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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.
The WorkOps Podcast - Kimberly Nerpouni
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[00:00:00]
Kimberly Nerpouni: Start small, but don't stop. Start small, and don't stop. Just keep learning, keep going. Even if it doesn't make sense, you'll figure it out, it's like riding a bike. You're not gonna ride a bike by looking at it.
Jeet Mukerji: Hey everyone. Today I'm joined by Kimberly Nerpouni, who's the Global Vice President of People and International Operations at Pearl. Kimberly, thank you so much for joining us today. Before we jump into things, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and how did you choose people operations in HR?
Kimberly Nerpouni: Yes. Hi, Jeet. Thanks for having me. So I've been in people operations, talent management over twenty years, but I actually started my career in IT. And when I was an IT manager at a software company called Macromedia, I was given the opportunity for a bigger role in IT, and the thought of moving up the career ladder at that point made me nauseous. I realized I should be really [00:01:00] excited and wow, this might not be my calling after all. So I actually ended up quitting that job in IT, which was a great job, it just wasn't the right path for me, and decided I need to figure out what I want to do. And in the process realized that what I... made me successful as an IT manager wasn't my technical skills or my passion for technology, even though I love technology.
It was really my ability to codify org and simplify processes and elevate teams, enable them to be successful and unlock their performance and full potential. And I was like, "I wanna do that. I wanna focus on that. That's what I wanna focus on." And that's when I made the pivot into human resources and landed at Bain & Company the management consulting firm where I was fortunate enough to work there for almost thirteen years.
And I did the whole employee life [00:02:00] cycle in my thirteen years there from recruiting, onboarding, all the way to offboarding and corporate alumni relations. And I haven't looked back. I really enjoy this work
Jeet Mukerji: Wow. My, my wife used to work at Bain. Small world.
Kimberly Nerpouni: Oh, funny. Small world.
Jeet Mukerji: Yeah.
Kimberly Nerpouni: world, big company.
Jeet Mukerji: Exactly, yeah. So you went from IT into HR. And you mentioned that you wanted to work on elevating people's full potential and helping them to reach that full potential. What I find interesting is it's almost like we are seeing a re-merging of HR and IT in some areas where actually, yes, in order to unlock someone's full potential, you kinda need to get the basics right?
You n- need to make sure their their laptop's there, their passwords are correct, and those kind of things. So I'm kinda curious to hear your thoughts on, do you feel like HR and IT should be one-- seen as one part of the employee experience? Should it be two separate departments? Is this a moot question and it's fine as it is, they just need to collaborate better?
Where do you stand on that piece?
Kimberly Nerpouni: Yeah, it's a good question, [00:03:00] actually. IT really is about technology that are, tools. We all have different tools in our chosen profession. What talent management, people operations, HR, they all actually have slightly different flavors, but I really believe that our core objective is to unlock the full potential of individuals, managers, and teams.
And how that intersects with technology is the enablement of tools. And so IT they ensure that your Wi-Fi signal works, that you have security on your desktop. People ops' role is to make sure that people have access to all the tools they need, and when they're unsure how to use all the tools at their disposal, that's where people ops can help support them and/or their manager
Jeet Mukerji: Gotcha. So it's gotta work together, but different parts of the puzzle by the sounds of things. And I just saw you lift your tea mug, which we were [00:04:00] talking about before we hit record with Just, with JustAnswer on it. And I saw on your LinkedIn that you have JustAnswer and then Pearl.
So tell me a little bit more about that relationship. Yeah
Kimberly Nerpouni: So JustAnswer's been around for over 20 years. It's a marketplace business where we connect experts, doctors, lawyers, techs accountants with the end user, the consumer, the subscriber that has questions, that needs support, needs help. So JustAnswer's been around for over 20 years, and we've been using AI in our technology and our platform for well over a decade.
