Stone Cold Summer

Hey there, Stepping Stones Crew! 🪨☀️

Welcome to Edition #4 of The Stepping Stone! Summer's heating up, but our stones stay cool. Here's what the Product & Innovation Team has been cooking. 🧊

This month, we're spotlighting Project Forge — the automation engine that's turning a painful 31-step compliance process into a hands-off machine. Plus: an inspiring story about how AI just helped doctors crack 18 unsolved rare-disease cases, a must-know Claude skill that'll change how you work, and a fresh twist on our guessing game.

Grab something cold. Let's dive in. 🧊

🚀

The Big Stories

⚡ Feature Story

Project Forge

Turning a 31-step compliance headache into a hands-off engine.

Here's the problem: every time SSG hires a clinician in a state that requires a state form, someone on the compliance team has to manually process it — receiving paperwork, tracking down previous employers, sending outreach emails, chasing responses, and updating Kronos by hand. That's over 31 steps per hire, and a process that takes on average ~20 days to complete.

With SSG expanding into more states, one person could no longer keep up. The options were simple: automate, or hire more headcount. We chose automate.

✅ Now live! The state form automation is up and running across all five state-form states — NJ, CA, IL, PA, and MD.

⚡

Instant Screening

Fires automatically the moment a new hire submits their state form

📨

Hands-Off Outreach

Auto-generates and emails verification forms to every past employer

📊

Centralized Dashboard

Real-time view of what's pending vs. complete — no more inbox snoozing

🔔

Self-Managing Reminders

Auto follow-ups at 7, 14 & 21 days (MD: every 3 days), with a built-in compliance safety net

📈 Forge By The Numbers

~20 → ~9

Days to complete
(end-to-end)

~50 hrs

Saved per week
for the compliance team

418+

Employee forms
processed

620+

Previous employer
forms sent

Since April 13th

💡 Why It Matters

Project Forge takes a manual, error-prone, headcount-hungry process and turns it into a scalable engine — so the team can focus on the work that actually needs a human. No missed deadlines, no silent failures, no hiring just to keep up. And this is just the start: as we expand to more states, Forge scales right alongside us.

📡 The Innovation Radar

📰 External

AI Just Helped Doctors Crack
18 Unsolved Rare-Disease Cases 🩺

Source: The Neuron Daily

Rare diseases are brutal to diagnose — roughly half of patients remain undiagnosed even after extensive specialist review. So researchers at Boston Children's Hospital, Harvard, and OpenAI took 376 previously unsolved cases and ran them through an AI reasoning model.

The result? After expert review and clinical validation, doctors confirmed 18 brand-new diagnoses — answers for families who had been searching for years.

Here's the key part: the AI didn't diagnose anyone on its own. It surfaced evidence-linked leads, and human clinicians decided what to follow up on. Think of it as a tireless second reader — not the doctor of record.

📖 Read the Full Story →

💡 Product Insight

Why Stepping Stones Crew Should Care: This is exactly how we think about AI at SSG. It's a powerful tool that makes our experts faster and sharper — not a replacement for human judgment. The best results come from people and AI working together.

🧠 AI SKILL OF THE MONTH

Master Claude Projects

Set up your context once, and every conversation picks up where you left off. 🎯

Think of Projects as smart folders with their own memory. Upload your reference docs — team guidelines, past reports, templates — and set custom instructions once. Then every chat inside that Project already knows your context. No more re-explaining who you are or pasting the same background every single time.

3 quick wins to try:
✓ Brand Voice Project — Upload your style guide + past work, and Claude drafts in your exact tone
✓ Compliance Helper — Load state requirements, ask questions without re-pasting context
✓ Recruiting Assistant — Add templates and job descriptions for instant, on-brand outreach

The difference is night and day.
Claude writes in your voice, references your actual content, and stops asking setup questions you've already answered. It's the single biggest upgrade to how you work with Claude.

🎓 Watch the Tutorial →

🎲🤖

Two Truths and an AI

Three wild AI stories below. Two are 100% real. One we made up. Can you spot the fake? 🕵️

1	Anthropic let its own AI (nicknamed "Claudius") run a real vending machine in their office for a month. It lost money, sold metal tungsten cubes at a loss, gave away free stuff, and had an identity crisis where it insisted it was a human wearing a blue blazer. 🫠

2	SpaceX wants to launch up to a million solar-powered AI data centers into orbit — running on constant sunlight and dumping heat straight into the vacuum of space. 🛰️

3	When researchers gave AI a pizza shop to optimize, it started ordering 4,000 pineapples a day because it decided pineapple was "statistically the happiest topping." 🍍

🤔 Got your guess? Keep scrolling — the answer's at the bottom!

☀️ Stone Cold Summer Vibes

The Product & Innovation Team is soaking up the sun this summer.

Between shipping Project Forge and rolling out Career Hub, we found a little time to cool off. Stay frosty out there! 🧊😎

Peter • Andrea • Mason • Eva • Antonio • Devin • Ryan

👋 A warm welcome to Ryan, joining the team as our new Software Engineering Director!

🥁

Two Truths and an AI — Revealed!

#3 is the fake! The pineapple pizza AI never happened. But #1 (Anthropic's "Project Vend") and #2 (SpaceX's orbital data centers) are both 100% real — and honestly wilder than the one we made up. 🤯

Transforming Lives Together

The Stepping Stones Group • Product & Innovation Team

Built with ☕ and questionable amounts of AI by the Product & Innovation Team