How software maker Monday.com's 'AI Month' unlocked a gusher of employee-generated ideas | Fortune

But even amid all of that progress, Daniel Lereya, Monday.com’s chief product and technology officer, wasn’t satisfied. He wanted to push his team of around 700 “builders”—a group of employees that includes software engineers, product managers, product designers, and data experts—to dream bigger.

And so earlier this year, Lereya kicked off “AI Month,” a four-week initiative of dedicated programming that included 17 workshops, 22 speakers, and 71 working demos, the latter presented by the company’s employees. The demos were all real tools that placed AI at the center of how work could be done to improve internal workflows or to make Monday.com’s customer products even better.

“AI Month” was so popular that the company has since launched similar efforts in other parts of the business, including for the marketing team. The marketing group’s “AI Month” was held in September and led to the design and deployment of new tools like Budget-Bot, which automates financial planning. Ask-Marketing is an AI-powered knowledge sharing hub that was built by marketers, specifically for their needs.

“It’s not taking what we are doing today and augmenting it, but thinking where are the radical changes that need to happen?” says Lereya. “These are the places where we saw the biggest impact.” 

Lereya felt it was important for Monday.com, which sells project management software, to create a precise moment in time where everyone across the organization would feel aligned on what AI will do to change work at the company and about how the technology will evolve in the future.

The company hosted educational sessions during the first week of “AI Month,” which included sharing the baseline details about the various large language models sold by major AI hyperscalers, and explaining industry specific lingo. 

Interactive sessions were built around key themes like vibe coding, a trendy new practice in which developers describe a project’s goals to an AI-powered coding platform which then writes the code. That code can then be refined later by the developer. Every developer that attended the vibe coding session left with an app that they built themselves when applying those principles, says Lereya.

Demos were presented each Thursday afternoon, and Lereya says a small team sifted through 127 submissions, allowing dozens to be presented to the broader employee base. Lereya’s main requirements were that every tool presented would be actually live and in production—not merely a working concept—and that the team presenting the tool could explain what it would do, what failed along the creative process, and what they learned. 

One product that was showcased was Sherlock, an internal performance analysis agent that analyzes requests from users who report a slow performance from Monday.com’s boards, the centralized hub that’s used to track team projects, manage timelines, and assign responsibilities. The Sherlock agent autonomously produces a report that investigators can use to guide them toward a speedier resolution, resulting in less back-and-forth between Monday.com and the company’s users.

Lereya’s team also presented some outside-facing capabilities during AI Month that have since become available to customers, including the AI assistants Monday Magic and Monday Sidekick, as well as an AI-enhanced vibe coding platform called Monday Vibe. 

Within less than three months, Sidekick had over 45,000 interactions and Magic had around 2,000 solutions built within it. Monday Vibe has had over 17,000 apps built within the platform within just two months.

An overarching goal for all the initiatives floated during “AI Month” was alignmebt with Monday.com’s key business objectives: to improve speed-to-market and to create higher quality products that will resonate with customers.

The company is projecting big top line growth from the ongoing AI product pipeline, as leadership at Monday.com recently forecast that annual revenue would reach a new target of $1.8 billion by the end of 2027. This year, Monday.com has projected annual revenue would total between $1.22 billion to $1.23 billion.

Ahead of the “AI Month,” Lereya says that all 80 teams that are part of Monday.com’s “builders” workforce met with senior managers to discuss how the work they do should be reimagined with AI. This naturally raises the question about the impact of AI on future employment. If new AI tools are doing so much more of the work, what will be left for humans? 

“It’s not about letting go of people,” says Lereya. He says Monday.com will want to hire more developers, so it can continue to execute on the company’s product roadmap at a much faster pace than today.

Lereya says that as AI use proliferates, entirely new jobs will be created, but also concedes that some roles will dramatically change, and even at times, be eliminated. But he hopes events like “AI Week” will inspire workers to embrace AI to ensure they’re relevant for the future of work.

“My approach is, ‘Let’s do more,’” says Lereya. “And I do expect more. This is the new standard.”

John Kell

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NEWS PACKETS

Investors cheer AMD’s long-term pact with OpenAI. On Monday, investors cheered the news that OpenAI will work with Advanced Micro Devices (disclosure: AMD is the sponsor of this newsletter) on AI data centers that will run on AMD processors, a deal that Fortune reports could generate tens of billions of dollars in annual revenue for AMD and mark one of the largest AI infrastructure commitments that’s not based on processors from industry leader Nvidia. Following the announcement, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman confirmed on X that the AMD deal “is all incremental to our work with Nvidia” and that OpenAI would also increase its purchasing with that company over time. Under the terms of the agreement, OpenAI plans to use AMD’s next generation of AI GPU chips for massive data-center deployments beginning in 2026.

IBM inks a partnership with Anthropic. The Wall Street Journal reports that Anthropic is making the company’s AI models available inside IBM’s software, which will allow software developers from large IBM customers to automate development tasks, including modernizing code. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, but WSJ reports it is the latest example of Anthropic angling to win over enterprise customers. One product it debuted in September 2024, Claude Enterprise, is reported to have over 300,000 business clients. “This partnership combines our AI capabilities with IBM’s enterprise expertise to make adoption happen where it matters most,” Mike Krieger, Anthropic’s chief product officer, told the outlet.

