Evolving workflows with AI: How BambooHR speeds up content at scale with Writer
A conversation with Executive Creative Director John Meese and Writing Team Manager Marie-Reine Pugh
AT A GLANCE
70
hours saved per week
95%
of users are highly engaged
Faster
time to market
WATCH THE CLIPS
LISTEN TO THE INTERVIEW
BambooHR headquarters
Draper, Utah
Industry
Technology
Department
Marketing
Key features used
Style guide AI apps Ask Writer Mac app Chrome extension
Listen to the BambooHR story or read the (edited) story below
Writer is the full-stack generative AI platform for enterprises. We make it easy for organizations to adopt AI apps and workflows that deliver quantifiable ROI quickly.
John Meese is the Executive Creative Director at BambooHR, with over 20 years of experience leading creative teams. Prior to joining BambooHR, he was the Creative Director at ExpertVoice, where he led major rebranding initiatives and established the product design team. John is passionate about inspiring his teams and focusing on professional and personal growth.
Marie-Reine Pugh manages the Writing team at BambooHR. She champions the Oxford comma and BambooHR’s voice far and wide, and oversees the development of blogs, newsletters, emails, social copy, and more.
Read or listen to the story of how Marie-Reine, John, and the team at BambooHR are using Writer to streamline the creative process, increase productivity, and scale teams.
Tell us a bit about yourselves and what you do at BambooHR.
I’m John Meese, the creative director at BambooHR. I’ve been here for six years now, and my team is inclusive of all of the writers, graphic designers, video producers, and project managers.
BambooHR is a SaaS company that provides complete HR software for small- to medium-sized businesses. That’s inclusive of payroll, benefits, employee data, hiring, onboarding, anything that you can think of for employee experience at any given company.
Our mission is to create a product that really connects with HR, that lets them know that we’re here to help solve any of their pain points, to help make their lives better. There is a lot that HR does that can feel rudimentary or repetitive, but there’s also a lot that can feel challenging and emotionally complex to navigate. We want to do anything we can to help folks in HR feel more supported, knowledgeable, and empowered to take on anything that may come their way. As a brand, that’s a really interesting challenge because you’ve got to connect with everybody on a really human level and provide technology and software solutions that aren’t the most exciting on the surface.
There are two main buckets we prioritize on the writing team. The first is internal-facing, which is growing each team member’s skills and careers as writers. The other responsibility is our big brand differentiator, which is the BambooHR voice. The voice is supportive and engaging, no matter the audience. We’re HR’s sidekick — we’re there to make them the hero and look as good as they possibly can.
One of the key challenges we’ve faced as a team is scaling as we grow. We’ve been able to handle a lot of growth in our own team, but we’ve seen an ever-expanding network of content creators within the company. It’s great, but it also increases the number of places that we need to have some creative influence in so that we can make sure the content is on brand, accurately articulated, and professionally done.
I’ve been working in the creative field for over 20 years now, and a couple of decades ago, there were people who felt like they could write, design, and do different creative things who I would’ve looked at with a very skeptical eye.
Now, we’ve been exposed to so much, and we have so many tools at our disposal that a lot of people feel like they can create content and frankly, they aren’t wrong. A lot of them just need the guidance and suggestions along the way to make sure everything is on brand and accurate. Writer really helps us enforce that.
“We handle a lot of personal data being in HR and a software provider, so it was also really important that it met our tight data governance policies. Writer met all of those requirements.”
When we began looking for an AI solution a little over a year ago, there was no shortage of tools and software touting AI capabilities. It was really important to us that the solution we chose felt robust and not just experimental, because we were going to trust it with a lot of information. Being in HR and a software provider where we handle a lot of personal data, it was also really important that it met our tight data governance policies. We needed to find a system that could handle any proprietary information that passed our stringent policies and made us feel secure. Writer met all of those requirements for us, and gave us the tools that we could feel confident in.
Two aspects we were evaluating were the assistive and generative AI components. On the assistive side, we were looking for a platform that could accommodate a style guide that people would actually access and use. We wanted to have suggestions related to all of our guidelines and style preferences, all the way down to how we use certain words for inclusivity or product naming conventions. On the generative side, Writer was a solution that had been available for a while compared to other platforms. We could easily add it to our workflows with the Writer Chrome extension, Figma extension, and Mac experience.
The experience from the prospect stage was also head-and-shoulders above other vendors. Our sales rep was very knowledgeable about the product and the ways it could help us specifically. It was so easy to work with Writer and feel at ease in the ways our business would be handled.
We worked with Writer to create an AI app for emails, which makes up a high percentage of the content requests we get. This app generates a draft, which gets it pretty close to a final version and for us to review. With our emails, there are lots of requirements like character limit, specific headers, and specific formatting. If you aren’t writing emails every single day, you won’t necessarily be familiar with all those components. Having all this baked in to the app makes it easy for people to plug in little different pieces of information and generates an email from all that information and a preview summary for whoever is receiving the email.
We also love the Mac experience and Ask Writer, because they’re both incredibly helpful in our workflow. Ask Writer is helpful in jump-starting content ideation, summarizing and rewriting content — all of which is already on brand.
One of the great values of Writer is that you’ve basically brought on your own prompt artist. We don’t need each member of our team to learn how to prompt the AI to get the results they want. The Writer app library gives you the structure to get the output you’re looking for depending on your use case, rather than requiring you to iteratively figure it out.
“Writer and other AI-capable tools are going to be part of your career, and you’ll be able to empower so many more people to do the work that you would have had to do on your own.”
