Birchwood Foods
Assembly Line
Generative AI Is Everywhere—Including At Birchwood Foods
Birchwood has historically used short videos to communicate safety and health-related information to its employees. This is generally an effective medium for learning, but only if the audience understands the language within the video. It was way too labor-intensive (and infeasible for English-only speakers) to record videos in every language that Birchwood employees speak, so Birchwood had previously used subtitles from a language translation company. That made the videos very expensive to produce, and many employees couldn’t read the captions.
In early 2023 Caitlin Hamstra, the Corporate Learning and Development Manager, mentioned to her boss that there might be a new solution to this problem based on recent AI developments. Kim Crawford, Birchwood’s head of HR, Safety, and Learning & Development, encouraged Hamstra to survey new technologies for translations in video-based learning. After experimenting with several different generative AI language models and vendors, Hamstra came across a UK-based startup called Synthesia. It specializes in creating avatar-based videos from text that can speak in multiple languages—131 of them at last count. Birchwood entered into a purchase agreement with Synthesia in October of 2023, and Hamstra and L&D Supervisor James Nolan began to implement their software.
Since that time, Birchwood has been very productive with AI-enabled translation. It has created 120 videos, each 5 or 6 minutes in length. They use avatars to do the speaking parts, and the 131 available languages cover 95% of the languages spoken at the plants. Crawford says that giving employees work instructions in their own language has led to very positive reactions. It helps, she says, with engagement, retention, safety, and buy-in to the job.