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The WorkOps Podcast is your weekly conversation with HR leaders and People Ops practitioners doing the real work.
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. Packed with practical lessons you'll want to bring back to your team. Whether you're supporting 500 employees or 5,000, this is how the best People leaders are building for what comes next.
Kinfolk - Carmel Smith
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Carmel Smith GUEST: [00:00:00] my whole revolution, if I'm getting on a pedestal right now, is just like, if we do this right, right? If we make all these systems work for us, what's left? The scary part that people are so scared about what's left, human connection, making this world a better place, saying hi to people around you, having great ideas, whiteboarding again, like being in person.
These are the things that we're actually scared if we do it right, and I'm on a mission to do this right. And I'll get off my pedestal now, but that is my mission, is do this right and bring humans together again.
Jeet Mukerji HOST: Hey, everyone. Today I'm joined by Carmel Smith, who's the director of people operations and programs at Tenstorrent. We're gonna talk about that job title soon. Carmel, thank you so much for joining us today. Before we jump into things, a little bit about Tenstorrent. So you guys build processors specifically designed for AI workloads, and the company was founded in 2016 and [00:01:00] is led by the amazing and great Jim Keller, who's this legendary chip architect.
He's hand-- had his fingerprints on chips at Apple, AMD, Tesla, and Intel. You guys have raised over a billion dollars, valued at 2.6 billion after a massive Series D in 2024 after which point Carmel, you joined. And you've seen that growth of 43% in 2025, reaching over 1,300 employees. So you've built people operations inside, effectively, rocket ship for the last six months and more in one of the most technically demanding hiring markets of chip engineers and AI researchers which is incredible.
So I wanna talk about all of that, but thank you so much for joining us today. And before we dive into those stories, can you tell us a little bit about how you chose people operations and how you are where you are?
Carmel Smith GUEST: Oh my gosh, yes. Wow, what an intro. I couldn't have written it better. Thank you so much. Yeah, I'm honored to be here. When I think about-- When you said how did I choose HR operations, I thought, "Did I choose HR operations or did HR [00:02:00] operations choose me?" I don't really know. But I've really spent my career in all sorts of places, HR programs, business operations.
I've been a chief of staff at places like Tesla, Palantir, Confluent, and now Tenstorrent. And so I always ask myself what the through line is there, and I think the through line is really that I'm tapped to join scaling companies that have realized that their operating systems don't work anymore.
And I think that's what I'm doing that's what I did and doing at Tenstorrent and through this crazy AI landscape, which is absolutely awesome
Jeet Mukerji HOST: Yeah. Amazing to hear. And I wanna dig into a little bit more about the title HR Operations, People Ops Programs. And I saw a nice post on your LinkedIn profile where you had some thoughts about that and you used some specific emojis.
So tell us a little bit more about that.
Carmel Smith GUEST: I don't know. LinkedIn doesn't like to see me coming. I'm like, once I found out I could post, I'm just post post all the time. What I was trying to explain is [00:03:00] that I believe that there's an identity shift that needs to happen for people operations and for HR as a whole, and I don't wanna wait for that.
I want my team to look at themselves in the mirror and see themselves differently. They're not people operations anymore. They're system architects. They're experience creators. I was telling you a story about my awesome team member that a year ago she was going, "I don't know if I can do this.
What's going on?" And yesterday wrote a Google App Script to change all permissions on all of our documents. A year and a half ago, she would've never thought she could do that, and I think really rebranding internally and showing them that they can do this and there's another way, and building that confidence, that's my job as a leader.
And that's the pressure I put on myself, and it's so exciting to see what people will do when they're confident and they feel like they've gotten a rebrand
Jeet Mukerji HOST: Yeah. We're gonna, we're gonna talk about that, about how do you help people make that transition or that shift in the right way [00:04:00] and help them to show up. That's maybe got five hours in there in and of itself. We're gonna try and squeeze it in. But before we do, I'm curious to hear with that semantic name change, which reflects more of what you're doing today, how does that impact the type of person that you're looking for?
Or how does that impact the team that you wanna build?
Carmel Smith GUEST: Yes. It's interesting. When I think about that, I think about the role of HR operations. It has not changed in at least a decade. I know that for a fact. And the people we were looking for are people that were efficient, that knew how to complete a process, that were organized, right?
