About Paycor
Paycor, a Paychex company, is a leading provider of human capital management (HCM) solutions that help businesses streamline payroll, HR, talent management, and workforce operations. Serving organizations across a wide range of industries, Paycor combines deep HR expertise with intuitive technology to support employers through every stage of the employee lifecycle, including hiring, onboarding, performance management and compliance.
With a strong focus on innovation and customer education, Paycor enables organizations to make smarter people decisions while adapting quickly to changing business and regulatory needs.
The organization’s requirements were clear from the outset. Any solution would need to scale alongside continued hiring growth, support a distributed and remote workforce, and provide new employees with clear, structured guidance from their first day forward. What remained undefined was the path to execution.
Challenge: Manual, multi-step instructional design
As Paycor’s products evolved and learning needs expanded, the Learning & Enablement team encountered a growing challenge: traditional instructional design tools and processes could not keep up with the demand. Creating even a single course required navigating a lengthy, multi-step workflow before any development could begin.
- Gathering source content from SMEs, including documents, videos, demos, emails, and job aids
- Manually reviewing and synthesizing large volumes of material
- Creating detailed outlines in Word templates
- Sending outlines to SMEs via email for review and revision
- Building storyboards based on approved outlines
- Managing multiple additional SME review cycles
- Cut-and-paste content into Articulate
- Rewrite content to ensure learning styles and best practices are applied
- Style and create interactive elements, build questions and apply layouts.
- Publish the course
This approach often required 10–20 hours of preparation just to reach the starting line for course production.
“It felt like writing a research paper every single time—digging through calls, recordings, demos, emails, and interviews just to get to an outline,” says Leela Summers, Learning Consultant at Paycor.
Beyond the sheer time investment, the workflow introduced several operational challenges:
- Lengthy feedback cycles driven by email-based SME collaboration
- Time-consuming to build multiple delivery formats such as e-learning, job aids, and webinars
As content demands continued to grow, it became clear that the team needed a more efficient, scalable way to handle early-stage instructional design that would preserve quality while freeing time for higher-impact work.
“It felt like writing a research paper every single time—digging through calls, recordings, demos, emails, and interviews just to get to an outline”
Solution: AI as a V1 instructional designer
By introducing LEAi, an AI-powered solution for creating training content and exam generation, Paycor fundamentally reimagined its instructional design approach. LEAi now serves as the team’s “V1 instructional designer”, automating the most time-consuming and manual stages of content development. This shift has reduced early-stage development time by up to 75% while simultaneously improving content quality, consistency, and delivery speed.
Instead of spending days synthesizing information before meaningful design work can begin, the learning team uses LEAi to rapidly transform raw source materials into structured, review-ready learning assets. AI handles the heavy lifting upfront, allowing instructional designers to apply their expertise where it adds the most value – strategy, learning experience, and alignment to business goals.
With LEAi embedded into their process, the team follows a streamlined, repeatable workflow:
- Upload raw source content directly into LEAi, including documents, videos, demos, transcripts, and job aids
- Automatically generate structured course outlines, creating a strong foundation in minutes rather than hours
- Use AI prompts to shape learning objectives and course structure that follows learning best practices and meets the needs of specific audiences and delivery formats
- Instantly extract key concepts, screenshots, and summaries from source materials, eliminating manual review and note-taking
- Generate a first draft of assessment questions and interactive elements that are tightly aligned to learning goals and retention outcomes
- Rewrite, refine, and search for related or overlapping content within LEAi to improve clarity, consistency, and reuse
This AI-driven V1 development ensures that by the time content reaches SMEs or moves into production of the course, it is already well-structured, comprehensive, and aligned, dramatically reducing revision cycles.
Results: Faster, better, and more strategic learning
By embedding LEAi into the core of its instructional design workflow, Paycor quickly began to see measurable improvements across speed, quality, and scalability.
What started as a solution to reduce manual effort evolved into a strategic advantage. The learning team now moves faster, produces higher-quality content, and responds more effectively to ongoing product and business changes.
The impact of AI is evident not only in time savings but also in the strength of early drafts, the effectiveness of assessments, time and effort spent to produce the courses and the team’s ability to continuously refresh learning content without friction.
75% Reduction in Prep Time
- What once took 10–20 hours now takes minutes.
- The team reaches SME review-ready content significantly faster.
Higher-Quality V1 Content
- More comprehensive use of source materials.
- Better-aligned outlines, interactive elements and assessments.
“Our V1 content is now actually much better than what it used to be.”
Improved Assessment Design
- LEAi generates focused, effective assessment questions.
Easier Content Refreshes
When products change, LEAi becomes the first stop:
- Upload new videos or demos
- Instantly extract updates
- Regenerate content and assessments
“We’re not skipping steps in instructional design – we’re just speeding up the parts where it makes sense”
Expanded use cases across teams
Beyond e-learning V1 development, Paycor also uses LEAi for:
- Facilitator guides for associate learning teams
- Learner guides and job aids
- Sales enablement content
- Rapid repurposing across delivery formats
Business impact
By offloading repetitive, time-intensive preparation work to AI, Paycor’s learning team has fundamentally shifted how it creates and delivers training. Instead of spending hours synthesizing source materials and building early drafts, the team can now focus its expertise where it matters most – on strategy, learner experience, and business outcomes.
As a result, the team can:
- Focus on strategic program design, including end-to-end learning journeys aligned to business and partner goals.
- Redesign and optimize learning domains, making it easier for learners to find, navigate, and apply content.
- Deliver fresher, more relevant training faster, keeping pace with frequent product updates and evolving customer needs.
- Sustain high engagement and completion rates, consistently achieving 90–95% completion and, in some programs, reaching 100%.
This shift has improved both speed and quality without compromising instructional rigour. “We’re not skipping steps in instructional design – we’re just speeding up the parts where it makes sense,” says Leela.
Overcoming AI hesitation
Many learning teams may encounter natural hesitation around adopting AI, such as concerns about accuracy, loss of control, and whether AI could truly match the rigour of a traditional instructional design process. Leela addresses these concerns by reframing AI not as a replacement for human expertise, but as a force multiplier.
“It’s about working smarter, not harder. Why spend 10 hours doing something a tool can do in 10 minutes – when that time could be spent on work that actually moves the needle?”
Rather than eliminating steps in the instructional design process, LEAi accelerates the most manual and repetitive parts, such as synthesizing source content, drafting outlines, and generating assessment questions, This balance has helped build trust in the tool and increased adoption across teams.
Today, LEAi is an indispensable part of Paycor’s learning ecosystem. By significantly reducing development time and improving the quality of first drafts, the team has unlocked capacity for higher-value work, including strategic program design, content modernization, and continuous learning optimization.
“It’s a gain of time, a gain of resources, and a gain of impact. We’re delivering high-quality training faster, and that’s better for everyone.”
