Lattice’s ‘Refounding’ Moment

Much has changed in the world of human resources since entrepreneurs Jack Altman and Eric Koslow graduated from Y Combinator in 2016. The duo had launched a startup called Lattice, built to improve organizational growth. They recognized there was a better way for companies to manage people—being proactive drove success. Though a technology firm, Lattice opted for a different approach, one that pushed its customers to be “people-first.”

“Lattice was founded on a mission that is evergreen, which is to make work meaningful,” Sarah Franklin, the startup’s chief executive, tells me. We’re speaking on the sidelines of Okta’s customer conference*, sitting in her green room where she’s relaxing after making an appearance on stage with CEO Todd McKinnon. She reminds me that Lattice’s initial premise was to help with performance reviews. Still, over the past decade, the company’s “surface area” has grown, and now with AI, she expects the technology will help Lattice “scale human potential.”

Nine years ago, I sat down in a conference room in a downtown San Francisco office. It was my first meeting with Franklin, then the general manager of Salesforce’s Trailhead educational program. At that time, the service had more than 200,000 people signed up to learn the enterprise tech platform. She would rise through the ranks, ultimately being named not only Salesforce’s chief marketing officer, but also president. But after 15 years, she decided to call it quits and left to join Lattice, becoming the startup’s first non-founder chief executive.

“I really saw the scale, growth, and opportunity that Salesforce made for customer relationships, and I really passionate about building out learning platforms there for people leaders,” Franklin explained to Fortune in 2024. “Lattice has a great opportunity right now to do for the employee what Salesforce did for customers.”

Now, nearly two years into her tenure as CEO, she has her eyes set on reimagining what the company can be, declaring it’s time for Lattice’s “refounding moment.”

From Cyclical to Habitual Help

Franklin declines to provide specifics about what that exactly means. However, throughout our conversation, she drops hints about the firm’s evolution, saying more details will be revealed later this month—Lattice is holding its first of several Innovation Days starting October 21.

“Lattice started more like the cyclical things—let me check in every quarter, every month or two, and see how things are going. But now, that has become a habitual thing that we do, and with AI, it can help coach us and really help our human interactions be more human, in an ironic way,” she states. “That’s really what’s shifted—the mission hasn’t changed, but the product surface area has gone from being cyclical and something that you use every so often, to being habitual and really being part of your daily work and being that coach for you to ask…’How can I prepare my day or help me prepare for a conversation or how am I doing on this or how do I get promoted?’ That’s the shift.”

In other words, Lattice’s strategy is not to necessarily deal with performance reviews, sporadic goal-setting, or disconnected interactions. Instead, it’s providing a continuous, integrated experience that utilizes AI to offer constant and contextual support to employees, native to their workflow. Franklin sees her company, with the help of AI, become more of a career coach for employees.

What ‘Refounding’ Might Look Like

When she describes Lattice as being in a “refounding moment,” Franklin means that her company is undergoing a transition into an AI startup. However, Lattice isn’t a n00b when it comes to the technology. Earlier this year, it introduced its AI agent, which acts like a virtual teammate and integrates data across all its products. This week, it’s generally available. Initially, it focused on assisting HR teams, but it has since evolved to benefit other departments.

Franklin teases that despite the agent and the use of AI inside its products, “the next phase is a complete reinvention for an AI-first product, which is more about simplifying the whole application to a conversation. And the employee conversation is one of the most important, yet the most broken things at any company.”

Nevertheless, Lattice is ready to evolve like it’s a Pokémon for the AI age. Franklin contends it’s the right time because “we have a lot of money, a lot of customers, a lot of revenue, and an incredible brand and community.” She argues these five things are what give Lattice a competitive advantage over not only emerging AI-powered HR startups, but also more established firms.

So what will the new Lattice look like? Based on what Franklin has said thus far, the company will rethink what it means to manage people in the AI age. This includes not focusing on cyclical tasks, but instead leveraging AI to provide employees with a reliable and consistent professional development coach. It’s the shift to the habitual pieces of an employee’s career, having one-on-ones, receiving continuous work feedback, understanding their goals, and integrating with other back-end systems.

“Where we’re going is to be integrated everywhere and have a full context of you as an employee so we can be there as your coach,” Franklin promises. “We can help you role-play. We can help you take notes. We can help you do all of the things that you need to do to be successful at your job, keep you focused, keep you rowing in the same direction, and keep your eyes open for opportunities.”

Don’t Diminish HR’s Role in AI

How does she feel about the evolution of Human Resources? After all, companies are no longer made up of human actors, but also bots. Is the department name still apt? And in the AI era, what’s its role?

“HR, to me, is now actually front and center, one of the most important things which we need to do, which is the people transformation that AI is bringing,” Franklin asserts. Tech companies, such as her former employer and others, are bringing about the rise of the digital workforce. They believe the future of work will be one where human workers are collaborating alongside AI agents. When this becomes more of a reality, what happens to Human Resources as we’ve known it for decades?

