Phase one of workforce-wide AI upskilling with strong early voluntary engagement
How a 100-year-old facilities management leader began equipping 414 employees with safe, practical AI capability, in a workforce where a typical training course runs 15 minutes or less.
At a glance
Customer
ABM, a global facilities management leader with a workforce across the US, Canada, the UK and Qatar.
Workforce Profile
Dispersed, predominantly frontline, and linguistically diverse.
Program
TrainTeams.ai, an online self-paced AI upskilling program delivered through ABM’s Learning Management System.
Training Pathway
Three progressive tiers: AI Foundations, AI Application and AI Strategy.
Initial Rollout
ABM first opened the program to an initial eligible group of around 700 employees, ahead of a broader rollout.
Early Results
414 voluntary enrollments on Tier 1, representing around 59% of the initial eligible group. Tier 2 was released later and has already reached 146 enrollments.
Emerging workflow use cases:
AI-assisted client billing reconciliation, multilingual communication support, safety checklist translation, and internal AI champions helping colleagues apply the training.
“We're a people-first business. We're really protective of our people”
- Sonny Holloway, Director, Learning and Development, ABM
ABM's world before TrainTeams.ai
ABM has been around for over a century. The company operates in facilities management, a sector where the words "AI" and "innovation" rarely come up first. The workforce is large and dispersed across the US, Canada and Qatar, with a linguistically diverse frontline.
Sonny Holloway leads learning and development at ABM under what he calls a "build, buy, curate" model. He has also been working hands-on with AI for three years, well before the post-ChatGPT scramble, and he had a clear read on where the company needed to go.
The challenge was not a vocal frontline frustration. It was a leadership-level conviction.
“There is a deep need on our side to be first in the space of really developing people.” - Sonny Holloway
The way Sonny frames it, AI is less a problem than a competitive lever. ABM’s frontline work involves practical, everyday tasks: spreadsheets, Word documents, client communication, reconciliation, reporting, safety materials and operational administration. Across a workforce of this scale, even small improvements in how employees draft, summarize, check, translate or reconcile information can create meaningful time savings. The case for AI capability was not abstract. It was about helping people use AI safely and practically in the flow of real work.
The bigger challenge was not access to AI, but capability.
ABM needed a partner that could help employees understand where AI fits, how to use it safely, and how to apply it with confidence across real workplace tasks.
Solution: The TrainTeams.ai program
TrainTeams.ai is an online AI upskilling program designed to help employees build confidence, judgment and practical skills with AI. The program is structured across three tiers:
AI Foundations builds confidence with the fundamentals: what AI is, where it works well, where it can go wrong, and how to use approved tools safely and responsibly.
AI Application moves learners beyond basic prompting into practical workplace use cases, including problem definition, advanced prompting, prompt libraries, retrieval, context windows, custom assistants, risk spotting and quality checks.
AI Strategy helps learners think beyond individual productivity toward workflow redesign, agentic AI, human-in-the-loop controls, risk management and measurable business impact.
Online training, at scale
For ABM, the value was not just the content itself. It was that the training could be delivered online, at scale, through a structure that allowed employees to start with the foundations and progress into deeper application as each tier became available.
“It's not very often we can partner with an organization that has the pedigree of people connected to some of the top technology companies in the world.”
— Sonny HollowayWhat they nearly did instead
Sonny and his team did the discovery work properly. They reached out to multiple vendors, kicked the tires on content libraries, and benchmarked TrainTeams.ai's content against the field.
What separated TrainTeams.ai was the pedigree of the subject matter experts behind the courses, the gamified learning design, and the tone of the early partnership conversations. The online format also mattered. ABM needed training that could reach a dispersed workforce without relying on live workshops or one-off enablement sessions. TrainTeams.ai gave ABM a structured, self-paced program that employees could access through the flow of learning already familiar to them, while still feeling more engaging than a traditional compliance-style module.