And now I'm looking for a different set of skills, right? And not only am I looking for a different set of skills, but I have to bring a lot of the, a lot of the existing team into the future. And what's really cool about it is they are really excited. I'm looking for people that are curious, that want to learn, that want to build that, that want more for themselves, really.
I always joke that my team [00:05:00] is a team of entrepreneurs. We all just, we could go run our own companies, but we all just wanna hang out with each other 'cause we like hanging out, hanging out with each other and building really cool stuff. And I've had people, join that's not what they want.
And I think that's okay. I was mentioning before we started recording, I met this awesome guy who is incredible, and he's in the nonprofit space. And the kind of person he's looking for is probably different than the kind of person I'm looking for. And similarly I'm probably not a really good fit for a lot of those larger companies, right?
And so it's definitely changed. I'm looking for people that thrive in ambiguity that wanna be creative, that want to change the way things work. And really, I'm looking for people that like to do the thing that I'm really good at, which is diagnose why an operating system doesn't work anymore and rebuild it
Jeet Mukerji HOST: Yeah. And doing all of that while you're in a growth phase where you're doubling headcount.
Carmel Smith GUEST: Yes, that's very hard
Jeet Mukerji HOST: that comes with a lot of resilience and a lot of uncertainty. How are you guiding the team through not only a transformation in how [00:06:00] they work and what they work on, but also supporting the growth of that company too?
Carmel Smith GUEST: Oh, so much comes to mind when you say that. I'll give you an example. We had a hackathon yesterday, and we spent eight hours just hacking solutions, which was so fun. And at the end of the day, I had to remind the team "Hey, that was really fun, but we also gotta do our day jobs."
So I think it's really making sure that there's a balance for the work that has to get done and also holding space for creativity, and then finding ways to merge both of those things, right? Maybe you have an aha moment while you're writing a VOE, a verification of employment, because you've had space to be creative and you go, "Oh my gosh, there's another way to do that.
You know what? I'm gonna take 20 minutes to try it." So I think it's creating space for both and also letting them bleed into each other. And then I think about the way that I lead as well, but in terms of how do I balance it, that's how I balance it.
Jeet Mukerji HOST: Tell me a little bit more about the way you lead and what's required from a leader to, to make that change
Carmel Smith GUEST: So I was talking to my [00:07:00] mom about this podcast yesterday, and we were just chit-chatting. And what I realized was that I just happen to be well-positioned based on the way that my brain works for this AI boom, right? Where I'm just like really teaching my team to diagnose what's wrong with the current system and how to bring it into the future.
I don't force AI ever. I think that people should want to be curious. I cannot stand when companies mandate, "You have to do this. You have to build an agent. How many hours have you spent on AI?" The whole point of AI, the whole point of this awesome tool that we've gotten is that you get to play. I would never tell you to take acrylic paint for the first time and put dots in a perfect order on a canvas.
I'd tell you, "Get your hands dirty. Get in there. Make a picture. Do something cool." I want my team to feel that curiosity and inspiration when it comes to these new tools. I also fail in front of them all the time. We learn together, and we teach each [00:08:00] other. I think it's really important as all these articles are coming out about, AI layoffs and AI took my job and all of this, things are changing, to create psychological safety within your team and tell them, "You got this.
You're good. We have all the tools. I'm here for you. How exciting that we were born in a time where you get to redefine your role." How lucky is that? And so I really try to build that positive momentum, not put so much pressure, and what happens is actually really beautiful because people want to learn.
They want more from themselves. They wanna be creative. They want those kudos. And if you create a less of a pressure cooker environment,
Happens, and it's really beautiful. I can genuinely brag about every single person on my team, which is phenomenal.
Jeet Mukerji HOST: Yeah that's pretty amazing. And I really like the analogy that you said around the you pick up the paintbrush, you're not expecting them to put dots on a picture straight away and I think we forget that, right? Like when you're [00:09:00] as a kid, the best way you learn is you fall over, you get up again, and that's how you learn. And it's okay to make mistakes. And it's similarly with AI, like there is a bit of learning and there is gonna be mistakes being made as long as then, to your point, you share those learnings and everybody picks up your teachings too.
