency and reduce mistakes
Consistency is the foundation of great frontline execution. It’s how you deliver reliable customer experiences, no matter the location, shift or team.
But consistency is hard to maintain, especially across distributed operations. Training gaps force employees to rely on whoever’s nearby for help. That might be a peer who’s still figuring things out or a manager who’s already stretched thin. This leads to slower execution, increased errors and mounting frustration for both employees and customers.
AI restores consistency at scale.
Give every employee a digital assistant they can turn to for guidance in the moment of need. Curate knowledge from across the organization—operating procedures, product details, training materials—to deliver reliable answers in the language each person prefers. Make on-demand support available on both personal devices and company-provided hardware to maximize your reach.
The result? Fewer mistakes, fewer manager disruptions and more consistent customer experiences—at scale.
AI enables you to put the right answer in every employee’s pocket.
💡Learn more about Max, Axonify’s conversational AI assistant
Accelerate content development and reduce production costs
Online training is critical for frontline teams. It delivers consistent information fast while providing a strong knowledge foundation to support hands-on training.
But building content is expensive. It takes an estimated 144 hours of work and over $9,000 to create one hour of online training. Most organizations don’t have the time, people or budget to create content for every need. You have to pick your battles, and the loudest stakeholder usually ends up at the top of the list. As a result, plenty of important problems go unaddressed.
You’ve got to move faster. But you can’t afford to blow up the budget to do it.
First, don’t waste valuable development hours reinventing the wheel. Leverage off-the-shelf content to cover common job topics like customer service, sales strategy and safety. Work with content partners that allow you to customize content so it reflects your brand and feels relevant to your team.
Then apply AI to accelerate custom development. Select authoring tools that generate modules, videos and assessments based on your existing materials. With the right technology, you should never have to start from scratch again.
The result? Organizations using this approach deploy training up to 5x faster while cutting content development costs by as much as 62%—without compromising relevance.
Content teams are under pressure to solve more problems with fewer resources. It’s time to get intentional—prioritize what matters most, repurpose what already exists, and speed up production without sacrificing cost or quality.
🔎 Explore the Axonify Content Marketplace, including 1000+ ready-to-go, customizable topics
It’s time to optimize frontline training and enablement.
Frontline work moves fast. Your training and enablement strategy needs to keep up.
- Identify and reduce unnecessary training to save time and lower labor costs.
- Give employees real-time, on-the-job support to improve execution and reduce mistakes.
- Build content more strategically to speed up development and maximize resources.
This isn’t about doing more with less: it’s about evolving your approach, building the right solutions and delivering them in the right way to empower the people who keep your businesses running.
About Axonify
Axonify is the proven frontline enablement solution that gives employees everything they need to learn, connect and get things done. It starts with brain science and AI to drive knowledge retention through bite-sized microlearning and daily intelligent reinforcement. Embedded two-way communication and feedback ensure your staff is engaged and informed, no matter the scale of your organization and guided task management shows employees exactly how to put their training to use, every single day. With an industry-leading 80% user engagement rate, companies use Axonify to deliver next-level CX, higher sales, improved workplace safety and lower turnover. Axonify enables over 3.5 million frontline workers in 160+ countries, with over 250 customers including Lowe’s, Kroger, Walmart and Citizens Bank. Founded in 2011, Axonify is headquartered in Waterloo, ON Canada. For more information, visit axonify.com.
Eric Jackson-Sarkany
Senior Manager, Marketing Programs
Axonify
