How Arm’s people brought the company’s next chapter to life

When people think about a company’s transformation, they often picture new products, technologies or strategies. What they don’t always see is the shift at the organizational level that has to happen first.

Over the last two years at Arm, I’ve had the privilege of helping lead one of the biggest workforce transformations in our company’s history. We’ve fundamentally evolved how we operate and what we’re building, while staying true to what’s defined Arm for more than 35 years: collaboration, inclusion, innovation, and the ambition to do the best work of our careers.

As Arm expanded into production silicon through the Arm AGI CPU, the organization needed to evolve alongside the wider company strategy. Engineering, finance, sales, operations, product, manufacturing, people – every function has been part of this great adventure.

Arm was not simply scaling; we were shifting identity, operating model and ambition at the same time. The hard work was not only technical or structural, but inherently human.

The transformation reinforced something I believe every leadership team should ask themselves: Is the organization designed to deliver the strategy? Because strategy alone doesn’t create success, people do. And people can only succeed if the organization creates the conditions for them to do their best work.

A once-in-a-generation opportunity

AI represents one of the most exciting opportunities of our lifetime. The pace of innovation is extraordinary, competition is accelerating and expectations are changing almost daily. Arm’s own strategy has evolved to meet this opportunity, expanding beyond the licensing model that established our success to production silicon.

That shift fundamentally changes what capabilities are required. Building and delivering production silicon demands new engineering disciplines, new operating models, closer collaboration across teams and deeper engagement with customers and partners throughout the technology ecosystem.

However, that doesn’t mean abandoning what made Arm special. Quite the opposite. We wanted to preserve the entrepreneurial spirit, curiosity and engineering excellence that have defined Arm since 1990, while building the scale, capability and execution required for the opportunities ahead.

Scaling with purpose

The growth of the company has certainly been visible. One of the most rewarding aspects of my job is seeing how attractive Arm has become to people who want to solve some of the world’s most complex computing challenges.

Over the past year alone, Arm has welcomed nearly 2,000 new colleagues across engineering, manufacturing operations, developer ecosystems, and many more areas of the business. We’ve also hired just shy of 1,000 interns, graduates and apprentices joining us this fiscal year alone. To deliver this, we’ve focused on an in-house talent acquisition model supported by deep partnerships, so every candidate gets a clear and consistent sense of who Arm is, what we stand for, and the opportunity to be part of what comes next.

Bringing thousands of people into a transforming organization isn’t just about introducing them to systems and processes. It’s about helping them understand our strategy, connect with colleagues, experience our culture and become productive as quickly as possible. So, we introduced a new Leadership Onboarding session that runs alongside our renowned Big Picture events where every single new joiner gets to spend time with other new team members over two days, immersing themselves into everything that Arm is, and the environment we’re seeking to cultivate.

We’re taking this further with a new onboarding platform with in-built process automation and AI. This is part of creating the warmest welcome, giving the right information at the touch of a button, and enabling connections, but also mitigating the risk of cultural dilution.

And we can’t forget the real estate! In two years, nine new offices have opened, 15 existing locations have expanded, and entirely new capabilities have been established. We’ve been challenging ourselves to constantly raise the bar, creating moments to remember in these new spaces (or as I call them “Instagrammable moments”), and the most inclusive, well-considered designs.

However, we’re not simply adding people and creating more space. We’re deliberately building the organizational structure required to support the next era of computing, all while ensuring the quality of our products continue to be world class. Every hire represents expertise that helps us become the company our strategy requires. Every new team strengthens our ability to execute. Every new office creates another place where collaboration, innovation and customer engagement can flourish.

One of the clearest examples is Solutions Engineering. Today, it has become a large capability within Arm, helping to drive the development of our silicon products and bring together expertise that simply didn’t exist inside the company only a few years ago.

The evolution of the Arm culture

One lesson I’ve learned throughout this journey is that organizational transformation isn’t just structural, it’s cultural too. And culture powers strategy. As companies grow quickly, culture can become diluted unless you’re intentional about reinforcing what matters most. For us, that meant introducing our “10x Mindset.”

The 10x Mindset, or “10x” as we know it, wasn’t created as another set of values to hang on office walls. It was penned by the Arm leadership team to create a shared way of thinking about how we work together, make decisions, and execute our strategy. There are ten factors that sit within it, and we opted for a degree of specificity to give a view on what we believe it will take to be successful, while preserving the company’s core DNA.

When talking about evolving the company’s core beliefs and values, Richard Grisenthwaite, one of Arm’s longest-serving executives and long-time advocate of the previous core beliefs, recognized that our new direction needed something new and simply said: “It’s time.” That endorsement mattered because it reflected something many of us understood: the market had changed, the company’s ambitions had changed, and, therefore, the way we worked needed to evolve too.

Today, we’re seeing that mindset increasingly reflected across the organization. After only 15 months since its launch, 89% of people understand 10x and 86% know how to apply it in their role. Managers are embedding it into everyday conversations, with 78% of people saying that they see their managers demonstrating this day-to-day. Teams are using it to make decisions more quickly, collaborate more effectively and focus on what really matters. Perhaps most importantly, it provides a common language that connects thousands of people, some who have spent their career lifetime at Arm and others who joined in the last year, all working across different disciplines, countries, and areas of the business.

Open communication

Transformation is never linear. There were moments when we were scaling rapidly while simultaneously redesigning our operating model. New business units were formed – Cloud AI, Physical AI and Edge AI. Leadership teams evolved as we brought on board new skills and experiences. Entirely new interfaces emerged between engineering, product, operations, sales and ecosystem teams.

One of the most important lessons for me has been recognizing that you have to sit with the constant moving parts and ambiguity as things find their place, and that isn’t always easy when you like to see things be “solved” straight away. Scaling at pace while transforming means considerable intensity of work across our teams. That hasn’t been easy, requiring us to build resilience and endurance alongside consistent reprioritization, spinning of endless plates, and a huge amount of flexibility from our people.

In this environment, organizations are like organisms, fluidly moving all the time which is an important attribute to avoid stagnation. As part of this, what people need is clarity of purpose.

Throughout this transformation we’ve worked hard to communicate openly, explaining not just what was changing but why with a high degree of transparency. We’ve hosted quarterly business updates led by our CEO and issued regular communications and updates across the company. When we launched the Arm AGI CPU, we live-streamed the event in San Francisco to every Arm office and hosted celebration events for every member of our team – this was their moment.

We want people to understand the broader context, see how their work contributes to Arm’s future, and feel part of shaping that future rather than simply experiencing change around them. That openness has made an enormous difference.

In July 2026, we have a 50-point people net promoter score, that is 2x the industry average and considered outstanding. We also have upper quartile levels of engagement at 86% and incredibly low attrition as people choose to build their careers with us. When people understand the purpose and reasons behind any change, they’re far more willing to embrace it and enjoy the ride along the way.

The adventure continues

At Arm, the transition never ends: technology is moving too quickly for any organization to stand still. What matters is building an organization that can continually adapt while remaining true to what makes it distinctive.

As Arm continues its path into production silicon and the next generation of AI computing, I know that our greatest competitive advantage won’t simply be our technology. It will be the teams throughout the organization that make it happen, and I want to thank them sincerely for this.

Every breakthrough begins with extraordinary people working together around a shared purpose. Technology may shape the future, but it’s the people at Arm that bring it to life.