Making work more human with AI

As AI rapidly reshapes the workforce, it also presents a unique opportunity to elevate the human experience at work, allowing us to focus on what truly matters.

This past Thursday, I joined over 400 HR leaders in Austin, Texas, for Bennie’s annual HR Advisory meeting. It was a full day of connection, community, and yes, a whole lot of conversation about AI.

No surprise, AI is rapidly reshaping the workforce. Every single function, from marketing to engineering, finance to people operations, will be influenced by it, if it hasn’t been already. At Smartcat, AI is an important part of everything we do, from our platform to the way we operate internally. We’re proud to be an AI-native company, and we’re already putting the transformative power of AI to work: 

• We’re coding faster with Cursor

• We accelerate business development with Synthflow

• We’ve streamlined expense management through Brex

• We craft career ladders with Gemini, and we structure hiring workflows implemented through Greenhouse

Over lunch, I hosted a roundtable on AI in HR. Our group spanned every stage of AI adoption, from defining basic concepts to training AI agents or deploying bots of their own. But what stood out most wasn’t the tech itself; it was the impact AI is having on the human experience at work.

HR lives at the ever-complex intersection of empathy and scale. People teams are constantly balancing employee needs with business outcomes. It’s undeniable that AI will affect both: employees fear displacement. Executives and investors anticipate sky-high productivity. 

AI can handle volume, complexity, and pattern recognition better than any human. But it doesn’t see nuance. It doesn’t care whether your teammate is struggling or your values are being honored. It can’t lead with integrity or pause for empathy in a hard conversation. It doesn’t recognize burnout, can’t read the room, or trust. Most importantly, it cannot feel. 

So while AI will automate many of our tasks, it also pushes us to confront a beautiful, necessary question: 

“What does it mean to be human at work today?”

And the answer might just be... AI enables us to be more human than ever before.

Our roundtable discussion centered on this idea: How can we use AI to enhance the human experience at work? Three key themes emerged:

• Productivity with purpose: We’ll complete tasks faster and with fewer errors, freeing up time for more meaningful work. Offloading manual tasks to agents, for example, means gaining back time for more human work, including coaching, collaboration, and problem-solving.
  

• Deeper alignment with the business: With AI, we can design better career growth paths, personalize coaching, and adapt growth plans. This way, we create better alignment between employee potential and business needs, ensuring employees not only perform but thrive.
  

• Elevated effectiveness: We’ll leverage AI coaching to help sales reps ramp faster or enable managers to practice hard conversations with real-time feedback. That’s not science fiction, it’s already happening. (And we’re living proof at Smartcat: we’re building agentic AI to help train our sales teams as one of our key internal use cases!)

Caroline Balter, Claribel Lizardo-Gonzalez and Stacey Richey after the AI in HR roundtable.

At Smartcat, we believe the future isn’t about choosing between AI and people, but rather, it’s about enabling humans and AI to collaborate in meaningful ways. As an AI-native company, here’s how we’re already making that human-AI future a reality:

We’re bringing this vision to life through the powerful features we’re developing for our platform, designed to empower a collaborative, human-AI approach.

Intelligent agents automate repetitive tasks across the content lifecycle, from translation and onboarding to coaching and compliance, freeing humans to focus on what matters most, from creative thinking to leadership.

Our agents aren’t just “copilots,” they’re team members.

• They support HR teams with structured onboarding flows

• They help L&D teams personalize and translate e-learning

• They guide managers through performance conversations with just-in-time training suggestions

These intelligent agents are informed by the Skill Graph, a dynamic learning layer that captures your organization’s institutional knowledge, including tone, preferences, workflows, and feedback, and then teaches it to every agent you deploy.

This means the agents learn and improve over time, becoming more effective and context-aware the more they’re used. The result is a system that gets smarter with your people, not instead of them.

What does an AI-forward future look like for our own teams? At Smartcat, we’re actively applying AI’s transformative power to reshape our daily operations and enhance the human experience of work from within.

Working at an AI-native company means constantly asking: How can we use AI to do this faster and better? It pushes us to rethink the way we work, to seek out new and creative approaches, and to shift our focus toward tasks that require uniquely human strengths like creativity, critical thinking, empathy, and compassion.

This mindset impacts every part of our organization, and we’ve seen significant shifts across every department after fully embracing it.

Leading the People team at Smartcat, it’s been exciting and incredibly rewarding to see firsthand how the adoption of this approach has transformed the way my team operates. Our meetings have evolved to include strategic conversations focused on identifying the next high-impact areas to apply AI. Our instinct has become, “How can we automate or use AI for that?” 

As a result, we’ve been able to automate multiple routine administrative tasks, freeing up time and focus for more impactful work. We launched company-wide Career Ladders in weeks instead of months. And we completed Smartcat’s first-ever company-wide Talent Review on time, with no delays. None of this would’ve been possible without the strategic use of AI.

AI is changing the nature of work, and it’s elevating the very experience of being an employee. It invites us to be our full selves, fostering deeper human qualities beyond just increasing speed.

As Rasmus Hougaard and Jacqueline Carter have said, AI makes us more human by requiring us to lead with awareness, wisdom, and compassion.

The future of work isn’t less human. It’s more human.

And I, for one, am energized by what we’re building—not just at Smartcat, but across the ecosystem—to make that future real.