Justworks Innovation, Technology & Agility

What is the unique story that you feel your company has with AI? If you were writing about it, what would the title of your blog be?
Justworks’ story with AI has been about making meaningful changes to empower our entire workforce with education and enabling them to take their AI usage as far as they can as experts in their specific domains. To achieve this, we used both internal and external solutions and fostered adoption, empowering all to use AI to solve real business challenges. Our focus moved from cross-functional exploration hubs, which we called “AI Hives,” to a companywide strategic priority, emphasizing tangible tools that improve efficiency and provide insights for teams like sales, operations and product. We’ve built leveraging OpenAI’s APIs, and today every employee has full access to Google Gemini. We’re making it easier for everyone to analyze data — like understanding customer interactions to find unmet needs — by building custom tools that automate complicated internal processes (and we have a huge backlog!). 

Our AI story has been about empowering our people to drive our mission and accelerate our business. We believe that the magic happens deep in the work, and so our path to impact with AI has been to arm the 1,400 people doing the work at Justworks rather than prescribe use cases top down.

What are you most excited about in the field of AI right now?
What excites me most is how AI development is becoming accessible to everyone. Starting in entry-level sales in 2022, I discovered this technology in October 2023 and felt an urgent need to build tools that improved my work. When Justworks began OpenAI testing, I was first in line. I asked ChatGPT for guidance — it told me to learn Python, do demos and embed myself in data. I dove in, copying code from ChatGPT into VSCode, quickly building sales tools. This led to our “AI Hive” experiment — six Justworkers from different departments tackling one problem using generative AI. Five prototypes and six weeks later, we sparked a trend that transformed my career (now AI product manager) and our approach to problem-solving. 

Today, product managers code apps and sales teams use Python for lead generation. Colleagues who once found technology intimidating now collaborate to build AI tools to dig deep into customer feedback to drive deeper insights into what our customers truly need. I’m optimistic about this collaborative future where technical and nontechnical boundaries blur, creating an integrated workplace where everyone contributes meaningfully to our AI journey.

AI is a constantly evolving field. Very few people coming into these roles have years of experience to pull from. Explain what continuous learning looks like on your team. How do you learn from one another and collaborate?
Continuous learning is a core part of our data and analytics team’s culture. It involves both self-directed study — exploring new models, frameworks or development tools — and close teamwork. We learn consistently from each other through frequent meetings, working together on code and detailed code reviews with engineering colleagues. We actively share useful resources, code examples and findings in dedicated Slack channels and presentations. 

Mentorship is important; for instance, I regularly step in to help colleagues in departments like revenue operations build their own AI applications. We also conduct programs like AI office hours and workshops for different teams, encouraging broader AI understanding and experimentation across Justworks. Collaboration extends beyond our team; key projects require deep partnerships with operations, product and sales, ensuring we learn and build together to meet business needs.