Sprout Social Innovation & Technology Culture

How do your teams stay ahead of emerging technologies or frameworks?

As an AI manager, I feel especially grateful to be at Sprout during this technologic shift. Sprout has institutionalized intellectual whitespace and a culture of curiosity which make it easier to foresee and ride the AI waves instead of letting them crash over us. We operationalize this through three primary channels.

We create structured play space and incentivize teams to get familiar with new technologies. Our biannual hackathons, for example, judge teams on both a customer problem they’re solving as well as the technical sophistication of novel frameworks. 

We scout, then we scale. We empower small, focused teams to scout emerging technologies and architectures. Once vetted, the teams create enablement tools necessary to unlock adoption across the entire R&D organization.

We encourage and enable T-shaped development. Sprout has a dedicated budget and resources that allow teams to build expertise in new, adjacent technologies.

These channels, combined with a truly fantastic team of curious, talented software engineers, designers, product managers and applied AI and machine learning scientists, result in products that the team is excited to build and our customers are excited to use.

Can you share a recent example of an innovative project or tech adoption?

A recent standout is Trellis, Sprout’s proprietary AI agent. This project was born at the nexus of Sprout’s curious culture, leadership support and a team of high-agency folks. The team practiced a change-the-game mindset that allowed them to successfully navigate technical gaps in emerging protocols, social media-specific reasoning, state management and state-of-the-art AI changing almost daily. This project has been a blast because the team has been able to engineer the agent’s personality and skill set all while experimenting with, embracing and contributing back to the agentic landscape.

Innovation at this scale demands an equal obsession with security. We balanced our obsession on user experience with rigorous internal partnerships to deliver a secure agent that manages exposure to untrusted content and access to private data, two of the three capabilities in the lethal trifecta of AI agents. We’ve built an agent that moves at the speed of social without compromising the integrity of our customers’ data. It’s been rewarding to see customers leverage Trellis as a strategist that transforms overwhelming social signals into clear direction.

How does your culture support experimentation and learning?

Sprout has an unwavering focus on developer experience and on the joy of building. One component we excel at is creating psychologically safe environments where folks are given space to experiment and candidly articulate potential challenges. In the AI space, we are constantly navigating unknown unknowns and we have intentionally built a culture where teams feel empowered to articulate technical risks and potential failures early.

This environment was the foundation for Trellis. We call out what’s broken and fix it fast and it is truly something special when your team is empowered to say “this model isn’t performing as expected,” “the latency on this architecture won’t scale” or a general “I don’t know and this is what I need to figure it out.” This transparency allows us to move at the speed of a startup while maintaining the rigor of an enterprise leader.

Furthermore, Sprout fosters a culture of learning through a robust growth program. Everyone in R&D has a dedicated annual budget for specialized courses, certifications and technical subscriptions. We incentivize teams to stay ahead of the curve then give them the space, time and resources to ensure they do.