AI+Automation Systems for NonProfits & SMBs

Design A Colleague, Not A Tool

• Growth Right Solutions, llc

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We trace the gap between new-hire excitement and early isolation, then unpack how Akamai’s texting-based coach, Avi, rebuilt confidence, accelerated learning, and kept humans central to the process. Clear metrics, practical lessons, and a roadmap any growing team can apply.

• the day-one drop in confidence and clarity
• the broken communication triangle between manager, mentor, and new hire
• the 31-day text-first design and human-in-the-loop model
• targeted nudges tied to a rigorous certification path
• measurable gains in completion, speed, confidence, and engagement
• translating enterprise lessons to SMBs with no-code tools
• testing, failure planning, and mobile reliability
• privacy, SOC 2, and GDPR guardrails
• why persona and experience design matter more than features


Nonprofits and Businesses plan to automate at least 30% of all processes in 2026. What is your plan?

SPEAKER_01:

So I want you to go back to a specific moment. Maybe it was a few years ago. Maybe uh maybe it was last week. Okay. You just signed an offer letter for a new job. You've got that incredible high you pop the champagne, you called your mom, you feel, you know, like the chosen one.

SPEAKER_00:

The honeymoon phase. It's a great feeling.

SPEAKER_01:

Exactly. You are ready to conquer the world, but then Monday morning hits. Oh, yeah. Day one. You walk into the office, or more likely these days, you log on to Slack from your kitchen table, and suddenly that excitement just hits a brick wall.

SPEAKER_00:

It really does. You're drowning in tax forms. You have three different logins that don't work, and everyone's using acronyms that, well, they sound like a secret language.

SPEAKER_01:

Aaron Powell And the worst part isn't the paperwork, is it? It's the silence.

SPEAKER_00:

Right. It's that feeling when you realize you have absolutely no idea who to ask for help.

SPEAKER_01:

Aaron Powell You don't want to bug your manager because they look frantic, and you definitely don't want to ask the dumb question on your first day.

SPEAKER_00:

Aaron Powell Because you're terrified they'll think they made a mistake hiring you.

SPEAKER_01:

Aaron Powell It's that classic synch or swim culture. And honestly, it turns a dream job into a nightmare of imposter syndrome in about four hours flat.

SPEAKER_00:

Aaron Powell It happens so fast, but you know, we aren't just here to vent about bad onboarding today.

SPEAKER_01:

Trevor Burrus Right. We are looking at a massive uh structural problem in how companies operate, and more importantly, how one tech giant used a little bit of personality and some smart AI to completely fix it.

SPEAKER_00:

Aaron Powell It's a really fascinating case study because it sits right at the intersection of two huge trends.

SPEAKER_01:

Right.

SPEAKER_00:

The rush to automate everything in HR and what? And the very human need for psychological safety when you're the new kid on the block.

SPEAKER_01:

Aaron Powell Right, because the stats you pulled for this are they're wild. We're looking at data showing that 71% of small and medium businesses are already using AI.

SPEAKER_00:

They are. But it seems like they're using it for spreadsheets or supply chains, you know, not for the human side of things.

SPEAKER_01:

That's the struggle. Everyone wants efficiency, but nobody wants to be welcomed to a company by a cold, unfeeling robot.

SPEAKER_00:

It just sets the wrong tone.

SPEAKER_01:

Which brings us to today's deep dive. We are looking at Akamai Technologies. A massive player.

SPEAKER_00:

Huge. For those who don't know, Akamai are the ones keeping the internet fast and secure behind the scenes. If you've watched a streaming video today, you probably use them.

SPEAKER_01:

Without even knowing it. But despite being this tech giant, they had a very, very human problem.

SPEAKER_00:

Their new hires were struggling to get up to speed. And to fix it, they built Avi.

SPEAKER_01:

Avi. And Avi isn't just a piece of software. He's an award-winning chatbot that, well, you could argue it changed the game for HR automation.

SPEAKER_00:

And before you roll your eyes at the word chatbot, the stakes here are incredibly high. We aren't just talking about making people feel warm and fuzzy.

SPEAKER_01:

Not at all. We're looking at sources specifically from Kumo HQ and HR Cloud, indicating that companies who get this right, who use AI effectively in onboarding, can save around$18,000 annually.

SPEAKER_00:

$18,000 per employee. That seems incredibly high.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

Where is that money coming from?

SPEAKER_01:

Well, it comes from two main buckets. First, retention.

SPEAKER_00:

New hires who have a bad onboarding experience are twice as likely to look for a new job in the first year. Hiring is expensive. Super expensive. But the second bucket is efficiency. It's about how fast that person becomes productive. If they spend three months figuring out their job instead of six months, well, that's pure profit.

SPEAKER_01:

That makes a ton of sense. So today our mission is to unpack Avi. How did he work?