But with generative AI and all the possibilities and innovation it's unlocked, it's accelerated our business, and we have other product lines and offerings that the business has. And so realizing that we have more to offer we've created a parent company, Pearl, and we have some really exciting things that are gonna be coming out in [00:05:00] the coming months regarding how we can take human plus AI and bring solutions to not only end user subscribers, but we're looking into small businesses, the independent lawyer the doctor that wants to start their own practice.
But maybe instead of trying to rent brick and mortar and hire a staff, a front office staff, how can I use a super agent and a platform like Pearl to provide my expert advice at scale with little overhead? So those are some of the things that we'll be doing.
Jeet Mukerji: I like that a lot. So you're amplifying the human expertise through AI across these different tools. And before we started to hit record, we were also talking about some of the initiatives that you're doing internally. So not just AI in the products, but also how you folks have an AI accelerator and how you drove Pearl's AI transformation agenda by embedding AI into the different departments, [00:06:00] including people operations.
So before we dive into your juicy story, which you're gonna share with us in a little while can you tell us a little bit more about the AI accelerator and how that worked?
Kimberly Nerpouni: Absolutely. So I mentioned that we've used AI within our company and in our product for some time. But with the advent of generative AI, specifically ChatGPT and others that hit the market about two years ago, we were fortunate enough that our founder, CEO, Andy, is a huge advocate for technology and innovation and specifically AI in this situation.
And pretty much just granted, the kingdom of AI to every employee. Didn't matter what level, didn't matter what department. The mandate was to use AI, get comfortable with AI. Really no limits, unlimited. It... And so with that, though, we still found people really uncertain where to start.
It's very intimidating, especially for non-technical folks. [00:07:00] We were wondering what does AI have to do with our job? Why do we need to use AI?" And so This wasn't a question that not just People Ops had, but other departments had. And People Ops is well-positioned to help an organization learn new things, get good at things, right?
So it wasn't a technology problem so much was, is a human enablement problem. And so People Ops partnered with engineering and machine learning and conversational AI, and we created the accelerator program. And one of the first things we did was, we have our core values, and one of them is data-driven.
So one of the key questions is, as we started this group, was how are we gonna measure?" Like, how am I gonna measure? Am I better with AI today than I was yesterday? How will, the legal team measure their AI transformation and adoption? And so one of the first thing we did was create a [00:08:00] measuring stick for AI adoption from 1 through 10, and anchored it in how work would look like if you were, on the 10 scale versus a 1 scale.
That was one of the first things we did. And with that, what we also did is there's no good score or bad score. This is about your personal journey. So some of us are starting at zero, some of us are starting at five, and the goal is growth. The goal is learning. And so those were the first two things we worked on, and then making it less scary and approachable for all parts of the business.
And that work was really fun and interesting and hard. It was really hard, especially in the beginning, 'cause there was no AI adoption playbook for a company to just buy or ask somebody. And that led to us hiring a head of AI operations, and we hired him just over a year ago.
And we handed it all over to him, and he's taken the playbook and run with it and has brought us to a whole nother level.
Jeet Mukerji: That's awesome to hear. I really [00:09:00] like that you mentioned it's a human enablement problem, not necessarily a tech problem. And I also like the framing that there's no good or bad score, it's just where you are, and it's just a baseline that you grow from. And your new colleague the head of AI operations, are they sitting with you inside the people team or are they outside of the people team?
Kimberly Nerpouni: That's a really good question. I don't think there's a right place for that in-- that role to sit. It's what works for your organization. He currently sits in engineering, but most of his work is done with partnership with my team. Up until recently, he was a one-person team, but doing really important big work.
And so he's partnered with about six or seven of the people ops team, my team. So huge partnership, close partnership, a lot of collaboration. And it has to be lockstep. He and I have to work closely together, and then I really wanna make sure that his work is hugely successful.
[00:10:00] So pretty much anything we can do to support him is a priority
Jeet Mukerji: That's awesome to hear. Which kind of brings me to the next question which is around, there's a lot of discussion these days about, hey, we can do a lot with AI. And there's that question of the classic one of build versus buy that comes up. And what we're seeing now is that it's less about build versus buy and maybe more about build and buy.
