How AI Helped Elevate Scale Mentorship at PagerDuty

PagerDuty has enhanced its mentorship program, particularly through its Elevate Employee Resource Group focused on empowering women, by integrating AI to streamline the mentor-mentee pairing process. Previously, matching over 140 employees across various regions and time zones was a labor-intensive task requiring multiple ERG leaders to manually sort through data from HR systems, employee directories, and pairing histories. The introduction of AI, via their internal system Abacus, automated this process by optimizing matches based on several factors such as pairing history, management chains, and time zones, while still allowing human oversight for quality assurance. This innovation led to a significant reduction in manual effort, cutting the process from nearly 20 hours to just 4–5 hours, and allowed the program to launch more quickly, with matching time reduced from two weeks to three days. As a result, around 74 pairs were successfully matched, enabling the organization to focus more on enhancing participant experiences and operational efficiency. The use of AI not only improved efficiency but also enriched the mentorship program by fostering deeper connections and growth, reflecting PagerDuty's commitment to removing barriers, empowering teams, and demonstrating the transformative potential of combining technology with human initiative.