The WorkOps Podcast - Becky Cantieri
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Becky Cantieri: [00:00:00] I think the most important thing is stay curious, be willing to innovate, experiment, and fail. And really think about how you set up your org to give yourself the permission, the capability and someone with the agency to get stuff done and inspire others across the org.
Welcome to the Work Ops podcast. In every episode, we dig into one story, a process that went sideways, a system that just didn't work, and what someone actually did about it. It's packed with practical lessons that you'll want to bring straight back to your team. This podcast is brought to you by Kinfolk, the AI service desk built for HR.
I'm your host, Jeet Mukerji, and with that, let's dive in.
Jeet Mukerji: Hey everyone. Today I am joined by Becky Cantieri, who's the Chief People Officer at SurveyMonkey, which is a tool I've used a lot in the past, and we still do today. [00:01:00] Becky, thank you so much for joining us today. Before we jump into things, can you tell us a little bit about yourself? How did you choose HR?
And you've spent 15 years at SurveyMonkey, which is an awesome tenure. Can you share a little bit about what's kept you there?
Becky Cantieri: Sure how I chose HR, I don't know if I deliberately chose HR, to be honest with you. I more found my way over the arc of my career. I started in retail. I started at Nordstrom out on the sales floor. Made my way through kind of customer service, which was an amazing training ground, and then into the HR function.
After wrapping my MBA, I moved over to Yahoo or joined a team at Yahoo and spent about 12 years at Yahoo in a number of different people, operations functions, recruiting, about four or five years in M&A, and then a more HR traditional HR [00:02:00] business partner role. Met a number of amazing people there that ultimately led to this opportunity at SurveyMonkey in 2011.
So I found my way into HR at-- with a kind of natural love of serving a customer, which my customer is the team internally and working with people, but also wanting to be have a seat at the table and really be part of the team that helps solve critical business problems through talent.
So that's what has led me to SurveyMonkey, and why I stay is it's just been the absolute most incredible experience. It's had a number of really, really different chapters, but what has been so consistent for me is extraordinary people. The team obviously is not the same executive leadership team that I joined to work with in September of 2011.
It has evolved over [00:03:00] time. But the team and the people at SurveyMonkey have always been amazing and part of building this really great culture. The second thing is the product. I actually love the product. I use it. It has fundamentally made me a better HR leader. It helps me listen at scale across the organization to the team and helps me make decisions, build solutions, solve problems, and deploy resources in a way that will really resonate with the team.
And then the last thing is it's been an endless source of education and learning for me. It has been a wild, wild ride, like a very unique journey. We have you name it, we've done it. We've done the kind of growth and growth at all cost era. We lost a CEO, Dave Goldberg, at one point in 2015.
We transitioned to a new CEO, and we went [00:04:00] public, which was amazing that kind of build-up experience. We were a public company for a number of years, and now in the last about two and a half years, we were brought by private equity. But there was lots of other things, pandemics, you name it, that happened in that mix that have just been such a source of growth for me personally as a leader, as an executive, and as an HR operator
Jeet Mukerji: I love that. Thank you so much, Becky, for sharing that. So many threads to pull and I really like the framing of that it's been a learning journey for you as a leader as opposed to being hit by all these challenges. So that's been really great to hear and it's so cool to know that your background is, has been on from the sales floor and customer service and you've also done the MBA and the M-M&A. It sets such a great grounding to, to your point, bring yourself and give yourself a seat at the table alongside others to really drive the conversation that's gonna be more strategic. Is that something that I'm kinda curious to hear that you'd [00:05:00] recommend for folks going into HR today that actually, hey, maybe try some other experiences and bring that across?
Becky Cantieri: Absolutely. I think carrying an operating role is important. Developing your business acumen and you really need to fundamentally understand how does this business make money? What do we do? How do we serve our customer to be helpful and part of an executive team, and to have the credibility you need to be part of the strategic conversation of where you're taking the business, and then all of the operating responsibility that you have as the HR leader to do that through talent.
So I think it's ~r-really~ important that you aggregate a lot of different experiences and challenges to help you start to develop this kind of pattern recognition or the ability to stand in front of a problem and be like, "Okay, where do we start, or where do we go from here?" It only enriches your [00:06:00] toolkit and your experience set , when you have that diversity of perspective,
Jeet Mukerji: yeah, exactly. And it feels like you could have kind of gone into any path with that kind of background, and you've decided to go for the HR path. And that again feels like a really great grounding. Over the 15 years you've seen a lot, and I can imagine it hasn't been easy the entire time.
