J. J. Keller Runs an Enterprise-Scale Safety & Compliance Training Operation With Articulate 360 AI

The Challenge

Build best-in-class training at enterprise scale

J. J. Keller serves clients across a wide range of industries—transportation, construction, manufacturing, food safety, and more—that operate under complex, frequently changing regulations where the stakes of non-compliance are high. J. J. Keller’s focus is on creating a genuine culture of safety, not just documentation that training occurred.

“Compliance and safety training has a reputation problem,” says Krystal Burrows, Senior Creative Content Manager at J. J. Keller. “No one actually wants to do it, but everyone has to—and at J. J. Keller, we’ve built our entire training philosophy around rejecting that mentality.” The team builds every course around adult learning theory, with structured objectives and assessment design.

The Creative Content team is responsible for producing customer-facing, regulatory-compliant training products. When J. J. Keller first entered the online training space, the company was contracting with a third party to develop its expertise into training and producing roughly 12 titles per year.

In 2014, J. J. Keller decided to bring online training development in-house. After evaluating several popular authoring tools, they selected Articulate as the foundation for everything the team would build—and haven’t looked back since.

As the team’s roadmap grew over the years, so did its operational complexity:

• Voiceover production was labor-intensive, as it required scheduling contracted voice talent, running in-house recording sessions, and editing individual audio clips to be dropped in slide by slide. 
• As they created content for a wider range of heavily regulated industries, photoshoots of real-world environments became increasingly difficult to capture. 
• In the early days, translation meant handing a completed course file to a vendor and receiving back an entirely separate course in Spanish, which was costly and added weeks to the production schedule. 
• Large national customers with multilingual workforces started requesting a single, accessible course that let learners choose their own language at enrollment—a capability J. J. Keller was eager to deliver.

Over ten years later, J. J. Keller finds that Articulate continues to meet the team where they are—and then some. 

The Answer

Multilingual, accessible compliance training across markets with Articulate 360 AI

J. J. Keller now produces over a hundred multilingual, accessible e-learning courses per year. The team has steadily expanded its use of Articulate, adopting new AI features as they’ve become available to create efficiencies in the product development process. These AI features have freed up space for curriculum developers and compliance experts to focus on the parts of the job that actually require human expertise, like judgement and accountability related to instructional design, andragogy, and regulatory compliance.

Articulate’s AI-generated voiceover changed the team’s production rhythm more than any other single feature. “We were ecstatic to be able to create AI-generated voiceovers right within the Articulate platform,” says Burrows. “It sped up our process so, so much.” What used to take roughly six hours per course now takes an hour or less and happens entirely within the tool.

AI image generation capabilities also proved valuable for a team serving customers across North America from a single production base in northeastern Wisconsin. Capturing the full range of industries, environments, and workers J. J. Keller’s customers represent—from food processing facilities to construction sites—was never something a local shoot could fully deliver. AI-generated images let the team build courses that reflect the actual workplaces and equipment their learners encounter on the job, across every market they serve.

Accessibility is non-negotiable in safety and compliance training—every learner has to be able to take in the content, regardless of ability. J. J. Keller’s most recent e-learning template is built to meet WCAG 2.2 standards, and Articulate’s Accessibility Checker, AI-generated alt text, and AI caption generation make that standard easy to maintain. What used to require a dedicated accessibility review now happens quickly within the same workflow the team already uses to build each course. 

Articulate’s localization features—adopted this year—completed the picture. Rather than creating separate courses per language, J. J. Keller now translates into many languages via localization and publishes a single multilingual course that lets learners select their language at enrollment. In addition to solving this customer pain point, Burrows notes that this feature makes publishing and updating courses “incredibly easy.” J. J. Keller prides itself on being first to market with accurate, up-to-date regulatory-based content. 

Together, these AI features have turned a complex balancing act into a single, integrated production workflow—one built to grow with the markets J. J. Keller serves.

Unlocking Human Potential

Faster production, greater reach, and training that actually changes behavior on the job

The results of J. J. Keller’s approach are visible across every dimension of the operation—volume, speed, and the quality of what learners walk away with.

Voiceover production dropped from six hours per course to under one—an 83% reduction—and that gain multiplies with every language added. The end-to-end development cycle shrank from 3-4 months to 1-2, driven largely by the time reclaimed from voiceover production, photo/video shoots, and translation. Course completions tell the growth story: The J. J. Keller® Training logged under one million per year when they started creating online training, and that number has since crossed 3.7 million. 

However, the impact shows up where it matters most: 89% of learners report that J. J. Keller’s training actually changed what they know and do on the job. For clients, that translates into measurable business outcomes. As one client, a building safety manager, put it: “I see the ROI from J. J. Keller training in our insurance. We’ve gone from a 260% loss ratio to 25% in one year.”

J. J. Keller’s Creative Content team also stays closely connected to Articulate’s product development process through active use of the enhancement request and support channel. Additionally, says Burrows, a feature request J. J. Keller made at an Articulate conference was reflected in a product update within two and a half weeks. “It’s amazing to have such a strong connection with the software that we use,” she says.

For Burrows, the team’s growth speaks for itself. “We’re not just a small in-house team experimenting with Storyline,” she says. “We’re an enterprise-scale content operation, and we have Articulate products to thank for that.”

With Articulate 360 AI, J. J. Keller has turned one of safety and compliance training’s hardest production challenges—multilingual, accessible content at scale—into a repeatable, efficient workflow.