AI has shifted from a "nice-to-have" to a "must-have" overnight, especially for companies navigating global compliance.

Rackspace, the global leader in multicloud solutions, recognized this need early. The company established a culture of innovation by embracing AI across all functions. The initiative was championed from the very top – driven by both the CTO and the CHRO.

In 2025, their AI journey brought them to Gia, a first-of-its-kind agentic AI for global HR. The goal? Remove the hurdles from global compliance and simplify HR tasks across 23 operating countries. Let’s take a closer look at their success story.

Laying the groundwork: AI literacy and the "build vs. buy" pivot

Rackspace’s AI adoption wasn’t a rush to implement the newest tool. It was built on deliberate strategy.

The foundation: AI literacy

After the public release of tools like ChatGPT, Rackspace quickly saw the need to get involved and upskill employees. In July 2023, the company created an AI literacy program called Foundry AI by Rackspace.

“We had four different training tracks depending on your role in the organization so that we could get our employees up to speed on AI and make sure that they were equipped with the knowledge and resources before we started solutioning.” – Mandy Moore, Director of HR Technology, Rackspace

Early wins: initial internal solutions

Rackspace knew the power of AI but wanted to explore their internal capability. So, the company held their first HR hackathon. The event led to two AI builds:

  1. HR interview app: A tool to generate interview questions and highlight gaps in candidate resumes based on job descriptions.

  2. Ask HR chatbot: A bot that uses internal HR documents and resources housed on SharePoint to cut down on the number of tickets generated through ServiceNow. 

The "build vs. buy" decision

Early wins proved internal capability, but Rackspace soon reached the "build vs. buy" decision regarding a new AI HR solution.

  • The challenge: Internal builds meant using the resources and infrastructure owned by their IT team. As the AI market matured, Rackspace’s customers began demanding AI solutions, forcing the team to pivot quickly to those needs.

  • The solution: With IT resources being spent externally, Rackspace made the decision to focus on products with proven AI solutions. This meant evaluating HR tech stack components and looking for new solutions that greaten the company’s impact. Which led them to Gia.

Rackspace meets Gia

Rackspace is a long-time G-P customer. They use G-P EOR to hire globally, without the hassle of entity setup. Rackspace heard about Gia through strategic conversations with their G-P customer success manager and became early adopters.

Tackling global compliance

For a global operation like Rackspace – which is present in 23 different countries – finding a solution that could support their extensive HR needs was essential. They were in luck. Gia offers expert-vetted compliance guidance across 50 countries and all 50 U.S. states.

A tool for every HR need

The utility Gia offered Rackspace quickly grew beyond simple compliance questions. It became a holistic tool used throughout HR:

  • Benefits

  • Payroll

  • Global mobility

  • Compensation

  • HR operations

Enterprise-grade features that make a difference

While every Gia feature has been helpful, two had the most impact and solved long-standing logistical issues for Rackspace:

  1. Document repository: Rackspace faced a logistical challenge when it came to managing document ownership and updates across multiple regions. Gia let them easily upload documents and create a centralized repository that all HR team members could reference.

  2. Regulation/notification alerts: Gia identifies which documents in a repository need updates when a regulation or policy change occurs. 

“The dashboard, or the notifications alerting us when there's a regulation or a change, puts it right there in front of our face so that we can make the changes more timely and focus on other areas.” – Mandy Moore, Director of HR Technology, Rackspace

Team adoption leads to real impact

When Rackspace integrated Gia into their HR workflows, the benefits were immediate.

  • Ease of use and speed: The time it takes Gia to generate a response sets it apart from other AI solutions. Instead of waiting on legal counsel, Rackspace can ask a question and get guidance immediately. Gia thinks like a lawyer and gives context-specific guidance across jurisdictions — without the billable hours. 

  • Answers in real-time: Gia speeds HR processes with instant guidance, so teams get the information they need to make data-driven decisions.

Prompting power and workflow integration

Currently, 23 Rackspace team members have access to Gia. The strategy was simple: "Have it open on your browser all day, every day." With agentic AI readily available, it was easy to input a prompt when questions arose.

Detailed prompting is always helpful when using AI, but you don’t have to be a prompt expert with Gia. Advanced reasoning allows Gia to understand the nuances of your questions. Users are encouraged to be descriptive, but also to refine and challenge responses. For instance, you can follow up a response with prompts like "it's too long" or "show this in a table format" to customize the output.

Valuable for the entire organization

For Rackspace, the power of Gia goes beyond HR. They’ve extended its use to their global mobility team.

This team now uses Gia to manage relocation requests. Our agentic AI gives them steps and legal guidance specific to the situation, but also adds an important addition: cost implications. By detailing setup fees for the moves, Gia has become a huge time-saver.

What’s ahead: scalability and lessons learned

Gia delivered some unexpected wins for Rackspace, especially in terms of task automation.

  • Holiday schedules: Rackspace publishes holiday schedules for its countries of operation every year. Gia lets them input templates and then creates new, compliant schedules for every country in minutes.

Rackspace plans to roll out Gia to their entire global HR team of 118 members. Although the company has access to other AI tools, like Copilot and Claude, Gia delivers results that are 10x better than the AI industry standard. Unlike other AI tools that scrape the internet for answers, Gia is built on a proprietary knowledge base of over a decade of global compliance expertise and G-P Verified Sources. 

The right way to adopt AI

Rackspace’s experience has valuable lessons for others looking to adopt and integrate AI:

  1. Do your homework: Thoroughly research the tools you plan to implement.

  2. Literacy first: Have processes and programs in place to train employees on what’s acceptable to input into the tools.

  3. Data privacy/GDPR adherence: Personal protected information (PII) shouldn’t be entered into your AI solution. This can be managed by anonymizing the prompt information – allowing you to describe scenarios without compromising privacy. Gia takes privacy even further by encrypting it completely (at rest and in transit), meeting strict security standards like ISO27001, CCPA, GDPR, and SOC2.

Rewrite your HR playbook. With Gia, it’s easy.

Rackspace's AI strategy – from literacy to making the move to Gia – is a testament to their future-forward mindset. Gia has become an invaluable ally, tackling logistical challenges, offering real-time responses, and simplifying compliance around the globe. 

By embracing the full potential of AI, Rackspace has paved the way for the future of robotics solutions. 

Learn how Gia can transform your global HR operations today.

Try Gia today