AI at Corporate Tools: Our Philosophy

– Jess P, Staff Writer

AI is everywhere right now, and a lot of people are left wondering what companies are actually doing with it and what it means for them.

Who is using AI to replace employees? Who is using it to weed out job candidates? How can I know if I’m really talking to a customer service rep or just a chatbot?

Fair questions. Here’s what we can say about our company.

At Corporate Tools, we aren’t interested in using AI to replace real people. We’re using it to build cool stuff and increase customer satisfaction. And we’re doing it the right way, with our own infrastructure and data centers and without depending on big tech companies.

Read on to see what this looks like in practice. And, if you like what you see, take a look at our open jobs while you’re here.

What’s the Corporate Tools Philosophy on AI?

AI should amplify people, not replace them. There are plenty of companies treating AI like a cheaper employee. That’s not us.

At Corporate Tools, we’re using AI to help talented people do more of the work they’re actually good at. When people spend less time trapped doing repetitive work a computer can handle, they have more space to unlock their creativity and find smarter answers to bigger problems that require human brains. So far, this approach has helped us set more ambitious goals and finally tackle all the great ideas that have been sitting in the backlog.

We want more smart humans executing more off-the-wall ideas that AI could never come up with because they’ve never been done before.

Does Corporate Tools Use AI for Hiring?

Let’s answer one of the biggest questions first: no, AI isn’t screening your application before a human sees it.

We believe in humans hiring humans

Our recruiters read every cover letter that comes in. That’s why we ask for one in the first place. We want to hear what you think you can bring to the company, what gets you excited about the role, and how you communicate your ideas.

Could we have AI summarize every application? Sure. Lots of companies do.

Would that help us find great people? We don’t think so.

If we’re asking you to spend time telling us who you are, the least we can do is spend the time to actually read it.

Do Our Employees Use AI at Work?

Internally, we expect that our engineers will be using AI. We provide engineers with a Cursor account, but we let everyone use whatever models or tools work best for them.

Across the company, AI is helping teams move faster in different ways:

• Engineers use AI coding models with Cursor to write, test, and deploy code faster.
• Designers use AI to mock up visuals and build prototypes faster with Figma or Cursor before refining.
• Analysts and marketers use AI to visualize data, explore ideas, and get collaborative projects off the ground quicker.
• Our SRE team uses automated AI-powered workflows that help move from bug detection to tested, deployable fixes with far fewer manual steps.

We also have an internal agent chat platform that lets employees interact with AI agents connected to our internal applications. More and more of our workflows are becoming agent-first.

The basic expectation is that we’re using AI to get things done faster and produce higher-quality work. We’re seeing people produce 2x, 5x, sometimes even 10x more output, which means we can build software we simply didn’t have time to build before.

Overall, bringing in AI has let us focus more on the creative and problem-solving parts of our jobs. The bottleneck now is testing ideas and deciding what to build next.

Where Do Our Clients See AI?

We don’t believe customers should have to learn AI just to use our products. The technology should remove friction in the background, not become the product itself. That means there are places where we intentionally lean into AI, and places where we intentionally don’t.

We use AI to make running a business easier

You’ll find AI in tools like our website builder, our client-facing chat features, and other products built to help make running a company or organization a little less frustrating. Have a question at 3:00 am about your account? Use our AI Business Assistant. Want to create a website for your business, but scared to start totally from scratch? Our simple website builder will help get you started.

These are the kinds of places we think AI makes sense. It helps people get unstuck, answer questions, and get back to running their businesses.

We don’t use AI to replace good customer service

Companies slapping AI features all over their homepage and forcing customers to use them instead of letting them talk to a human are 100% missing the point (and probably creating more work for themselves later).

If you want to talk to a real person, call us or email us. Our team understands our products, understands your business, and can help you solve the problem right then and there.

How Do We Stay Independent From Big Tech?

One of the things that we’re most hyped about is not relying on any large AI providers. We’ve been ahead of the curve for over a decade in building our own software in-house and not relying on big tech. This also applies to AI. We bought a data center in Iowa and GPUs, and we are hosting our own open-source models and using them in production applications like:

• our AI chat for customers
• our agent chat for employees
• even our document classification systems

It’s pretty amazing to be able to say we’re doing this while staying completely independent of big tech AI providers.

Essentially, we get to maintain control over a lot of the data that comes in and out of Corporate Tools. Because we’ve invested in our own infrastructure, we aren’t sending our customers’ data to OpenAI or Anthropic. Protecting client data and privacy is one of our core missions, so handling this right has been important to us.

Conclusion

We mean it when we say our priorities are employees, customers, then profit. In that order. AI hasn’t changed that. What it has changed is our capacity to think more creatively and to build cooler, more intuitive tools that make running a business easier for the average person. And we’re proud to say that we’re doing that on our own terms, because when we prioritize our own independence, we’re able to maintain our clients’ independence, too.

If this lines up with how you want to work and spend your time, check out our open positions. And if you want to learn more about our company and how we’re prioritizing people over profit, dive into our Company Principles.