Vendasta wins Lattice People + AI Pioneer Award for AI culture

Vendasta received a 2026 Lattice People Success Award and a Josh Bersin honourable mention after building an AI operating model inside People Operations. The Saskatoon company says the approach lifted AI literacy to 78% and reclaimed more than 20,000 work hours.

Why it matters: - Vendasta’s recognition signals that AI adoption is now being judged as much by workplace culture as by software. - The company’s approach ties AI use to measurable workforce change, including higher literacy, more certified builders and reclaimed time. - The awards also underscore a broader shift: companies are being rewarded for putting people operations at the center of AI rollout.

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

The details: - Vendasta built an AI operating model inside People Operations rather than routing adoption through IT. - The company renamed its Director of Learning role to Director of AI Business Enablement. - A Citizen Developer program trains employees already experimenting with AI and sends them back to their teams as internal champions. - Vendasta keeps an internal build board that tracks every AI tool, agent and workflow employees create, along with the hours saved. - Employees across functions, including executive assistants, HR team members and marketing strategists, post their builds on the board. - Weekly demos give employees a forum to show what they built and share failures openly. - Vendasta says company-wide AI literacy has climbed from 65% to 78% since launching its AI literacy journey. - Nearly 10% of employees are certified AI workflow builders. - The company says its AI tools have reclaimed more than 20,000 work hours so far, with a target of 300,000 hours by the end of 2026. - Vendasta’s internal AI employee, Pepper, handles people-ops questions around the clock across 12 countries, including benefits by country, letters of employment and policy clarifications. - The HR coordinator who previously handled those questions now manages Pepper and builds other AI systems. - Vendasta says its employee model emphasizes agility, openness to failure and a bias toward action. - The company also uses an “M-shaped worker” approach, where employees build depth across multiple areas as AI takes over repetitive work.

Between the lines: - Vendasta is framing AI adoption as a leadership and culture problem, not a tooling problem. - The company’s recognition suggests that employee trust, visible experimentation and public learning can speed up AI usage across the organization. - The Pepper example shows how AI can shift jobs rather than eliminate them, which may be part of why the company is treating adoption as a people strategy. - The honors also give Vendasta a proof point as it markets itself as an AI-first organization.

What’s next: - Vendasta is tracking toward 300,000 reclaimed work hours by the end of 2026. - The company appears set to keep expanding its internal AI builder model and workflow automation across departments. - Lattice says the award recognizes organizations building people-first workplaces as AI reshapes how work gets done. - Vendasta says it will continue using AI Employees to automate marketing, sales and operations work for its partner network of more than 60,000.

The bottom line: - Vendasta’s awards reflect a simple wager: AI scales faster when employees are trained, visible and encouraged to experiment.