About the company
Actian is a software company specializing in data management, analytics, and integration solutions that empower businesses to harness the full value of their data. Its portfolio includes advanced database software, cloud-engineered systems, and technologies designed to help organizations manage, connect, and analyze information for faster, more informed decision-making.
With a strong focus on scalability, cloud innovation, and platform flexibility, Actian delivers solutions that integrate seamlessly with existing infrastructures while supporting future growth.
Problem
Matt Rendell, Director of Technical Education at Actian, leads a team responsible for developing hundreds of exam questions across the company’s technical certification programs. These exams are critical for validating skills and ensuring that partners, customers, and employees are equipped to succeed with Actian’s technologies. However, the traditional approach to question creation presented several challenges.
The process was inherently complex, as reference materials included a mix of written documentation, technical guides, and video-based training. Extracting consistent, accurate information from multiple formats added layers of difficulty and slowed the workflow. It was also highly time-intensive. For instance, one sales enablement colleague spent nearly a full week producing approximately 150 questions—an investment of time and resources that wasn’t sustainable as demand grew.
Another persistent challenge was that writing convincing incorrect answers (distractors) often proved harder than creating the correct responses themselves. Well-designed distractors are critical for testing real comprehension, but generating them required deep subject expertise and careful thought. This made the process especially hard to execute at scale.
Scaling the effort was nearly impossible. The team needed hundreds of high-quality questions across multiple certifications, yet the manual process created a bottleneck that limited growth. On top of this, there was a heavy burden on subject matter experts (SMEs), who had to review and refine every question multiple times to ensure accuracy, consistency, and alignment with exam objectives. This not only consumed SME time but also delayed certification program rollouts.
Together, these challenges underscored the urgent need for a more efficient, scalable, and reliable way to create and maintain certification exam content.
Solution
To overcome these challenges, Matt and his team adopted LEAi’s Question Banks, an AI-powered solution designed to streamline and scale certification exam development.
Automatically generates questions
Instead of relying on manual review and drafting, the platform can automatically generate exam questions directly from existing content—whether in the form of articles, technical documentation, training transcripts, or even video materials. This eliminated the need for extensive manual extraction of knowledge and significantly reduced the time spent on initial question creation.
Creates exam blueprint
Beyond simply generating questions, LEAi also creates a complete exam blueprint. It automatically organizes questions into domains and competencies, balancing the weighting across key topics to align with the objectives of each certification program. This ensures that exams are not only comprehensive but also fair, structured, and consistent with industry standards.
Develops different question types
The platform further enhances quality and efficiency by developing multiple question types. It generates both recall-based questions for foundational knowledge checks and reasoning-based questions that measure deeper understanding and application. One of its most valuable features is its ability to create plausible distractors—convincing but incorrect multiple-choice answers. This addresses one of the team’s biggest pain points, ensuring that every question challenges test-takers appropriately without requiring hours of manual effort from SMEs.
By integrating LEAi’s Question Banks into their workflow, the team transformed exam development from a time-consuming, manual process into an automated, scalable system that delivers high-quality results quickly and consistently.
“The quality delivered [by LEAi’s Question Banks] really impressed me. The distractors were strong, and the reasoning questions made you stop and think, which is exactly what a certification exam should do.”
Business impact
Using LEAi has completely transformed the way Matt’s team scales their training and certification programs. What once required days of effort can now be achieved in a matter of minutes.
In terms of speed, the impact has been dramatic. With LEAi, the team can generate hundreds of exam questions almost instantly. For example, from just 13 pieces of content, the platform produced 200 questions in minutes—representing a 90% improvement in efficiency compared to their traditional process.
The quality of the output has also been a game-changer. LEAi consistently generates high-quality, relevant questions that go beyond simple recall. Many include scenario-based challenges and strong, well-constructed distractors, ensuring that exams measure not only knowledge but also real-world application.
Finally, the process of review and publishing has become far more straightforward. Instead of multiple rounds of manual edits and SME validation, the content produced by LEAi is easier to refine and approve, significantly reducing bottlenecks and accelerating certification program delivery.
“Manually writing questions and especially distractors is painful. With LEAi’s Question Bank, we generated 200 well-crafted, relevant questions from 13 pieces of content in just minutes”.
LEAi for certification exam question creation
LEAi by LearnExperts is transforming the way organizations build training and certification programs by saving weeks of SME time and reducing the costs for creating exams. With LEAi, teams can accelerate exam creation while ensuring quality and consistency at every step.
The platform delivers unmatched efficiency with features such as automatic exam blueprint creation, question generation by topic, competency, or difficulty, and built-in industry best practices. It reduces reliance on SMEs, streamlines collaboration and review, and produces referenceable, high-quality questions that are ready to publish.
By making the process seamless and scalable, LEAi enables organizations to launch exams faster, with less effort, and greater confidence in the results.
Ready to see how LEAi can revolutionize your certification programs? Contact us to discover how LEAi can streamline your certification exam question creation.
