Rackspace streamlines global HR compliance to power growth and cloud innovation

The challenge: managing global compliance across multiple continents

Managing employment compliance across 21 countries is not a background task. For Rackspace's HR team, it meant piecing together guidance from outside counsel, external consultants, government websites, and individual institutional knowledge, depending on the question and the jurisdiction. The process was slow, inconsistent, and expensive to scale.

The team wanted a centralized solution that could support multiple HR functions and give employees at all levels quick access to trusted compliance guidance — without routing every question through outside counsel. When they discovered G-P Gia, they saw an opportunity not just to speed up research, but to change how compliance work gets done entirely.

Rackspace had already built a track record with G-P through their employer of record (EOR) relationship, which gave the new partnership an important foundation of trust.

"Rackspace has trusted G-P for years as an EOR around the world, and we still rely on them today when entering new countries before establishing an entity," said Janelle Noble, Senior Director, HR Strategy & Analytics at Rackspace. "Their experience as a global employer makes them uniquely qualified to create an AI solution for HR operations, especially one focused on compliance."

The solution: G-P Gia as a centralized compliance engine

Rackspace became an early adopter of Gia, the AI-powered global HR agent that delivers legally vetted answers, policy templates, and jurisdictional insights in seconds. The team integrated Gia into daily HR workflows across compliance research, payroll, and global mobility, turning it into a trusted first stop for compliance questions across the business.

"Compliance was the primary driver for us," said Mandy Moore, Director HR Technology at Rackspace. "With employees across multiple jurisdictions, having a single source of trusted, consistent guidance helps our HR teams move faster and make better-informed decisions."

Expanding into new markets without the manual research overhead
Before Gia, low-headcount markets like Italy were simply too labor-intensive to prioritize. Translators, outside counsel, internal hours — the manual work required to build a jurisdiction-specific handbook made the business case hard to justify. Gia changed that equation. By querying existing company templates against local compliance requirements, the team can now draft and localize jurisdiction-specific content in-house, with Gia handling the heavy research lift that previously went to external vendors.

The team consistently describes Gia as delivering roughly 80% of the initial work — enough to meaningfully reduce outside counsel dependency while leaving room for the final judgment calls that experienced HR professionals are best positioned to make.

"Gia helps us complete much of the initial research internally," said Kevin Gaskin, HR Senior Transformation Manager, UK at Rackspace. "In many cases, it provides enough context and direction that we can reserve legal counsel for final validation rather than starting every inquiry from scratch."

Verified intelligence, and why legal grounding changes everything
As a company that helps enterprises move AI from experimentation into production, Rackspace's HR team isn't new to AI. Several team members used general-purpose AI tools before and alongside Gia, and that experience sharpened their understanding of what makes Gia different.

General AI can produce plausible answers; Gia produces answers with a traceable, legally reviewed trail behind them. For a team that thinks carefully about AI governance every day, that distinction matters enormously when a wrong answer carries legal exposure.

Turning compliance alerts into internal advocacy
One of the less obvious wins from Gia has been what happens after a regulatory change surfaces. Gia's Compliance Monitor proactively tracks employment law updates across jurisdictions and flags when existing policies may be out of date, giving HR teams advance warning rather than a last-minute scramble. That advance notice has changed how the team shows up in leadership conversations.

"When Gia identifies a regulatory change, we're able to engage leadership earlier with clear evidence, timelines, and business impact — which makes it much easier to prioritize the work and secure the resources needed to stay compliant," said Moore. "That speed has been especially valuable in high-stakes moments: when a time-sensitive holiday compliance issue surfaced, Gia helped us quickly validate the legal requirements, assess risk, and make a defensible decision internally without delaying action."

The impact: HR teams move faster, think bigger

The time savings have been significant. For projects like handbook reviews, holiday validation, and country-specific employment guidance — work that previously required pulling from multiple sources and validating legal references — the team now often completes initial analysis in a single research session. Tasks that previously took several hours have been reduced to under an hour for first-pass policy reviews and statutory compliance checks. For more complex inquiries, the team estimates Gia reduces research and drafting time by roughly 50–75% compared to traditional manual workflows.

"Gia accelerates the research process because the underlying guidance has already been vetted," said Moore. "The articles and guidance are reviewed internally and given the G-P Verified stamp of approval, so we can trust it as factually right from the first prompt."

"As an HRBP, I can respond faster and cover all the important legal and compliance angles," said Sudan. "Gia responds with references to documents and laws, which reduces the effort needed to support our statements with internal and external parties. It's like having Google on my desktop — it opens as soon as I log in."

Rackspace is now using Gia to speed recruitment and improve turnaround times. Plans are underway to upload handbooks, policies, and guidelines into Gia's Project Workspaces, creating a centralized, living repository that flags regulatory updates and ensures timely revisions.

"As we've adopted Gia, we've continued to uncover new use cases across HR operations," said Moore. "What started as a compliance resource is becoming a platform that helps us scale knowledge, improve responsiveness, and support a more strategic HR function."