Transforming Frontline Worker Training: From Boring to TikTok-Style Learning with Bites Co-Founder Hagai Horovitz at SHRM 2025

Automatically Transcribed With Podsqueeze

Rhona Pierce 00:00:06  Hey everyone, I am here live at SHRM 2025 at the Sherm Labs with Haggai, and we're going to talk about a very exciting new product that he has launched. So first of all, thank you so much for joining us.

Hagai Horovitz 00:00:22  Thank you for having me.

Rhona Pierce 00:00:23  Can you tell us a bit about who you are and kind of like what you are doing in your product?

Hagai Horovitz 00:00:29  Okay. I'm I'm Haggai, one of the co-founders of bytes. Bytes is a next generation platform for, internal communication around mostly around training and learning, folks, mostly on, front end employees in the workforce in general. I think the best way to describe who we are and what we do is the way one of our customers did. She said, it's like, it's as if TikTok and LMS are the baby. we bring the, you know, the excitement and engagement of social media experience into the world of learning and development, while still maintaining all the important business features that you need, like getting reports and insights and easy delivery.

Hagai Horovitz 00:01:12  But we just make a completely different experience, whether it's how we deliver the information, mainly around instant messaging, where it's comfortable for employees to actually get that, and the types of content that they get, which is very much like social media, short videos, quick experience, seamless new app installation. So it's super easy for them. And it actually gets us 90% engagement, which is like around more than four times the, the industry benchmark. And and we built an amazing content creation tool which also creates both, TikTok style, videos, but it also transforms your existing, documents. And like other, contents that you already have. So we just, like, take the PDFs and PowerPoints or Scorm files that you have. Just dump them in our tool and on the other side comes out bites TikTok style completely with the fully translated to 150 languages. Ready to share. Good to go.

Rhona Pierce 00:02:18  Oh, wow. So tell me more about the content creation part, because I know that that's really where people are like, get stuck.

Hagai Horovitz 00:02:25  I would say even more than stuck. I would say even afraid. It's like, you know, you go to your own meet with companies and you meet with people and they say, yeah, but I know, I know that I have content and and I'm kind of aware that it doesn't really work for me, but like, just the thought of having to recreate everything from scratch. I'm not going to do that. So we understood that actually, and I can relate to that. I mean, it's okay. I mean, it's totally understandable. But, what we did is we built our own a tool where you can just take your PDF or PowerPoint, throw it in, you literally dump it in and then we're analyzing it. We're like doing a very thorough analysis of that. We're breaking it down into small subjects that will fit short videos. Then we're offering you with the written script with scenes for that video. And then after you approve or customize that, we actually we create a video from scratch with visuals, with some visuals that were part of the content that you uploaded, with some visuals that might be new.

Hagai Horovitz 00:03:32  AI generated voice over speech music end to end. Wrap it into our own microlearning unit because it's not just around video, it's around a complete learning experience and we hand it to you, ready to be shared. We also handle the sharing because we have our communication tool.

Rhona Pierce 00:03:51  Oh, that is amazing. And I just I talked to a lot of internal comms people and employer branding people as well. It's interesting that you guys, you mentioned frontline workers because those are usually the ones that are ignored or forgotten when we talk about learning and development. So tell me a bit about like how your clients have been using this.

Hagai Horovitz 00:04:14  Yeah, that's an excellent question. I mean, frontline workforce, they they're neglected in a way. There are many reasons for that. It's not because people are bad and they want to neglect them. But like for example, the the churn rates for this workforce are like through the roof. We spoke with, we spoke with some prospects that told us that they have over 100% churn rate.

Hagai Horovitz 00:04:38  So they, like, retrain their entire workforce in a year, rehire and retrain. So first of all, the cost of that is unimaginable. It's actually imaginable. You can actually calculate that. But that's that's tons of money. And second of all, like, you know, the hassle of having to go through all of that, that's that's a lot of hassle. So you constantly train people. You constantly have people learning to do their jobs, and you're hoping that they stay long enough so you can benefit from them. That's another thing because, you know, if if your training is too long, then you have less time to benefit from them actually working for you, and then they leave. So you have a very strong incentive to shorten the training. This is something that we we do. Now the thing with, with, with the frontline workforce is most of them are they're younger, most of them. I mean, not all of them, but most of them are younger. 75% of them are Gen Z and millennials, and they do not have an email.

Hagai Horovitz 00:05:40  They do not have a corporate email. So how are you supposed to communicate with them? I mean, that's a big issue. Yeah. And you have to communicate with them obviously, and you have to train them. So one thing we understood here is that since they don't have their own corporate emails and they can't really be part of your LMS or your portal or whatever you have, you have to communicate through the communication channels that they already use. So we built our platform around being able to communicate and integrate directly into basically any communication channel you can think of. I mean, whether it's instant messaging, like, you know, WhatsApp, like messages, like, slack teams, obviously, emails, Google Chat. So whatever it is that you're already using to communicate with them, that's it. It's perfectly fine. We'll just keep on communicating with them over there. But this is where you're going to use to send them the professional, you know, knowledge and information and and training and these things. So that's part of the concept.

Hagai Horovitz 00:06:45  And we built it, you know, more than just like a simple distribution. It's you can build workflows based on that. You can build reminders you have scheduled sending and you have everything you need. And obviously you have full reporting on anything. Now I'll tell you one more thing. These guys won't even do a signing. I mean, it's like it's it's enough that you, you you give them a signing screen and you lost like 50% of them because they're not going to sign in. They're not going to remember a new password.

Rhona Pierce 00:07:17  Reset it every couple.

