Fortune 500 work with this CEO building a $1billion dollar company with 100 people - Siobhan Savage.

0:00They basically said to older people that we're going to reduce costs and we're going to make an organization more productive. What actually happened was you had a whole pile of people that didn't even log in. You had a whole pile of people that designed their own way of working. And for me, this is one of the biggest failure points. If you imagine that we're all in a rowing boat and if everyone is rowing in a different direction in a large company, stuff doesn't get done. You go backwards.

0:31What would happen if we just told the truth?

0:34Siobhan Savage:Welcome to TruthWorks, where we dig into the nitty-gritty of leadership and work. And what needs to change. I'm Jessica Neal. And I'm Patti McCord. Our journey together started in HR, but trust us, it's evolved into something wild, honest, and well, a bit rebellious. So throw out the handbook. We're here to redefine rules to work for us, not against us. Let's dive into another episode.

1:09Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of TruthWorks. I'm Jessica Neal, your host, and I'm here with a friend of mine who's going to help me co-host today, Jeff Markowitz. Hi, Jeff. How are you today? I'm great. How are you? Good. Everybody will remember Jeff was on the show a few weeks ago. We had a great conversation and he just couldn't get enough. So he's back to hang out with us. Took me a few weeks. Yeah, I know it did. You're a busy man. Yeah. Well, Jeff, he is busy, but he also likes to play golf. And my husband was in a golf tournament all weekend and that meant I didn't see him for days.

1:50Do you go out, do you do the tournaments? I do, but I'm in Park City now, so I'm not golfing. Okay, good. All right, good. But more importantly than Jeff's golf habit or hobby, I don't know what you want to call it. We have a very, very special guest today. This is a woman I met a few years ago and through one of my investor meetings. And when you have all these meetings all the time and you meet all of these founders and all of them are truly great and smart and special, but then you meet ones that, you know, have a spark and that are maybe a little bit different than some of the others. And that is what I felt when I met Siobhan Savage, who is here today.

2:33She is the co-founder of a company called Rejig, and she's going to tell us all about it. But when I met her, the energy that I got from her, the passion that I got from her was just very different than what I was getting from some of the other folks I was meeting with. And we just hit it off and became friends. And I'm excited about what she's doing. I'm excited that she's a female founder because there's not enough of them. I'm excited for Jeff to get to know her because he hasn't met her yet. I'm excited for you all to get to know her too. Welcome to the show. Siobhan, how are you? I'm great.

3:10It's finally sunny in New York, so I've got my t-shirt on. I'm good. I'm good. I'm happy to be here. No, the other day I saw you. Yeah. The other day I saw her in the office and she was literally wrapped up in like a blanket. No, I had to I had to go to Target to get a twenty dollar fluffy fleece because my office was so cold that I had to get something to wrap up because it was freezing. Yeah. I'm happy to see the sun. Yeah. Jessica, you said something. What was it about your first interaction in that energy level that was just different? I mean, you've seen so many people like what was it? It's hard to explain.

3:47It was, it kind of, like I said, it was a spark. Like she had this like way to captivate me very quickly. And sometimes it takes a little bit of time to get captivated. You know what I mean? But she just drew me in and I was glued. I was paying attention and the passion that she feels for what she does oozes out of her. And I think you'll, you'll see that And maybe that's exact. Maybe that's. It's like when a tornado meets a volcano, what happens, Jeff? Right. Right. Right. And so, Shimon, I want you to tell everyone your story. But before we get into the rejig of everything, take us back through how this all happened.

4:34Like, because I know, but I want everybody else to know. Okay, I'll go a little bit of context because my accent is probably confusing everybody on the call. I'm Canadian born, Irish raised, lived in Sydney for 15 years and now I live in New York. So I have like the weirdest accent and it depends who I'm talking to. It depends on how far I'll go. So I've had a pretty traveled like early upbringing. Started my career in workforce strategy. So my brain is really programmed around like strategy, optimization. How do I move work to worker? How do I make a business like high velocity? Like my bonus in my previous life was connected to how well the business was doing in terms of productivity.

5:13And so you can see that kind of like brain part of my head thinks around like, I want to move fast. I want to do high velocity work. I want my business to do really well, but I also want my people to have access to meaningful work because then they stay longer and the flywheel continues. And yeah, I really spent my career obsessing around workforce agility and making sure that I could move work to worker freely. I could never have thought big enough to think that agents would become a form of worker in the context of what it is today. But like that's really where I started my career and probably spent like 15, 20 years doing that all over the world as well.

5:47And some huge multi-billion dollar workforce strategy. So that was my first part of my career. Second part is I've built an AI company, you know, building a work operating system to help large organizations move work to worker in the world of AI. So that's kind of where my expertise sit. I do get this like really great viewpoint that I think a lot of people don't get to see. I think in the world now where they're splitting it into two camps, there's one camps that are obsessed about agents. And there's this other camp that are obsessed with like workforce strategy and optimization and org design.

