Citi needed to train a global, distributed workforce on inclusive design and accessibility, subject matter with real weight both ethically and in terms of how the bank showed up for its customers. The ask was a video training series. The problem was that the production infrastructure to make one didn't exist. No centralized studio. No shared equipment. Presenters scattered across countries and time zones, each with whatever tools they had on hand. Under traditional methods, this was a multi-month, multi-vendor undertaking that would have delayed training for a workforce that needed it now.

I took a different route. Instead of lowering the production bar or stretching the timeline, I built a flexible capture workflow that let presenters record themselves on whatever they had (Zoom, webcams, phones) and used emerging AI tools to do the unifying work in post.

Adobe Podcast handled audio cleanup and voiceover enhancement. Cutout Pro standardized backgrounds across recordings shot in dozens of different rooms. Lighting and color were corrected across all footage. ElevenLabs cloned voices and replaced VO lines that weren't usable in the original take. Synthesia and Descript produced custom AI avatars for segments where the on-camera presenter needed to be swapped entirely. The finished series looked like it had been shot in a single coherent studio environment, even though none existed.

This was the first time AI-powered creative tools had been introduced and used at Citi, a meaningful first at an institution where new tooling moves carefully through legal, compliance, and information security. Getting it through those gates was as much of the work as the production itself.

The way I think about it: the AI wasn't doing the creative work. The curriculum, the presenters, the subject-matter expertise, all of that was human. AI handled the unification layer, which is the part that would have eaten months of editing and a six-figure production budget under the old model. That's what made the program shippable in the timeframe the business actually needed.

What I took from it: new tools don't replace creative authorship. They collapse the distance between an idea and the thing — the work is still the work, you just get there faster, with a smaller gap between what's possible and what's practical.