But then as you mentioned, yes, you also have to then go in, do your day job and creating that space really helps. Did you receive any kind of hesitation from folks around I've never used this before." Maybe people don't have that growth mindset. We e-expect everybody to have that growth mindset.
How did you get them to that point where it was okay to engage in the first place?
Carmel Smith GUEST: Yeah. I think it's because I never put pressure on it. I would do things like very naturally-- 'cause I'm so excited about these tools and what, how it's changing my job, my career, my leadership. So I'm naturally going to ooze excitement to my team because I'm so excited about it. And so I [00:10:00] would do things like, "Hey I'm about to use Cursor to do this really cool thing.
I'm gonna share my screen. Do, you wanna see what I can do?" Or, "Hey, no, you can totally do this. Share your screen. I'll walk you through it." Or, "Let's go for a walk and talk about this." The other thing is that Something that I preach too is not just tool usage, but also the approach to tool usage. People think that a lot of it is technical. With Cursor, with any of those, right? Even ChatGPT can write an, a Google App Script. Anything can write a Google App Script. You can learn about that. I preach that it's the way you think about building that. What AI really demands is that you have strong opinions, you understand what you're trying to do, you can clearly articulate it, and then the part where you connect systems is really just like the second part of it, right?
The easy part of it. And Cursor can tell you how to do that. I'll just say, "Hey, I wanna do this thing. I have strong opinions. How do I do it? Oh, here's 20-step plan. Go ahead and follow it." And so I think it's a combination of me being super excited, oozing that [00:11:00] excitement, sharing my learnings, and helping people rethink...
just show them that it's actually not technical knowledge. It's more just the way you think and how you approach things and how creative you are and how much you wanna learn.
Jeet Mukerji HOST: It's funny, right? Like you're dialing up, if anything, even more of what makes us human in order to get more out of the AI. It's like the creativity
Carmel Smith GUEST: happy you said that
Jeet Mukerji HOST: Like you can't get the good stuff out of AI if we don't dial up what makes us really good at being human. So that's really great to
hear.
Carmel Smith GUEST: my whole revolution, if I'm getting on a pedestal right now, is just like, if we do this right, right? If we make all these systems work for us, what's left? The scary part that people are so scared about what's left, human connection, making this world a better place, saying hi to people around you, having great ideas, whiteboarding again, like being in person.
These are the things that we're actually scared if we do it right, and I'm on a mission to do this right. And I'll get off my [00:12:00] pedestal now, but that is my mission, is do this right and bring humans together again.
Jeet Mukerji HOST: Totally. And I'm already sensing it in your energy that if your team is anything like you, then I'm sure they're loving it. What are the type of areas in people operations that you are pointing AI towards and that your team are working on?
Carmel Smith GUEST: Oh, everything and anything. So I'll break it down. The first thing that comes to mind is systems. Before the HRIS was responsible for people data in a silo, right? I didn't have a responsibility to the company. If I could ship a report and someone could manually review it, if I could explain what was going on, that was enough.
Now it's different. Now the people team has a responsibility for the people data in a way that we never have before. And that responsibility is to make sure that we understand our data, that it is correct, that we can define it, that it has proper nomenclature, that you have a data [00:13:00] dictionary. Because my goal, and one of my goals for this year, is to create k- a data dictionary that allows the company to connect to HR data in an open source manner.
So if Tenstorrent's all about open source. If you haven't read it, re-re read their Open Future. If you haven't read Open Future, go read that. It is absolutely phenomenal. It is why I'm bought into this company, and I wanna mimic that. I wanna create an open source data dictionary.
Finance wants to connect with me. Recruiting wants to connect with me. Pay for compani- compensation, here you go. You have the right security, you have the right access. Here, connect. Go for it. So there's the system side, and that seems small, but it becomes bigger because people team will be responsible for systems management because it all starts with people data. And then we're gonna be managing this intricate web of systems. Oh, I want a new field. Do I have something changed? We need to be able to manage that. So that's one direction. So exciting. The next direction, the employee life cycle, which if we're doing it right, in my opinion is that we're [00:14:00] automating all of the things that we should automate.
