As AI Gets Smarter, Why Is Rokt Investing More in Human Talent?
A growing group of technology leaders, with e-commerce company Rokt among the most committed, are treating the AI era as a reason to invest in their people, including their youngest talent, rather than a reason to pull back.
When Rokt co-founder and CEO Bruce Buchanan was featured in a New York Times DealBook report this May, the conversation centered on a question many technology leaders have struggled to answer clearly: What does the AI era actually mean for the people building these companies?
The loudest predictions have been grim. Some executives, including those at frontier AI labs, have warned that the technology could wipe out a large share of entry-level white-collar jobs within a few years. But a different camp of leaders is making the opposite bet. They argue that AI raises the value of skilled people rather than erasing it, and that the smartest move in a fast-moving market is to invest in talent, including the youngest talent, more aggressively, not less.
Buchanan sits firmly in that second camp. For him, AI compresses the time between an idea and a working product and creates space for people to tackle harder problems. It is a tool in the hands of builders, not a substitute for them. He is not alone, and the company he built offers one of the clearest case studies of what that philosophy looks like when it is actually wired into how an organization operates.
The Bet That AI Raises the Value of People
The augmentation argument has serious backers. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang put it bluntly earlier this year, saying most people will not lose their jobs to AI but rather "to somebody who uses AI," and that the only sensible response is to make sure everyone learns to use it. Glean CEO Arvind Jain has gone further, saying AI "never replaces any human" and instead enables people to do higher-quality work.
That is close to the operating principle inside Rokt, where AI is treated as standard equipment for every employee rather than a cost-saving reason to have fewer of them. The company isn't asking how AI can help it do the same work with a smaller team. It's asking how AI can help its people do work that wasn't possible before.
The broader data increasingly supports this more nuanced view of AI's impact on work. According to Microsoft’s 2025 Work Trend Index, 82% of business leaders expect to use digital labor to expand workforce capacity within the next 12 to 18 months, but the report also found that organizations continue to prioritize human oversight, judgment, and creativity as critical differentiators in AI-enabled workplaces. Rather than replacing people outright, many companies are redesigning jobs around a combination of human expertise and machine-assisted productivity.
A Platform Built on Scale, Powered by People
The scale gives that question real weight. Rokt will power more than 10 billion transactions in 2026, making it one of the most consequential infrastructure layers in global e-commerce. Its platform sits in the checkout flow of companies, including Live Nation, Fanatics, Macy's, AMC Theatres, PayPal, Uber, Hulu, and HelloFresh, surfacing relevant offers and products at the moment a customer completes a purchase, which Rokt calls the Transaction Moment.
The business has grown at a rate few technology companies sustain at any stage. Between 2021 and 2024, Rokt grew revenue from $97 million to $418 million, a 330% increase over three years. That verified growth earned the company the #87 ranking on the Financial Times list of The Americas' Fastest Growing Companies 2026. The company has held a compound annual growth rate above 40% for more than a decade, and in 2025, revenues surpassed $800 million.
More than 33,000 active clients now use the platform, including more than half of the largest global e-commerce companies by volume. The company operates in 17 markets and invests $100 million annually in product development. That trajectory shapes how Rokt thinks about its workforce, because scaling that quickly without losing technical quality depends entirely on the people doing the building.
Giving Every Employee the Tools
Buchanan has been explicit about where he sees the AI era taking the company. In a statement accompanying the appointment of Sam Dozor as Rokt's Chief Technology Officer, he described AI as something that accelerates what his team can build.
"We are in the middle of the most significant transformation in how software is built in a generation," Buchanan said. "AI has collapsed the cost of experimentation and compressed innovation cycles from quarters to weeks, handing a structural advantage to the companies that adapt fastest."
Dozor, who spent more than 13 years building mParticle into one of the leading customer data platforms before its 2025 acquisition by Rokt, framed the opportunity from the engineering side: "Clients don't win by having more data. They win by having the right data and using it faster and more intelligently."
