After 11 years building e-learning software at a major enterprise, here’s what surprised me when we started shipping GenAI features to real users.
The Starting Point Nobody Talks About
Most GenAI integration blog posts start with a clean slate — a greenfield app, a fresh codebase, a blank canvas. Real life is messier.
When we began integrating generative AI into our e-learning authoring tool, we weren’t starting from scratch. We were dealing with a mature enterprise product — millions of users, legacy architecture decisions made years ago, compliance requirements from Fortune 500 customers, and LMS interoperability standards (SCORM, xAPI) that were designed long before anyone imagined AI-generated content.
The challenge wasn’t “how do we call an AI API.” It was “how do we ship AI features into a product that thousands of instructional designers depend on daily, without breaking their workflows or their trust.”
