Justworks at a glance

Justworks is an HR technology platform serving mid-market and enterprise employers with payroll, benefits, and compliance solutions. The company runs a large, specialized go-to-market organization: more than 200 sellers across 20+ distinct roles, from account executives to customer success managers to specialists. Enabling that sales force is a function that operates at genuine scale.

The program rebuild: Talia's story

“When I came back from leave, it was clear we had an opportunity to rethink how enablement could operate in an AI-first world,” Talia Babel Jones said. “The mission was ambitious: support more than 300 revenue team members across 20-plus specialized roles, dramatically reduce AE ramp time, and build a program that could scale alongside the business. We knew the traditional enablement playbook wasn’t going to get us there. AI gave us an opportunity to redesign how we worked.”

"When I came back from leave, my team was a third the size it had been," Talia Babel Jones said. "The mandate hadn't shrunk with us — onboard 400+ sellers across 20 specialized roles, cut AE ramp time in half, and somehow do it without burning anyone out."

Talia Babel Jones

Senior Manager of GTM Enablement

The previous onboarding experience was built for a different era. Managers had little real-time visibility into where their new hires stood. Updating a cohort already in flight meant manual rework. And there was no structured place where a rep could practice a customer conversation before having one for real.

“The honest answer is I didn’t know exactly how at first. But I knew this was where enablement was going.”

What the team built

Talia’s team rebuilt the entire onboarding program inside Tangelo: learning pathways, cohort calendaring, AI-powered roleplay, and manager dashboards, all integrated rather than stitched together from separate tools.

The piece that changed rep behavior most visibly was the AI roleplay. Talia calls it the “phone booth” model: “We can put them in a phone booth. They practice back and forth with this bot that’s challenging them. They come out way more confident and prepared.”

The roleplay isn’t a checkbox exercise. It scores reps, and the scoring triggers a competitive loop that Talia didn’t fully anticipate. “Some people will take an AI roleplay 10 times until they perfect it. They want to get higher scores. ‘I only got an 80, okay I’m going for an 82, now I want an 85.’ They will perfect it.”

That intrinsic motivation matters. It means reps drill the hardest conversations they will face, objection handling, pricing pushback, competitive positioning, on their own schedule and at their own pace. They get a level of repetition no live facilitator could match across an organization of over 300 individuals, practicing as much as they need, whenever they need it.

The other shift was manager visibility. For the first time, managers can see real-time progress across their cohorts: who’s on track, who’s falling behind, and where a rep needs help before they’re three months in and struggling. That dashboard didn’t exist before. Cohort-level awareness was periodic at best.

What changed

AE ramp time dropped from 18 months to 9 to 10 months, a reduction of eight to nine months at scale. For a company with Justworks’s sales headcount, that is a substantial acceleration in time to productivity. Every month shaved off ramp is a month sooner a rep is carrying full quota, and getting there more prepared than reps did under the old program.

But the number Talia keeps coming back to isn’t the ramp metric. It’s the team’s standing inside the company.

“I think we’re almost at one of the head seats [at the table]. We’re not just reacting anymore. We’re heavily influencing and aiding in leading the charge in AI for enablement at this company.”

Talia’s Readiness function, which sits within Revenue Effectiveness, went from a behind-the-scenes support team to one the rest of the organization watches for how to adopt AI in learning. That repositioning didn’t happen because Talia made a compelling deck. It happened because the program produced results reps and managers could feel.

“We’ve done more with AI and Tangelo than I think we would have been able to do if we’d stayed in our old state.”

"We've done more with fewer people and Tangelo than I think we would have been able to do if we stayed in our old state."

Talia Babel Jones

Senior Manager of GTM Enablement

The content engine: Matt’s story

The story inside the instructional design function was different. Where Talia was rebuilding program architecture, Matt Brooks, Senior Instructional Designer on the same enablement team, was wrestling with the daily reality of producing enough training content to fill it.

More than 20 specialized roles means more than 20 sets of learning pathways, each with role-specific scenarios, product knowledge, and customer conversation patterns. An instructional designer building that from scratch, mapping out every day of a multi-week onboarding schedule, was looking at weeks of work per pathway.

Matt’s workflow changed when he started using Tangelo’s AI Builder, a chat-based tool that scaffolds structured learning plans from a prompt.

“I built two weeks of every day mapped out, just in a second in the Tangelo AI chat. That saved me probably a month of work just in one minute.”

"I built two weeks of every day mapped out, just in a second in the Tangelo AI chat. That saved me probably a month of work just in one minute."

Matt Brooks

Senior Instructional Designer

The velocity shift is hard to state without it sounding exaggerated, and Matt knows it. Asked to quantify the overall speed improvement in his content creation workflow, he put it bluntly: “It’s maybe 90, 80, 90% faster. Not lying. Sounds like I’m lying, but I’m not.”

What AI Builder produces isn’t a finished product. Matt still validates, refines, and layers his instructional design expertise on top of the scaffold. The tool gets the structure and pacing right in under a minute. The human expertise shapes it into something that actually teaches. But the time from blank page to working draft collapsed by an order of magnitude.

Beyond speed

The second-order effect Matt noticed wasn’t about his own productivity. It was about how learners engaged with the content.

“Active learning vs passive. That is the shift that I’m seeing in terms of our reputation, how excited [stakeholders] are.”

The content the enablement team now produces, built faster, with more variety, tailored more tightly to each role, generates active engagement rather than passive consumption. Reps interact with onboarding in more meaningful ways, and internal stakeholders have noticed.

When Matt describes what Tangelo means to his daily work, he doesn’t reach for a feature list. He describes it as added capacity: “I would position it as two extra people on your team. Just think of a head count plus.”

How the pieces fit together

Talia’s program rebuild and Matt’s content velocity aren’t parallel stories that happen to share a platform. They’re load-bearing for each other.

The program architecture Talia and her team built (the pathways, the AI roleplay, the manager dashboards) needs a constant supply of high-quality, role-specific content to work at scale across more than 20 roles. Without Matt’s 80 to 90 percent velocity gain, that pipeline would have bottlenecked the program. The architecture would have existed, but the pathways would have sat half-empty.

Conversely, Matt’s content speed only matters because there’s a program sophisticated enough to use it. Faster content creation poured into a disorganized onboarding process just produces more clutter. The structured pathways, the real-time dashboards, and the AI roleplay give each piece of content a purpose and a place in the sequence.

The headline result (ramp time from 18 months down to 9 to 10) is the product of both mechanisms working together. The architecture compresses the learning loop. The content fills it. And the reps on the other end of it ramp faster, and walk in more prepared.

What’s next

Talia’s target is six months. Ramp time from 18 to 9 to 10 was the first compression. Getting to six would be a 67 percent reduction from the original baseline, and another step toward reps who are productive almost from the start.

Talia isn’t framing this as a product story. She’s framing it as a bet on what enablement becomes.

“The future of learning and development belongs to those who can balance speed with intention, automation with expertise, and innovation with practicality.”

"The future of learning and development belongs to those who can balance speed with intention, automation with expertise, and innovation with practicality."

Talia Babel Jones

Senior Manager of GTM Enablement

That balance, between the AI that generates leverage and the human judgment that directs it, is what Justworks is building toward: an enablement program that makes every rep better, every rep more confident, and gets them there faster.

“Tangelo is not here to replace people,” Talia said. “It’s here to work alongside us. If AI gets us 80 to 85% of the way there, you still need that human touch for the remaining 20%.”

The six-month target is the next proof point. The model they’re building is the longer play.