Michele Cappellini
Chief Information Officer · Growens
The company
Growens has been building marketing software for over 25 years. Its customers are companies' marketing departments, which use its products to run campaigns across multiple channels.
It all starts in the early 2000s with MailUp, the platform for creating and managing email campaigns. From there comes Beefree, the no-code editor that lets you build emails, landing pages and sites by drag-and-drop, without writing a line of code.
Over the years Growens has grown both with its own products and by acquiring other companies in the sector. Today it counts around 170 people, fully remote, between Italy and the United States. Leading the technology area and the innovation projects is Michele Cappellini, the group's Chief Information Officer.
The challenge
As a tech company, Growens already had people using AI every day, starting with the developers. The leap to make concerned the whole rest of the company. Bringing AI into every department, without letting adoption depend on individual curiosity.
That is why Growens had launched an internal project, "Enabling AI", to give every person one more tool to work better with. Even so, some operations still ate up time. In administration, for example, every week someone downloaded the data by hand, pasted it into a Google Sheet and built charts and analysis from there. Hours of work, often interrupted by an urgent request that pushed the deadline.
The solution
Yellow Tech built the "Enabling AI" track together with Growens, tailored to the company rather than to a standard programme.
The work started from listening. In the first two weeks Yellow Tech interviewed the people who had conceived the project and colleagues across the departments, to understand where AI could make a difference. Out of that came a group of AI Ambassadors, around fifteen people, one per department, tasked with bringing AI inside their own team and gathering the real needs.
Then the weekly workshops, calibrated on the needs collected. Interactive, hands-on. Yellow Tech showed how to use tools like Lovable to build prototypes alongside the main assistants such as Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini. In every session it took the real use cases brought by the ambassadors and built them live, side by side.
“Yellow Tech proved to be a lean, fast company, able to solve problems with AI. That's the spirit I wanted to pass on to the whole company.”
The results
In administration the change was immediate. After a week or two people had learned the right questions to ask the AI. Many reports now run automatically.
In development the method changed. Today the team feeds project proposals to the AI to stress-test them, builds prototype and design in a few hours and receives code already scaffolded. The developer reviews it, corrects it and owns security and compliance. Less time on repetitive code, more time on the choices that matter.
This has not reduced headcount. The time freed from repetitive work has gone into creativity and into new skills.
“We freed up time, and now people create more.”
Adoption also went beyond internal use. Ideas came from the departments on how to bring AI inside the Growens products, including from people who until shortly before weren't using it at all.
“Not using AI today is like not using a search engine twenty years ago.”