It just depends what are the use cases and starting from the problem and then you may have someone that quickly brings together certain tools and people to solve problems much faster. How are you seeing that play out now that you have someone to fully drive this forward? Are you seeing a mix of build and buy or is it primarily build since you have the capabilities internally?
Kimberly Nerpouni: We initially did a lot of building ourselves. So our first people ops agent that sits in Teams we built in-house. It was a partnership between my team and engineering. And it basically is a people ops agent in Teams that anyone in the [00:11:00] organization can ask questions. "When's the next holiday?
When's open enrollment? What are my benefits in Ukraine?" You name it, it's that first line. Think of the dozen questions that every people ops person gets over and over again. Definitely covers that and then some. It pulls from our wiki, it pulls from our HRS, and it gives you the level of access
into our HRS associated with your level of access. So that was our first agent, and we had to build it 'cause nothing existed at the time, so that was a year and a half ago. Now there are products like that, and so if it were today, I don't know if we would've built it. It would depend. But now we've gotten so good at building agents and incorporating into our workflow.
That's our primary focus, is building, and mostly because we have fun learning and challenging our brains to learn. But I also find in the building process, we are pushing and challenging our vendors that we work with to move quicker with AI, and it's taken our partnerships with some of our vendors to the next level, which is really interesting.
So [00:12:00] build versus buy, but there's a third option that we've done, which is borrow. So what we've done is partnered with some startups that are playing with AI, and we'll pilot, and we will give them feedback. So it's this short-term, mutually beneficial relationship where we give them feedback on where their product isn't hitting the mark or what we would love to see, but we are seeing what they're doing with their technology and going, "Oh we could build this ourselves," and it would be bespoke to us.
So we've done that a couple times now.
Jeet Mukerji: That is a really good litmus test of is this a viable business moving forward or is this not actually defensible at all and we could just have it in-house? And I think, that's the way to go. It's if you can do something and if you can maintain it, then why not? That's really cool to hear.
And the other question that I had for you is when we were talking before we started recording, you mentioned that there are these levels of work. So you mentioned that, for example, hey, your People Ops agent is now answering those repetitive questions and [00:13:00] then some. And we were talking about the first one, two, three levels, and that sounds like kind of the level one, and then you were encouraging your team to say, "Let go of the level one work so that you can do more level two or maybe three."
Maybe there's even a fourth level. Can you tell the listeners a little bit more about those levels and how you're helping your team move from one to all the way to three?
Kimberly Nerpouni: Yeah. The wonderful thing about human beings is that we're learning organisms, and if we can tap into the, our curiosity and the satisfaction and joy that learning has, you can really start to unlock everyone's potential. Even unlock talents they didn't know they had. And that's been one of my favorite things about being a manager, is being able to see super special skills in others that they don't see that in themselves.
And so a lot of times managers aren't able to tap into that because we're so head down busy with the work that has [00:14:00] to be done right in front of us. So it might be a little naive of me and overly optimistic, but I really think that AI used in the right way can make work so much more enjoyable and rewarding for humans.
And so one of the big things that I think a lot of people have struggled with and continue to struggle with is AI will take my job
That's a real concern that people have, and I get that, and I don't wanna diminish that. But I think in any organization, it's going to impact some jobs. But I think for the vast majority, it's about up-leveling our jobs.
And much like a laptop or, tools like PowerPoint, at a different scale, of course. Before PowerPoint, how did people make slides?
Jeet Mukerji: Yeah. Yeah.
Kimberly Nerpouni: With paper and scissors and X-Acto knives. And most of us don't remember that. There were whole departments at Bain that made PowerPoint slides [00:15:00] so that consultants wouldn't use time...
consultants have a very specific skill helping solve business problems. You don't want consultants, creating PowerPoint slides. You want them solving business problems. So you think about the different types of work and all of us coming together to give you that end product. And so when I think about bringing AI into your teams or into your workflow, moving AI into level one work.
