As the AI era fundamentally reshaped how we work, I recognized an urgent need to reimagine our people programs at the intersection of human and machine. As VP of People & Culture at CloudZero, I saw that traditional approaches to employee development, mentorship, and performance conversations were no longer sufficient. The challenge was clear: how could I leverage AI to amplify our people initiatives and create a culture where employees took greater ownership of their growth, engaged meaningfully with their managers in developmental conversations, and accessed mentorship at scale?
I threw myself into the uncomfortable and designed an entirely new AI-native platform to foster these behaviors. Starting with a clear vision of how employees and managers needed to interact—from quarterly developmental touchpoints to ongoing mentorship connections—I taught myself Claude Code and began building. Over four weeks, I partnered cross-functionally with Revenue Engineering to brainstorm feature solutions and deploy code, while collaborating with our Security team to ensure safe architecture throughout the platform. I learned to integrate code and feature updates into GitHub, committing and pushing 48 pull requests from concept to launch.
The results were transformative: 100% of employees and their managers now conduct quarterly developmental 1:1s (Touchpoints) through the platform, and 100% of people leaders have completed their mentor/mentee profiles within the mentorship module, ready to be paired. What began as an experiment in building at the intersection of people practice and AI became a fundamental shift in how CloudZero approaches employee development—proving that HR leaders can be builders, not just buyers, of the technology that shapes workplace culture.
