Nextdoor’s HR team halts people work once a month and dedicates the day to AI

Experimenting with AI can be hard to squeeze between relentless meetings that coulda-been-an-email, Slack messages to absorb and sometimes reply, and, not to mention, the actual day-to-day work of running HR.

So at Nextdoor, they decided to stop trying.

Instead, HR pros at Nextdoor dedicate one full day each month to AI experimentation, building their own tools and testing how the technology can impact their own work and the company’s overall HR workflow.

“In prior eras, you’d have a new tool come on the scene, and its capability set was defined,” Nextdoor’s head of people, Tony Castellanos, told HR Brew. “But we’re in this world now where—if instead of being on computers, we were in carpentry—you’re holding a thing that is morphing from a hammer to a screwdriver to something else, and, how do you know what you can do with that? You have to play with it before you can start to shape how it lifts your company.”

Over the last year, Castellanos and Nextdoor focused on activating employees and learning where in the workflow and/or HR process AI was helpful and where it was not. Early in Q2, it adopted AI principals and designed ways to measure progress.

“This is a moment of rapid evolution,” he said. “We don’t want to miss opportunities, and so we’ve encouraged people to go out and explore what could make sense.”

AI Days. But like at many companies, there were too many meetings (and other work) at Nextdoor, he said. While employees were encouraged to dedicate time to experimenting and building with Claude Cowork and other sanctioned tools and models, between their priority work and meetings, they lacked the time to make real progress on AI projects.

“It’s actually impossible to get into a build state in 30 minutes,” Castellanos said. “We’re missing out on opportunities to develop things that are going to elevate our team purely because the time-boxing associated with our days doesn’t allow for it. It’s a silly problem. You know what? Easy one to fix, too.”

Castellanos set aside one day each month for AI development for the HR team. This AI Day is dedicated to “focused building,” and no one is excused. Calendars are cleared: no meetings, no interviews, no reports due. Employees are even encouraged to turn off Slack.

His goal was to “really allow the dedicated space for things to fail multiple times over, because it’s going to,” he said.

A week before an AI Day, Castellanos surveys the entire HR team for their ideas about potential projects. These topics are then shared in advance to encourage partnership because the AI Day also fosters improved collaboration and cross-team understanding, and because “things are just more fun” in teams, he said.

Some of the first AI Days were a bit looser in design. HR pros would choose their own AI project ideas, which was great for learning, but the results were more “throwaway stuff, tactical, transactional.” It’s evolved now to include more intentional design and projects iterate each month, he said.

Examples. Nextdoor’s AI Days shipped “People Brain,” an agentic service that helps audit the people team’s knowledge infrastructure, but it has evolved with each AI Day. Now People Brain helps structure and organize company assets and is a live service that reviews content published to Nextdoor’s public channels, enterprise platforms, or databases ensuring the messaging and policy from the people team is aligned with the company’s core content base.

They’ve built an agentic events reminder system that collects and distributes information about internal events. Entire portions of the employee lifecycle have been redesigned to incorporate AI efficiencies, he added, pointing to employee exiting as an example. Teams even developed an enablement app that helps guide HR pros through designing applications outside of Claude—to consider those more technical components like data sourcing and running applications through Google App Script.

“You have AI helping to create the foundation that AI then uses,” he said. “There’s an AI loop that is benefiting all the agentic services that we’re trying to deploy. So that one’s been really helpful.”

Castellanos also told HR Brew he built his own chief-of-staff agent, Samwise. The agent scans Slack and briefs him on info shared on the app. It also manages his calendar, delivering a meeting prep document to him 30 minutes ahead of each meeting, surfacing up info on the attendees, the topic, notes from previous meetings, and other info “that might come up.” He said it’s been really helpful.

Space for humans. Whether its People Brain or Samwise, or another app favored by recruiters, the program’s goal is to lift up the human-side of the HR work by finding ways to leverage AI for administrative and logistical support, he said.

The AI tools Nextdoor’s people pros are developing, he claims, are helping to change the value of the work inside HR, morphing them into one of human judgment and taste, and away from handling process or logistics.

“Humans are forever going to remain ‘judgment’ and ‘taste.’ Technology is ‘leverage’ and ‘scale,’” he said.