Cleo Innovation & Technology Culture

Describe a project you’re especially eager to tackle in the new year.

In the coming year, I’m especially eager to lead a project focused on supply chain orchestration powered by AI. The goal would be to create an integrated, intelligent system that optimizes end-to-end supply chain processes — improving visibility, resilience and decision-making. By leveraging AI to enhance operational metrics such as cycle time, order accuracy and fulfillment speed, we can reduce inefficiencies and boost agility. This initiative excites me because it combines cutting-edge technology with a critical business function, delivering measurable impact on cost, speed and customer satisfaction.

What technologies and/or practices is your team leveraging to tackle this project?

To tackle this project, our team is leveraging a combination of advanced technologies and best practices. On the technology side, we’re using AI-driven optimization engines, ML models for demand and supply forecasting, and cloud-based orchestration platforms to ensure scalability and real-time visibility.

How does this project tie into larger company goals?

This project directly supports Cleo’s strategic goals of driving operational excellence and delivering superior customer experiences. By implementing AI-driven supply chain orchestration, we enable real-time visibility, faster decision-making and improved operational metrics such as cycle time, order accuracy, fulfillment speed and on-time in-full performance. These improvements align with Cleo’s commitment to innovation, scalability and resilience, strengthening our ability to meet customer expectations globally. Ultimately, this initiative positions Cleo as a leader in intelligent supply chain solutions, reinforcing our mission to simplify and optimize complex business ecosystems.

What project are you most excited to work on in 2025, and what is particularly compelling about this work for you?

In 2025, I am most excited to work on some of the updates we have planned for our product. Currently, almost all the configuration needs to be done though a user interface, but we are adding a feature to allow users to optionally configure our product using files they can drop in. This will allow users to easily re-create a system or spin up another instance of it. Users can also keep this configuration in version control if they want so they can easily see any updates that were made to the software. I also like that it requires us to make improvements to the software that affect customers who aren’t going to use that specific feature. Some customers exclusively use our REST API to configure parts of our application, and we are expanding it to support this endeavor so they will be able to configure even more without having to touch a single button.

What does the roadmap for this project look like? Who will you collaborate with, and what challenges do you anticipate having to overcome?

This project takes a lot of work and is an ongoing goal for us throughout 2025. We are hoping to have a beta version out by the third quarter of this year and a full release by the end of the year. We are breaking the work down into manageable chunks so we can make steady progress on it throughout the year while continuing to update and add existing features to all of our product lines.

The biggest challenge that we face is the fact that when our product was originally architected, it was not designed to support this at all. We need to figure out a way to add this new feature without breaking the product or re-writing everything. One way we are overcoming that is by expanding our existing REST API. Currently, not everything can be configured through it, but we can add new endpoints and features to it. By leveraging and improving this existing resource, we can get around a lot of those architecture issues and add more functionality for the customers since they can use the REST API when they make updates themselves. I’m working with five other very talented engineers on this project, a few of whom are extremely knowledgeable about the product and a couple who just started working on it.

What in your past projects, education or work history best prepares you to tackle this project? What do you hope to learn from this work to apply in the future?

In college, I gained experience looking through existing code I had never seen before and learning how to figure out what it was doing and how best to update it. I have also done extensive work with this product, notably the REST API. But the thing that prepared me the most was being willing to learn, knowing how to work with other people and being confident asking questions — and for help. It is impossible for me to know everything about how our product works. I know certain parts very well while my coworkers know other parts very well, and being able to admit when I don’t know something helps us all make a better product in the end.

How does innovation show up in your company culture?

In Cleo, innovation can show up in any corner of the company. There is a common quest for the best ideas, regardless of who or where they come from. That culture starts with our CEO, whose door is always open.

Within engineering, we approach innovation in a systemic way. We recognize that innovative ideas only become great product ideas if they provide significant value to a large portion of our user base, can be built in the market opportunity time window, and provide significant return on investment for Cleo. Thus, in every development squad, we form a triad leadership team to vet product ideas and plan work for the squad that includes a product manager to vet the business value, a software architect to provide feasibility, cost and time assessments, and a user experience expert to ensure features are both valuable and usable for our users. 

Additionally, in the age of AI, innovation is not limited to those working on Cleo’s products within research and development. All teams across Cleo are being asked to reimagine their roles in the age of AI and find innovative ways to both increase the quantity and quality of their work output. Thus, we are all innovating on a daily basis.

What’s one recent innovation that improved user or employee experience?

We are in the midst of the most innovative period in Cleo’s history. This is partly due to the unprecedented opportunities that AI brings in terms of hyper-personalization, expert advice on any topic and the ability to take actions on the users’ behalf with generative AI. We are optimizing the user experience dynamically based on who is logged in, with relevant insights based on the user’s job function to orient them to what needs to be done, provide guided recommendations on how to best perform tasks, and offer to automate recurring tasks. The opportunity to accelerate outcomes for our users is unparalleled. 

With the SCO initiative, we are introducing an additional layer of supply chain intelligence on the data moving through our platform that will enable new-business, non-technical personas to orchestrate their supply chain through our platform. Not only will we provide visibility across historically siloed areas of the supply chain, but AI will offer expert guidance and automation for these users to identify and remove inefficiencies, reduce fines, and strengthen business relationships across the supply chain. We have moved from managing bits to managing businesses.

How do you balance experimentation with stability?

Given our platform is mission-critical for our customers, if our platform stops, their business stops. So we take stability and security very seriously, and yet we can’t stop innovating. We achieve this in multiple ways.

First off, we do a lot of iterative prototyping of ideas that can be tested and validated with users before they become platform features. This allows for unlimited experimentation without ever affecting the stability of our platform. 

Additionally, given we have a cloud platform, we can push out new features selectively in targeted releases down to a given set of customers and even down to specific users in those customer environments. This allows us to experiment with new features while checking the utility, usability and performance in real environments before doing larger rollouts. 

Lastly, we have continued to optimize our deployment pipelines to decrease the time between deployments. It’s counterintuitive, but changing the product more often with smaller changes leads to more stability and less issues than if code was deployed infrequently in big chunks. If issues are found, they are much easier and faster to fix if less has changed since the last push.