The rollout
ABM began with an initial voluntary rollout to around 700 employees. The program was delivered as three self-paced eLearning courses and designed to fit into ABM’s existing learning approach.
This was a real ask. In a workforce where standard training runs 15 minutes or less, ABM was inviting people to spend 90 minutes on the foundation and a further 2.5 hours on the deep dive, often on their own time.
The numbers came back within days.
Tier 1 (AI Foundations)
Module
90 minutes
Length
414 employee enrollments
Voluntary enrollments
87% response rate
Engagement signal
Tier 2 (AI Application)
Module
2.5 hours
Length
146 employee enrollments
Voluntary enrollments
Ratings near top of scale
Engagement signal
Strong engagement and clear appetite for AI upskilling
“Despite seeing 'whoa, 90 minutes,' people said no, we're gonna do it.” -Sonny Holloway
That signal matters more to Sonny than the enrollment count on its own. People with limited training time were choosing to spend a substantial chunk of it on the TrainTeams.ai content. Tier 1’s uptake was the strongest early signal. Tier 2 was released later, but its early enrollment and ratings suggest the appetite for deeper AI application is continuing.
“The concept was different. More intentional, more thought provoking. Not just let's be first to market. Let's do it the right way.”
- Sonny Holloway
Where it is starting to show up in the work
The most useful proof points are not only course completions. They are the practical ways employees are starting to apply the training without being asked.
AI-assisted client billing reconciliation.
This was the clearest signal of the real business impact of the training. A team member came into the training apprehensive and openly worried that AI would take her job. She came out the other side as ABM's loudest internal evangelist for the work. She now builds AI assistants and agents, teaches colleagues to build bots, and has automated a piece of the client contracting and billing reconciliation process that used to be a multi-day manual exercise.
The business impact of that one change is straightforward. Bills go out faster. Clients query less. Cash collects sooner. Sonny's analogy is sharp.
“You go to a restaurant, finish your meal, and wait a month for the bill. That doesn't feel good. We're cutting that lag out.” — Sonny Holloway
The translation bot.
ABM has a large Spanish-speaking workforce, and multilingual communication is one practical area where AI is already helping. In one example, drafting a difficult email to an English-speaking client could take a team member up to an hour, partly because writing in a second language slowed the composition process down. An AI assistant now does the heavy lifting, in ABM's brand voice and conversational style.
“She may have spent an hour crafting a tough email to a client. Now she converts it in seconds.” — Sonny Holloway
Why ABM is not putting a number on it yet
Sonny is clear-headed about the temptation to manufacture ROI projections for a board pack. He is resisting it on principle.
“We expect efficiencies. We just don't know where yet. And we're okay with that.” -Sonny Holloway
“Putting a price tag on where you think those efficiencies are when it comes to your talent is, in my view, the biggest failure of organizations. We would rather discover what good actually looks like.” -Sonny Holloway
What he is comfortable saying out loud is that ABM is a people-first business, that the goal is to give frontline team members back time and capability, and that the early signals from the rollout, the voluntary engagement, the team-member success story and the early workflow use cases point in the right direction with very little prompting.
Where ABM is going next
The early rollout is only the first phase. ABM’s ambition is to take the learning from this initial eligible group and use it to support a broader AI upskilling journey across the organization. The goal is not a one-off training campaign. It is to establish a new baseline for how employees understand, evaluate and apply AI in their work.
“What does the model team member look like in the future? They join, they take the training, and they put it straight into their workflow. That's what good looks like.” - Sonny Holloway
ABM has used its company-wide Elevate Live town hall, weekly internal comms and the company home page to promote the program so far. The next wave of communication is being shaped around the early stories that are now visible inside the business.
Ready to see meaningful and impactful AI adoption in your workforce?
Talk to the TrainTeams.ai team about a scalable online AI upskilling program for your workforce, from foundations and practical application to AI strategy and workflow transformation. We work with L&D, AI and technology leaders to deploy training that employees actually opt into — and that helps them use AI safely, confidently and effectively at work.