So if you think of work in three levels, everyone has work that they do that doesn't really require your specific functional expertise. But someone has to do it, Everyone has that. No matter what you do, there's a certain level of work that, it's not really pulling on my twenty years of people ops experience
And so where can AI do that? So the people ops agent is a good example. So we have a team, a global team of people ops. Yes, they can answer all those questions, but it doesn't take ten years of experience to answer [00:16:00] when's the next company holiday. When's open enrollment. How do I submit re travel expenses
So that's level one work, right?
Jeet Mukerji: Yeah,
Kimberly Nerpouni: within that grade, so now my people ops team they don't have to think about... that's freed up their capacity to do other things, spend more time with our customers, more time on level two work and then level three work. And as we've gotten more sophisticated with AI, we're starting to see how AI can start taking on level two work.
And that's really interesting. And the specific example r- relative to people ops is we really want managers and employees to have a really strong relationship and want that, feedback loop to be continuous. And people ops in my worldview is not responsible for managers giving feedback, but we are responsible for enabling them and supporting them and giving them tools to do it and to do it well.
And now we are creating agents that can help facilitate that, [00:17:00] right? And so the agent will Scan the environment and go back to the manager and say, "Hey, Sally's been working on these three projects, collaborating with these individuals over the last quarter. Now is a good time to facilitate that input from those individuals, and ask them specifically about this project."
So it'll come back to me. So I can go to the agent and say, "Hey, what's Matt been working on in the last quarter, and who's he been collaborating with?" And in, within seconds, the agent comes back and tells me all the projects that Matt's been working on in the last quarter and the individuals that he's been collaborating with.
And it's scanning emails that between me and Matt, Teams messages between me and Matt, public Teams messages that he's on Asana, the wiki, all the things that he's adding, collaborating with and adding to and coming back, and I'm learning things. Oh, I didn't know he was doing that. He didn't share that.
He's being too humble. Or wow, I love to see all that collaboration, huge [00:18:00] collaboration with engineering and product. Okay. So I'm gonna go to those individuals in product and get some input. How's Matt showing up in these meetings? How is he further enabling your team? And those are things that the agent will help us do because it...
when we think about continuous feedback between employee and manager, one of the biggest barriers I've found in my career is not intent. Most managers want to give feedback. We just get distracted, and all of a sudden it's oh, it's been six months. What happened? I forgot to give feedback. And so this agent will proactively reach out to you on a cadence that you've set whether it's quarter or bi-monthly, depending on the individual preference, and say, "Hey, this is what Matt's been working on in the last quarter.
Here are the people you wanna solicit feedback from, and here are the things based on his growth plan that you developed with him that you might wanna focus on."
Jeet Mukerji: That is pretty awesome. For folks who are wondering, "Hey, how do I do this internally?" What is your tech stack [00:19:00] to enable this kind of flow?
Kimberly Nerpouni: We have pretty much any tool you can imagine with ChatGPT, Claude, it's really our-- I have to give a shout-out to our engineering team
What we've been able to do and our head of AI, Mark, has really made that accessible with what we call our AI agent hub
Jeet Mukerji: Oh, that's awesome to hear.
Kimberly Nerpouni: And so it's basically a platform on our wiki, and it has all our AI tools there.
It shows you all the MCP servers that we're connected to. And what we would do, and anyone, literally anyone in the organization, no matter tenure level or department, can go into the Agent Hub, pick the tool they want, whether it's Claude or ChatGPT and the different models. It's a candy store of AI, basically.
It's a smorgasbord.
Jeet Mukerji: Yeah
Kimberly Nerpouni: And then it has a list of all the MCP servers we're connected to, and it's updated [00:20:00] all the time. And you can create as many agents as you want. They're private to you, and you can publicly share them if you want. So people are sharing agents. So I can see, oh, Andrew who is not in people ops and who is not in finance, created an AI travel agent to help support people that are traveling for work, though it probably works even if you're traveling not for work. And
That's public. Yeah
Jeet Mukerji: So you're democratizing access in such a fun way through this hub. And I'm curious to hear your thoughts. It seems like there's a lot of transparency in the organization. Did you face any kind of hesitation when people were saying, "Hey, it looks like now my manager can read my emails," or, "This AI can read my emails, and therefore my manager can."
