Benchling Innovation & Technology Culture

We work hard to make sure we’re applying AI in situations where it’s truly useful, not just building AI for the sake of it being AI.

Designers are very collaborative, both by choice but also by the nature of how Benchling is evolving as a product. We’re building more solutions that cut across multiple product areas, rather than building siloed experiences that are specific to one product area.

On Benchling's AI week:

"AI Week proved that non-technical people can build useful tools when you give them the right resources and protected time. It also proved that execution matters as much as vision.”

What tools support your day-to-day work?

Claude is our backbone today. I run a personal project that knows my team, voices, calendar and work in flight, and everything else feeds into it. It’s always aligning with sources of truth, architecture and structures. We use Workato to wire Slack, Google Workspace, Atlassian and our back-end systems together so the rote work doesn’t need a babysitter. Confluence holds the team’s living playbooks: SOPs, prompt and skill libraries, and training docs. App Script is the unglamorous duct tape that turns a sheet into a small app or makeshift connector, when a tool would be overkill. Slack is where the team works, so we built skills that post into it: a daily brief, a channel digest, project updates, a room booker and various pipeline trackers. With all these tools together, the team moves faster than it should be able to. The stack does a lot, but combining it with consistent training and alignment across the org is what removes toil.

How does your team experiment?

We have a culture of experimentation, especially today, when tools and ways of working aren’t set in stone. It’s an exciting time to be a traditionally nontechnical team.

“AI Day” is how we run experimentation as a department. Every quarter, we block protected time to build something: an agent, an automation or a pipeline that turns a recurring slog into a button press. Nothing is a demo for its own sake. We always ask: Does the thing we ship buy back time we’d rather spend on the employee experience?

A lot of internal tooling came out of those sessions. A daily brief triages calendar, email and Slack into a 90-second read. A channel digest auto-summarizes any Slack thread. A helpdesk ticket drafter turns a Slack message into a properly formatted ticket.

Last quarter, we removed the human from the “request to first response to ticket” creation chain. This quarter, we’re on ticket to completion: An approved swag ticket auto orders via the swag API, which is the same for desk booking and shipping labels. Anywhere we can, we’re removing toil.

The posture is the same: Pick what hurts, build the smallest thing that fixes it and ship it to the team’s skill library so the next person doesn’t build it twice.

How does Benchling adapt to change? 

The clearest example is how we rolled out AI fluency. When generative AI started reshaping knowledge work, we immediately started building a program around it.

We defined what fluency means. Our AI Fluency Rubric maps four levels — emerging, capable, adoptive and transformative — across five dimensions: velocity and quality, fluency, tools, goals and pace. People know where they stand and what “next” looks like.

We set a concrete target: 100 percent of the team at “capable,” 50 percent at “adoptive,” by the second half of the year. We built the infrastructure: the AI Hub holds all training docs for each transition, a prompt library, a skills library any teammate can contribute to and an AI Fluency Coach, a shared Claude project, that assesses where you are and routes your next move.

We’ve really tried to make it a habit. “Coffee with AI” runs every Friday morning: Someone shares what they built, someone brings a problem, and we run workshops and host an open Q&A. There are additional quarterly workshops tied to transitions in addition to AI Day for protected build time.

We’ve been lucky to have space to change how we think about our work — the rubric, the hub, office hours and build days. We’ve focused on adapting culturally with these rituals and alignment.