Revolgy’s People Success team built the company’s own employee platform — no development agency, no engineering team pulled off client work. It is the clearest proof we have of what AI enablement does to the cost of building software.
At a glance
- The challenge — two established SaaS products for learning and performance reviews, around $8,000 a year. The reporting they gave the People Success team was genuinely good; the experience for employees and managers was not.
- The approach — one product owner who knew the process, paired with AI-assisted development, improving the tool in small, carefully checked steps.
- The result — Compass: a company-owned platform that runs the real quarterly performance cycle and hosts all learning content for around 60 employees — with the reporting depth kept and the experience rebuilt.
- Running cost — so far comfortably inside Google Cloud’s free tier.
Every off-the-shelf tool comes with limits
Any software you buy as an organisation comes with limits. These tools have to follow certain standards to work as products at scale, so the room for customisation is often narrow or cumbersome.
That’s the trade-off most organisations quietly accept — you cannot fully customise an off-the-shelf tool to match your needs and processes. And the absence of tailored tools is rarely for lack of ideas about how a tool could fit a specific organisation better. The people who understand a process best usually aren’t the ones who build the software, and the people who can build are already committed to other priorities. So good ideas sit and wait.
Building its own tool is how Revolgy stopped accepting that trade-off. Compass was shaped around how Revolgy actually works — by the people who understand those processes — rather than around how a vendor assumes every company operates. AI-assisted development is what made that achievable for a 60-person company, and Revolgy decided to prove it internally before recommending it to anyone else.
The person who built it wasn’t a developer
Compass was led by a member of Revolgy’s People Success team — someone whose background is HR rather than engineering, who knew the people process inside out. Paired with an AI coding assistant in a tight, disciplined loop, he built the platform: the AI doing the heavy lifting of implementation, while he steered every decision, reviewed every change, and owned the outcome.
“I’m not a developer. But I understand our people process better than any vendor ever could — and with AI doing the engineering, that turned out to be enough to build and run the real thing.”
— Tomáš Veliký, Talent Engagement Specialist, People Success, Revolgy
Compass on mobile: the home screen with feedback and learning status, and the learning catalogue with required trainings
The playbook
The method matters more than the product, because the method is what transfers to other organisations.
- The person who owns the process stays in control. Nothing goes live until it has been reviewed and tested. AI speeds up the building; it doesn’t take over the judgment or the accountability.
- Small, tested improvements. Compass grew through a steady stream of small updates rather than one big launch — lower risk, and the people using it shape what comes next.
- A simple, reliable foundation. Compass runs on Google Cloud, using managed services for sign-in, data, and hosting. There are no servers for anyone to maintain, and no new passwords for employees.
Security and compliance, built in from the start
Security is built into the system from the ground up, not added as an afterthought. Permissions are controlled at the core, so what someone can see is governed by the system itself, not just by hiding buttons on the screen. People log in with their normal company credentials, so there’s no separate password to manage. And when data is exported, People Success controls exactly which fields are included, so sensitive or confidential information can’t accidentally end up in a version that employees see. Employee records themselves stay in Revolgy’s existing HR system, which already meets the privacy and compliance standards expected of an HR platform.
What it produced
After testing, Compass replaced both SaaS products and ran a full quarterly performance cycle for the whole company — the real thing, not a trial.
- Reporting depth kept, experience rebuilt — the exports and cycle reporting People Success relied on are all there, now answering Revolgy’s own questions, alongside screens designed for employees and managers rather than adapted from a vendor’s template.
- Licence cost of roughly $8,000 a year eliminated, with running costs so far inside the cloud free tier.
- The company owns the product — no per-seat fees, no vendor lock-in, and a roadmap driven by its own needs rather than a vendor’s release schedule.
- The tool fits the process, including steps the off-the-shelf products simply couldn’t support.
- One sign-in, on credentials people already use every day.
- It is live and improving — running real cycles and hosting learning content, extended continuously through small updates.
“We stopped bending our process to fit the software. Now we have a tool we designed to fit our people — and we move it forward every quarter.”
— Orsolya Sogor, Chief People Officer, Revolgy
Carrying the history over
AI also handled the part of a migration that usually causes delays. Switching to a new tool is the easy part; moving years of historical records is what tends to stall these projects. In this case, several hundred past performance reviews in PDF format from the old system were sitting waiting to be renamed and matched to people’s profiles — the kind of daunting admin task that takes someone a couple of days to sort by hand, with potential mistakes along the way. Instead, AI read all the documents at once, matched each review to the right person, separated former employees from current staff, and organised everything by quarter — nothing lost, nothing duplicated. Days of error-prone manual work became a fast, reliable process you can repeat and check, exactly the kind of document-heavy task Revolgy now automates for clients.
Why this matters for your organisation
The bottleneck in internal software has never been ideas. Every HR, operations, and finance team has a list of tools it wishes existed, and a list of compromises it has learned to live with. The bottleneck is who has the capacity to build them — and that is the constraint AI enablement lifts. When building becomes realistic, the limits of off-the-shelf software stop being a fact of life and become a decision you get to make.
The lesson is not “AI writes your software.” It is that the people who understand a business problem best can now build and own the solution to it, provided someone puts the right foundations, guardrails, and review discipline around them. That is the work Revolgy does: cloud platform, security and compliance design, and hands-on AI enablement for your own teams — the same playbook that produced Compass, run with your people instead of ours.
“Compass is what AI enablement looks like in practice. Someone who isn’t an engineer built and now runs production software that replaced two SaaS products. That’s not a demo — it’s the exact capability we help our clients build.”
— Miroslav Vlasák, CEO, Revolgy
Where Compass goes next
Because Compass is owned and cloud-native, it can keep taking on more of the employee experience without per-seat fees: automated day-one induction training, new joiners set up straight from the HR system, clearer insight for managers across cycles, career paths and development plans, and a directory that answers “who here can help me with this?”
Talk to us about AI enablement
If your team has a list of internal tools that never get built, we can help you work through the same loop that built Compass — starting with the cloud foundations and guardrails that make it safe to move quickly. Contact us to start the conversation.
