How Equans Switzerland turns PowerPoint decks into training videos in half a day with EasyVideo

This interview was conducted in German. All quotes have been translated into English. 

At Equans Switzerland, Paul-Pierre Egli is responsible for learning and development, and supports the creation of e-learning for a wide range of audiences across the business. He is a trained educator with a postgraduate qualification in learning coaching, and he has spent around 30 years in education, with the past 10 years in adult education and people development. 

That experience shaped a clear view of where classic e-learning runs short. It works well when knowledge has to reach people who sit in different places at different times, and when content has to stay standardized. What it struggles with is retention, transfer into daily practice, and a heavy reliance on written text. Video answers a lot of that, which is why Equans Switzerland started to make training videos during COVID. The problem was what a video cost to produce. Internal employees were filmed on camera, the footage was cut together by hand, and translations arrived as subtitles. “Brutally time-consuming,” Paul-Pierre said. 

Today he starts from a PowerPoint deck instead of a camera. He imports the deck into EasyVideo, the speaker notes become the narration for an AI avatar, and he spends about half a day on the animation before the video is ready for a course. Producing one video used to take him more than a full working day before. “With the last projects I did, everything ran automatically and even faster,” he said. “And the AI also changes the text in the speaker notes. It adapts it, and the quality is great.” 

Equans Switzerland filmed its own employees and edited the footage together by hand. 

The video work started for a familiar reason. “This whole video thing came up in connection with COVID,” Paul-Pierre recalled. “We started producing videos to train employees, and we actually put internal people in front of the camera, who then presented something, and cut it together in a video editing program.” 

It was a workable answer at the time. It was also a lot of effort for one video. Producing a single video usually took more than a full working day. Approval added more, as several stakeholders reviewed each video, and the back and forth between them could extend the timeline by weeks. 

Translation added another layer. Equans Switzerland often needs training content in German, French, and Italian, and subtitles were the route they had. Paul-Pierre was not convinced by the result. “Especially the translations afterwards, with subtitles, which was not really optimal either,” he said. “Because when you have to read subtitles and follow something on a slide at the same time, that is demanding.” 

The bigger constraint was maintenance. Training content changes when a process changes, and the old production chain made that expensive. A single corrected sentence meant a new recording, so content aged faster than it could be refreshed. As Paul-Pierre put it, “every small change was a huge ordeal.” 

He asks for the source material as a PowerPoint deck, imports it into EasyVideo, and lets the speaker notes drive the narration. 

Most of the knowledge he turns into training already exists somewhere in the business, and it usually exists as slides. So, he made the file format part of the deal. “When I get materials from the business, I either ask for, or make it a condition, to receive a PowerPoint file,” he said. “I get this file, and I import it.” 

From there, the speaker notes do the work. They become the script for the AI avatar, which means the subject-matter expert who wrote the deck also writes the narration. That step used to be manual. “Recently a lot of it happens automatically, since the tool also recognizes the speaker notes,” Paul-Pierre said. “At the beginning, I fed the speaker notes to the avatars manually.” 

He has been pleased with what the AI does with those notes, including on the decks that arrive without any. “It adapts it, and the quality is great. It has no downside,” he said. “If there are no speaker notes in there, it produces something itself, and that is actually really useful.” 

A full video project now takes about half a day, down from more than a full working day. 

The half day covers the part Paul-Pierre still does by hand, which is the animation. “There is a bit to do, the editing work basically,” he said. “But for a project, I spend half a day and then it is done.” They don’t need any cameras or complex editing software anymore. 

Maintenance changed even more than production. Small content edits used to mean re-recording a whole video sequence. With the text-to-speech feature built into EasyVideo, Paul-Pierre now makes the change in the script and republishes within minutes. Learning content can now be refreshed as processes change. 

He has built 40+ videos so far, and he keeps them short rather than build one long sequence. The response from learners has been consistent. Asked whether any of the feedback had been critical, he was clear. “No, no, the feedback has been positive across the board, without exception,” he said. 

