Vendasta Wins a 2026 Lattice People Success Award for Building a Culture That Adopts AI

Vendasta wins Lattice's People + AI Pioneer Award and a Josh Bersin honourable mention for the culture that took AI literacy to 78% and reclaimed 20,000+ hours.

SASKATOON , SASKATCHEWAN, CANADA, July 23, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ -- Vendasta, the AI workforce platform for small and medium businesses, has been named a 2026 Lattice People Success Award winner, taking the People + AI Pioneer Award, and earned an honourable mention at the Josh Bersin Company’s HR Pacesetter Awards, recognized at the Irresistible 2026 conference in Los Angeles. Both honours point to the same work: an AI operating model, built inside People Operations, that is moving Vendasta toward becoming an AI-first organization.

Ask Jean Parchewsky, Vendasta’s Chief People Officer, where the recognition actually comes from, and she doesn’t start with AI. She starts with a termination binder.

“If you’re not seeing AI take hold in your company, that’s more of a culture problem than a tool problem,” said Parchewsky. “The tools are good, and they change every week. The hard part is getting your team to experiment, to try them, to get over the learning hump. That’s culture, not which tool you bought.”

Hire for the culture you want
Early in her career, Parchewsky came across a training manual that gave two full chapters to letting someone go and barely a paragraph to hiring the right person. It was, she says, a company optimized for legal risk instead of for its team. The lesson stuck: hire slow, fire fast. Spend your energy choosing the right person, and be honest quickly when it isn’t working.

Eight years ago, Vendasta’s executive team defined not the skills they wanted employees to have, but the behaviours: agility, openness to failure, a bias toward action. The result was an ideal employee profile that screens for how a person works before it screens for what they know. “It’s kind of like being tall enough to ride the ride,” Parchewsky says. “If they don’t have those behaviours, they don’t get to the technical stage.” The profile was built long before AI was the headline. It turned out to be exactly what the company needed when AI arrived.

AI adoption is a culture problem
When most companies talk about AI adoption, they talk about tools. Vendasta talks about culture, and it put enablement where the people are, not in IT:
Enablement lives in People Operations. Vendasta renamed its Director of Learning to Director of AI Business Enablement.

A Citizen Developer program trains the people already experimenting, then sends them back into their departments as internal champions.

Make progress visible. An internal build board logs every AI tool, agent, and workflow anyone creates, including what it does and how many hours it saves. Executive assistants, HR team members, and marketing strategists post alongside engineers.

Weekly demos. Every week, someone shows what they built. Failures are shared openly as wins.

“If you know the CEO is asking what Markdown means, it really alleviates your imposter syndrome,” Parchewsky says. “When the most senior person in the room is visibly learning, everyone else feels free to.”

The results are measurable. Since launching its AI literacy journey, company-wide AI literacy has risen from 65% to 78%, nearly 10% of employees are now certified AI workflow builders, and the company has reclaimed more than 20,000 work hours to date, tracking toward 300,000 by the end of 2026.

"AI doesn't transform organizations on its own, people do," said Sarah Franklin, CEO of Lattice. "The organizations leading this next era of work understand that AI adoption is as much about culture as it is about technology. Vendasta has built an environment where employees have the confidence to experiment, learn, and grow with AI. That's what the People + AI Pioneer Award celebrates, and it's a powerful example of what's possible when you put people at the center of transformation."

M-shaped workers and Pepper
Two ideas anchor the strategy. The first is the M-shaped worker. Where a T-shaped employee has broad knowledge and one deep skill, an M-shaped employee builds several areas of depth, because AI handles the repetitive lifting that used to keep people from learning adjacent skills. Vendasta designs for it on purpose. When a content writer leaves, the rest of the team can cover, because they’ve been growing across each other’s work.

The second is Pepper, an internal AI employee built by Vendasta’s own HR team. Pepper answers the daily flood of people questions, including benefits by country, letters of employment, and policy clarifications, around the clock across 12 countries. The HR coordinator who used to spend her days answering them now manages Pepper instead, as well as building meaningful systems with AI. Her job changed. It didn’t disappear.

"Very rarely do I talk to an organization operating at this level of maturity," said Stella Ioannidou, Senior Director of Research, The Josh Bersin Company. "Most companies are still piloting tools. Vendasta is well beyond experimentation. They built an AI operating model and put it in the hands of their people. The way they've thought it through, and how far ahead they're looking, is next-generation. Honestly, I'm flabbergasted."

The pattern points to a single claim: the companies that move fastest with AI aren’t the ones that bought the best tools. They’re the ones that hired people willing to experiment, built cultures where failure is shareable, and put AI enablement next to the people doing the work. Vendasta’s two 2026 recognitions suggest the approach is working.

About the Lattice People Success Awards
The Lattice People Success Awards recognize organizations and People leaders who are building high-performing, people-first workplaces. The awards celebrate innovative, measurable approaches to helping employees align, grow, and succeed, especially as AI reshapes how work gets done.
Lattice is a best-in-class people platform where people and AI succeed together. Built on the belief that high performance is a habit, Lattice helps organizations turn clarity, feedback, and alignment into daily habits, enabling employees to grow, managers to lead, and companies to thrive. Learn more at lattice.com.

About Vendasta
Vendasta is the AI workforce platform for small and medium businesses, providing AI Employees that execute marketing, sales, and operations work automatically. Founded in Saskatoon, Vendasta serves a global network of 60,000+partners. Explore careers at Vendasta.com/careers.

Nykea Behiel
Vendasta
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Vendasta earns an honourable mention at the Josh Bersin Company’s HR Pacesetter Awards

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