Inside organizations, the people management teams will be more invaluable than ever, Franklin stresses. To her, HR is the brains of the operation, overseeing not just people, but also AI agents. That may sound counterintuitive—shouldn’t the responsibility rest on IT? Franklin posits that it falls under HR’s purview because this is the group that defines the employee organization and its structure, how companies should plan and govern the workplace, and what rules are in place to guide employees on their responsibilities, with whom they should work, and other related matters.

“It’s really important for HR to look not just at their company as only people, but to look at it as, what does this mean for the people together with the technology, and to paint that picture so people understand the world that they’re working in,” she says.

Interestingly, she uses Waymo to illustrate her point, an analogy that Marc Benioff has also used to tout the significance of AI’s effect on business technology. In her case, Franklin states that those in autonomous driving cars shouldn’t pretend that other vehicles on the road don’t have people driving them. It’s important to know who’s on the road. Similarly, “you can’t have a workforce where you don’t know who’s on the other side of the road driving with you. That’s the role of HR, to open our aperture to say, ‘It’s our job to look at the whole organization, how we’re structured, how we’re managed, how we’re governed, and what our goals are, and keep us working together.”

The alternative isn’t good: “If you had Waymos out there on the road that weren’t mindful of people driving cars, we’d have a disaster. We need to be able to have a system that provides oversight of how everybody is working together. And that’s really what HR’s job is, to look at the oversight of the company and how everybody is driving to the same place.”

The Recalibration Call

Despite bold predictions from experts, Franklin argues that AI is still in its infancy. The technology’s rapid rise has sparked “knee-jerk reactions,” with some organizations swinging wildly in their response to its potential—and danger. This isn’t a sustainable effort, she claims, calling for more balance between how AI works with humans and how AI changes the workforce.

With entry-level workers, for example, when companies react to being asked to be more efficient, these are often the easiest people to let go. “But it doesn’t mean that entry-level workers aren’t capable of the work that we need to do,” Franklin counters. “Actually, the young college graduates are the most digitally native. They’re the most AI-comfortable. They’re the most affordable employees, and what they may lack in real-world experience, they can now tap into a bunch of knowledge through AI. That doesn’t replace experience, but it really gives them an advantage.”

Throughout our conversation, she appeared very diplomatic in taking a stance on AI. Was she a champion or a critic? Her answers suggest she sees a middle ground, though it will take time to see how AI shapes out. After all, in her words, nobody in the room has had 10 years of agentic experience. That said, Franklin believes that there is a balance between the work AI and humans do.

“AI is much more a transformation of how companies are structured [and] how workforces are defined than it is just the technology and how it works,” Franklin points out. Just because AI can code doesn’t mean humans are dispensible—she contends, “You could be a human, that you may not know the syntax of how to write Java, Python, or whatever the language may be, but you’re curious. You’re a problem solver, you’re creative, you have a passion, and now you have all of this opportunity to expand and open your aperture to the opportunities in front of you.”

In a way, she subscribes to proponents who argue that AI’s role frees human workers to focus on more creative and strategic endeavors, highlighting that it’s an “incredible opportunity for us to get even more into our passions and the things that we’re great at, because the AI can do the things that we thought were maybe not possible for us.” That means artists could become technologists, or writers could be coders, and vice versa.

She predicts that organizations will need to shift their thinking, evaluating what roles are and aren’t truly necessary, and understanding how AI can be helpful. “We’re in a period of calibration, and I think that AI, used responsibly, can unlock our human potential, and the doomsayers and the naysayers are causing unnecessary fear that is paralyzing us, and it’s making us afraid to also use it, which is the worst thing that could happen is somebody says, ‘I don’t want to use this technology because I’m afraid of it,’ when they’re then actually making themselves less marketable as an employee because they don’t know these technologies.”

Franklin echoes what others have said, that organizations need to follow their North Star. When it comes to the workforce, the focus should be on people. “What we need to do is calibrate and understand deeply that our North Star needs to be a success of people. We’re not trying to build a society of robots. We’re trying to build a society, a sustainable planet, of human beings who can get along, collaborate, and have meaningful work,” she declares. “Technology can be an enabler. It can be a helper. But it is not here to be our ruler.”

For Lattice, that balance—between empowering humans and harnessing technology—defines its next chapter. Just as the company once helped organizations transition from rigid performance reviews to continuous growth, its “refounding moment” aims to ensure that, in the AI era, the human side of work remains not only relevant but also essential.

*Disclosure: I attended Okta’s Oktane conference as a guest of the company, with my flights and hotel costs covered. Okta did not dictate the contents of this post. These words are my own.

Featured Image: An AI-generated illustration of Lattice CEO Sarah Franklin. Credit: Google Gemini