Reduce the text density of the deck first and do as much as possible in PowerPoint before the import. 

That is where Paul-Pierre spends most of his time, and he considers it time well spent. “I always spend a relatively large amount of time preparing the material, the PowerPoint material,” he said. “What is decisive is to anticipate a bit what you want to animate and what not, and the text on the slides has to come in individual blocks.” One large text box gives him one element to work with. “If it imports everything at once, all the text on a slide in one block, then it is difficult to fade in individual lines,” he said. 

His second rule concerns graphics. Native PowerPoint shapes with custom effects do not always survive the trip, so he flattens them beforehand. “It is also important to save complex graphics as images,” he said, “especially when shapes are used with rounded corners or whatever else PowerPoint allows.” 

Once the deck is prepared that way, the build is quick, and the remaining work is the craft he cares about. “I hold myself to the standard of animating things a bit, so that the slide is built together with the speaker,” Paul-Pierre said. “When the avatar mentions something, the corresponding text appears on the slide, so that it is really a visualization of what is being said.” 

Natural enough that they were the biggest surprise for Paul-Pierre, who compares them favorably with older tools he has seen. 

“Especially compared with other tools, or with tools that are a bit older,” he said. “It is striking how natural the speech comes across, and how authentic these avatars look. You can still tell that they are avatars, but the quality is seriously good.” He had recently come across another tool where the speech sounded very mechanical, which sharpened the comparison. 

What he did not expect was how much control he had over delivery. “With this tool, you can also play with punctuation, with commas, periods, exclamation marks, question marks, and you can steer the intonation a bit. That is great,” he said. A comma buys a pause, a question mark lifts the end of a sentence, and the narration lands closer to how a person would actually say it. 

One detail he had never deliberately tested turned out to work too. German business language is full of abbreviations and English terms, and both come out correctly. “It also works with abbreviations. Anglicisms inside German,” he said. “It is really strong.” For a company that provides training in German, French, and Italian, natural voices in each language matter as much as the avatars themselves. 

In onboarding, in quality and ISO training, ahead of in-person seminars, and whenever a new process has to reach a lot of people quickly. 

Onboarding is the one topic that eventually reaches everyone, since new employees arrive continuously and all need the same foundations. Most other content goes to a smaller group. “The population is about 6,000,” Paul-Pierre said. “There are topics that only affect a certain group. With the project leaders, for example, it is about 600.” 

For quality and ISO training, traceable documentation matters as much as the content. Those courses run through the company’s LMS, so participation and completion are recorded reliably. 

The use case Paul-Pierre has been expanding is preparation for in-person training. Learners work through the foundations in a video beforehand, so they arrive at the seminar already familiar with the core concepts. That frees the time in the room for discussion, exchange, practice, and reflection, which is where the learning actually sticks.  

Video also carries new processes and standards to large groups quickly. A good example at Equans Switzerland is a sales fundamentals training for technical staff who are not salespeople by trade. 

It lets learners hear and see the content at the same time, instead of only reading it. 

That is Paul-Pierre’s central argument for the format. Information gets told, shown, and explained, much like a good presentation or a conversation with a teacher, and the learning experience becomes more varied and easier to access. For an educator who spent 30 years watching people learn, it closes the gap between a classic e-learning course and an interactive training video. 

It also comes with discipline. Paul-Pierre keeps his videos short and splits content across several of them rather than build one long sequence, because he does not think learners will stay for the long version. “I have the feeling it is important not to build sequences that are too long,” he said. “Attention spans have dropped through the floor, also in connection with social media and Instagram, where you just scroll through and watch the first fractions of videos and then keep scrolling. That is a challenge.” 

So, the format keeps changing shape at Equans Switzerland. The videos get shorter, the courses get more of them, and with the help of EasyVideo, the production cost stays low enough that Paul-Pierre can keep adjusting until the learning works. 

Paul-Pierre was interviewed in German. His quotes have been translated into English, with light edits for readability.