6:20And I actually believe in order for this AI moment to have the moment that it deserves, you need both lockstep together or an agent's just an agent. So yeah, that's a little bit about my background. I got two little girls, an 11-year-old and an 8-year-old who are pretty feisty. They've become little Sydney beach babies to now New York City girls. So they drink matches and eat sweet green around New York. So yeah, that's a little bit about me. I wonder where they get their spiciness from. When I'm one of 12 children, eight boys. So if you feel the feisty, that's the savage coming out of me. And that's generally because of being raised around eight big fighting boys in my house where you had to like step up to be heard.

7:04So that's probably where the passion comes from. Yeah. Twelve. One of twelve. How are you going to prepare your 11 year old and your eight year old? I mean, it's a long way off, but how are you going to prepare them for what the future looks like in their careers? Yeah. So it's interesting because, I mean, my kids are in a really different situation than probably most kids in their school because their mom probably works 16 hours a day. And I have to find things for my kids to do around me. So my kids help me create content. They take content ideas from Trello. They put them into my custom cloud with my skills and they create content for me.

7:40Like my little ones are like learning how to do like commenting and adding people on LinkedIn. So like from an early age, my kids have been wearing the reject hoodie, right? They have been programmed to like help mom make more money. I think just we met maybe, I think it was one of the conferences and my kids were part of the conference booth, like handing out leaflets and they would only let you take a photo of them if you tagged their mom in on LinkedIn. So they're good. But I think like my little one has dyslexia and she has really struggled, really struggled with learning. and I think the one thing that I talk to her about is like you know in this new world actually the skills that she has are these beautiful human like she's very funny she connects really quickly with people she can make conversations with people in a lift and do really well a lot of those skills are going to be the ones that are going to be really favorable for folks in their career in the future so like really making sure that I'm helping them think how to make sure that they can connect with people build relationships so that's where we talk a lot in my house about you know obviously they can build agents and they're only little people, but how do we make sure that they are building the skill sets that'll make them be able to build their own companies?

8:48You know, sales like marketing, the components of work that will still exist because they're very human centered. I mean, listen, we have all the data in the world that tells you about work. And I don't think we still have the answer about how work will change, like parts of work will change, but it is still yet to be played out like exactly. But I do know that part about the human component of relationship building and that type of skill set is where I'm going to drive them to spend a lot of their time. Well, yeah, I mean, you know, in this new world that none of us have quite figured out yet, the human to human skills become way more important than sort of the administrative skill, the, you know, being able to write an email.

9:31You won't have to write an email. Something else will do it for you, but you still need incredible judgment and you need, You need to be able to relate to people. That's interesting because, Jessica, you know, I have two boys. Both of them are actually in recruiting, one in New York, one in L.A. And, you know, people ask me if I encourage them to do that. And then what I think about, you know, AI affecting recruiting. I have no idea. I mean, I think you always have to have the relationship and the relationships matter and AI cannot take the place of a relationship. Yeah. You know, things to face, conversation to conversation.

10:14But what do you think? Yeah. I mean, my first chopper job was a recruiter. So that was the best training that I could have ever got in my whole career. Like we had to stand and make 60 calls to candidates. Unless you took an interview, you weren't allowed to sit down. 100%. Yeah, I remember those days. So I built these, like, literally, I built the most incredible stuff. We could slam the phone down. I mean, I'm like, yes. I get to do it again. So, Jeff, are they training your kids the way that they trained us? Have things evolved? Because I want to know. So the older ones at Hydric and, you know, they have such a regimented way of training, which I think works.

10:54My younger ones at True. And, you know, it's a more entrepreneurial, newer firm. And I think what he's doing, it's just very different than the way I learned. Yeah. That skill, though, see if you're able to pick up the phone. Yeah, like same as me. It's the ability for your sons to pick up the phone and be able to connect with a human in like five seconds because that's your shot. Like that in itself is like an ultimate skill set that would be transferable. I mean, I've been able to take that skill with me right now. Like I built the business to where it's at because I have the ability to pick up the phone and have a conversation and cut through really quickly.

11:31So I think there's a lot around like those skill sets that won't go. But also I seen this demo not so long ago and the tech folks were pitching for investment and their whole plan was that they've got one product which represents the candidate and one product that represents the and then they go out and like interview each other. So it's like imagine two iPads sitting in a boardroom like interviewing each other. And I was like, on what planet is that going to happen? Like, seriously, if we get to that place in the world where we have got to that, like, that's not a world that I want to be part of.

12:03And I'm certainly not going to be designing for that because that's terrible. Yeah. That would be pretty scary. Yeah. Like, that was a real tech bitch. That was a real thing that I was present for. And I was like, we're going too far here, guys. Like, pull it back a little bit. Pull it back. Well, tell us, Siobhan, what you're seeing out there, because I think that right now, this is AI. Everybody's talking about AI. And it is a big strategy agenda for CEOs, CIOs, CHROs, and figuring out not only how they're going to utilize AI in their organizations to make them maybe more productive or a safe cost, who knows, But no one really knows the impact that it's going to have on the number of jobs, the exact skills and tasks and things.