Which I hate talking about automation 'cause I feel like people talk about automate agents, agen- agentic. I'm like, "Okay, we get it." But if we can do away with the things that we were never meant to focus on in the first place anyway. I wasn't meant to sit at a computer and click 100 times the same thing every day.
I was meant to use my brain. I was meant to be creative. Then that team will lean into the human experience, which I believe strongly is what the next generation of employees coming out of college, all these new grads, that's what they're going to crave. And that's what we're gonna going to deliver to them. And then there's the program side, which is, how do you completely redefine programs? One of the things that I'm really obsessed with right now is making communication addicting. I want people at people at Tenstorrent to wanna scroll what I wanna say like they scroll TicTac- TikTok, like they scroll Instagram.
I want them to be excited. How do I do that? How do I rebrand communications at a company so that they wanna do their performance management, so that they want to take the employee surveys, so they can't [00:15:00] wait to see the results
Those are the areas that I think about is data
Jeet Mukerji HOST: Yeah
Carmel Smith GUEST: and how that's evolving, the employee experience and people operations and how that's evolving, and people programs and how we're completely redesigning it to cater to the kind of people that are entering the workforce right now
Jeet Mukerji HOST: That's so cool. And I wanna touch a little bit on folks entering the workforce. It's really great to hear that actually you're not in the camp and you're not worried about the fact that AI is gonna take away these jobs because we were never meant to be doing those jobs in the first place.
Like the repetitive things where you're clicking buttons which is very refreshing to hear that you're so optimistic about it.
Carmel Smith GUEST: I'm so optimistic
Jeet Mukerji HOST: do you find that that optimism is shared or are you seeing that even some junior folks are concerned? Like where is that concern coming from?
Carmel Smith GUEST: I don't see that concern on my team. I refuse... I had a post on LinkedIn a couple, I don't remember when, [00:16:00] but a couple weeks ago that was like, if you're gonna let the negative thoughts to, come in, you also have to let the positive thoughts come in. There are days where I do go and go, "Oh my God, where is this going?
What if these bigger companies win? Oh gosh." But then I reel myself back in. I say, "Carmel, you are a leader of this space. You have a responsibility, and you are optimistic about this future," which I am. And we need people like that who are going to define the beauty of the future, not the darkness. And that's part of why I buy into this open future.
It's the whole point of it. And I just refuse to let myself go there. I let myself go there so I can be strategic and constructive about how I wanna lead, but I put a lot of pressure on myself in a great way to show people that, yeah, we were delivering ice door-to-door at one point.
We were working in factories. There are so many times in history where we thought that we would not recover, and we did. And it got better, and it's gonna get better again. And we can't imagine right now what that's going to look like, but I promise you that if you have a glass-half-full mentality and you challenge [00:17:00] yourself to change the way you lead and lead people into this brighter future, that will be the future we go to
Jeet Mukerji HOST: of that how are you seeing that reflecting in like the way that you describe the work that needs to be done today? Are you restructuring your team into those kind of three buckets when you're hiring? Are you writing different job descriptions? How does that play out?
Carmel Smith GUEST: Yeah. I think the biggest difference is that I'm hiring some technical interns, but I'm really not putting pressure on myself to change overnight. I think I'll compare it to an agent, right? If you've ever built an agent, which literally anyone can do, and if you don't think you can, call me, I will show you how to do it in two seconds.
It's not scary. Many people built an agent, but I did a talk internally a few weeks ago and I said, "Raise your hand if you've built an agent." Everybody raised their hand. I said, "Okay, raise your hand if you would trust that agent to do things with for you. Okay, you use it." Some people raised their hands.
Some people... "Raise your hand if you would just say play and leave." Everyone's hand's down. That is the equivalent to trying to force [00:18:00] this change. I could fire everyone. I could build some agents. I could try to op- automate everything, right? But it would fail so fast. It's the same thing that happened to people operations when they tried to outsource it overnight, fire the whole team, and then guess what?