The teams messages, they can see what's happening in Asana. Did that cause some anxiety with people?
Kimberly Nerpouni: Yes, it definitely does. But what we've [00:21:00] done we've intentionally done is it doesn't give any access to a manager that they don't already have. So I have access to manager... to emails between me and Matt. I don't have access to all his emails, just the emails between me and Matt.
Anything in Asana I have access to is anything that they've already granted me access to. And so with our SharePoint, though, in People Ops, each department has a SharePoint, and as the manager, the department head of the SharePoint, I have access to everything that's posted on the People Op SharePoint, which, if in my free time I could look through it and see who's building what and what they're sharing but as most managers don't have a lot of free time to just, snoop around the SharePoint and see, "Hey, I wonder what the team's working on."
But what AI will do is with the right instruction and configuration, will just share with me what's the most important, what's the most relevant, So if, let's say Sally's working on an audit. Let's say she's doing a, an audit, [00:22:00] and that's her core OKR for this quarter, right?
So I know that agent knows that's Sally's OKR, right? So it'll scan the environment and go, "Okay here's the update on the audit. Here are the t- people that she's working with." And
from,
And for the feedback facilitator agent, it's not going to grade her work. The tool isn't about giving feedback to the employee, 'cause I was very conscientious and very very explicit that I don't want AI to give feedback. I want the AI to help the manager facilitate it, 'cause feedback at its, in its best, truest form is human and it's a conversation.
Jeet Mukerji: Yes. Which I think ties us very nicely into the story that you're gonna share with us which is the flip side of, "Hey, we have all this data, and maybe there are some gaps here." And a natural reaction to this might be a PIP eventually. So tell me more about
Kimberly Nerpouni: That's interesting. Yeah. That's interesting. Actually, it's a good conversation [00:23:00] to have based on the conversation we just had for all the people that might be freaking out "Oh, she's gonna use AI to determine who's performing, who's not performing, and to have very, different conversations."
Not the intent at all, and, it's about facilitating that conversation and facilitating performance conversations and growth conversations, which is part and parcel why I don't believe in PIPs, and PIPs are performance improvement plans. And the reason I don't believe in PIPs is mostly because how they've been used, and they've been weaponized for terminations.
And I didn't create PIPs. They already existed when I moved to HR and people operations, so I can't say who first started using them or who coined it or what their intent was. I doubt that their intent was, "Hey, this is step one in firing somebody," but that's basically how they've been used.
And so I don't believe in PIPs. And what I do believe in though is transparency, clarity, and [00:24:00] care amongst talent management programs, and PIP does not do those things.
Give clarity, but it's too late.
Jeet Mukerji: A path towards the exit, and w- we've seen it. Yeah we've seen previously where... and I'd be curious to hear when you joined JustAnswer were pips in place, and then did you remove it or were they already not being used?
Kimberly Nerpouni: Yeah, PIPs were in place It wasn't so much explicit that manager, a mana- a coup- several managers in my first year came to me and said, "Oh, I wanna put this person on a PIP." Maybe one person did. It was more about, this person isn't working out, I need to start the process of letting them go.
And what's interesting is in those early days in conversations with a couple managers i'll pick one manager in particular who will remain nameless that this manager is no longer here, which when you hear this story might not be that surprising. A manager came to me. This manager hadn't been at [00:25:00] the organization very long.
I think I'd only been here about six months, and this person had been here about four months, and said, "I have someone on my team that's underperforming. I ... i've tried to give her feedback. It's not going well. I need to let her go." And I said, "Okay. Let me... I really wanna understand the situation and what's going on.
