It Takes a Village: Building Gusto’s First AI Risk Agent The Myth vs Reality of AI at Work As an engineer, I’ve grown skeptical whenever I hear the word “AI” thrown around as a solution …

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Building an AI risk agent at Gusto required close collaboration between engineers and domain experts, not just technical implementation. The team discovered that success came from tight feedback loops with operations specialists who understood the nuances of risk assessment, pragmatic architectural decisions favoring learning over purity, and treating prompts like code specifications. The resulting system reduced manual reviews by 70% and achieved 6x faster approval times by combining AI automation with human oversight safeguards.