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, what's under the hood?

SPEAKER_01:

Why was he so successful? And critically, if you are a smaller business listening to this and you don't have Akamai's budget, which most don't. How can you replicate that success?

SPEAKER_00:

It's really a story about connecting the dots between technology and psychology.

SPEAKER_01:

So let's rewind. Let's go to the before state. Akamai is this massive successful company. They hire brilliant engineers. What exactly was breaking down?

SPEAKER_00:

Well, it wasn't that they didn't have resources. They had tons of documentation. Yeah. Wikis, PDFs, you know, portals.

SPEAKER_01:

The usual stuff.

SPEAKER_00:

The usual stuff. But the feedback they were getting from new employees was a little worrying. It wasn't about the perks or the coffee. It was a specific complaint about a lack of support and guidance.

SPEAKER_01:

Which is kind of ironic for a company that specializes in connectivity.

SPEAKER_00:

Precisely. They identified a breakdown in what they called the communication triangle.

SPEAKER_01:

The communication triangle, what's that?

SPEAKER_00:

So in any onboarding scenario, you have three key players the manager, the mentor, if you have one, and the new hire.

SPEAKER_01:

Right.

SPEAKER_00:

In a perfect world, information flows freely between all three.

SPEAKER_01:

But in the real world, the manager is busy putting out fires, the mentor might be in a different time zone or just swamped.

SPEAKER_00:

And the new hire is sitting there terrified to interrupt anyone. The triangle's broken.

SPEAKER_01:

Exactly.

SPEAKER_00:

And at Akamai, the stakes are even higher. Their onboarding isn't just here's the bathroom, here's your laptop. They have a really rigorous program called the Technical Primer Certification.

SPEAKER_01:

I saw this in the notes. This is not a read-the-handbook situation. It's basically a pass-fail exam just to start your job.

SPEAKER_00:

Yes. It's a serious technical hurdle. Yeah. Complex networking concepts. And the problem was new hires were missing milestones. Oh. They were losing track of what to study. And ultimately, they were failing to finish the certification on time. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_01:

That is a recipe for disaster. I mean, if you start your job by failing something, your confidence is just shocked.

SPEAKER_00:

It's gone. You're already thinking, I don't belong here. And that's where the psychological safety part comes in.

SPEAKER_01:

Right.

SPEAKER_00:

They needed a way to nudge these employees, remind them of deadlines, but also a really low pressure way for them to ask questions without feeling, you know, judged.

SPEAKER_01:

Aaron Powell Enter Avi. Now, when I first read about this, I groaned a little. I pictured another web portal you have to log into or one of those little chat bubbles on a website that never actually helps.

SPEAKER_00:

Aaron Powell No, Abi is very different. Akamai partnered with a company called Mobile Coach to build this. And the brilliance was in the delivery mechanism.

SPEAKER_01:

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: A delivery. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

Avi isn't a portal. Avi lives on your phone. He talks to you through SMS or in some places the line app.

SPEAKER_01:

Trevor Burrus, Jr. That is such a crucial shift. It meets the employee where they already are. I check my texts constantly. I check my corporate learning portal. Basically never.

SPEAKER_00:

Aaron Powell It creates a low barrier to entry. No new password to remember, no VPN to log into. It's just a text message.

SPEAKER_01:

Aaron Powell And he's active for a specific window, right?

SPEAKER_00:

Yep. Just the new hires first 31 days.

SPEAKER_01:

Only the first month. Why cut it off then?

SPEAKER_00:

Aaron Powell Because that's the critical sync or swim window. That's when the habits get formed. And during that month, Avi has three core functions. First, he reminds you, he nudges you about upcoming deadlines for that technical primary.

SPEAKER_01:

So, like, hey, don't forget to study chapter four.

SPEAKER_00:

Exactly. Yeah. Second, he motivates, sends encouraging messages. And third, he gathers info. He checks in on key tasks. But here's where it gets really interesting technically. Avi isn't fully autonomous.

SPEAKER_01:

This is the human in the loot concept, right? I want to dig into this because AI usually implies no humans.

SPEAKER_00:

Right. And this is a huge lesson for anyone listening who's afraid of AI, you know, hallucinating or giving the wrong answer. Avi was designed so that if a user asked a question he couldn't answer, he wouldn't guess.

SPEAKER_01:

So he doesn't just make something up.

SPEAKER_00:

No, he passes the query to the actual human onboarding team.

SPEAKER_01:

Okay, so walk me through that. I text Avi a complex question. Avi realizes he's stumped. What happens next? Does he just say, I don't know?

SPEAKER_00:

Nope. Avi routes that question to a human expert at Akamai. That human types the answer, but the system sends it back to the new hire through Avi.

SPEAKER_01:

Oh, that's clever. So to the user, it just looks like Avi got smarter.