They're rehiring them. I'm not interested in firing everybody and trying to automate. I'm interested in bringing my team into the future and redefining our roles. So when you ask me what's changing, yes, the kind of culture I'm creating is changing a little bit. The person I'm looking for is slowly evolving. but that doesn't mean that things are changing overnight. I wouldn't want that. That's not the point. The whole point is to explore and create. And so I think that's why my team feels safe because they don't go into their job every day going, "I have to use AI or I'm fired." They go into their job every day going, "I'm crushing my job, and by the way, I did this really awesome thing I wanna share."
Jeet Mukerji HOST: That's amazing. So you're-- yeah, you're not like asking them how many hours they're spending on AI. You're not, "How many tokens have you spent on-- in the last two weeks?" That kind of thing, which is
Carmel Smith GUEST: I [00:19:00] wouldn't want someone to ask me that. That puts a lot of pressure on something that I thought was really fun,
Jeet Mukerji HOST: exactly. Yeah. And it seems like you're really outcomes focused as opposed to output focused.
And I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on there's been and is a rising piece of pressure, which is okay, we've had some time to experiment and play, and now we want to see ROI from AI. How do you square that with hackathons and creating space for people and allowing them to have that space to experiment?
Carmel Smith GUEST: I don't think we need to be tracking ROI for AI. I think my whole philosophy is that it will naturally bleed into everything that the team does if you implement it correctly. So we should measure, how many people are scared of AI how much faster are processes how many processes have we redesigned or rethought?
I wanna ask different questions. I think when you put pressure on where is your KPI for AI, then it's like, I want it to be how has your team evolved? How has your team changed? What is the culture like? [00:20:00] How much faster can they produce? How have you evolved the roles and responsibilities, what they're focused on?
I think it should show up in everything, not in one thing.
Jeet Mukerji HOST: That is a very refreshing take, and I really like it. It reminds me of when you know on people's like websites they started to say like digital marketing instead of just marketing 'cause they wanted to specify that the way we do is digital or when folks moved to the cloud it was like cloud native.
It feels like a very similar thing where from what I'm hearing from you is that it shouldn't be a separate bucket. We shouldn't need to call out AI and agents and all these things. It just needs to be how we work. And then the... Amazing, yes, and therefore the OKRs or KPIs, you're just tracking normal business OKRs and KPIs as you do normally and the way you do it is just different.
Are you seeing an a pressure or an expectation of "Hey, yes, we now have this new way of working, so we are going to not grow our HR team [00:21:00] ever again, or we're gonna reduce our HR team over the next three years." Like where does this play out for you?
Carmel Smith GUEST: It might be a not like super strategic leadership thing to say, but I'm not thinking three years from now right now. I'm thinking about how do I evolve this team right now, and right now I need this team. I think that if I, if we were doubling in size again, I would scale the team in the same way that I would before.
I think things have just-- The way that we have worked has just changed.
Jeet Mukerji HOST: Yes.
Carmel Smith GUEST: I'm really not scared about losing my job. I'm really not scared for my team. I just feel an in- an insane, amazing pressure to bring them into the future. And what we work on might change, right? Their job in three years may not be the job they're doing now.
We talked about how they may be systems architects, how they may lean into the human experience. But as long as they're willing to come evolve with me, they're still necessary
Jeet Mukerji HOST: Yes, exactly. Do you see everyone needing to become more technical? Like you mentioned you're hiring more technical [00:22:00] interns or is there a carved out space in the people operations world where, hey, you have these folks who are more technical, they're the system connectors, and then you have folks who are more on the business partnering side or what does that team shape look
Carmel Smith GUEST: Yes. So I don't manage HRBPs, but there are areas in HR that will always be human. I can-- there's always gonna be an aspect of human, right? And so I don't know the answer to that question, but when I think about... what comes to mind for me is that there'll probably be more technical roles. But something that I think is so powerful is can you imagine an HR person who is slightly technical?
An HR person that's slightly technical is so powerful. I don't think we need to be engineers, but I do think we need to be curious about doing things in a different and a better way or, evolving way. On the other end, we talked about human experience, right? There's still the aspect of someone who [00:23:00] needs to say hello to someone and see how they feel and connect with them and give them that experience they're looking for.
