Carol Delisi rolled out an AI policy course at the largest US no-kill animal welfare organization, to a workforce that mostly works from phones, on the floor, with animals. 74% enrolled.
A workforce the LMS was never built for
Best Friends Animal Society employs around 950 people across the country, and about half of them work in animal care. Animals don't keep office hours, and animal care staff don't sit at desks. Carol Delisi, an instructional designer who came to L&D after a long facilitation career, joined the organization and ran straight into the same reach problem most frontline operations face.
"Time for training is limited … access to training is limited as well because a lot of the animal care workers that come in, they've got their phones … but they don't necessarily each have a computer or a laptop. In fact, they don't."
Carol DelisiInstructional DesignerBest Friends Animal Society
Why microlearning fit the job
Carol's team needed to roll out an AI policy and guardrails course, what AI would and wouldn't be used for at an organization whose mission is saving animal lives. The audience had minutes, not hours. She had already been quietly piloting 7taps with a supportive manager who let her try new tools, and the format matched the constraint.
"I love the idea of microlearning, which to me is sort of this one learning objective and brief learning … I look at a video and I'm like, oh, it's 10 minutes. That's an awful long time. So 7taps really appealed to me in the idea of let's give people what they need, when they need it and in just the right amount."Carol DelisiInstructional DesignerBest Friends Animal Society
Built fast with AI, shipped through Workday
The first draft came together quickly. Carol dropped the source documentation into the AI authoring inside 7taps and edited from a working draft instead of a blank page. The course then went out through a brand new Workday LMS rollout, with dynamic SCORM letting her push last-minute edits without re-uploading. Staff opened it on phones. Quizzes inside the modules stopped people from skimming and pulled them back to the material.
The number that mattered: 74%
For an all-staff course, in an org that had previously relied on chance encounters and one-off virtual sessions, the participation rate was the proof point.
"74% of our staff, and this was for all staff, so this was 950 plus people enrolled into the content. And that is amazing because before we rolled this out … it was kind of a just by chance that people would find learning. They either contacted me directly and we did a virtual session or the online learning just kind of sat there."Carol DelisiInstructional DesignerBest Friends Animal Society
What she'd do differently
Carol was honest about the messy parts. She moved into a rapid build before all the stakeholders were confirmed, and the course grew larger than a true single-objective module. The reviewer function in 7taps absorbed a lot of the late feedback, but she still flagged it as the lesson she'd carry forward.
"Curb your enthusiasm because remember to confirm all those stakeholders. I took people at face value that came to me with the content. I'm like, oh, we got it. Let's just do it. And then we learned along the way, oh, there were a few more people that wanted to comment on it."Carol DelisiInstructional DesignerBest Friends Animal Society
Keeping the human in an AI rollout
The course wasn't only built with AI, it was about AI. At a people-centric, mission-driven organization, the message Carol's team kept returning to was that AI assists, humans decide. The same principle shaped how she built the course and how she taught staff to use AI in their day jobs.
"Over and over again, we talked about the human element and the need for humans to review what AI has done … AI can help us analyze the data and then we tell the story … the human element, we're about telling the stories and use AI to hopefully make us more efficient at … getting the data that we need to move forward to save more lives."Carol DelisiInstructional DesignerBest Friends Animal Society
Takeaways for L&D
- If your audience works from phones on a shift floor, design for the phone first, assume no laptop, no quiet desk time, and no patience for a 10-minute video.
- AI authoring is a draft accelerator, not a shortcut around stakeholder sign-off. Confirm every reviewer before you build.
- Dynamic SCORM into your LMS lets you fix copy after launch without re-uploading the course, useful when policy wording is still moving.
- Test with real staff, including the ones you assume are tech-savvy. The friction is often a pop-up window, not the course design.
If your workforce lives on phones and your LMS sits untouched, this is the gap 7taps was built to close, see how Carol's approach could work for your team at the next MicrolearningCONF.
