From "AI Curious" to "AI Capable": How Zscaler People Services Glitched the Status Quo

Zscaler’s People Services team wrapped up their first-ever AI Hackathon, bringing together teams in India, EMEA, Asia, and the Americas to pause their daily work and answer one radical question: How can we use AI to disrupt our own work?

Glitching the Status Quo

People Services is our front-line HR operations team helping to manage our data and help employees access benefits and services. This team’s work is often intentionally invisible—seamless for the employee, but manually intensive behind the scenes. The goal of the hackathon wasn't just efficiency; it was empowerment–giving the team the agency to solve their own pain points and prove that you don't need "engineer" in your title to build powerful solutions.

As People Services leader Aaron Webb likes to say, they wanted to "glitch the status quo."

The Journey: From Nervous to Unstoppable

Prior to the hackathon, most People Services team members were using AI for the basics: drafting emails and summarizing notes. But once they were given targeted training on how to leverage AI and the permission to experiment, the hesitation vanished.

Teams moved from "AI Curious" to "AI Capable," building functional Proofs of Concept that solved real-life problems.

"I went from 'I have no idea what I'm doing' to 'Look at this masterpiece we created' in record time! I don't make the rules. It didn’t just make me proud, it made me feel genuinely unstoppable. I’m a builder now." — Nella Loria, Sr. People Services Specialist

Real Solutions, Real Impact

Over the course of the hackathon, 15 teams built working prototypes to automate processes and solve bottlenecks that had leadership saying, "We need this live NOW."

• The Parental Leave Planner
• The Pain: 600+ complex cases a year requiring high-touch manual support.
• The Fix: A scalable AI assistant that instantly guides colleagues through complex policies and local laws, giving them clarity and peace of mind when they need it most.
• The Offer Letter AI Assistant
• The Pain: Manually reviewing long offer letters for compliance is slow and risky. Accuracy matters.
• The Fix: An AI auditor that uses semantic analysis to instantly flag compliance risks, ensuring we move fast without breaking things.
• The Onboarding Buddy
• The Pain: New hires want to feel supported from day 1, and this often requires a heavy lift from experts to help ramp them up.
• The Fix: A customized new hire "Buddy" that gives instant access to essential knowledge, allowing our team to focus on the human connection rather than answering repeated process questions.

The Future of Work is Being Built Here

During the People Services AI Hackathon, a team with no prior coding experience successfully architected a fully autonomous AI Agent—proving that AI can remove barriers and empower non-technical teammates to develop powerful solutions.

This experience shows that at Zscaler, we aren't just deploying AI tools to our teams. We’re trusting our teams to embrace AI to build the tools they need. 

Interested in joining a team that empowers you to build? Check out our Careers Page.