What's her title and what's her level? And do you have a job description?" And she said, "I don't know her level, and I don't have a job description." So right then and there, I'm getting, red flags. Because any well-rounded, thoughtful manager would know that before you signal to your HR, head of HR that this person is underperforming, I should've had a good conversation with that individual on why and how they're underperforming and what we can potentially address.
And I don't know if you can have a thoughtful conversation if you don't have a job description, and it doesn't have to be a super formal job [00:26:00] description, but explain to me what my job is and where am I failing. So that was my first indication that, this is not about letting this person go. This is about coaching this manager on how to be an effective manager.
My second follow-up question was, " Okay. What's her background? Do you know her background? Do you have... you don't need a copy of her resume, but what's her background?" And this time, I'm not even making this up, she goes, "I don't know."
I'm like, "Okay. All right. If you don't have a job description and you don't know her background, what does she think her job is?"
And she walked me through a couple high-level things. So what I did is I, it ... what started off as a conversation on potentially letting someone go really became a conversation about helping this manager think about how she engages and motivates members of her team. And just giving her some pointers of I think you need to have a conversation of what the job is.
Understand what her interests are and her background is. Why [00:27:00] was she hired? She's been here several years. You've been here four months, so maybe things have changed. And I don't know, maybe you should have a conversation about that." So that person that she was coming to me about ended up staying and ended up being fine.
She was great, and it just became an exercise of job clarity and setting expectations. The manager didn't realize how actually junior that person was, and was expecting them to deliver work, not to get too technical, but if you think of P1 through P7s, P1 being very entry-level P7 being an expert at their functional area.
This person was like a P2, if I recall, and she was expecting them to deliver P3, maybe even P4, which would be more senior work. And just calibrating, recalibrating, and providing clarity and consistency of expectations on both ends helped a lot.
Jeet Mukerji: Wow. Was that kind of the signal to you of "Hey, we need to cut pip or maybe redefine [00:28:00] pip"? And how are you doing it differently now? Do pips still exist in
Kimberly Nerpouni: No, so , what we've done differently is it's all the things I think PIPs were supposed to be, but done way earlier in the process, right? So it happens before you even walk through the door. Like you you know your job title, you know your level, your manager has your job description, you have your job description.
Everyone is on a career ladder. Everyone has a career ladder now. So it's all the things that PIP did way after the fact. It's all front-loaded. So you know your level, you know where you are in your career ladder, you have a job description, you understand what you need to get to the next level. Maybe some people have more clarity than others.
Humans are different and jobs are different, and so some are more complex, some are more opaque than others in that trajectory. And so performance management is the key to that, and doing performance management well and those conversations between managers and employees.
So we [00:29:00] have a robust 360 feedback, and I mentioned everyone has a career ladder. We also really encourage employees to talk to their managers about development plans
Jeet Mukerji: Nice.
Kimberly Nerpouni: And so whether you have a development plan or not, at least having a conversation about what you want out of your career.
And so there are no s- the goal is no surprises, right? Only good good surprises. But everyone should understand where they sit in their career ladder and how they're performing. And so PIPs are not a thing here. I know maybe for some organizations they're needed. But if you're doing, full life cycle performance management, if you're supporting managers on having those conversations, you are making it clear to employees that they own their development, not the managers.
They own it, and I think that's a big thing. That's a surprise to some people. Managers are there to support you, but you can't expect your manager to care more than you about your [00:30:00] career, right? And I think sometimes by being explicit to people "You own your career. You go talk to your manager.
You, find out what is needed to get to the next level."
That can be... and that can be overwhelming and intimidating to managers knowing that, "Oh, my ma- my team is gonna come to me and ask me about where they are in their career ladder and how to get to the next level." So that's where people ops needs to partner with managers and give them the talking points and the toolkit.
Radical candor was a big thing for us in this last year, and helping managers shy away from difficult conversations. Not gonna work here anymore unfortunately, because we are telling employees that they have career ladders, they should be using them and having conversations, so we gotta make sure that the managers on the receiving end of those sometimes really tough questions.
