When Sage came to us, the challenge was a familiar one: how do you onboard tens of thousands of accounting partners across dozens of countries without a production budget that doubles every time you enter a new market?
The old answer was to shoot something, localise it expensively, and hope it held up long enough to be worth the cost. We tried a different approach.
Sage has one of the world's largest accounting partner networks. Getting new partners productive quickly is a real operational problem. Whether a partner is based in London, Lagos or Los Angeles, the experience needs to be consistent.
The traditional approach is expensive and slow. You film content, it goes out of date, you film it again. You enter a new market, you localise, you rebuild. The budget compounds and the quality still varies. We were asked to find a better way.
A series of AI-generated mentor avatars, styled to Sage's brand and set inside their actual offices. The characters were built to feel like part of the team rather than something bolted on.
New partners get a welcome that feels considered and local. When Sage needs to update the content or add a new language, it takes hours rather than months. The cost of a new market doesn't require a new production.
Partner onboarding tends to fall in a gap between teams. Not quite marketing, not quite HR, not quite ops. So it often gets less attention than it should, and the experience suffers.
The first thing a new partner sees from your brand sets a tone. A generic PDF or a recording from a couple of years ago sends a message, just not always the one you intended.
AI gen video won't solve everything, but it does make it a lot easier to produce something that actually reflects your brand, consistently, without the kind of budget that's usually required to get there.
The technology is only part of it. Poorly directed AI avatars are unconvincing and people clock them immediately. The creative decisions around how a character looks, where they're placed, how they speak, matter as much as they always have in production.
Setting the avatar inside Sage's actual office rather than a neutral background made a bigger difference than we expected. It's a small thing on paper but it changes how the viewer relates to what they're watching.
The localisation side is where the practical case gets interesting. Once the system is in place, a new language or regional version takes hours rather than a new shoot. That changes the economics significantly for any brand operating across multiple markets.
We're now building out a fuller onboarding platform for Sage, where the video series sits alongside AI chat support and real-time video responses to partner questions. It's an ongoing project and it's teaching us a lot.
If you're thinking about what AI video production could do for your brand, talk to us.