There's been different types of challenges. How do you feel the people team's role and an HR leader's role has evolved over that time? There's been so many different changes, but then also now we have AI in the mix. What does that mean for you since you've seen the last 15 years?
Becky Cantieri: Yeah. It's almost impossible to put into words the evolution of the experience, to be honest with you. When I joined, it was earlier in my career. We were very much focused on growing the team. We were in that kind of growth at all costs era in the internet and specifically in SurveyMonkey's life [00:07:00] cycle, so that's what we were really, really focused on.
And then, as you introduce challenges like the loss of a CEO a pandemic, the need to prepare to go public the need to prepare to go private, for example, all of those moments or kind of forks in the road require that you assess how is it how do I need to add value at this moment?
How does my team need to show up? Even if there's a category of things that's not in my operational responsibility, how can I help if it's struggling? What do I need to do? So it's just this constant reinventing yourself and your team and your seat at the table to help deliver on business outcomes.
So it just requires you have to be pretty self-aware. You have to know when you need to ask for help, 'cause many of those experiences nobody had a playbook to. Even the people that I [00:08:00] reached out to, they were like, "Oh, there's no playbook for this. You're gonna have to, like, use your best judgment, be really authentic, be very empathetic, and kinda get through this."
So it has evolved so radically. And how do we transform ourselves into more agentic organizations who can leverage all of this amazing technology, but still bring humanity to the table and bring people and technology together to do really great work.
And we haven't solved it. If you know anybody who has solved it, that would be really great to know. But we're iterating, we're experimenting, we're innovating, and that's really where you learn what works and doesn't work and how to pivot from there.
Jeet Mukerji: Yeah it's really interesting that you mentioned how do we bring the humanity into it? And it seems like a common thread which was great to hear, like across the 15 years and the experiences that you had, is about surfacing that humanity. And it's about being open to change, adaptability, authenticity, having the agency. [00:09:00] Funny that the word's cropping up now even more so with AI these days. And it seems like those things are not dissimilar to what you need today to be able to drive the organization and your own through-- team through the AI change. Are you seeing though, that like things are moving faster and the expectation for change or the expectation for results are now higher than they used to be because of AI?
Or is it similar and you're like, "Hey, this is just another thing and we're just gonna see through this like we did before"?
Becky Cantieri: No, I definitely feel like the expectations feel higher in this moment. I don't know that it's just exclusive to AI. We've talked a little bit about that kind of growth at all costs moment or kind of chapter. Then post-pandemic, now we're in this more profitable growth, not exclusive to SurveyMonkey, but everyone is operating under this profitable growth mandate.
And then you layer on a new technology that is moving at a really, really rapid [00:10:00] pace. So it definitely feels like the expectations are higher. The best word that I can come up with is, like, metabolize things feels like it's never been as high. Like, you're just getting so much thrown at you, and the rate at which you metabolize information and find signal in noise just has to be really high to be able to prioritize what you're doing, to recognize when you need to pivot and to just keep up with the pace of everything that's being thrown at you on a regular and daily basis, AI being a great example of that.
Jeet Mukerji: Yeah, I really like that word. I'm gonna steal it. Metabolizer.
Becky Cantieri: Yeah, if you come up with a better word, it's the one that just conjures up in my mind what is going on. It's like you gotta just get through a lot
Jeet Mukerji: Yeah. Do you think it's something that's teachable, and is that something that you kind of look for in your team or when you're hiring new team members? Like, how do you see someone who is good at [00:11:00] metabolizing all this thing that are being thrown at you?
Becky Cantieri: Yeah, I do think it's teachable for sure. I think at the heart of it is curiosity. You have to want to learn. You have to be open to change. You have to be willing to, AI being a great example of throw out a process that you built and you're super proud of and has worked for a really long time but can be done better and different and more efficiently.
Yeah, so I think you can definitely learn that if you have the right kind of growth mindset and curiosity inherently in you to be willing to learn something that you don't know and probably make a ton of mistakes and not be good at it for a really long time before you find a kernel of goodness and something that works in a work environment, which can be scary and challenging.
Jeet Mukerji: Yeah. You gotta have that space to also fail, I suppose, and say, "Hey, it's okay to fail." And [00:12:00] these are the learnings and we've picked it up. And I really like what you said earlier around the fact that you were alluding to the fact that it's, it's not really necessarily about sticking to your job description, and you kind of have to just go beyond your remit a little bit to make sure, okay, what is the outcome that we're looking to drive as a business, and how can I kinda support these different areas to unblock that?