How do I answer that, how do you have a conversation with somebody that really wants to get promoted, but they're not ready?
Jeet Mukerji: Yeah
Kimberly Nerpouni: it. I'm a manager, too. It sucks.
Jeet Mukerji: Do you think [00:31:00] these days with AI at your fingertips both Claude and ChatGPT like you guys have at Pearl and JustAnswer where do you see AI fitting into this? Because on one side you could probably be like, "Hey, give me the CliffsNotes of Radical Candor," and you can be like, "Great, this is how it works.
Great, I'm gonna have a scenario, I'm gonna test out, I'm gonna understand how to have a difficult conversation." But equally at some point, that's gonna maybe draw you towards the average as opposed to really highlighting like what is specific to this particular scenario. So like how do you encourage using AI in those scenarios versus not?
Kimberly Nerpouni: It's the battle of all times. Anything you think about, right? The difference between knowing and doing,
Right? We know we're supposed to get eight hours of sleep. We know we're supposed to drink X number of glasses of water. We know we're not supposed to drink too much.
So if it was just simple as knowing, We don't need people. We just use AI. it's the doing that matters. It's how you do it, and doing... It's showing up [00:32:00] consistently. And we could all read the book Radical Candor, or we could even read even if you didn't read the whole book and you read the talking points, right?
We could read all the TED Talks. That doesn't mean we, we become better managers. It's the practice. It's the doing. It's showing up that way every day. So that's where AI can't do that, just like books can't do that, just like TED Talks can't do that. It's information, but it's not the knowing, it's the doing
Jeet Mukerji: Yeah. You gotta show up and you Gotta
practice it.
Kimberly Nerpouni: Gotta practice it. And so I think what AI can do though, and how it can support the individual and or the manager in that, it can be if you use it well, like anything, it's how you set it up. If you use it to be objective, right? If you're using it as a mirror a real mirror versus the mirror from Snow White. Was it Snow White? Where the mirror just tells you're beautiful all
the
time. Like, "You're amazing. You look perfect. Don't change a thing," right? Versus "How did I screw this up?" "How could I h- done this better," right? If you're [00:33:00] using, if you're asking AI those questions, those really honest questions that we hopefully are asking ourselves, I ask myself all the time "God, I don't think I handled that very well.
How could I have done that better?" I think about that all the time, but now I have AI to help me. So I've created my own agent, a chief of staff my chief of staff agent, and I've fed it my talent management philosophy. It has my people ops 2026 plan. It has all our OKRs. It has a background on all my direct reports and a little bit about our founder CEO, our company values,
it has... I fed it all this information, and I've told it, "Do not placate me." " Don't tell me I'm amazing. I need you to be honest."
Jeet Mukerji: I like that a lot. Your own chief of staff. I was gonna ask you what is your kind of favorite way of using AI, and it sounds like you've answered that question, having your own chief of staff to help you along the way. And I'm sure there's a lot of folks who are listening in who are at [00:34:00] different paths of the journey of experiencing AI and how to use it.
So before we wrap up, Kimberly, are there any kind of final thoughts for folks on that journey that you wanna leave them with in the middle of kind of that process optimization or transformation within a business,
Kimberly Nerpouni: What I would say w- would be don't wait. Don't wait. Just do. Think about that build, measure, learn loop with
Jeet Mukerji: Yeah
Kimberly Nerpouni: Start small, but don't stop. Start small, and don't stop. Just keep learning, keep going. Even if it doesn't make sense, you'll figure it out, it's like riding a bike. You're not gonna ride a bike by looking at it.
Jeet Mukerji: That is so true. Yeah. And if folks wanted to find out about your chief of staff, how you built it are they okay to reach out to you on LinkedIn, or is there another way to
Kimberly Nerpouni: Yeah, LinkedIn is great or kimberly@pearl.com
Jeet Mukerji: There you go. Okay. Thank you so much, Kimberly, for joining us on the WorkOps podcast. And to everyone listening, we'll catch you on the next one
Kimberly Nerpouni: Thank you