A licence does not take a person off the queue. The meeting stays on the calendar, the pack is still due, and the course is the thing that slips when the afternoon fills up. Curiosity survives as a side task, done after the work that already has a name. A company can tell people to use the tool and still leave the week exactly as it was.
Xero, the accounting software company, launched a Citizen Builder programme in July. It took 30 people out of their jobs, full time, for 90 days, and set them to building AI agents, workflows and skills that every employee could use. The people were drawn from Marketing, Sales, Finance, Design, People, Business Operations, Legal and Security. The company's own account says they will be able to return to those teams as peer coaches. Taking them off the line is the move. Sending them home as coaches is a design that still has to be staffed.
Who was nominated
Xero describes them as a hand-picked group, nominated by leaders, from teams that do not build the product and are not engineering. They are not engineers. They were chosen because they are curious, because they will work across functions and because they can champion the workflows their own teams already run. This is not a class for people who have never opened the tool.
Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, chief executive of Xero, described the cohort as people already in the building. On her account they are "those who are already building agents inside their teams as their side hustle", and who like the work. They are given 90 days away from the day job so they can build reusable skills, agents and workflows for other people to use. She is explicit that an engineering background is not required. The functions she names are marketing, sales, finance, design, strategy and security.
Claire Bramley, chief financial officer and interim chief people officer at Xero, told Adam Zaki of CFO.com that finance had begun with a narrower hope: make the team's own jobs more productive. What followed, she said, was a nomination. With help from the technology and engineering team, across the six months before she spoke, the company had begun naming people who had an interest in AI and asking them to represent their functions. "Full time, their job is to be a citizen builder here at Xero," she said. She was describing a job, not a lunch-and-learn. The figure of 30 belongs to the company's account of the inaugural group. Bramley did not put a headcount on the people she was describing.
What they were asked to build
The cohort started with hands-on training, access to advanced AI tools, and support from executive sponsors and programme specialists. Xero does not name the sponsor who owns the cohort. The group then started across three time zones, shared what they were learning in workshops, and went into a hackathon meant to turn rough ideas into work worth building. The cadence after that is fortnightly sprints. The people had not worked together before. Xero treats that as part of the point, a cross-functional group formed at speed, rather than a team that already shared a backlog.
Cassidy named workflows already being built for other employees and for customers. A reporting co-pilot pulls data and context together for OKR reporting, so a team starts from a draft instead of a blank page. A vendor spend skill pulls spend and, on her account, reconciles it back to the ledger each time, with rules applied and the source verified. She also named an automated programme management tool that handles different reporting with little change to its instructions, tools that document a process and mark the gaps, and finance libraries for spreadsheets, audits and data summaries. The spend skill is the one that states a check. The OKR draft is described as a starting point. The note does not say who decides that draft is fit to use.
Three of the functions are described in enough detail to see that the jobs are not the same. Marketing is building the workflow rather than a prompt, and putting brand systems, quality standards and content guidelines into the tools. Legal is building an automated non-disclosure agreement workflow, described as a self-service tool for everyday legal requests. People Experience is trying to replace scattered internal efforts with platforms the whole company can see, so the capability is visible and people can get to higher impact work. None of the three is a course completion. Each is a thing a colleague is supposed to be able to run.
What the first month produced
In the first month the group shipped more than 130 skills across eight plugins, in beta, to every employee. The builders reported a shift from using AI to building with it, and said they had gained cross-functional exposure. One output Xero highlights is a session that supported more than 550 leaders through a one-hour, hands-on build, using skills it calls prebuilt. The company presents that hour as the cohort spreading past its 30 people. A headcount in a room is not the same fact as a workflow still in use the following month.
Xero says usage, fluency and the productivity benefit are still being measured. Bramley named hire-to-retire and source-to-pay as the processes she wants reimagined. The return she described was time: the hours that go into hiring, onboarding and training, and into raising a purchase order or chasing an invoice. She put it as a condition. If people no longer had to chase that work, the hours could go to analysis and scenarios. She did not say the hours had been counted. A process name is not a result, and Xero still says the benefit is being measured.
When they go back
Xero calls this cohort one, and says it will not be the last. The plan is to share the skills, agents and workflows with every employee, and to keep going through further cohorts and training. The return is part of that design. The people will be able to go back to their teams as peer coaches. Nothing in the public description says who maintains a workflow once the 90 days end, or whether the coach is given an hour for that coaching once the old job resumes.
Cassidy thanks the cohort for showing other people what is possible, and for helping their teams move faster. She does not name an owner for the thing that was built. A coach without time, and a workflow without an owner, is how a strong month becomes a folder of beta plugins. The nomination gets a curious person off the queue. It does not decide what happens to the work when the queue takes that person back.
What this means for L&D
The useful question is who was taken off the work, and from which team. A briefing for directors is a different programme. This one nominated people who do not build the product, made the building their job for a fixed stretch, and said they would go home able to coach. The part worth copying is the removal. A slide that calls everyone a builder does not do that job, and a town hall does not either.
Three questions are still open, and a learning lead can ask them before copying the shape. Who checks the draft, the way the vendor spend skill says the source is verified, rather than trusting a fluent first pass. Who owns each workflow on the day after the 90 days. What number will be published when the company says the productivity benefit has been measured. If those three are blank, the cohort can be real and the transfer can still fail.
Collective Campus has done capability building for teams since 2015. The AI training workshop is for a team that can bring a live task and is allowed to practise on it for long enough that the queue does not win the same afternoon. A room of every function watching one demonstration fails for the reason set out in role-based AI training. What happens when the first week looks busy and the old work returns is in your AI rollout stalls in week two.
Count the people who were actually removed from the line. If the only artefact after the stretch is a beta plugin and a leadership hour, and nobody owns the workflow on the Monday they go back, the company has run a cohort and kept the queue. The next design decision is the owner, the check and the hour, not another nomination.
Sources
Xero, Introducing our AI Citizen Builders, 13 October 2026. Xero careers. Claire Bramley, chief financial officer and interim chief people officer at Xero, interviewed by Adam Zaki, CFO.com, published 21 August 2026, from Xerocon in Denver on 20 August. CFO.com. Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, chief executive of Xero, on the Citizen Builder programme. LinkedIn.