And it feels like with AI, those tasks or those job descriptions are blending even more. Are you kind of seeing that happen in the people function too? Or is it actually making it much clearer of like, these are the tech people in people, and these are the strategic people in people, and these are...
I don't know. Like, how would you kind of see the people function changing and evolving?
Becky Cantieri: Yeah I definitely see it changing and evolving. I don't think things are as discrete and siloed as they maybe were once designed to be. Everything is becoming more kind of cross-function and then cross-organization too. Not everything has like [00:13:00] such a discrete boundary, you might say.
And people need to think both like a business partner, like an HR technologist, like an O- HR ops leader, just more general overall and tackle a problem that way versus it being so discrete. "Oh, that's a HR tech problem. I'm an HR business partner. I don't really care." That's just not the way it works.
You have to see holistically how work gets done in the benefit of the business, and then what do I need to bring to bear to solve that challenge, that problem, rework that work, and it usually takes expertise across the function and org, like I said, to get solved accurately.
Jeet Mukerji: Yeah, that's really interesting about how kind of you breaking down those traditional silos, and it brings me back to, and it's probably a good segue into the main topic of the conversation of like when we think about an employee [00:14:00] experience, they're also not thinking in terms of those silos, right?
They're thinking, "I just have a problem. I need help from someone. I don't really care where it is and I need that solved." It sounds like maybe AI is helping us to more align closely with almost what the employee expects and what the business expects. So would love to hear the story that you brought for us today.
What was the original challenge, and then we can get into how you looked to solve it.
Becky Cantieri: Sure. So for us, the original challenge was payroll and the employee experience with payroll. Payroll had traditionally been a finance function sitting in the finance operations team. The experience our employees were having, however, was when there was a problem or a challenge or a mistake, they weren't getting kind of the responsiveness, the explanation, the digging in to solve the problem and correcting the problem in a timely [00:15:00] or efficient manner.
And just like you said, an employee does not think, "Oh, this is finance. Finance isn't asking my questions." Slack channels would just blow up 'cause employees were upset weren't getting the response that they needed, their problem wasn't being solved, and it was one of the most critical parts of the employee experience, their paycheck, like what they rely on.
You know, they have everything on bill pay, and a problem or a challenge with a paycheck is something that's really important to them. Oh, and by the way, takes away from their productivity the longer it is, it goes unresolved. So we did try a number of different little fixes, and then we're just like, "We just need to hit the blow-up button here and start over."
So we actually brought it into the HR function so that we could then really treat it like as part of the employee experience [00:16:00] for our team. So at a very high level, that was
Jeet Mukerji: challenge. Lots of threads to pull there too in terms of the evolution of the HR function of owning these different parts of the employee experience as well, which I'd love to cover in a little while. But it'd be great to hear, like at what point were you like, "Hey, we gotta press the button."
What were you seeing in terms of the signals? Were you sending out surveys and then getting feedback from employees on that piece? Or was it more the Slack experience? Was it the productivity piece? What kind of triggered the change?
Becky Cantieri: Yeah. What really triggered so we always send out surveys about the employee experience, and it was a persistent theme in there. We also had the, like I said, the Slack channels. And we just had the growing tension in the partnership between HR and finance 'cause we were getting frustrated of their lack of responsiveness and wanting to help and saying, "Let us help you."
And Then we had a really willing partner in the CFO who had a [00:17:00] similar mindset about the employee experience and said, "Listen, we have so much on our plate." This was kind of as part of we were going private too. They just had so much on their plate. "You guys take it." We have to keep the strong connection, of course, because of the literal backend connections that they own the buttons to the bank accounts and all of those things.
So we needed to keep that strong connection, but we wanted to improve the operational effectiveness, the communication, the responsiveness, and the re- 'cause it was damaging our reputation. 'Cause like I said, employees don't think about, "Well, who does that? Does IT do that? Does facilities do that? Does..." They just think of like, "Hey, my m-my paycheck's messed up, and I'm mad about it, and I'm gonna go to the first person I know who usually gives me a response, and that's HR."
So we wanted to improve the experience to make sure that our repr- reputation [00:18:00] stayed strong with the team across the globe.
Jeet Mukerji: Yeah. And you said something interesting there, which was that you had a CFO who was equally concerned about the employee experience. And I'm wondering that any recommendations for like folks in other organizations where the CFO may not be as similarly aligned about what's important or they may wanna kinda hold, hold control of certain use cases?
How do you kinda build that case to make sure that they are thinking more employee experience first as opposed to siloed department first?