SPEAKER_00:

Exactly. It unburdens the managers from answering the same FAQ 50 times, but it ensures the new hire gets a 100% correct answer, and it maintains that single friendly interface.

SPEAKER_01:

It preserves the persona of Avi.

SPEAKER_00:

It does. And there was a great example in the source material about this. A user was really struggling with a concept, told Avi about it.

SPEAKER_01:

And Avi didn't just say tough luck.

SPEAKER_00:

Not at all. This is a great user story. The new hire was struggling with a specific technical topic, and Avi probably triggered by a keyword suggested specific lynda.com videos that targeted that exact problem.

SPEAKER_01:

Lynda.com, which is now LinkedIn Learning for context.

SPEAKER_00:

Correct. But the key is that it wasn't generic advice like study harder. It was a targeted resource, delivered instantly to their phone.

SPEAKER_01:

It's like having a really smart friend who knows exactly which YouTube tutorial you need to watch.

SPEAKER_00:

Exactly. The user feedback was that this interaction alone made the whole thing worthwhile.

SPEAKER_01:

Okay, so we have the setup a tax-based bot, a 31-day window, a human safety net. Did it actually work? Or was it just a cool novelty?

SPEAKER_00:

The metrics are. Well, they're staggering. And we have to look at this through the lens of that technical primer certification because that was the big pain point.

SPEAKER_01:

Okay, hit me with the numbers.

SPEAKER_00:

Metric number one, completion rates. New hires who used Avi were 58% more likely to complete their certification.

SPEAKER_01:

58%. That is that's not a marginal game, that is a transformation.

SPEAKER_00:

It is huge. Imagine if you could flip a switch and 58% more of your staff became fully qualified without you doing any extra teaching.

SPEAKER_01:

And I'm guessing that's because of the nudge factor.

SPEAKER_00:

Absolutely. An email buried in an inbox is easy to ignore. A text message asking, how's the studying going? creates a different kind of accountability.

SPEAKER_01:

So it wasn't just about finishing.

SPEAKER_00:

It was about finishing fast. Metric number two, speed. Employees using Avi took 20% less time to complete the certification.

SPEAKER_01:

Okay, I have to play devil's advocate here. Speed sounds great for the company, but is it good for the learner? If I rush through a certification 20% faster, am I actually absorbing it?

SPEAKER_00:

That's the valid fear. Speed without retention is totally useless. But that brings us to metric number three: confidence. This is the quality metric. The real proof? The real proof. They survey the users, and 80% of Avi users reported feeling confident with HTTP concepts.

SPEAKER_01:

And for those of us who aren't network engineers, HTTP is.

SPEAKER_00:

It's the language of the web. Hypertext transfer protocol. If you work at Akamai and you don't understand HTTP, you can't do your job. It's foundational.

SPEAKER_01:

So 80% felt confident there. What about the certification as a whole?

SPEAKER_00:

100%.

SPEAKER_01:

100%.

SPEAKER_00:

Every single user reported feeling confident with the concepts learned during the technical premier. So they weren't just rushing, they were learning faster and feeling better about it.

SPEAKER_01:

That is the holy grail. Faster completion, higher completion rate, and they actually know the material.

SPEAKER_00:

And they liked doing it. The engagement stats back this up. 76% of users were classified as high responders.

SPEAKER_01:

Meaning they answered more than half of Avi's questions.

SPEAKER_00:

Yes. Anyone who works in internal comms knows getting a 76% response rate on anything is a miracle.

SPEAKER_01:

Usually you're begging for 10% on an employee survey.

SPEAKER_00:

Right. And 62% expressly said Avi was helpful or very helpful.

SPEAKER_01:

So we have a clear win for the employees. But let's circle back to that$18,000 figure. How does a chat bot directly translate to that kind of savings?

SPEAKER_00:

It all comes back to that time to productivity metric. If an engineer is earning a significant salary and they spend two weeks less time training and two weeks more time building product because of that 20% speed increase, well, that's direct ROI.

SPEAKER_01:

And you save the cost of recruiting a replacement because the first person didn't quit in frustration.

SPEAKER_00:

Exactly.

SPEAKER_01:

There was also a sidebar in the research about fraud and security. It seemed a bit disconnected from onboarding. How does that fit in?

SPEAKER_00:

It's more about the broader context of AI in these kinds of companies. The source points out that while Akamai uses AI like Avi for the warm and fuzzy stuff, the same underlying tech is used for fraud detection to protect revenue.

SPEAKER_01:

Aaron Powell So it's a duality: a colleague on one side and a security guard on the other.

SPEAKER_00:

You could put it that way, yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

Okay, so if I'm listening to this and I'm the CEO of Akamai, I'm popping champagne. But I'm guessing most people listening aren't running a multi-billion dollar tech giant.

