Who has time to train?

Who has time to train?
Walmart invested heavily in training technology for their 1.5 million associates. Spark City, a gamified app with more than 104,000 downloads. VR simulations that trained over 1 million employees to handle Black Friday rushes. Sophisticated modules for everything from dry goods management to asset protection.

Then they added conversational AI tools. Now those AI assistants handle over 3 million queries per day from more than 900,000 weekly users, answering questions like “How do I process a return without a receipt?”

Why would the world’s largest retailer spend millions building training infrastructure, then pivot to conversation?

Because they discovered what learning science already knew:

Push-based training fails at the moment of need.
Training happens on a schedule.
But questions happen right now,
customer waiting,
decision needed.

If unlimited resources can’t make push-based training work, what does that mean for SMEs?

The expensive lesson you can skip

SME leaders often think: “We need better training. Modules, an LMS, maybe some gamification.”

They’re considering the same path Walmart took.

But Walmart already discovered that path leads nowhere useful. Not because their training was bad. Spark City put players in charge of entire departments, training them on daily challenges managers face. Their VR program created immersive scenarios that employees’ brains “remembered as though it really happened.”

The training was sophisticated. Expensive. Well-designed.

It still couldn’t bridge the gap between scheduled learning and moment-of-need questions.

The fundamental mismatch exists whether you have 2.3 million employees or 20.

For SMEs, the gap cuts deeper. No buffer for mistakes. Every question that goes unanswered costs more proportionally. When Sarah’s on vacation and she’s the only one who knows the vendor password reset process, the entire sales pipeline stalls.

Here’s what Walmart learned the hard way:

Walmart’s expensive path	Your shortcut
Built gamified modules	Skip modules entirely
Required training completion	Make knowledge pull-based
Invested in VR infrastructure	Start with conversational AI
Years of iteration	Implement in weeks
Millions spent learning	Learn from their discovery

You don’t have years and millions to spend discovering what Walmart already proved.

Why push-based training fails everywhere

The problem isn’t company size or training quality. It’s human memory.

Research shows employees forget 70% of training content within 24 hours. Within a week, 90% of new information vanishes.

This is why completed modules don’t prevent questions. The training happened. The retention didn’t.

Even if employees remembered the content, they face the search problem. When you need to process a customer refund, you don’t remember the module was titled “Customer Credit Procedures.” You search for “refund process” and find nothing. Fifteen minutes lost hunting through documentation while the customer waits.

So employees ask someone.

That creates the interruption cascade. Workers spend five working weeks per year reorienting after context switches. Nearly 4 hours weekly getting back into focus after interruptions.

For experts, this compounds fast. Answer the same question ten times this week, that’s your strategic work time gone. Your product roadmap doesn’t move. Your process improvement project stalls.

This isn't a training problem.
It's an accessibility problem.

The Moment-of-Need Method

Walmart’s pivot validates what learning science already showed: knowledge needs to be accessible when people need it, not scheduled when convenient.

This is the Moment-of-Need Method.

It has four steps:

Step 1: Capture what you already know

Don’t create perfect training modules. Capture existing knowledge.

That email where you explained the vendor approval process. The quick video showing how to override a shipping address. The FAQ doc customer service built. The tribal knowledge in your head.

FAQs are particularly valuable. They’re already in question-and-answer format, capturing real questions people ask. Perfect input for conversational systems.

Step 2: Make it conversationally accessible

Upload to a system that understands meaning, not just keyword matching.

Employees ask in natural language: “How do I process a return without a receipt?”

They get specific answers with source citations. Not the entire 40-page procedures manual. The three sentences they need right now.

Step 3: Show confidence levels

Not all answers are equally certain. Sometimes the system knows definitively. Sometimes it’s uncertain.

Confidence scoring prevents false certainty. Employees know when to trust the answer versus when to escalate.

This transparency beats the false confidence that completed training modules create. Just because someone clicked through doesn’t mean they know.

Step 4: Route low-confidence to humans

When the system isn’t confident, connect to an expert.

Quality preserved. Majority of questions handled automatically. Experts handle edge cases, not repeat questions about password resets and return processes.

Answered questions become new knowledge. The system improves over time.

Who has time to train?

Large companies have dedicated L&D teams, million-dollar budgets, years to iterate.

SMEs have an owner or manager creating training materials between running the business.

Every hour spent building training modules is an hour not spent on strategy. On growth. On solving the problems only you can solve.

The expertise concentration problem hits SMEs hardest. Knowledge lives in a few key people. When they’re answering questions, growth stops. When they’re on vacation, bottlenecks appear everywhere.

The interruption cost compounds faster in smaller teams. Research shows it takes 23 minutes to refocus after an interruption. For a manager earning $80K interrupted 12 times per day with questions, that’s 5.6 hours of lost focus time daily. Over a year, that’s nearly $11,500 in lost productivity from repeat questions alone.

For SMEs, this is a larger percentage of total capacity than it would be for Walmart.

“Just ask someone” works when you’re five people. Breaks when you’re 20. Catastrophic at 50.

But you don’t have enterprise resources to solve it.

You’re caught in the middle: too big for “just ask,” too small for dedicated L&D.

Five red flags you’re repeating Walmart’s mistakes

You’re researching LMS platforms

These optimize for completion tracking, not knowledge access. Built for the module approach Walmart discovered doesn’t work.

You’re planning “comprehensive training”

Comprehensive means time-consuming. By the time it’s done, parts are outdated. People won’t wait for comprehensive when they need answers now.

You think “if we just had better training modules”

Walmart had the best modules. Gamified, VR-enhanced, sophisticated. Still needed conversational AI. The problem isn’t module quality. It’s the approach.

You’re blocking work until training is “ready”

Perfect documentation takes months. Your team needs to work now. Processes change while you’re documenting. You’ll never catch up.

You’re investing in engagement features

Walmart tried engagement. Points, gamification, immersive experiences. Then they built conversational tools handling 3 million queries daily instead.

Engagement doesn’t solve access.

These aren’t bad impulses. Walmart had them too. Thanks to GenAI technology, there’s just a faster path now. The one Walmart discovered after the expensive experiments.

What changes

When you implement the Moment-of-Need Method, several shifts happen quickly:

Experts stop being interrupted with repeat questions. They work on problems that actually need their expertise.
New hires become productive faster. They get answers immediately instead of waiting for the next scheduled training session or bothering a colleague.
Knowledge scattered across emails and docs actually gets used. That detailed explanation you sent six months ago doesn’t disappear into someone’s inbox. It becomes searchable, accessible.
FAQs and tribal knowledge become conversational. The question “how do we handle international shipping exceptions?” gets answered the same way every time, with the right answer, citing the source.

No months spent building modules that will be outdated before they’re finished.

This isn’t experimental

Walmart validated conversational AI at massive scale. 1.5 million associates. Thousands of locations. Diverse roles from retail to warehouse to management.

If it works there, it works for 20 to 200 employees.

Their practical discovery aligns with learning science research on just-in-time learning and question-driven knowledge access. This isn’t lucky. It’s how humans actually learn.

Skip the expensive lesson

Walmart spent millions discovering that scheduled training modules fail at the moment of need. If unlimited resources can’t make push-based training work, SMEs need a different approach.

Eanis was built on this insight. Upload your existing knowledge: SOPs, videos, FAQs, partial docs, however imperfect. Employees ask naturally, get specific answers with source citations and confidence scoring. Low-confidence answers route to experts. No integrations. No modules to build.

You don’t have time to repeat Walmart’s experiment. Activate the knowledge you already have and make it accessible when your team needs it.

Start with one role, upload what you have, and go.