What we did
Reduction in configuration research time
Reduction in documentation debt
Faster ramp-up for junior admins
Deluxe
Payments and financial technology company powering commerce for millions of businesses
Industry
Financial Technology
head count
4571
team size
8
At a glance
Impact Highlights
"Documentation that would have taken us an entire day to build got shrunk down to a 1 hour session" - Jess Wagner, HRIS Manager
70% less time spent searching for answers
1500+ admin hours returned annually for higher value work
10X faster documentation - enabling admins to continuously capture config changes
Junior admins tackle tickets they previously would not attempt, accelerating skill development
3 complex workflows replaced with 1, becoming the team's default starting point for all troubleshooting
Use case
01
Replacing fragmented research with a single destination
Most enterprise application teams deal with similar problems, regardless of the specific systems they support. Tickets come in. Users report issues. Leaders ask for answers in meetings. New requirements appear mid-project. The job is not just "support." It's a constant mix of troubleshooting, solution design, bug triage, policy interpretation, and cross-functional decision-making.
With Workday in particular, knowledge is everywhere: Community posts, admin guides, customer forums, Slack messages, SharePoint folders, email threads, and even Reddit. The challenge is not whether answers exist, it's how long it takes to find them.
For Deluxe's 8-person HRIS team, that fragmented research process quickly became the largest productivity drain in their day-to-day operations. Composed of both senior experts and junior admins, the team operates with a mix of specialists and developing talent. The challenge was that too much of the team's time was going into gathering context and researching potential solutions before the real work could even start.
Before Mando
Before Mando, an admin's first task was often not solving the problem - it was figuring out where to even begin. A question might start as a production issue, a configuration decision, or a leadership request. But the workflow was the same every time:
Start in Workday Community
Search multiple keywords and rewrite the query in different ways
Scroll through many pages of results, most of which are irrelevant
Read through several half-relevant threads and attempt to connect the dots
Check customer forums to see if others have run into similar issues
Search Reddit, etc.
Hope for a clue as to how to start
Jess Wagner, HRIS Manager at Deluxe, described the experience bluntly:
"You spend an hour searching Community, you get super frustrated. So then you go to a customer sharing group…then you cruise over to Reddit…until you finally maybe find a nugget that sends you in the right direction."
This was not occasional overhead - this was an ongoing tax on team productivity. Jess estimated her senior admins were spending the equivalent of an entire work day every week just trying to locate the right information before they could begin solving the issue.
"It's somewhere between 5 to 10 hours per person. That time searching doesn't add any benefit."
The Problem
The problem was not that Deluxe lacked smart people or system knowledge. The problem was that modern enterprise applications generate too many possible places to look and too many partially relevant answers. That creates three operational failures:
Senior admins burn time on retrieval instead of resolution
Junior admins escalate more because they don't know where to start
Decisions are deferred because longer research cycles are required
"Trying to find relevant information on Community is becoming harder and harder."
For an 8-person HRIS team, losing 5 to 10 hours per week per admin meant entire weeks of capacity disappearing into research. Problems sit unresolved longer. Junior admins escalate sooner than necessary. Senior admins become efficiency bottlenecks. And the team loses the ability to answer important questions in the moments that matter most. That drag slows everything down - ticket resolution, project work, and leadership decisions.
The Solution
Mando gave Deluxe a single destination for solving problems. Instead of traversing through a fragmented search stack, the team now begins and ends its research process in one place - AI Search. That matters because the work itself is varied. Some questions are about how to fix an issue in production. Some are about how to configure a new requirement. Some are about whether the system can support a policy the business wants to introduce. Some are simply about finding the right task or concept fast enough to keep moving.
Mando addresses all of those needs the same way - it gives the team a natural language interface where they can simply ask questions and get verified answers. Instead of returning a list of keyword matches, AI Search synthesizes answers grounded in documentation, community discussions, and expert-verified implementation patterns. Jess says the workflow change is now definitive:
"We don't go to customer forums or Reddit anymore…we go to Mando first."
In addition to troubleshooting, Mando has also proven valuable in live, high-stakes situations. In one example, Jess was on a call with leadership trying to solve a tax-tracking requirement for employees who work in the state for a single day. Instead of filing the question away for later research, she used Mando during the meeting and got back three viable approaches immediately.
"I was able to do that live in a call. There is no way I would have been able to do that before, because I would have needed the weekend to try to figure it out. But in that meeting, same day, first try out of the gate we were able to have a solution."
Instead of leaving the meeting with an action item, Jess left with an answer.
