At PagerDuty, mentorship is more than a program — it’s a way we invest in our people, build community, and empower growth across the organization. For Elevate, our Employee Resource Group (ERG) dedicated to empowering women in their career development, mentorship has always been a cornerstone. But running a global program for 140+ employees across functions and time zones came with its challenges.

For the last few years, matching mentors and mentees was a week-long, manual process, taking about a total of 18-20 hours for 4-5 of our ERG leaders. It meant pulling data from our HRIS system, our internal employee directory, and our Elevate pairing history, manually checking management chains, and coordinating across regions. It worked — but it was slow, frustrating, and unsustainable.

This year, we decided to try something different: AI.

Chloe Taylor, our Elevate career pillar lead, integrated non-confidential employee data with our internal AI system, Abacus, using targeted AI prompts to automate the pairing process. The system optimized matching based on pairing history, management chains, time zones, mentor/mentee preferences, and job levels — while we still provided oversight to ensure quality and handle exceptions. We then used Abacus to help us build a mail merge that could automatically send around 70 emails to pairs, introducing them to their mentorship pairing.

The results were game-changing:

• 60–70% reduction in manual effort: What once took nearly 20 hours now takes just 4–5, managed by two leaders.
• Faster program launches: We reduced matching time from 2 weeks to about 3 days, so mentoring can start more promptly.
• Successful scale: We successfully matched approximately 74 mentor-mentee pairs across our global organization.
• More capacity for impact: Instead of spending time on spreadsheets, we were able to focus more on the participant experience and increasing operational efficiency.

But for us, this is about more than efficiency, it’s about creating space for connection, empowerment, and growth. And it’s a real example of how PagerDuty is living our transformative vision: removing barriers that slow us down, empowering teams to innovate, and leveraging AI and automation to create capacity and deliver impact.

AI didn’t replace the human touch in our mentorship program — it amplified it. By streamlining the work behind the scenes, Chloe & I made it possible for Elevate to scale mentorship globally, deliver stronger outcomes, and show what’s possible when technology and people come together.

This is just the beginning. At PagerDuty, every team is finding ways to use AI to innovate, create capacity, and make a bigger impact. Other ERGs and global connection programs that need to streamline pairing processes can benefit from similar automation approaches. AI didn’t just make our work faster — it transformed how quickly we can connect people and create meaningful relationships at scale.