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G’day from Australia!
That’s right, I’m home sweet home.
Although I’m writing this from a hotel room in Rome (just before jumping on the loooong flight back home), you’ll be reading this as I’m no doubt wrangling the jet-lag, before returning to work next week.
TBH I’m a little daunted by my first week back. Something I’m bad at is letting pre-holiday Matt put way to much on the plate for post-holiday Matt. Apart from it being weird to talk about myself in third person, it means I have lots to do in my first week back.
But it’s ok. Because while I’ve loved travelling, something I love about taking a gargantuan 5-week break, is how much it hypes me for getting back to work.
Nothing tells you whether you love what you do more than your attitude towards work at the end of holidays (post-holiday blues is a thing, people!).
So two things from me:
Take your leave!
Be in a job you love!
Enjoy this week’s edition ✌️
IN PARTNERSHIP WITH HIBOB
HR and Finance alignment isn’t just a ‘nice-to-have’.
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See how to:
Link engagement, performance, and EVP to productivity, retention, trust and cost
Replace intuition with measurable outcomes
Turn people investments into strategic wins
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Know a startup Head of People looking for answers 🙋 why not forward this to them for some instant karma? ✨
TODAY’S INTERVIEW
AI’s Impact on the People Function
with Chief People Office of Vidyard, Sarika Lamont
Sarika Lamont is the Chief People Officer at Vidyard, a video‑enabled go‑to‑market platform, where she also leads AI and automation enablement across functions.
Sarika has stewarded AI adoption not as a side project, but as a central cross‑functional mandate, partnering with IT, security, engineering and leadership to embed generative and agentic intelligence into core workflows. Her background spans consulting, operations and growth-stage scale-ups, giving her a unique fluency across business, tech and people.
In this conversation, Sarika surfaces how AI is reshaping the levers of talent work: cutting administrative burden, reimagining onboarding, and demanding new modes of critical thinking. She pushes beyond tool adoption to mindset, culture and flow-of-work design.
What you’ll learn in this episode:
How to position AI adoption squarely inside the People remit
Where low‑risk experiments unlock disproportionate gains
Why AI actually demands more critical thinking
How to reduce HR admin friction as you boost accuracy
The architectural role of knowledge and agentic workflows
What to ask your IT/security partners early
Cultural levers to build trust as you roll out AI
My Key Takeaways:
AI is the People team’s work, not “IT’s problem”.
Sarika argues AI adoption belongs in the People function, not something to be delegated as a technology initiative, but a People one. Embedding it under HR gives it legitimacy as a matter of culture, change management and adoption. She told her CEO early that AI enablement should be part of her scope as a way to help people understand “how, why and when” to use it, rather than leaving it to disparate functional siloes (e.g. engineering).
Start small, prove value, then scale aggressively.
Her advice is to look for “low‑hanging fruit” first: automated employment verification letters, nudges and checklists, routine workflows that don’t risk business outcomes. These act as lab experiments. Once those prove ROI, you gain trust to build more complex agentic workflows that cross systems.
Question the AI, and don’t take it at face value.
Sarika warns of over reliance on generative AI: “AI is really good at making you believe that they’re right about everything, and they’re not always right”. She insists prompts must be interrogated, outputs validated, and context must be preserved. The transformation lies in combining AI with human judgment, not replacing it.
Subtract drudgery to make space for strategic thinking.
One of the most immediate and visible benefits has been reducing repetitive, admin‑heavy tasks. By automating scheduling, documentation, onboarding nudges and chat workflows (e.g. Slack bots that answer policy questions), her team frees up bandwidth to focus on high‑leverage, strategic work.
Agentic architecture is the new frontier.
Beyond classic automation, Sarika is now designing workflows where the AI agent can actively connect systems: e.g. reading a travel policy, walking a user through next steps, and writing into the HRIS. The vision is not a query interface, but a proactive system embedded within workstreams that anticipates what the user needs and acts.
The cross‑functional backbone matters.
Her most important ally has been IT and security. Early integration with those teams ensures governance, data integrity, privacy, and technical scalability. AI in the People function can’t live in a vacuum. These dependencies must be considered from day one.
Culture, not tech, is the biggest shift.
Sarika views AI adoption as fundamentally a mindset and cultural challenge. Because people come with fears about displacement, hallucination or misuse, the role of change management, communication and training cannot be underestimated. The “soft lift” of building trust is as hard (if not harder) than the technical lift.
Where to find Sarika:
If you enjoyed this post or know someone who may find it useful, please share it with them and encourage them to subscribe.
That’s all for from me this week.
Sure, this is technically the end of the newsletter, but we don’t have to end here! I’d love this to be a two-way chat, so let me know what you found helpful, any successes you’re seeing, or any questions you have about startup compensation.
Until next week,
When you’re ready, here’s three ways I can help you:
1. Tools & resources
Resources and tools that give you what you need to build your own startup compensation practices.
2. Comp consulting
I run FNDN, a global comp consultancy that builds compensation practices that are clear, fair and competitive for startups.
3. Startup People Summit
I run the Startup People Summit, a one day annual event focused on creating the playbook for startup people practices. Grab recordings from past events, or subscribe to the newsletter to join the next event.