Additionally, having a tool like Writer in front of our teams all the time is a great way to put our style guide in front of them all the time. Before, somebody would have had to go through some folders and documents and find our style guide somewhere. The chances that they were doing that in the middle of their workflow while writing an email or generating ideas for a report are slim. But with Writer, we can be immediately in front of our teams as they write and help guide them with phrases and terminology that are accurate to our current product.
The Chrome extension is a game-changer for us. It’s difficult as a brand team to get in front of everybody that’s going to create content, and be aware while they’re working. We use Google Workspace, so wherever folks are writing, our Writer-enabled guidelines, suggestions, and terminology are right there with them. The Chrome extension enables a fluidity of work and presence by putting us with them at all times. It’s really a simple yet effective solution.
The marketing team works with many different teams across the company as well, like the copy team. On the marketing team, you have to know the brand and when you’re compliant or not, but that’s not necessarily how people on other teams are thinking. Being able to enable people across the company will be incredibly important to making the brand more cohesive, so we’re excited to start using Writer in other teams.
“The expertise and support provided by the Writer customer success team is invaluable.”
Once we began using Writer on the marketing team, sales — particularly our SDR team — became interested. The woman who leads messaging direction for email cadences, responses, macros on the SDR team is very interested in Writer, and comes to our team workshops with our Writer customer success manager to better enable her team on the platform.
We will go deeper into sales with Writer. Our sales executives and teams communicate with prospects all the time, and we want to make sure they sound like the BambooHR brand at all times. Our HR team is also looking at adopting Writer to improve our internal comms. We’re additionally targeting our content experience team, since they work on content to educate people about our platform, the benefits, and help them onboard. They constantly create content and messaging, some of which is evergreen and will be accessed by many people over many years. The other primary touch point that defines the experiences people have with us is the product team. If we can bring Writer to our product and CX teams, that’s a win for everybody.
“Writer has allowed us to scale support for content to other teams that we otherwise wouldn’t have been able to.”
Marie-Reine Pugh Writing Team Manager
How did you and the team approach rollout and adoption?
One of the key ways we’ve found success in implementation has been through recurring workshops with our Writer customer success manager. Having someone there who is willing to go in-depth and explain specific use cases, answer questions, demo different possibilities, and show us workflows that we wouldn’t have thought of has been crucial. That kind of expertise and support is invaluable.
Since we’ve adopted and now try to gain awareness of Writer across the company, we are having different conversations about how we want to structure our team and meet the needs of the business. We have a lot of excitement from the executive level about us being able to provide more company-wide support as content creators. Previously, providing more as a brand team would’ve meant staffing up, resourcing, contracting agencies, etc. But with Writer, we have a built-in active participant that automatically understands our needs and guidelines.
It’s not just a change management and adoption problem, but it’s a fear management problem to solve, too. I knew that we needed some key people in the organization to feel positive and optimistic about AI-enabled tools. Setting context and expectations with decision makers across the company who could be AI evangelists was all part of a really meaningful adoption strategy.
Our initial goals with Writer are all about adoption and usage. One of the things we’re tracking are how many suggestions are made and how many people are accepting them. I love seeing the specific language and terms that we contributed to the system are being accepted.
If we look back at all the users that we have registered, 96% of those view suggestions from Writer and are engaging with them.
To be honest, I was worried at first about the level of literacy people would have just by sending people off with such a new, different tool. But quickly I realized that it’s not having people generate entire blog articles, but more about speeding workflows up at scale and enabling more people to write faster and more confidently. When they share content with us, it’s already in draft form instead of being a request for brand new copy, which helps us speed up our time to market.
Writer has also allowed us to scale support for content to other teams that we otherwise wouldn’t have been able to. For example, our email team doesn’t always have the bandwidth to take on all of the requests for email campaigns and nurtures from different teams, and so we’ve seen some great success with our custom email app.
There are people that are fearful AI-enabled tools will supplant them or will outmode them or will take their jobs. Frankly, we hear that language all the time. I take the position that we are much better prepared if we lean into it and use it as a tool. It’s going to be no different than many of the other tools that have come along over the years that have made our professions more capable, more interesting, and enabled us to do more high-quality work.
The AI evolution is no different to me than the massive evolution that digital publishing was, or the digitally-based creative was, or that the Internet was, or that mobile was, or that the knowledge revolution was. My advice is to lean into it. Find opportunities to make it work for you. Don’t be afraid of how it’ll evolve your career. It will. The sooner you accept that, the better off you’re going to be. It’ll make our lives and our careers more interesting, more exciting and it’ll make you more valuable across all of the organizations that you work with.
“With Writer, we have a built-in, active participant that automatically understands our needs and guidelines.”
The one difference this time as a creative is your career will be made up of not just outputting content, but helping enable others to output high-quality content. Writer and other AI-capable tools are going to be part of your career and you’ll be able to empower so many more people to do the work that you would have had to do on your own.
My advice is that you should find a partner you truly feel supported by. The more I’ve worked with Writer, I’ve seen how personalized support and advice goes a long way in building engagement and confidence with the platform, and helps my team succeed. Our Writer customer success managers gives me the tools and support to be a better leader, better use the platform, and better understand its potential for BambooHR as a company.
We’re excited to start using the voice capabilities and then see what comes next from Writer. We’re always amazed at the pace of innovation and improvements. It always feels like there are new features coming out, and it’s exciting as we plan to expand to all these new teams.
AT A GLANCE 