Becky Cantieri: Yeah. I think it, it builds over time. It's both a combination of your credibility as an operator in terms of how well you manage your own function and the operations of your function and the credibility you have with the organization more broadly. And then thinking differently about being willing to think differently about organizational boundaries.
And yes, I understand that perhaps this has [00:19:00] historically been a finance function. But let's think of the problem that we're trying to solve and, like, what are we experiencing? And I think the light bulb went on for our CFO when in talking to the team, it was clear that the finance team members behind the scene didn't really like talking to employees.
They didn't like the feeling of conflict and for them, what felt like tension, 'cause they were meeting with an employee that was upset about something, and that wasn't their normal customer. They didn't really typically deal with customers. They dealt with internal processes, maybe a consultant, but they, like, didn't have that accountability day to day with their customer in their face.
And we are used to that, and we don't really shy away from it. We-- It is part of your role in human resources. You do a ton of interaction. You [00:20:00] don't see everything as conflict. Sometimes you get some conflict, and that's okay, but not everything is conflict. You know, it's an interaction with an employee where you seek to understand and then you help to solve, and they weren't willing to do that.
And we were never gonna be able to get this function on track if they weren't willing to talk to the customer. So we aligned on, "All right. Well, we're willing to talk to the customer, so let us..." And we're willing to, this was before all of the ag- AI agentic stuff. We wanted to know how many emails we were getting from employees.
Like, we wanted to report on it. We wanted to be data-oriented. We wanted, we were willing to have an SLA and meet those SLAs. So I think it was just this Asking really good questions to understand what was at the heart of what was preventing them from operating in a way that was meeting employees' needs, and then being willing to say, "Well, if that's not what you wanna [00:21:00] do, then maybe you shouldn't own this function."
Then, who is willing to own this function or capability? The people who are willing to talk to the employees. So it was a slam dunk once we worked through that. And then we're still willing to be partners and ensure that we could deliver on the controls that were really important to them.
Jeet Mukerji: Yes. That's such a good point about where the handoff is and the control still is sitting in, quote-unquote, "the right place."
Because to your point they're pressing the buttons. I'd be curious to hear when you brought that over into your team, how did that conversation go? Did-- Were your team all "Great, this is yet another thing that we have to manage"?
Did you add more people? Like, how did that transition actually take place?
Becky Cantieri: Yes. So I would say there was some initial reluctance. Like "Oh, congratulations, I got the hot mess problem," kind of thing. That quickly changed into, in fact, we were kind of dying [00:22:00] to improve this experience, so we were excited to see what we could do. And again, it was a learning area for us.
We hadn't had it before. We weren't payroll experts, but it gave us something to dig our teeth into and apply some of the, approaches that we've used on operations, employee interaction, employee experience to this new challenging problem. It did come with two people too and an outsourced service provider that was doing some of the work too.
So it was a lot to sort through. And I think initially, you know, we had to get the team to gel and work together and return to trusting one another and seeing themselves as one team, not opposing teams with different objectives. We were all working on the same team here. We were gonna sort out roles and responsibilities, so the people who liked to interact with people were gonna do that.
The people who had the kind of true payroll expertise, the [00:23:00] calculations, all of that kind of stuff, they were gonna stick to what they were really good at. And it took a while but we got there over time, and it's maybe not perfect, but it's improved a lot, and our error count is down, our employee experience is up, and like that's a really good starting point.
Now we can move on to more agentic stuff and more self-serve on some of these things too.
Jeet Mukerji: That's really cool. I'd be curious to hear where do you feel that the people team will kind of draw the line? Because we're seeing-- Okay, so payroll is now part of HR. We've seen some folks have IT report into the people team. And there's, you know, thoughts there of like, well, maybe they shouldn't.
I mean, I've had CPOs, tell me flat that, "I do not wanna own laptop shipments.
I want that to happen. I don't want it to be responsibility for my team." Other folks have said, "Well, why not? Because, like, that's the employee experience, and our goal is to get people to productivity as quickly as possible."
So where do you sit on the kind of that [00:24:00] spectrum? Okay, payroll's in, but what else is in? What else is out?
Becky Cantieri: Yeah. I'm fluid about the conversation is I guess the way that I would say it. It depends on the needs of the business, the makeup of the executive team and your peers in those roles. So I, for example, have now accumulated, I have, all of the traditional HR stuff, payroll, I have facilities and real estate as well.