The conviction shows up in a concrete decision. According to Built In's 2026 culture profile, Rokt gives every employee access to the full suite of AI tools it licenses, regardless of role or seniority. One employee described it as a collective effort to democratize access to tooling, unlike anything they had seen elsewhere. The company also runs an annual company-wide hackathon, the Rokt'athon, which in 2025 focused on building AI-powered solutions to real business problems, with cross-functional teams shipping working products under time pressure. That is Huang's everyone-must-use-it point turned into standard practice.
The Early-Career Question
The sharpest test of the invest-in-people thesis is entry-level hiring, because that is where AI anxiety is most acute. For the first time in decades, recent college graduates face higher unemployment than the national average, and surveys show many firms trimming junior roles. MIT researcher Andrew McAfee warns that pulling back on early-career hiring sacrifices the future and shuts off "the most enthusiastic power users of AI" inside an organization.
Several of the largest employers are betting the other way. IBM said it will triple US entry-level hiring in 2026, with its chief human resources officer noting the expansion covers "all these jobs that we're being told AI can do." AWS CEO Matt Garman said Amazon is hiring as many software developers as ever, with roughly 11,000 engineering interns planned and demand accelerating. LinkedIn is expanding its entry-level engineering internships by 40% year over year, prioritizing AI-native talent with a builder mindset.
Rokt's version of that bet shows up in how it grows leaders from within. A recent Retail Insider feature followed Dan Wright, now VP of Operations and Solutions, who has worked at Rokt for nearly a decade across fourteen different teams. The clearest illustration is a promotion story Wright tells about himself. About four years ago, he hired Jon Humphrey as a Director of Solutions. Six months in, during a performance calibration meeting with the executive team, Wright opened his review with what he called a half-joke: "I think I've just hired my boss."
He meant it. Humphrey became VP within a year and is now SVP of Operations and Advertising. "He's just absolutely skyrocketed," Wright said. The story captures a deliberate design choice: leaders are measured in part by what the people they hire go on to accomplish, and the company actively hires people stronger than the person doing the hiring. Internal promotion rates at Rokt run above 10% annually, well above industry averages, according to Built In.
Recognition That Employees, Not Executives, Determine
The external validation for that approach comes from sources that companies cannot apply for or buy. Great Place To Work, which bases certification entirely on direct employee surveys, reports that 91% of Rokt employees describe it as a great place to work, compared to 57% at a typical US company, a rating the company has held for five consecutive years. Fortune ranked Rokt among the Best Workplaces in Advertising and Marketing for 2025, and in 2026, the company earned recognition across eight Built In Best Places to Work lists, including the #2 midsize employer in Seattle.
Recognition like that is a trailing indicator. It reflects choices made much earlier in how teams are structured, how leaders are developed, and how junior contributors are given room to grow. Through its Build Forward initiative and Pledge 1% commitment, Rokt extends that same logic beyond the business through time, funding, and technology.
Why This Debate Matters Beyond One Company
The significance of this shift extends far beyond Rokt or the technology sector. Across industries, executives are confronting a fundamental question about the future shape of work. For years, digital transformation was largely discussed in terms of efficiency and automation. Today, the conversation is evolving toward augmentation—the idea that technology can increase the capacity of employees rather than simply reducing labor requirements. Financial services firms, healthcare providers, manufacturers, and professional services organizations are all experimenting with models that combine AI-driven productivity with human judgment, customer empathy, and strategic thinking. The organizations that succeed may not be those that automate the most tasks, but those that learn how to combine technological capability with human potential most effectively.
Building for What Comes Next
A pattern runs through these companies. Huang and Jain are betting that AI multiplies the value of skilled people. IBM, Amazon, and LinkedIn are betting that the youngest workers are an asset worth expanding precisely because they are the most fluent with new tools. Rokt is making both bets at once and has the decade-long growth record and the employee surveys to show what happens when the bet pays off.
As Buchanan put it, the companies that adapt fastest will hold the structural advantage. The throughline across this new class of leaders is that adapting fastest starts with the people doing the building, and increasingly with the people just beginning to build.