Stacey Richey is Global Vice President of People at Smartcat, an AI-native technology company. With over 20 years leading people operations in high-growth technology companies and an early career in private equity consulting spanning firms from $5M to $5B, Stacey built the "intelligence fabric layer" — a system that records and extracts signals from every meeting, call, Slack message, and email to identify high-leverage workflows for AI and to create one single source of truth across the organization.

Most companies treat AI as a productivity tool, which produces marginal efficiency but misses the structural redesign that compounds. Stacey argues that for a 100–1,500 person scaleup, institutional knowledge trapped in individual heads gets lost every time someone leaves. Her fix is to redesign work around "jobs to be done and missions to be handled" and to make the People team the owner of that transformation.

• HR excluded from AI strategy: Daria cites research that roughly 95% of CEOs do not see HR as a strategic partner in AI transformation. Stacey counters that AI transformation is a business transformation that becomes a people transformation, placing the head of People at the center.
• Institutional knowledge loss at scale: At Smartcat, expertise was scattered across Slack, meetings, documents, and emails, and lost whenever an employee left. Stacey's intelligence fabric layer captures this knowledge so it stays inside the organization.
• Measuring human-plus-AI performance: Stacey warns against measuring AI only by hours saved. Smartcat instead tracks ARR per full-time employee to confirm AI raises output per person while freeing time for higher-value work.

1. Ask the 10–100x question with your executive team: Smartcat's leadership asked how to get 10 to 100 times results using the same resources, then mapped every gain to three levers — people, processes, and systems. Run this exercise cross-functionally to find where AI actually compounds.
2. Record and mine your communications for high-leverage workflows: Build an intelligence fabric layer by capturing meetings, calls, Slack, and email, then extract signals to identify which workflows deliver the biggest ROI when automated. Start with one bottleneck workflow, such as sales research and deck creation.
3. Reframe AI as coworkers, not tools: Smartcat never pairs "AI" with "tooling," using "AI coworkers" and "AI teammates" instead. Adopt this language to reduce adoption resistance and shift leaders from having all the answers to asking better questions.

• Why should HR lead AI transformation instead of IT? Stacey Richey argues AI changes how work gets done, how decisions are made, and what skills people need — all areas where the People team already has deep expertise. Since every business transformation becomes a people transformation, the head of People is positioned to lead it.
• How do you measure ROI on AI adoption in a scaleup? Smartcat uses ARR per full-time employee, a capital efficiency metric CFOs already track, as its North Star. Stacey pairs this quantitative measure with a qualitative check on how much higher-value work employees now do instead of busy work.
• How should the People function evolve over the next few years? Stacey describes four shifts: process owner to operating model architect, knowledge manager to intelligence designer, workforce planning to capability planning (mixing people, agents, and automation), and change management to continuous adaptation.

Links & Resources Mentioned:

• Connect with Stacey Richey on LinkedIn
• Smartcat website: smartcat.com