SPEAKER_00:

Right. Probably not.

SPEAKER_01:

So how do we translate this? If I'm running a mid-sized marketing firm, what are the implementation lessons?

SPEAKER_00:

The good news is you don't need to be a tech giant anymore. The tools have democratized. The first lesson from Akamai's success is start small and focused.

SPEAKER_01:

Don't try to build a bot that knows everything about the company history and the cafeteria menus.

SPEAKER_00:

Exactly. Don't try to build Skynet. Akamai focuses specifically on the technical primer, one workflow. For a smaller business, maybe start with just FAQs or document collection.

SPEAKER_01:

And you can do this without a dev team now, with this no code thing people talk about.

SPEAKER_00:

Yes. The sources highlight the rise of no code platforms. Tools like Zapier or Make.com. You can integrate them with tools you already have, Dmail, Slack, whatever.

SPEAKER_01:

So you can use them as like digital duct tape.

SPEAKER_00:

That's a great way to put it. You build a system that says when a new employee is added here, send this email on day one, this text on day three. You build the logic without writing code.

SPEAKER_01:

Got it. Okay, what's lesson two?

SPEAKER_00:

The human element. We touched on this, but it's so vital. Akamai didn't fire their mentors. Avi connected the mentor.

SPEAKER_01:

I love that term super worker that came up in the research.

SPEAKER_00:

It's a great concept. The AI handles the admin, the scheduling, the reminders, the did you sign Form 3B?

SPEAKER_01:

Frees up the human.

SPEAKER_00:

It frees up the human mentor to handle the culture, the complex problems, the let's go get coffee moments.

SPEAKER_01:

So the human gets to be the fun parent and the bot gets to be the nag.

SPEAKER_00:

In a way, yes. But it makes the human interactions more valuable because they aren't just transactional.

SPEAKER_01:

Okay, lesson three. Testing. I feel like this is where people get burned. They launch a bot, it breaks, and everyone hates it.

SPEAKER_00:

It happens all the time. The test automation source we looked at emphasized this heavily. Something like 46% of recruiters report technical issues as a barrier.

SPEAKER_01:

That's almost half.

SPEAKER_00:

If your new hire tries to use your cool new bot and it crashes, you've done more damage than good. Yeah. And you have to remember mobile testing. It has to work on different phones.

SPEAKER_01:

Right. And there was that concept, chaos engineering.

SPEAKER_00:

Sounds intense. Right.

SPEAKER_01:

Sounds like a superhero movie. What is it in plain English?

SPEAKER_00:

It just means intentionally trying to break your own system. You simulate failures. What happens if the internet cuts out? What happens if a user sends 50 messages at once?

SPEAKER_01:

So you're making sure it fails gracefully.

SPEAKER_00:

Exactly. Like Ovi handing off to a human rather than just spitting out an error code. Break it yourself before your user breaks it.

SPEAKER_01:

Smart. Okay. And finally, lesson four. The boring but scary one.

SPEAKER_00:

Privacy. This is huge. It is. HR data is so sensitive. You cannot just feed that data into a public large language model without safeguards. You need to make sure your tools are GDPR or SOC2 compliant.

SPEAKER_01:

Can you break down SOC2 for us? I see it on websites all the time.

SPEAKER_00:

Think of SOC2 like a health inspection grade for a restaurant, but for data security. It means an outside auditor has verified that you're handling data safely.

SPEAKER_01:

So if a tool isn't SOC2 compliant, you probably shouldn't trust it with your employee's personal info. Right. Don't just upload your employee's spreadsheet to a free chat bot online.

SPEAKER_00:

Please don't do that. That is how you get fired.

SPEAKER_01:

So, to wrap this all up, we've gone from the anxiety of a new job to a solution that not only eases that anxiety, but boosts certification by 58%.

SPEAKER_00:

It's a really powerful story. And I think the big takeaway is that we often view automation as a way to remove humans to save money. But Akamai showed that the best automation actually makes the human connection better.

SPEAKER_01:

It frees HR from being reminder machines so they can be career builders.

SPEAKER_00:

Exactly.

SPEAKER_01:

So here is my final thought for you to chew on. We are heading toward a world where by 2026, something like 40% of enterprise apps will use these kinds of AI agents.

SPEAKER_00:

So they're going to be everywhere.

SPEAKER_01:

Everywhere. The competitive advantage is no longer just having a bot. Everyone will have one.

SPEAKER_00:

The advantage will be in the design.

SPEAKER_01:

Exactly. Avi was successful because he had a name, a visual avatar, that guy in the blue sweater. He had a personality. He felt like a guide, not a form. So the question is is your company ready to design a colleague, not just a tool?

SPEAKER_00:

That's the question that will define the next phase of HR Tech.

SPEAKER_01:

Thanks for diving in with us. We'll catch you on the next one.