The Result
For Deluxe, Mando transformed the way the team operates across the board. Senior admins slashed research time from 5 to 10 hours per week to roughly 1 to 2 hours, a 70% reduction. Across an 8-person team, that's the equivalent of 1500+ hours returned annually to focus on strategic work.
Mando does more than save time on routine questions. It elevates the capabilities of team members to solve what they otherwise wouldn't be able to. Jess described this when she assigned a task to James, one of her new hires at the time. Deluxe's system had a floating-holiday issue that had existed since go-live, and it was starting to frustrate management. Given the complexity of the task, Jess expected this investigation would take a full day. The first thing James did was ask Mando, which immediately synthesized the right articles and proposed the exact fix they needed.
"We would have never found that, no matter how hard we searched on Community."
That's the real result - not just fewer clicks, but faster resolution, better answers, and more confidence in the moment. For Deluxe, the decision tree that used to begin with "where do I even look?" now begins with "let me ask Mando."
Use case
02
Elevating junior admins into capable operators
Every enterprise applications team has the same structural challenge: experience is sparsely distributed but tribal knowledge is densely concentrated. A handful of experienced admins understand the deeper configuration patterns, the historical decisions behind certain workflows, and the edge cases that appear in real production environments. Newer team members are still learning the system, the organization's configuration philosophy, and the context behind decisions made long before they've joined. That gap slows teams down.
Jess's HRIS team reflects a structure common across most enterprises: a mix of senior experts and developing admins responsible for supporting a large, complex Workday environment across a broad, global workforce. The challenge was not intelligence or capability, it was access to the right context at the right time.
Before Mando
Before Mando, junior admins often hesitated to take tickets that involved unfamiliar modules or configurations. Jess described the pattern clearly:
"My junior members wouldn't even attempt to pick up a case with that particular module if they didn't have the background."
This hesitation is common in enterprise environments. A configuration decision might depend on rules or trade-offs made years earlier. Without knowing the reasoning behind those decisions, newer admins risk making incorrect changes in production. As a result, escalation becomes the safest option. Work naturally funnels to the most experienced people on the team.
The Problem
When institutional knowledge lives primarily in people's heads, organizations experience two problems:
Senior admins become constant escalation points. Even relatively straightforward issues require their input because they hold the historical context.
Junior admins struggle to ramp up. They are not just learning the platform, they are trying to reconstruct the reasoning behind past configuration decisions.
Jess saw this pattern repeatedly:
"They just wouldn't take those tickets."
Without access to the system's operational history, junior admins were effectively starting from scratch every time they encountered something unfamiliar.
The Solution
Mando gave Deluxe two complementary capabilities. First AI Search provides junior admins a reliable starting point for investigating unfamiliar problems. Instead of guessing or escalating immediately, they can ask questions in natural language and receive answers grounded in documentation, community knowledge, and expert implementation patterns.
After rolling out Mando, Jess quickly noticed the shift in behavior:
"Prior to Mando, my team would say, 'I can ask Jess where to go'…now they're like, 'Oh we got this ticket in…I don't know exactly how to do it, but I'll just ask Mando, so I can take that one'"
However, search alone does not solve the deeper issue of institutional knowledge. That's where AI Docs changes the dynamic. Instead of knowledge living only in the heads of experienced admins, teams can now capture configuration decisions, troubleshooting workflows, and operational processes as structured documentation. New admins can effectively time travel through the system's history, reviewing the decisions and processes created before they joined.
"Mando is allowing my junior members to be self-sufficient in areas where before they were getting lost"
Unlike other document repositories, admins don't need to manually dig through every document to find the right answers. AI Search automatically queries external sources as well as the team's internal knowledge base, so admins can simply ask a question to Mando and immediately access years of organizational context. This saves senior colleagues from the frequent context switches that come with escalations.
The Result
The effect is a dramatically faster ramp up time for new admins. Jess estimates that new hires can pick up a new Workday module shortly after onboarding, rather than needing years of experience to build confidence.
"With Mando, they're able to support a [new] module from nothing to something in a couple of months."
Because junior admins now have a starting point for investigation trained on all historical documentation, they can confidently take tickets that they previously avoided. One member of the team quantified the immediate time savings she was able to benefit from:
"It's a huge time saver…I would say it saves at least an hour per day"
For a manager like Jess, the impact goes even further. Mando has become a source of leverage to attract talent:
"In interviews [candidates] are like, 'what kind of support do you give people?', so I actually tell them about Mando because it makes the job that much easier"
At Deluxe, Mando goes beyond accelerating troubleshooting. It's helping the team capture institutional knowledge, ramp up new talent faster, and operate more independently as the system evolves.
