Portfolio
The People Collective
Background
Ember Technology has partnered with Brannigans for over five years. In 2024, Brannigans merged with Intepeople and Intesafety to form The People Collective, and our brief widened with them: supporting a larger, multi-region team while keeping day-to-day operations steady through a period of significant change. That long relationship meant we already understood how the business worked, what the teams needed, and where technology could genuinely help rather than get in the way.
The People Collective is a national HR, recruitment and workplace safety group, bringing together Brannigans, Intepeople and Intesafety under one banner. Between them they cover executive and governance recruitment, HR consultancy, employment relations, leadership development and health and safety, with teams based in Nelson, Blenheim, Christchurch and Queenstown supporting clients across Aotearoa. It is a people business in the truest sense — the work involves handling sensitive information about candidates, employees and client organisations every day.
About The Client
The Challenge
The People Collective required a solution that could:
01.
Roll out a comprehensive strategy around AI across the organisation
02.
Implement tools that make a real impact on day-to-day work for everyone, not just the technically confident
03.
Meet a standard of cybersecurity appropriate to the sensitivity of the data they hold
04.
Support consistent ways of working across four regions
Key Outcomes
Organic Innovation &
Internal Efficiency
Classroom-style webinars and online training sparked innovation from within the team, producing new dashboards and documents that were not possible before these tools.
Gold Tier Cybersecurity
Standard
The People Collective has reached gold tier cybersecurity standards and runs an ongoing programme, placing them among the strongest in their industry.
Adoption at an Organisational
Level
Rather than a handful of early adopters, the technology has been taken up right across the organisation, and continues to evolve.
Our Solution
Our approach centred on education rather than deployment alone. We ran classroom-style webinars and online training covering the safe use of AI, how to get the best out of the tools, prompting properly, and practical tips and tricks for using Claude across different platforms and for recurrent tasks. We also covered self-verification of work, producing better looking documents, scheduling, and the ethical and environmental considerations that come with using this technology.
Giving people the confidence to use these tools well is what unlocked the results. Once the fundamentals were in place, teams began building their own solutions — dashboards and documents that had not existed before, and levels of performance that had not previously been available to them.
Alongside AI, we have supported The People Collective with innovation dashboards and other transformative technology, and continue to run their ongoing cybersecurity programme.
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