So if that's the area that they're more interested in, I think there's definitely a non-technical space that they can evolve into if we do it right. But I don't know. I feel like every month my thoughts change because things are moving so fast. But I do think that there's always gonna be space for the human
Jeet Mukerji HOST: Yeah, totally. And whether that's hiring all the way to someone leaving the company, every touchpoint, if anything, we're gonna see more and more, I think and hope us leaning more into the human pieces as you take away more of the repetitive work. And as you're building up this team and as you're starting to experiment more with agents and AI generally what are some of the next areas that you're thinking about focusing on?
Is it surfacing data to yourselves for a better decision-making? Is it allowing other parts of the business to access HR data more easily or other pieces?
Carmel Smith GUEST: Yeah. I, right [00:24:00] now the things that I'm the most obsessed with are making sure that anyone can connect to my data. I really believe that people data will be the foundation for all of the data necessary to run the business. And so my data needs to be easy to connect to, and there's a lot that goes into that.
I think about the human experience. So I really want to push my team to automate as much as possible so that we can lean into the human experience and start to define what that looks like, which is really scary because we define things in productivity, working a lot really fast, pushing so many buttons.
And I'm asking my team to lean into a space where they're giving that part of their job away and focusing on the human side which is really scary. And then I think about redesigning programs in a way that leverages the systems that I've built and the human experience that I've [00:25:00] created. And so what does that mean?
I-- Like performance management, I don't wanna do performance management the way we always have. How do we change it? But you need time to think about that and space, and I think what's really scary for people is that, "What do you mean I'm sitting in a room for two hours and I might not have an idea? But I wasn't productive."
Oh, but you were. But you were. You had great conversations. You had a few whiteboarding sessions that led to a few ideas. And so I think just changing what productivity looks like is something that I'm really obsessed with
Jeet Mukerji HOST: Yeah. There's a lot of talk about productivity now, right? Particularly with AI agents. And it makes me think about how do you measure that? Or how do you help people feel confident that the way that they get remunerated or that they feel valued used to typically be, let's say we take the example of sales, it's a much more transactional quant- quantitative field.
I close 20 sales, I get remunerated for that. But if you take away that productivity lens and we're talking [00:26:00] about human experience how are you measuring that and then therefore saying when someone has been successful versus not of creating a good human experience within your team?
Carmel Smith GUEST: It's such a good question. When I think about that, I think about the roles within HR that are hard to measure. And the first role that comes to mind is an HR business partner. We need HR business partners, but their productivity is sometimes hard to measure. And so I think I would probab-- I don't know the answer to the question, but I'd probably lean into roles where it's hard to measure productivity and try to mirror how they define success, and then think through how that success-- how I can define success in the same way.
Because I think there will be systems-- Like, you can define whether a system is successful. There are a lot of KPIs you can put on that. But then for the human experience side, I think I would borrow [00:27:00] some approaches from other teams that are hard to measure, and HR business partner is one that comes to mind
Jeet Mukerji HOST: Yeah. That's it's a tough one. It's a really tough one. I don't think we've cracked it fully. We are almost coming to time, Carmel, and I feel like we've just scratched the surface of so many different topics here. But I wanna make sure that we pull some threads on the things that you've talked about from the transformation that you've seen over your time at Tenstorrent.
The 2X-ing of growth, building out your team migrating folks from the old ways of working to the new. If someone was in your role or if someone's going through a similar kind of transformation do you have any tips for them? Any advice of what to do, what not to do perhaps, that you do differently?
Carmel Smith GUEST: Let me make everyone listening feel better. I don't know what I'm doing, okay? I have no idea what I'm doing, and I'm excited about it. And so I think that we need to stop thinking that everybody has everything figured out and [00:28:00] start realizing that we all just need to work together to figure it out. And that's exciting.
when I think about tips and tricks, I think... and this is, I have to acknowledge that I am at a scaling startup in the Bay Area, right? So my advice may not work for someone at a really big company where they can't avoid these mandates or, at a company that doesn't really care to implement AI right now, which is totally fine.
But for Bay Area tech, which is what I'm familiar with, I think about, I don't put pressure on my team. I don't want them to feel pressure. Instead, I try to create a culture of learning and curiosity. Did you find out something that's really cool? Share your screen. Did you create a process that was awesome?