Anthropic also strikes a deal with Deloitte. Financial advisory and consultancy Deloitte has inked a deal to bring the AI assistant Claude to the firm's more than 470,000 employees globally, a rollout that CNBC reports is the largest-ever enterprise deployment for the AI startup. Deloitte will build out and deploy various Claude “personas” for different groups of employees, which will range from software developers to accountants. “Our clients obviously want to know: ‘Are you using it as well?’” said Ranjit Bawa, Deloitte’s U.S. chief strategy and technology officer. Underscoring how much of a work in progress this still is however, in a separate development, Deloitte offered a partial refund to the Australian government for a report it prepared that had AI-generated errors, including a fabricated quote from a federal court judgment.

Lessons from the Fortune AIQ 50

The inaugural Fortune AIQ 50 list identified the top companies across a broad swath of industries that have made significant progress integrating artificial intelligence technology into their operations, leading to real impact. The insights and experiences of these companies offer valuable lessons for all businesses. Explore all of Fortune AIQ, and read the latest playbook below:

• How Coca-Cola’s leadership developed a taste for AI that helped distribute the technology across its beverage empire
• AI came from tech, but the most advanced AI businesses are in every industry
• ‘Our chapters will work for any enterprise’: Honeywell’s AI chiefs share the strategies that helped the firm mature its AI efforts
• How Visa wove AI into every facet of the company by approaching it as both a science and an art
• Women CEOs are one common thread at some of the companies seeing the most success with AI

ADOPTION CURVE

A proliferation of AI projects is making it more difficult for businesses to manage risks. A OneTrust-backed survey of 1,250 governance-focused IT professionals found that on average, this group is reporting a 37% increase in the amount of time spent on managing AI-related risks versus a year ago, driven by the growing volume and complexity of AI systems that are continuing to mature across many enterprises. Over 40% of respondents said that they are spending 50% more time managing AI risks.

Blake Brannon, OneTrust’s chief innovation officer, tells Fortune that many organizations and their IT departments would typically assess risk for a just a handful of technology projects on an annual basis. But with AI, capacity has swelled, with hundreds of projects being piloted or fully deployed within mere months.

“We've got to build for this new scale that we're seeing, where we as an organization have to be able to review new AI initiatives in orders of magnitude higher than what we're doing today,” says Brannon.

The survey also uncovered the top AI-related risks that were currently underestimated by these organizations. Cybersecurity vulnerabilities ranked at the top (44%), followed closely by third-party use of AI (38%), data governance gaps (36%), and AI agents (34%).

Courtesy of OneTrust

JOBS RADAR

Hiring:

- Taylor Corporation is seeking a chief information officer, based in North Mankato, Minnesota. Posted salary range: $275K-$375K/year.

- The Centre For Neuro Skills is seeking a CIO, based in Irving, Texas. Posted salary range: $161K-$265K/year.

- Persistent Systems is seeking a chief information security officer, based in New York City. Posted salary range: $255K-$290K/year.

- Amtrak is seeking a CISO, based in Washington. Posted salary range: $265K-$356.4K/year.

Hired:

- Anthropic named Rahul Patil as CTO, joining the AI hyperscaler after most recently serving as CTO of payment-processing company Stripe. He succeeds co-founder Sam McCandlish, who is moving to a new role as chief architect. Previously, Patil has served as a SVP of Oracle’s cloud infrastructure business and held roles at Amazon Web Services and Microsoft.

- New York Life announced the appointment of Deepa Soni as EVP and CIO, where he will oversee enterprise technology, cyber, data, AI, and the mutual life insurance company’s venture capital arm. Soni most recently served as chief information and operations officer at insurance giant The Hartford. She also held senior tech leadership roles at financial firms BMO Financial Group, M&T Bank, and KeyBank.

- A.O. Smith appointed Chris Howe as chief digital information officer to replace CIO Melissa Scheppele, a new role that will include the traditional CIO duties with organization-wide digital transformation initiatives, including advanced data analytics and AI capabilities. Howe most recently served as CEO and co-founder of consulting firm Rise and Shift and held various leadership roles over the course of a 25-year career at conglomerate 3M.

- Vertiv promoted Scott Armul to the expanded role as chief product and technology officer, effective January 1, following the retirement of CTO Stephen Liang after a career of over three decades. Armul originally joined Vertiv, which manufactures infrastructure technologies for data centers, in 2017 and most recently served as an EVP. He previously worked as a director at Emerson Network Power.

- Protolabs announced Marc Kermisch as the digital manufacturer’s chief technology and AI officer, effective October 13, and succeeding prior CTO Oleg Ryaboy, who has departed the company. Kermisch most recently served as CTO for Emergent Software and prior to that, was the global chief digital and information officer at agriculture and construction equipment maker CNH.

- CFA Institute has appointed Eliot Pikoulis as CIO, effective September 22, reporting directly to President and CEO Margaret Franklin. Pikoulis joins the not-for-profit organization, which offers finance education for investment professionals, after most recently serving as chief technology executive at education publishing and services provider Pearson.

- Eraneos named Danila Rudenka as CTO, joining the consultancy after most recently serving as VP of Europe, the Middle East, and Africa for IT consulting company Onix. Prior to that, Rudenka spent nearly 16 years in various leadership roles at Google, including as global head of aerial imagery and 3D mapping.