So it's just been organic over time based on my areas of interest where I can help solve problems, like where I have the skill, will, and the interest to learn something new and where it helps balance out the experience and capability of the rest of the executive team and what the business needs.
It has been great having real estate and facilities, especially as we reinvented ourselves coming out of the [00:25:00] pandemic and moving to a hybrid, and then working to right size our global real estate footprint and be more profitable in that. So it's exposed me to a lot of new and different work that I had not previously had responsibility for, but makes sense as part of the overall employee experience.
So I guess I would say I'll never say I will never take a thing, 'cause you just don't know when you get to a fork in the road where you may need to pitch in and help based on the needs of the business or like I said, the makeup of the executive team.
Jeet Mukerji: Yeah. That's a good place to be fluid and it sounds very company to company specific rather than like here's a hard and fast rule of what's working in one place versus another. Which feels like the right way to go. And what does the experience look like today?
You were mentioning that, okay, we've set the foundations and we're gonna look at AI agents next with the payroll piece and I guess the broader when folks reach out to you for support. How has that [00:26:00] kind of evolved from where you were to where you are now?
Becky Cantieri: Yeah, I mean, it continues to evolve. We, like most, started with introducing agents as the first line of defense with employees and answering basic employee questions. Whether it's open enrollment or just kind of ongoing payroll and HR questions. We've really been working on our underlying technologies and kind of almost totally ~re-im-imagined~ or reinvented our talent acquisition technology and tools to take advantage of more AI and agents within our workflow.
We're doing the same on our kind of core technologies now with HRIS and all of that. You know, we are really working to learn and absorb and imagine what managing agents across the organization looks like for us, and then what technologies and tools do we need to do that? What expertise do we need to be able to train them?
All [00:27:00] being mindful of, like, employees don't exclusively want to interact with , agents or bots. There are moments that they do want and need to talk to another employee. And we want to make that, again, this combination of technology tools and humanity that works to build a strong community and culture while also helping the team be wildly productive.
Jeet Mukerji: Yeah. There's also a lot there in terms of we are now asking the team to do two things. One is to upskill yourself on AI agents and build out AI agents for your team internally, but then also someone that's in the people function. You mentioned training and training I assume the rest of the organization and the workforce and how to build up that AI fluency. How did that conversation go with your team of "Hey, this is your day job," but then also now there's these other kind of two things that we have to manage and we have to do. And I'm sure there was some excitement based on kind of the culture you've set up and the [00:28:00] learning mindset, but would love to hear how you had that conversation.
Becky Cantieri: Yeah, and I mean, while we got to excitement, like many things with change, starts a little bit with resistance or fear. What is this? What is it gonna mean for me and my job? What if I can't keep up? What if I can't learn it as well? So while we did, you know, we have broad access to some tools across the team, what for us has been most effective is I have a great champion on my team, and she has amazing technical aptitude.
She has the most patience I've ever seen in my entire life, and she has found a couple of really great use cases that illuminate for the rest of the team where they can find efficiencies in their work, where they can stop doing manual tasks, where they can significantly increase the quality of their analysis and [00:29:00] their recommendations or whatever the scenario may be.
And then she acted as a teacher and tutor across the org, and then as they got something under their belt, their enthusiasm grew and their willingness to experiment on their own, but have her as a backdrop to work through a challenge when Gemini or NotebookLM or Claude is not doing what you want it to do or when you're challenged to get it into a coherent executive summary or something like that.
So we have this teacher amongst us, you might say, that is not a video that they watch or just someone to go to when they're either not having... Their confidence is waning, they're a little out of their depth in their technical ability and they wanna move more quickly 'cause they do still have their day job to get to.
So she has been probably the single most effective thing we could [00:30:00] deploy to help the team build their confidence and start to interact more and imagine the possibilities.
Jeet Mukerji: Yeah. And it's quite interesting, isn't it? Where, like, you gotta get people the aha moment. And as soon as they see the aha moment, it is kind of addictive. You kinda get to that point where it's like, "Oh, it can do this." It's like, "Oh, great. Let me try a few more things." But getting to that point can be bit of an issue. And it sounds like with this person on your team, she sounds amazing. It sounds like you kind of had to shift her role away from her current job into another one. Is that kind of a recommendation that you'd have for other people teams as well of like, well, actually, you do need someone dedicated here?
They can't, it can't really be so dissipated across the team. Is that something you'd recommend?
