How Globant’s Head of Innovation empowered 30,000+ employees to solve problems using automation

Large corporations like Globant often share a common problem: a small number of professionals become enablers for the many. A brilliant engineer holds all the solutions. One automation expert fields every request. One data scientist handles every integration. And so forth. 

Daniel Gonzalez, the Head of Innovation and AI at Globant, believes that while these individuals bring huge value, when demand exceeds their capacity, they can also become bottlenecks. 

Daniel aimed to solve exactly that. His vision: by democratizing access to technology for over 30,000 people, business challenges can be solved. And the business can move faster.  

"Technical resources cannot be the bottleneck of an organization. It cannot be the bottleneck of problem-solving. Problem-solving is about everyone in the company."

Daniel was confident he had the right tool to get there. Make, a tool he has been using for almost a decade, was the perfect platform. Because it offers the right balance of power and usability to enable teams across the business to solve problems. He knew AI automation with Make had the potential to save the company hundreds of thousands of hours. 

The challenge: Innovation available to only a few 

As Globant’s official innovation pioneer, Daniel could see opportunities everywhere. But most professionals facing business problems that could benefit from automation aren’t engineers. 

For Daniel, that’s not a problem, but an opportunity.

"People in marketing usually don't know how to code, or they're not interested in coding. Not everyone has to code; that's very healthy. You need both creative and analytical people. But you also need to make technology accessible for every single person in your team."

The problem, therefore, was one of enablement. A platform that enabled access to automation, without advanced technical skills, could open doors to a wider set of problem solvers across the business with the will and business knowledge to craft the right solution.

For example, SEO specialists had to reimagine their approach for the AI era. In times of a fuzzy AI-powered search, a list of generic keywords no longer cuts it. The SEO team needed to more deeply understand customer behavior. With Make, the SEO team can now use an AI workflow to research customer archetypes, identify prompting behavior of different personas, and adapt content to actual human needs. 

For Daniel, AI was the ‘missing piece’ that triggered this enablement. AI helps a broader range of roles to build and manage automations. Meanwhile, automation keeps AI focused on the task and objective at hand. 

"AI and automation are like brothers. You cannot think about automation without AI today, and you cannot think about AI without automation. It was the last missing piece to the peak of innovation.”

The solution: Empowering problem solvers

Daniel’s mission at Globant tapped into something deeply personal. 

"I remember when my father gave me a screwdriver when I was five. Ever since, my sister and I would take all our toys apart. Then build them back together. My mother was crazy, like, 'Why are you doing that?' We said, 'We want to understand how this works, so we need to look inside.' That's the same thing I'm doing today."

Just as it had driven his childhood curiosity, exploration, and empowerment fuelled how Daniel approached Globant's transformation. He took the teams’ processes apart, analyzed them, and defined what to improve. Then, he gave teams the means to shape the solution on their own – by giving them access to Make. 

"The interface of Make creates an easy way for anyone to solve problems. To achieve things, to make things. It just enables your team. As simple as that."

Make became the bridge between technical capability and creative problem-solving. 

Marketing professionals can now build sophisticated automations. The content team now has “Fusion," a custom AI solution for content creation. SEO experts can orchestrate multi-step AI research workflows. Product leads can integrate systems without waiting weeks for engineering resources.

The technical barrier that had held back thousands of ideas vanished.

The results: Changing the status quo

The transformation Daniel sparked became a full cultural shift. 

By democratizing technology as a solution, he revolutionized how people work.

Teams stopped waiting for technical resources. They started experimenting. They built processes, tested ideas, and iterated quickly. 

They started to wonder: What can I build? What can I learn? What problems can I solve? Non-technical teams across the entire company are building solutions that would have cost hundreds of thousands of Euros in engineering time. They're delivering better outcomes for clients at speed. While technical teams have more time to solve complex technical problems and consult and support teams. 

The bottleneck disappeared. And it was replaced by something truly exciting: diverse skills and experiences coming together to think bigger. 

"If you learn by yourself, shake things up, and change the status quo, that's what you’d do in Globant. The most interesting part is bringing people together and inspiring them so they see problems with different perspectives."

Give a man a fish…

As the old saying goes: “Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime."

The same applies to Globant. Top-down automation activation would enhance certain processes, but teams would stay locked in silos. They would remain reliant on technical support for improvements, waiting to be served. 

Thanks to Daniel and his team, 30,000+ people are empowered to solve problems for themselves. 

Because when you give people the right tools to build, that's when you make it happen.