Hagai Horovitz 00:07:18  They're not going to sign in. That's it. So we actually built a this very smart system that actually signs them in automatically without them having to do anything. So for them it's just like, you know, you get it. You get a message on well on iMessage it looks nice. The message it has a preview image and it's branded. They click on that and that's it. Boom. They're in. It opens on their phone or their computer or whatever it is that they're using.

Hagai Horovitz 00:07:42  It's like the name of the game is to remove friction, to remove friction, to make everything seamless. Whatever device, whatever communication channel. We don't want you to do anything except get the content.

Rhona Pierce 00:07:54  Get the content that that is amazing. I like that you guys have thought about all of these things. It shows that you've spoken to the people that are going to use this, and the people that are getting are trying to get people to use this. So how did you get involved with Sherm Labs.

Hagai Horovitz 00:08:11  And by mistake. No, I, I obviously heard about Sherm. And then I saw the Sherm Labs. I ran to the Serum Labs program, and obviously it seems very, very desirable. So I filled their initial form, not expecting anything. And then one day they called us back and they said, hey, you passed through the first stage of, filtering or, candidates and let's talk. So we went on and we talked to them and we had quite a few other meetings with them, and we ended up here.

Hagai Horovitz 00:08:49  And it's amazing that it is.

Rhona Pierce 00:08:51  It is amazing. I love what they're doing. how has your experience been? Tell us a little bit more about.

Hagai Horovitz 00:08:57  First of all, they're awesome people. I mean, really, and Nathan, they're amazing, like everyone else that we just met with and, you know, worked with us in one way or another. Everyone was super amazing. Everybody really wants to, you know, help you, promote you, assist you. they're always open to any request or question that we have, and they can always find the right people that we can talk to if we need to consult on something. And we also had like these weekly sessions where the exposes to different professionals from different industries and different roles and some founders of other companies. So you get like the full scope of, you know, information and knowledge that you would want to acquire as, as a founder of, of a startup company. and, you know, they they gave us amazing exposure in events like this one, which is fantastic.

Hagai Horovitz 00:09:56  I mean, it was a fantastic event for us.

Rhona Pierce 00:09:59  Yeah. That is so great. And yeah, the exposure I mean, just here is 16,000 people. and you guys, I believe, had like a demo day here and everything.

Hagai Horovitz 00:10:09  That was a lot of fun.

Rhona Pierce 00:10:10  Oh, did you see it? No, I was not able to see it. But tell us about that. How did that go?

Hagai Horovitz 00:10:14  It was fun. It was. It was a lot of fun. It's like I had to see how I can say everything I want to say about bites in five minutes. It was a struggle because I have a lot to say about bites. but, you know, I had a lot of fun, you know, actually going on stage and talking to people. It's it's one of my hobbies, actually, and I haven't done it for a while, so I it was good to go back to it. And, and it was also very fruitful because many people came to talk to us after that, came to our booth.

Hagai Horovitz 00:10:45  Talk to us personally. So again, excellent exposure. And then it really helped us also in, you know, maybe focusing on like what they give you only five minutes to talk about what you do. And as you can see, I can talk forever. When you give you five minutes to talk about what you do, you have to be super accurate. So it was a good process for us as well.

Rhona Pierce 00:11:08  Yeah. And and I'm not surprised that people were wanting to learn more. It's like you guys are solving a true, true pain point. I know for people in our industry. So what's coming up next? What's in the future for bite?

Hagai Horovitz 00:11:21  I have to say that we're not just solving a problem. We're also very cool. Yes, it's like we do. We do the the cool stuff in the world of learning and development, which is many times it's super boring. You know, the compliance stuff and like, getting people to do, I mean, my demo, my first slide of the demo said employee training sucks, and I think everyone can relate to that.

Hagai Horovitz 00:11:49  And we're trying to bring something that's different. So not everyone would say it sucks. Some would still say that, but like, not everyone would say it sucks. And you know, I think we're kind of the world has changed. I mean, people are not consuming content like they used to. People don't read anymore. They don't go through PowerPoints, and they don't even want to go into long face to face sessions. Because, you know, on our every everyday, the way we consume content, we just use TikTok, Instagram, YouTube. That's what we do and it makes sense. And we got used to it. And it's not only a Gen Z thing, it's everyone. So we're bringing, you know, the the more familiar and more I would say lovable and even fun experience into this training that you have to go through anyway. So if you have to go through this training and you have no choice, it's better that you do it in a way that's that makes more sense to you.

Hagai Horovitz 00:12:42  what we have, like what the future holds. I'm not sure I'm allowed to talk about that, but like, I would say that we're super focused on making the very direct connection between training and the bottom line in business. So it's how training can actually directly impact your business results, how you can actually measure that also. And actually you get to see that you went through this training and now your sales went up. You went through that training and your retention rates have improved. And, you know, it's easy to measure sales in terms of how much money. It's easy to measure retention in terms of how much money it didn't cost you to hire new employees. So we're actually working very hard on making this, like, very, very clear, connection between the two.

Rhona Pierce 00:13:47  Perfect. So I've enjoyed this conversation. Thank you. Listeners, connect with you.

Hagai Horovitz 00:13:52  they can go into our website. it's, my bite, but, like, bite, like, you know, bite my bites. Dot io.

Hagai Horovitz 00:14:00  That's our website. or they can look me up on LinkedIn.

Rhona Pierce 00:14:05  Okay. Perfect. Thank you so much for joining us.

Hagai Horovitz 00:14:08  Thank you very much for having me.

Rhona Pierce 00:14:09  Great.