Vendasta wins Lattice People + AI Pioneer Award for AI culture

Vendasta won Lattice’s 2026 People + AI Pioneer Award and earned an honourable mention from the Josh Bersin Company after turning AI adoption into a people strategy. The Saskatoon company says AI literacy has climbed to 78% and employees have reclaimed more than 20,000 work hours.

Why it matters: - Vendasta is treating AI adoption as a workplace culture challenge, not just a software rollout. - The approach has produced measurable results, including higher AI literacy and time savings that can be reinvested in higher-value work. - The recognition signals that people-first AI programs are becoming a competitive advantage in how companies scale automation.

What happened: - Vendasta won the 2026 Lattice People + AI Pioneer Award. - Vendasta also received an honourable mention at the Josh Bersin Company’s HR Pacesetter Awards. - Both recognitions were announced at the Irresistible 2026 conference in Los Angeles. - Vendasta is based in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, and serves small and medium businesses with an AI workforce platform.

The details: - Vendasta says its AI operating model was built inside People Operations. - The company renamed its Director of Learning role to Director of AI Business Enablement. - Vendasta created a Citizen Developer program to train employees already experimenting with AI and send them back to their departments as internal champions. - An internal build board tracks every AI tool, agent and workflow employees create, along with the hours saved. - Executive assistants, HR staff, marketing strategists and engineers all contribute to the build board. - Weekly demos give employees a forum to show what they built, including failed experiments. - Company-wide AI literacy has risen from 65% to 78% since the AI literacy journey began. - Nearly 10% of employees are now certified AI workflow builders. - Vendasta says the company has reclaimed more than 20,000 work hours so far and is tracking toward 300,000 hours by the end of 2026. - The company’s internal AI employee, Pepper, answers HR questions around the clock across 12 countries, including benefits by country, employment letters and policy clarifications. - The HR coordinator who previously handled those questions now manages Pepper and builds AI-enabled systems. - Vendasta says its culture was shaped eight years ago around behaviours such as agility, openness to failure and a bias toward action. - The company’s ideal employee profile screens for how people work before it screens for what they know.

Between the lines: - Vendasta’s strategy suggests AI success depends as much on employee confidence and manager behavior as on technology selection. - The company is betting that visible learning from senior leaders lowers resistance and makes experimentation feel safer. - The emphasis on M-shaped workers shows a push toward broader, cross-functional skills as AI takes over repetitive tasks. - Lattice CEO Sarah Franklin said the award recognizes organizations that put people at the center of AI transformation. - Josh Bersin Company Senior Director of Research Stella Ioannidou said Vendasta is beyond pilot mode and has built an AI operating model for employees.

What's next: - Vendasta says it is continuing toward an AI-first organization. - The company is aiming to reach 300,000 reclaimed work hours by the end of 2026. - More employees are expected to move into certified AI workflow builder roles as the internal enablement model expands. - Vendasta’s results will likely serve as a test case for other employers trying to move from AI experimentation to broad adoption.

The bottom line: - Vendasta’s award wins show that AI adoption can scale faster when companies design for culture, not just tools.