Use case
03
Turning everyday work into a living knowledge base
Enterprise systems change constantly. Configuration changes accumulate, new policies introduce edge cases, and teams troubleshoot unexpected issues along the way. Over time, these decisions become the institutional knowledge required to operate the system. The problem is that most organizations never capture that knowledge in a durable way.
For teams managing complex enterprise systems, documentation is usually the first thing that falls behind. Creating detailed process guides can require hours of manual work, and writing them often happens long after the original problem was solved.
At Deluxe, the HRIS team experienced this challenge directly. The team was constantly solving problems and configuring new workflows, but most of that knowledge was never documented. And when there was a paper trail, it was often scattered across email threads, hallway conversations, and inside the heads of experienced admins. Documentation is rarely a problem in theory - everyone knows it should exist. The problem is the cost of creating and maintaining it.
Before Mando
Before Mando, creating structured documentation required deliberate effort. When the team implemented a new configuration or solved a complex issue, someone would need to write step-by-step instructions so the rest of the organization can follow the process later. The documentation that accompanies every change could easily take hours to create manually.
Jess described this challenge while preparing for a large benefits migration project that required extensive documentation for testing and handoff:
"One of the main reasons we wanted AI Docs was because we have the benefits project coming up…and I know there's going to be a ton of documentation to build"
For a system as complex as Deluxe's, comprehensive documentation of a new project requires enormous effort, only to go stale when updates are made. Now with AI Docs, it gets automatically generated.
The Problem
When documentation takes hours to create, it rarely keeps up with the pace of system changes. Teams focus on solving the immediate problem and postpone documentation for later. And let's face it - manually documenting processes is among the least exciting parts of the job. However, when you need to retrace your steps and get everyone on the same page, it is essential.
When the state of the system drifts from its accompanying documentation:
Institutional knowledge becomes fragmented
Teams are forced to rediscover solutions that were already solved
New admins struggle to understand why systems were configured the way they were
External stakeholders require hand-holding for workflows that should be self-serve
Over time, organizations accumulate operational knowledge faster than they can document. Jess and her team recognized the risk and decided to do something about it. They needed a way to capture complex processes as they happened, not weeks later.
The Solution
Mando changes the economics of documentation. With AI Docs, teams no longer have to manually write up documentation after the fact. Instead admins can simply perform the workflow once while Mando captures each step and generates structured documentation automatically.
Jess described one moment during the benefits rollout when she was able to teach her team what was implemented while the documentation wrote itself:
"We were in the testing phase and the team was like, 'well how do I do that?'…so I explained it to like 6 people while letting AI Docs build the document [in the background]…I showed them live and they could keep testing and now they don't need to remember how you do that"
This rollout in particular involved highly detailed workflows that needed to be clearly explained across the organization. For example:
"To do a new hire transaction for the benefit item internally was around 78 steps. That documentation would have taken us an entire day to build. With AI Docs, we were able to create that document and 4 others in 1 hour!"
Processes that once required hours of manual documentation are now generated instantly.
The impact multiplies when AI Docs and AI Search work together. Once documentation is generated, it becomes part of the team's knowledge base. That means, instead of manually digging through individual guides, admins can simply ask a question in AI Search. Mando automatically queries both external knowledge and the organization's internal knowledge base to retrieve a personalized answer.
This means new admins can immediately access operational decisions and configuration workflows that were implemented long before they joined. The result is not just better documentation, it's a continuously evolving knowledge layer about the system itself.
The Result
For Deluxe, documentation is no longer a backlog task. It's a natural byproduct of everyday work. Processes that once required an entire day of manual documentation can now be captured in under an hour, representing a 10X improvement in speed. More importantly, that knowledge becomes instantly accessible to other admins through AI Search. Instead of rediscovering solutions repeatedly, the team builds a permanent operational playbook for their enterprise systems.
The team is already looking forward to the next chapter. Because AI Docs captures step-by-step workflows, Mando can also capture QA scenarios. Instead of manually designing validation scenarios during testing cycles, teams can use captured documentation to generate repeatable test cases that can run autonomously. This kills two birds with one stone - the same documentation that helps teams understand how a process works automatically becomes a test case that when run, provides evidence that the system is operating correctly.
For organizations subject to frequent audits and compliance reviews, this marks a significant shift. Documentation goes from being a static artifact to a living record of system behavior. Over time, Mando creates a continuously expanding knowledge base that is in sync with the state of the system and supports not just troubleshooting but also testing, compliance, and audit readiness. For Deluxe, solving a problem once means the team never has to solve it from scratch again. Jess put it simply:
"Instead of guessing, we just ask Mando."
