Amanda Whalen, chief financial officer at Klaviyo, shared that over 15,000 of the company’s customers reported their best sales day ever during the weekend and achieved $3 billion of what the company calls “Klaviyo Attributed Value,” meaning revenue a client generates from email, push notifications, and text messages sent by brands using Klaviyo’s marketing tools. 

“Brand loyalty beat out bargains,” said Whalen during a virtual conversation hosted by Fortune and HR and financial management software provider Workday. “Consumers were waiting for the brands they love to offer an incentive, as opposed to waiting for just the best deal overall on an absolute basis.”

Klaviyo’s customer-centric focus and investments in new technologies like generative artificial intelligence helped it rank No. 7 on the annual Future 50 companies list. Since 2017, Fortune has developed the list along with Boston Consulting Group (BCG) to generate an index of public and private companies that are fast-growing. It examines data beyond revenue growth and shareholder returns with a focus on more forward-looking metrics of success.

“The insight for us is that we have to go beyond the financial metrics,” said Johann Harnoss, partner and associate director at BCG. “We look deeply at the technology stacks of companies, and also the talent, organizational, and cultural makeup of companies.”

This year’s Future 50 list came from the evaluation of 3,000 candidates, with Australian software company Atlassian topping the ranking, followed by gaming platform Roblox, and project management software firm Monday.com ranking third. 

Whalen said the investment decisions that her team makes are squarely focused on ways to improve outcomes for customers, such as offering up the product in seven languages, including French, Spanish, and Italian, and personalized messages crafted by AI that can be edited by a marketer. “In the case of AI, that is how we help our customers not only send the right message to the right customer at the right time, but also generate that message,” she said.

The power of investing in AI and remote work

Workday is an example of how prescient the Future 50 list can be. The company was ranked No. 1 in both the 2018 and 2019 lists, and since then annual revenue has soared from $2.1 billion to $7.3 billion in the latest fiscal year, helping Workday leap onto the Fortune 500 list for the first time in 2024. Workday has over 10,500 customers, including more than 60% of the Fortune 500.

Alejandro Mayer, Workday’s chief strategy and business operations officer, said the company’s initial value was that it built a tech stack around a new technology at the time, which was the cloud, giving it a point of differentiation. The company is now applying that same innovative approach to AI. 

“It’s now a new technology, but it is the same concept and DNA of leveraging that technology to help our customers get more out of their human resources and their financial resources to drive value for their companies,” said Mayer.

Atlassian credits the company’s success to investments in the future of work, which includes embracing remote work and AI. While large employers like Amazon and Starbucks are enacting return-to-office mandates, Atlassian has a “Team Anywhere” approach that allows employees to work across thousands of cities but also visit a dozen physical company offices if they’d like. 

“Where the talent is, it is not situated in the big cities,” said Avani Solanki Prabhakar, Atlassian’s chief people officer. “The future of work is going to be where you are not collaborating and sitting inside an office, but you will be collaborating online, wherever you are.” 

Prabhakar said being location agnostic has resulted in a 20% uptick in the number of offer letters that are accepted by job candidates. Atlassian’s investment in AI is centered on the belief that in the future, workers will collaborate with human and AI teammates.

Databricks, a data storage company that works with customers including Comcast and Shell, ranked No. 11 on the Future 50 list. The company said the wider accessibility of generative AI has led to customer conversations that stretch beyond traditional IT leaders, as departments like finance and marketing also hunt for use cases for the fast-evolving technology.

“Everybody in the organization says, ‘Well, I know how to use ChatGPT, so I should be able to get access to all the data and insights across an organization,’” said Arsalan Tavakoli, Databricks cofounder and SVP of field engineering. 

Databricks stands out by organizing the team by customer segment so that employees can become deep experts on the AI use cases and solutions for various sectors ranging from finance to health care to retail, he explained. These employees can be sharp technologists but also need to be able to clearly communicate the benefits to customers’ businesses. 

“The hard part is teaching them how to connect that to the technology and the differentiation,” said Tavakoli. “That’s something we have to do internally.” 

Balancing agility with scaling up

Atlassian, Klaviyo, and Databricks all shared that they’re investing in ways to make their internal processes faster and more agile, while quickly scaling up their businesses. “For us, it is about having this constant mindset of thinking about, ‘What am I doing and what is the outcome today, but how do I make this process bigger, more scalable, and longer lasting?’” said Whalen.

At Atlassian, the company has different planning cadences for its overall operating strategy, performance reviews, and product launches. It has cultivated a workplace culture that tilts toward speed. “Do you have a culture where people can move fast and break things, and ask for forgiveness later?” said Prabhakar, alluding to a Silicon Valley ethos of asking for forgiveness, not permission.

Tavakoli of Databricks said businesses should encourage efforts to think innovatively and allow employees to explore projects that could improve business processes, not stifle them by being too focused on day-to-day tasks.

“When people look at the culture, what behavior is recognized and rewarded?” he asked rhetorically. For innovation to work, he added, “Oftentimes people in the organization look at a problem and think, ‘I can build something from broken pieces.’”