Teach someone. Create a space where everyone feels safe to be creative and to learn, and don't put mandates on what they need to be doing as it relates to AI. I guarantee you that will put them in a box, and you'll just get what everybody else gets, which is, "I [00:29:00] built an agent." You don't want them to build an agent.
You want them to redesign the way they work. That doesn't come from mandates. It comes from safety and curiosity and time and support, and what I'll end with too is that I think a lot of people are thinking about how this is an AI revolution. I actually think that what I'm leading is a human revolution, right?
I want, the hard part's not AI. AI will math, will build. How do you bring the humans along with you to understand, to like rethink how they look at things, rethink how they work, and be really excited about that? That's what I care about a lot. I love bragging about my team.
I love bringing them along. I love their wins. But yeah, don't be scared. Be excited. This is exciting
Jeet Mukerji HOST: Yes, you're definitely a glass half full kind of person. Shout out. And I really like what you said there, which is actually it is-- you're not measuring the number of agents that is replacing repetitive work. You're measuring the outcome and if they've redefined [00:30:00] their role.
That's quite different from the narrative now, which is like how many tokens, how many agents, that kind of thing.
Carmel Smith GUEST: How many agents? 100 if you want, in five minutes, in five hours. They're not gonna be great. I'm not gonna have thought differently about the way I work, but here is your 500, 500
Jeet Mukerji HOST: Yeah. And I did wanna touch a little bit about on kinda like the creating the space tangibly for learning and curiosity. And we started the discussion with a hackathon. And are you doing hackathons on a regular basis? How do you set them up? What's the follow-up? What are some of those practical things that folks in...
like your peers can take away and implement directly
Carmel Smith GUEST: I actually can't take credit for this. My leader, who's absolutely exceptional has been pushing for us to have space to be creative. One of the biggest feedback points around AI implementation for our employee survey was that people need time and they need training. And so she's been a huge [00:31:00] advocate to ensure that there is dedicated time and training.
And so she's carved out once a month, eight hours a day to focus on that, and she defends it. She sends it to our C-suite, "Don't talk to my team. They're doing their day of creativity, their day of learning, their day of hacking." And so I can't take credit for that, but it has absolutely transformed the way the team works because like I said, it oozes into the day-to-day.
They start seeing that there is another way. They go, "Wait a second. I connected this via an open API. Oh, can I do that here? Oh, I remember Carmel asked Cursor. Oh, maybe if I ask Cursor, I can do it too." And all of a sudden, they're down this rabbit hole of automating something super cool
Jeet Mukerji HOST: so yeah, it's, you can't have that kind of creativity 30 minutes here, 30 minutes there between meetings. Eight hours that's awesome. Carmel, thank you so much
Carmel Smith GUEST: think it's also about where do we place value?
Jeet Mukerji HOST: Yes.
Carmel Smith GUEST: after that day, I'm like, "Yeah, I have 300 emails, 100 Slacks, but [00:32:00] I think we need to start placing value in what I've received from taking that day to learn."
Jeet Mukerji HOST: That is such a good call-out 'cause yes, you're gonna you're gonna see those 300 emails and you're gonna be like, "Did I use my time wisely yesterday?" When, to your point, after eight hours, the outcome was a bit of a failure and you
Carmel Smith GUEST: it was.
Jeet Mukerji HOST: come out with something to show. And therefore balancing that with those 300 emails the next day can't be easy.
So that's really refreshing to hear. Carmel, thank you so
Carmel Smith GUEST: team, I always remind my team that when you go out of office and you come back, you live. If you go and take eight hours to do a hackathon and you're gonna live. It's gonna be fine. We're gonna figure it out together.
Jeet Mukerji HOST: We're gonna live. That's gonna be the mantra we're gonna take away. But I really appreciate your time for joining the WorkOps podcast. Where can people find you? Where can people engage with you? Would it be LinkedIn?
Carmel Smith GUEST: Yes, LinkedIn. Carmel Smith on LinkedIn. Can't wait to hang out, can't wait to talk, can't wait for the spicy comments. I love them. Let's have a conversation. If you're interested in this, I'm interested in this. Always open to chat
Jeet Mukerji HOST: Awesome. [00:33:00] For everybody listening thanks for tuning in and we'll see you on the next one
Carmel Smith GUEST: Thank you so much