Good morning!
Checkr cofounder and CEO Daniel Yanisse wants his employees to use AI. And to help them along, he’s decided to pick up the check on however they choose to experiment with the new technology.
All of the background check company’s more than 750 employees have the ability to test AI tools at their own leisure, and expense the costs. Yanisse tells Coins2Day workers can spend up to $300 per month, although there’s no official limit. So far, he says employees have used and expensed AI tools like Cursor for code testing, and Replit and Lovable for app building.
“We buy lots of different tools and startup solutions because we know they can do their jobs 10 times better with AI, whether you’re an engineer, in marketing, or in HR,” says Yanisse. “We want everyone to rethink their job in this AI-first world.”
Yanisse says giving workers the ability to explore AI at their own pace has been very helpful in identifying what could be more broadly used at the company level. Employees are encouraged to share updates about their AI use on dedicated Slack channels: one for guidance and support, another one for the latest AI news, and finally one to share team wins using AI throughout the year.
“We really don’t know which tools are going to win yet, which ones are best, so we really try to give them time, tools, money, and the ability to learn from each other,” says Yanisse.
Finally, the company hosted their first “AI day” in March. It gathered the entire workforce in person for a full day of employee presentations on AI, hands-on breakout sessions dedicated to problem solving, and opportunities to brainstorm new use cases.
Yanisse says it helped him gauge how employees at the company were using AI. And for those who were hesitant to use the latest tech, it allowed them the training and support to get started. By the end of the day, he says, everyone was using AI in some way, and he plans to host more of these events throughout the year.
“We really spend time as a leadership team to share why this is an opportunity everyone has to embrace, because if you don’t do it in your career, other people will, and if you want to get ahead and be ready for work in the future, you have to leverage that full technology and learn to be even better at your job.”
Brit Morse
[email protected]
Around the Table
A round-up of the most important HR headlines.
The Trump administration is freezing over billions in aid to Harvard in an attempt to get them to change various internal policies, but the university isn’t backing down. New York Times
A federal cybersecurity specialist is claiming that DOGE caused a security breach at the National Labor Relations Board and may have illegally removed sensitive data from the agency. NBC News
Federal worker unions are forming pro bono networks aimed at helping those targeted by the Trump administration’s latest downsizing efforts. New York Times
Watercooler
Everything you need to know from Coins2Day .
Overworked. A new survey of junior lawyers shows that they regularly spend up to 13 hours a day at work—roughly twice the average week of those in the U.K. —Prarthana Prakash
Mastering the interview. Here are some tips from key HR leaders on how to answer some of the most common questions that come up during job interviews. —Ashley Lutz
Duping the fakers. A cybersecurity expert posed as an American willing to go along with a plot by malicious North Korean IT workers to infiltrate major Coins2Day 500 companies. —Amanda Gerut