Built on We Are: How Fabio Gatto and NT Group use We Are to turn store staff into confident advisors

For Fabio Gatto, technology always starts with people.

Fabio is the Head of Learning Technologies and Innovation at NT Group and an organizational psychologist. Throughout his career, he has focused on one key question for every new tool: how does it really change people's behavior?

"I work a lot with technology," he says, "but always from the point of view of how technology changes culture and the way people have to work with stuff."

For 25 years, NT Group has built its reputation with gamified, in-person classrooms. They used board games, business simulations, team competitions, and the lively energy of people learning together.

When Fabio came on board, he was tasked with putting all of it together into a digital classroom. From that experience, he learned something he still believes: the best learning designers know what they want to change in people, then find the right tool to help make it happen.

So when one of its biggest clients arrived with an interesting problem, it became exactly the kind of challenge Fabio had built his career around.

Immersive learning for change management

The client was a major Italian telecom company, and its problem was a textbook case of change management.

For years, the franchise stores sold SIM cards. Now, with more competition, staff were being asked to sell insurance, energy, cybersecurity, and a whole range of new products.

This meant store staff needed training on the new products and how to sell them to both existing and new customers.

A product brochure wouldn't solve this. The client needed to help its staff learn how to identify and meet customer needs. Three roles needed their own versions of this skill: the person at the counter, the person making outbound calls, and the person visiting small businesses.

Before building anything, the NT Group team studied how staff actually behaved in stores compared to how the management wanted them to behave.

That gap became their framework, and the framework shaped the story.

Finding a learning tool that fits the organization

Fabio knew that one of the hardest parts of change management was getting the organization to agree in the first place.

He has seen impressive tools fail to catch on, hitting what he calls a 'wall in adoption.' People at demos are impressed but often say they're not ready yet. 'It is amazing,' he says, 'but the IT department will never accept that.'

So for this project, he needed something flexible enough to handle a real behavioral challenge, yet approachable enough that a cautious organization would say yes.

So when his boss showed him We Are Learning, Fabio was curious.

What convinced him was that We Are felt approachable to both him and the cautious decision-makers.

"It's very flexible," he says, "and I think it's something that can be easily accepted by organizations."

He immediately read it as a companion to NT Group's existing courses, an interactive layer that could turn a static manual into something people actually wanted to use.

A safe space for learning

Fabio believes that adult learners need room to make mistakes.

Too much training, he argues, treats grown adults like children. For example, a quiz with one obviously correct answer flanked by two obviously silly ones. That teaches nothing.

"People should not be shielded from this kind of harmless mistake," he says. "We drive them to make healthy mistakes."

Every option in his Stories is plausible, so a wrong turn is built to teach rather than trick.

The problem with mistakes, of course, is that in real life they have consequences; a fumbled conversation can lose a customer.

That's what drew him to interactive scenarios. He treats a scenario like a rehearsal space: a learner can misread a customer, choose the wrong approach, and watch it unfold, with nothing at stake but the lesson.

But not every scenario design serves that goal.

Developing branching scenarios

Fabio had learned the hard way that branching scenarios can quickly get out of hand.

“If you branch too much, it's hard to create, takes a lot of time, and you lose control over the experience”, he says. After all, most learners will only try once, which makes it even harder.

For example, in one of his scenarios for the role of a family assistant at a store, he designed a Story that "branches out and closes in, branches out and closes in."

A narrator sets the scene and reminds the learner of what they covered in class.

The learner then has to make a choice. A weak choice prompts the narrator to step in gently and ask them to try again, rather than opening a confusing new path; while a good choice moves the story forward, and the score reflects it.

To the learner, it feels like a natural conversation where it's safe to stumble.

For Fabio's team, the structure is also a reusable pattern, which changes the economics of building content.

What stood out in We Are Learning

A few features about We Are genuinely stood out to Fabio.

The first was speed. With a previous tool that used voice-intent recognition, every possible learner response had to be carefully mapped out. Just one intent could take four hours of work.

When he tried the same open-response in We Are for the feedback demo, he was stunned by the difference: it took about fifteen minutes.

"I was like, oh yes, this is amazing," he says. “You just give it a few phrases, adjust the confidence threshold, test it, and move on”.

The second feature was the tool's handling of off-script answers. We Are lets the creator decide where a spoken answer fits in the story, and it can also blend the learner's own words into the character's reply.

Fabio tested it with a sales conversation, throwing in an irrelevant comment: " Did you see the football game yesterday? The character acknowledged it naturally: I didn't catch the game, but… and then carried on with the line he'd written, in the right voice, with the right expression.

"That was the wow part," he says.

And then there was a design decision he admired precisely that We Are bets on expressive characters.

We Are's characters, he says, struck the right balance: good-looking and pleasant, which helped learners emotionally connect with them.

From "I just sell SIM cards" to "I help customers find what they need"

NT Group is now building all three Stories for the telecom client, with two already in progress and more topics lined up. The structure Fabio designed once will carry the next scenario, and the one after that.

"With this basic structure, we pretty much can train people on anything."

But the measure of success was the change in behavior happening behind the counter. Store staff who walked in believing their job was to sell SIM cards are learning to see it as helping customers find the right mix of services for their lives.

For Fabio, that was always the point. You can't simply tell people to change. But you can give them somewhere to practice it.

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Built on We Are is a series that spotlights the people using We Are Learning in creative, unexpected ways and the thinking behind what they build.