DoorDash CPO: AI Is Turning Non-Technical Staff Into Builders

Mariana Garavaglia, DoorDash’s Chief People Officer, says the company’s operator culture was already running constant experiments long before the current AI wave. The difference now is speed. In a new interview, Garavaglia explained that AI has supercharged how quickly teams can learn, test, and iterate—compressing learning cycles that once took days into minutes for engineering staff.

But the more striking shift is happening outside of engineering. Garavaglia pointed to a concrete example: a member of the people operations team who used to manually upload documents one by one recently built a script to automate the entire process. That kind of task used to require an engineering request. Now, she argues, AI is democratizing automation and letting non-technical employees build tailored solutions for their own workflows. The company is pushing this through enterprise rollouts of co-pilots, hackathons, and tutorials, treating tooling as a core HR and IT responsibility.

On the measurement side, DoorDash is keeping it simple for now. They’re tracking two foundational metrics—adoption and frequency of use—while also looking at how evenly licenses are distributed across the organization. The harder work is just beginning. Garavaglia said the company is starting to weave AI literacy into its performance framework, evaluating competencies like willingness to adopt new tools and maintain a learning mindset. She admits engineering teams are ahead of other functions in measuring impact, and that the metrics will evolve as the tools do.

Garavaglia seems most animated about what AI means for employee development. She described a future where the company can offer personalized, scalable development plans tailored to an individual’s goals, performance patterns, and career trajectory—a move away from one-size-fits-all support. AI is already helping synthesize performance review feedback and employee survey data to surface clearer themes and growth areas. The throughline is clear: DoorDash is betting that AI’s real value in HR isn’t just efficiency gains, but making individual employees more capable and self-directed than they were before.