When Orlando startup Pete Learning lifted off last August, the company had no clients and its product wasn’t finished yet. What a difference a year makes.
Now, the AI-powered learning management system has 15 clients and recently added another feature, which President Luis Garcia says has helped the young company clinch its newest deals — particularly its largest client, Addition Financial Credit Union.
"We spend a tremendous amount of time here working on learning, development and other ways to enhance training,” said Addition Financial President and CEO Kevin Miller. “So, the fact that we could adopt some technology from a local company to help, we had to revisit it."
New Pete Learning feature
Pete Founder Jacques Fu and Miller were both judges at April’s 2024 Joust Business Competition at University of Central Florida, and that’s where the conversation started.
By then, Fu, Garcia and their small but mighty team had built out an interactive role-play feature, where learners engage with simulated scenarios.
In these scenarios, learners respond to various customer interactions and situations. The platform tracks and evaluates their responses, providing feedback and insights on performance.
Before the upgrade, Pete Learning’s platform ingested client input, converting it to customized online courses for workforce training such as regulatory compliance, product knowledge, technical skills and more. It still does that, but the role-play piece is an advancement clients have responded to.
“I like the fact that the platform simulates real-life situations employees might encounter, and that H.R. can pull data on those interactive sessions and aggregate that information to understand learning trends across departments or across the company,” Miller said.
While the AI orchestration engine behind Pete Learning — Cognition — is responsible for making this and other features possible, the intelligence driving the conversation between Pete and the learners is the client’s in-house expert or experts, Garcia explained.
As employees take courses and interact with the AI, the voice they hear is not random — it belongs to the expert. The style of speech matches the expert, as does the breadth and depth of knowledge.
Growth for Pete Learning
The Joust competition where Fu and Miller first talked shop happened days after Pete Learning announced it had closed a $2 million funding round, and the newly formed company was aggressively pursuing clients.
By then, Orlando City Soccer had signed on to use Pete Learning, using the platform to train full- and part-time employees, as well as third-party partners at Inter&Co Stadium, namely vendors. Orlando Venues — which operates Kia Center, Camping World Stadium, Tinker Field, Harry P. Leu Gardens and the Mennello Museum of American Art — also signed on.
Both organizations chose Pete Learning because it tailors digital courses to meet the needs of different types of learners, Garcia said at the time.
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“We target companies between 50 and 500 [employees], so with 500 employees, they’re basically at the top. We can serve companies larger than that — it's not a limitation of our software,” Garcia told OBJ. “Usually, when you're larger than that, you tend to have the resources to employ an entire training department. When you’re smaller, you have the problem but not the solution.”
The new relationship with Addition Financial is at the larger end of the scale, with 500 employees, and Addition Financial does have a training department.
Katie Bohman, the learning and development manager at Addition Financial, highlighted the platform's role in improving efficiency. “We are a little different with Pete because we have a training department, but Pete can really come alongside us and help us do our work better and faster and more efficiently."
Miller said once Pete Learning is fully rolled out, all 500 employees will interact with it.
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