The company-wide AI hackathon that transformed 1,000 employees in one week | Muskan Kukreja (head of ML and AI at Checkr)

What happens when you pause all company operations for a week to teach everyone — from marketers to legal teams — how to build AI co-pilots? At Checkr, it sparked an innovation wave from an unexpected source: their non-technical teams started outpacing engineers in creating practical AI solutions. But that's just one part of Checkr's unconventional story. As Head of ML/AI, Muskan Kukreja explains how the rise of the gig economy forced them to reimagine background checks for a world where workers change jobs daily. By using AI to drive costs down to $1 per check, they're expanding trust-building tools beyond enterprise clients to serve entirely new markets. In our first episode of The AI Adoption Playbook, Ravin Thambapillai, CEO of Credal.AI sits down with Muskan to unpack how Checkr is using AI to transform background checks from a weeks-long process into a same-day service. How Checkr's week-long company-wide AI hackathon yielded an unexpected outcome: non-technical teams (legal, marketing) outpaced engineers in creating practical AI solutions by focusing on their daily pain points rather than technical capabilities Their data processing architecture: handling billions of searches across thousands of data sources by implementing AI-powered verification workflows with human-in-the-loop fallbacks for edge cases The "T-shaped team" structure they implemented: instead of hiring separate specialists (data scientists, ML engineers, AI researchers), they built teams with broad skills across disciplines who deeply understood business problems Their approach to high-stakes AI applications: enforcing a strict checklist process that includes PII masking, data retention policies, and mandatory security/legal/ethics reviews for any customer-facing AI feature Their 90-day shipping philosophy: breaking down large AI initiatives into quarter-sized chunks with clear KPIs, allowing rapid iteration while maintaining compliance with emerging AI regulations Learn more about Checkr's approach to AI implementation on their engineering blog or read about their compliance framework in their trust center.