Becky Cantieri: Yeah, it has worked amazing for us. I do think it's very hard for everyone to do this off of the side of their desk and for it to get the momentum it needs, 'cause it will always fight [00:31:00] against the urgent in front of them, right? So to kinda clear the desk of someone and give them the responsibility of finding the biggest points of opportunity across the org and work with them to solve that problem so that they can have the aha moment and they benefit from it.
Find the win-win across the org 'cause then you'll get fast followers, and that she has. Now, like everyone, we have, now we have to kind of prioritize where we deploy her and what problem we're gonna solve 'cause there's so much demand. And like other functions in the org now, finance and the strategy team So she has become a Swiss Army knife across the org to help other...
Everybody always wants us to record everything so that they can share it with their team, even if it's an HR use case. It's just the idea of showing them the arc we went through, where we [00:32:00] started, what we did, how we got to where we wanted, that is a source of inspiration of how they may be able to do it in their function.
Jeet Mukerji: That's great to hear. We hear often that actually the AI, let's say transformation, is being led by engineering or IT, and HR kind of falls lower on the priority list when you go to IT and say, "Hey, can I fulfill this use case internally?" But it seems like you guys have done something differently that's allowed you to have that agency and autonomy and kind of run with it from within the department. Is there anything kind of specific about SurveyMonkey or about the team that you have or maybe about the IT team that's allowed you all to experiment and kind of run with it instead of having to rely on like a AI transformation officer or IT or corporate engine internally or something like that?
Becky Cantieri: It's a great question. I think we didn't wait for ourselves to be put in the queue because [00:33:00] typically, Maslow's hierarchy of needs, the opportunity for productivity, efficiency, or velocity, you're gonna go with engineering first, and I totally get that. That makes sense.
But I didn't wanna be at the back of the-- we also didn't wanna be at the back of the line. So we decided, okay, we're gonna run in parallel, even if it means we have to work on our own a little bit, even if it means we have to be a bit self-taught. Just tell us what tools we can use, and we're gonna work within the tools that have gone through security reviews and done all that.
Like it's really important that we're stewards of our data, our employee data. So just tell us the box we have to work with, but we're gonna start to experiment. And we were given the ability to run, and we weren't a tax on business systems or IT or taking away from the primary focus on maybe go-to-market and engineering where we were.
But we weren't, we just certainly weren't gonna be left behind. And we, we ended up being really great role models for the other [00:34:00] functions across the org too just of how much you can get done if you just approach it from a position of curiosity and wanting to keep up and not wait for your turn without getting in the way of anything else that was going on.
Jeet Mukerji: Yeah. And, and it feels like the unlock was really having a dedicated person to actually push this forward, 'cause, 'cause without that, it does sound quite difficult to actually do this. And what is next for you guys in, in, in the people team? You mentioned y- you have the foundations, you've started experimenting with agents.
What are some of those kind of big use cases that you think, "Okay, this is what we'd love to tackle next as a, as a team with agentic AI"?
Becky Cantieri: Yeah, next up is kind of our core HR technologies, our HRIS and all of that and our operation, you know, our HR ops. All of those processes that are now cued from person to person to person to onboard and move people through the employee experience. So that's our next big [00:35:00] frontier that we're kind of really, really deep in at the moment.
We're still in the, half the marathon mark on our TA stack, so we're still focused on moving that forward and continuing to improve the agentic experience on that side, and learning a lot in the process that will apply here on the HR side of the house.
Jeet Mukerji: Nice. Becky, before we wrap up, are there any final thoughts that you'd wanna leave someone with who's in the middle of kind of this process optimization or this transition in this world of AI?
Becky Cantieri: Yeah, I think the most important thing is stay curious, be willing to innovate, experiment, and fail. And really think about how you set up your org to give yourself the permission, the capability and someone with the agency to get stuff done and inspire others across the org.
You'll just, like all things [00:36:00] with change, you'll have people who get through the curve a little bit more quickly, and then you're gonna have people who are stuck at the edge of the curve going, "I don't know what to do. I'm still scared. I don't know how this will affect me." And yet you have to have an agent of change who helps bring people along, and that can't always be myself.
So I have this great partner who really helps everyone imagine what it can be like and helps them in the weeds of their problems, and that's worked for us. So y- just really have to think holistically about how you set yourself up, what tools you use, and your willingness to try and fail.
Jeet Mukerji: I love that. Permission, capability, agency, and think holistically. Nice. Metabolism, we come back to that, I suppose.
Becky Cantieri: That's right. And increase your metabolism too.
Jeet Mukerji: That's right, yeah. Becky, thank you so much for joining us on the "WorkOps" podcast,
and to everyone listening, we'll catch you on the next one.