GoDaddy 2023 Sustainability Report: Our Customers | Innovation

Originally published in GoDaddy's 2023 Sustainability Report

Innovation 

We’re focused on evolving to deliver for our customers.

The world is constantly changing and so are the needs of our customers. To stay ahead of the curve, we commit to progressing our products and services through continuous experimentation and innovation.

Controlled Experimentation 

We intentionally create a culture of experimentation to empower each employee to be an inventor, a problem solver, and a champion for our customers. In 2023, our experimentation catapulted many ideas into becoming fully integrated customer solutions. The purpose behind our controlled experimentation lies in our commitment to building great products and experiences that solve real customer problems. This effort requires an approach to decisionmaking that embraces learning and evidence-based methods, where decisions impact not only our performance but also our customers’ performance. GoDaddy experiments use randomization and robust statistical methods that empower teams to build confidence in their decision-making, find incremental value in each experiment, and trace the causal effects on key stakeholders.

To engage in controlled experimentation, our teams follow our five experimentation lifecycle stages:

• Observation or opportunity
• Experimentation design
• Platform experimentation
• Experiment configuration
• Experiment results and decision

In 2023, we conducted a total of more than 1,700 controlled experiments in product — 33% more than in 2022. We also continued our Experimentation Showcases to further our test-and-learn culture. During the 11 Experimentation Showcases held in 2023, GoDaddy teams created and trialed experiments to enhance customer experience and submitted them for review. Senior leadership representatives then voted on experiments based on design features, innovative thinking, and potential for value creation. Experiments with the most votes are featured in a live, cross-company Experimentation Showcase.

Technological Innovation 

Our GoDaddy Tech Manifesto guides our innovation through a set of technological principles:

• Simplicity
• Abstraction
• Consistency
• Extensibility
• Connected Data
• Iterate

These foundational principles allow our teams to make the right technology decisions quickly, increasing both the velocity and quality of delivery. Our Tech Manifesto also builds on our existing engineering principles of security, speed of delivery, performance, availability, quality, and embracing innersource and open-source communities to foster innovation. In 2023, we enhanced our Tech Manifesto by elaborating on the implications of our principles to emerging GenAI technology, specifically with reference to how our GoDaddy GenAI service and custom LLMs (Large Language Models) promote the fifth principle of connected data.

To improve transparency and cross-company collaboration, we use Tech Radar, a forward-looking summary of our global technology strategy. In 2023, we continued the Tech Radar Tuesday newsletter series to highlight new technologies and encourage engagement across engineering teams. This sharing of ideas promotes breakthrough innovations that solve the most challenging issues at hand.

Artificial Intelligence 

Keeping up with the fast-paced digital world means leveraging GenAI and machine learning (ML) to build experiences that improve feature discovery, engagement, and monetization. We engage GenAI to enhance accountability, save time, and effort, which in turn helps our customers achieve heightened success.

In 2023, we announced GoDaddy Airo™, a GenAI-powered intelligent experience that proactively builds and helps entrepreneurs grow their online businesses. GoDaddy Airo™ is a breakthrough technology that simplifies our customers’ experience, automatically generating a branded logo, customized website, tailored content, communications, social marketing, and more. The process is GenAI-driven and personalized.

We are also leveraging GenAI to improve our customer service experiences and the accuracy of our support bots, helping to reduce the time it takes to get to the root of a customer’s need. Our Care Guides are an integral part of the community learning how to use prompt engineering to offer value to our customers quickly and more effectively. While GenAI enhances and streamlines processes, our GoDaddy Guides are available to provide one-on-one customer assistance and guidance.

In 2023, we rolled out an Artificial Intelligence (AI) coding assistant so our developers can write code faster and with less work, by quickly cycling through lines of code, completing function suggestions, and deciding which to accept, reject, or edit. Using these new AI tools, we can accelerate our innovation to meet our customers' evolving needs.

As these technologies continue to evolve, we remain vigilant in encouraging ongoing dialogue and minimizing risks posed by GenAI, such as misinformation or algorithmic bias. At GoDaddy, our AI and ML Governance Council helps to oversee these efforts and works to ensure that the appropriate guardrails and risk management measures are in place. By fostering a culture of responsibility and ethical GenAI use, GoDaddy seeks to leverage GenAI to deliver real customer impact.

AI Office Hours 

For our customers who wanted to harness the power of AI for their small businesses, GoDaddy’s internal AI enthusiasts offered indepth video support to enhance customer usage of AI and drive their business growth. During these ‘AI Office Hours,’ GoDaddy Guides dove deep into the world of AI, offering practical advice and real-time problem solving to attendees. Leveraging our extensive prompt library and crafting new prompts on the fly, we demonstrated how AI can revolutionize operations, marketing, customer engagement, and more.

Whether our customers were curious about chatbots, predictive analytics, automated processes, or any AI-related topic, GoDaddy panelists provided valuable insights and actionable strategies to help navigate the AI landscape safely and effectively. In 2024, we are eager to provide more opportunities for our customers to learn from industry leaders and help their small businesses gain a competitive edge in the digital age.

GoDaddy Engineering Hackathon 

Hackathons are a way we inspire employees to think innovatively. At the GoDaddy Engineering Hackathon 2023, employees were encouraged to build solutions across any areas they felt would drive impact in customer experience, developer productivity, and security. Innovations created during the Hackathon were tested, and select innovations were launched into production.

Ambitions for 2024 

In 2024, we'll continue to experiment and innovate, including hosting more employee-led events to reward creative solutions. The Experimentation Showcase remains integral to our commitment to harness game-changing innovations. Efforts to streamline developer processes from ideation to production are underway through tool development and hands-on training sessions. We’ll also continue to innovate responsibly leveraging GenAI, while monitoring and mitigating evolving risks. Our culture of innovation is a cornerstone of GoDaddy's success, fostering creativity and customer-centricity

To learn more, read our 2023 Sustainability Report.

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About this Report 

The GoDaddy 2023 Sustainability Report details our progress toward our corporate sustainability goals, strategies, and initiatives in support of our overarching corporate mission and values. Unless otherwise noted, this report reflects our corporate sustainability performance across our global operations covering the fiscal year period from January 1 to December 31, 2023. To demonstrate our commitment to transparent communication regarding our sustainability progress, we routinely share updates through our website and our annual Sustainability Report. We welcome your questions, comments, and feedback on this report by contacting ESG@GoDaddy.com.

This report references the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) Standards and includes select Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) metrics for the Internet Media and Services sector. We also disclose our contributions and progress toward priority UN SDGs. For additional information on how we align with these frameworks and key indicators demonstrating our sustainability performance, please review the Frameworks and Metrics section.