Joining honorees such as Anthropic, Chipotle, American Express, and many others.
IRVINE, CA – September 8, 2026 – Fast Company today announced its eighth annual Best Workplaces for Innovators list, recognizing businesses that are creating cultures where innovation can thrive at every level. Caylent earned a spot as a winner in the Emerging Enterprise: 201–999 Employees category. Caylent's recognition reflects a year of deliberate investment in employee-led innovation.
The 2026 Best Workplaces for Innovators list recognizes 100 companies across industries such as entertainment, biotech, consumer packaged goods, marketing, education, and healthcare. To be considered, applicants detailed their investment in innovation, internal programs, and company culture. Fast Company’s editors evaluated each application and conducted extensive research to develop a score for each company. A distinguished panel of judges then reviewed the top-rated companies to determine the final honorees.
Caylent's recognition as a Fast Company Best Workplace for Innovators reflects a commitment to innovation that predates the current AI wave. Years before generative AI reshaped professional services, Caylent's engineers noticed that the most time-consuming parts of cloud delivery (schema conversion, dependency mapping, code translation) were repetitive rather than strategic. That insight became the foundation for Caylent Accelerate™, the company's proprietary agentic delivery framework built on Amazon Bedrock. It has since grown into a full portfolio: Database Modernization (up to 3x faster migrations), Cloud Migration (which helped earn Caylent AWS Global Migration Partner of the Year and AWS Global GenAI Partner of the Year), Application Modernization, which uses coordinated agentic fleets to rewrite and refactor legacy applications up to 4x faster, and the newest addition, Caylent Accelerate for Agentic Cloud Operations leveraging 12 years of proprietary CloudOps intelligence to anticipate, optimize, and evolve environments. Each evolution reflects the same principle: professional services built on decades of delivery experience, continuously reimagined through new technology rather than replaced by it.
That same instinct for innovation extends inward. Caylent rolled out Claude Enterprise, including Claude Code, to every employee company-wide – not just technical teams – supported by office hours, a dedicated Slack community, and a free AI fluency course. That investment is reinforced by EVO, Caylent's internal AI platform built around a proprietary Global Context Manager that lets any employee semantically search across Salesforce, Jira, Slack, Notion, Google Drive, GitHub, and AWS documentation at once, and by the Builders team, an internal product studio in the CTO organization that ships new tools nearly every week based on direct employee feedback. Together, these investments have made innovation a habit rather than an initiative; one where ideas from any corner of the company have a clear path to becoming real, adopted tools.
"Everything we do at Caylent, we do so our customers can move faster," said Valerie Henderson, CEO at Caylent. "AI isn't a feature we bolted onto professional services; it's the foundation we build on. For years our teams kept hitting the same friction, so instead of accepting it, they solved it. That's how Caylent Accelerate went from an idea to how we operate. Staying dynamic and experimenting isn't optional for us; it's what lets us keep showing up better for the people we serve. This recognition tells us that bet was the right one."
“The most innovative workplaces don’t simply ask their employees to come up with great ideas; they create the conditions that make great ideas possible,” says Brendan Vaughan, editor-in-chief of Fast Company. “This year’s honorees understand that innovation is ultimately a cultural commitment that requires empowering people to think differently, take risks, and turn ideas into actions. We’re proud to recognize the companies and executives who are leading by example.”
The full list of honorees is available at https://www.fastcompany.com/best-workplaces-for-innovators/list.
The Fast Company Best Workplaces for Innovators issue (Fall 2026) is available online now and will hit newsstands on September 22.
About Fast Company
Fast Company is the only media brand fully dedicated to the vital intersection of business, innovation, and design, engaging the most influential leaders, companies, and thinkers on the future of business. Headquartered in New York City, Fast Company is published by Mansueto Ventures LLC, along with fellow business publication Inc. For more information, please visit fastcompany.com.
About Caylent
Since 2015, Caylent has grown alongside organizations modernizing on AWS. It is the operating partner they trust to build, run, and evolve intelligent systems at scale. As an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner, Anthropic Preferred Services Partner, and AWS Managed Services Provider, with ten Partner of the Year Awards including GenAI, Migration, and Security Consulting Partner of the Year in 2025, Caylent combines deep AWS expertise, proprietary accelerators, and an agentic delivery system to move organizations from idea to impact, faster. Learn more at caylent.com.
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Caylent Team