12:57But you're kind of getting a front seat to not only this agenda, but the concerns that are coming along with it. So what are you seeing? And you work with very, very large companies. Yeah, so we work with probably the most ambitious companies in the world. Think of your most complex. They employ the majority of the world's population. that's the type of orgs that we work with and they're big they're complex they operate in pharmaceutical within fda regulators or they operate in banking or huge retailing like we operate across that whole sphere i love big and complex like that's kind of where my sweet spot sits so when i'm talking about this i'm not talking about a startup that's building you know a five people team i'm talking about like really enterprise work because it's very different and i think the the investors hype a lot about all of this stuff which is not real it's just like start it that can happen in a pod of five people but if you transfer to over 100 000 people it's a very different reality what i've seen i'll tell you first what i see is not working and then i'll tell you what is working so typically what's happened that enterprise is the ceo has come from somewhere a board meeting or some description of like something has caused this external pressure for the ceo to then say we've got to do ai we want to become an ai first company everybody needs to do this they spent probably the first two years of the large language model movement, really focused on risk and allowing it into the company.

14:18So that was really where most enterprises sat. And then probably over the last maybe 12 plus months, it moved into like, okay, like let's start POCs and little pilots. And what a lot of orgs did was they rolled out, you know, big tools like Copilot or OpenAI or like think of your generic horizontal products. And they basically said to all their people that we're going to reduce costs and we're going to make an organization more productive. What actually happened was you had a whole pile of people that didn't even log in. You had a whole pile of people that designed their own way of working. And for me, this is one of the biggest failure points.

14:52If you imagine that we're all in a rowing boat and if everyone is rowing in a different direction in a large company, stuff doesn't get done. You go backwards. Like you literally don't create the velocity that you're intending. So you see a lot of customers, you know, a lot of the press, you see the articles, it's not working, AI is a waste of time. Most of the time, it's actually not the AI is the problem. Most of the time is that they have stood it up like a CRM and did a big change transformation program. They have rolled out a whole pile of co-pilot to all of their people, suddenly assuming that they will do prompt training and know how to pay an invoice in a different way because they did a prompt training course.

15:29So you see this, like, it's like a transformation theater. It's all kind kind of the old way of thinking, old way of doing. And what's essentially happening is that no one has actually thought about the work and how the work runs. And if you scale that with chaos, you're going to create more chaos. So what we're seeing with companies is that they're spending, there's so much money going into this in enterprise now. There's so much money. Think of the big companies and then think about all the verticals that are popping in with like new startups. And a lot of that is kind of a little bit AI touristy for me right now, where you're seeing a lot of money is being spent, but they switch it off.

16:06Spent, switch it off because they're not seeing the ROI. And when you start to spend multi-millions of dollars on agents and you cannot see that it has in any way transformed your organization, how companies right now are reporting that the AI working is through an NPS score, which I just think is like crazy. Like you need to see how work has changed, not like your employees are saying, don't take this tool from me, so I'm going to give you a five out of five. That is basically what has not been working very well. Now, what is working really well was the way that we have been doing it. And I think a lot of my early career was like, if you don't understand work, and if work is invisible, like think about a company, most companies have no idea what people are doing.

16:48They have no idea like, and I'm talking like pay an invoice is a task, but think about the subtask level of all the steps that need to happen when you pay that invoice. No one has that visibility. unless you plug into every single system within an enterprise. And by the way, the customers I work with, they're never going to allow open heart surgery. They're never going to allow you to plug into their emails, to their calendars. You might see in B2C and into B2B smaller consumers that they're allowing like that level. But the top companies from a risk perspective, they're not going to do that. So what you need to do is to one, make work visible, like understand like how work actually runs within your company.

17:25So we created like a, each one has its own industry map where we can tell you basically a map of all of the work and then we plug it into your org. So you're already day one starting with context. And then we're essentially giving like a GPS telling you like, where is the opportunity? Where is the AI able to perform at today based on what your company is allowing you to use? Because there's no point in matching you to stuff that you're never going to be allowed to bring in from cyber. Like if it doesn't have SOC 1, SOC 2, the banks are never going to let it in the door. So you have to like show them the reality of what's possible today.

17:57The other thing that's really tricky for anyone to navigate, the amount of forward selling in the AI world is crazy. So they're selling like this whole, I'm going to pay your invoice orchestrated end to end. That's not possible. Like we're talking little parts of this is getting done, not the full orchestration. So what you have is like the organizations who are then bringing this in are getting really confused about like what's even possible? Like what can I actually do? So that idea of like showing them like here's your work, here's where to go, here's what agent is able to do this. And we can see performance of all agents based on our customers.

18:32We'll show you like the one that performs. And then we're going to re-engineer the workflow to make sure that like we've designed this for AI era. So that's what we're doing with customers. and then proving, like, has this actually changed the velocity of the work? So if the invoice took five hours to pay before, we're bringing it now down to 45 minutes. We've got evidence of that. At a strategic level across the org, because it seems like you're right in the center of mission-critical things for companies, how do you know that you're doing a good job for them? Yeah. I mean, there's a couple of, like, instant impacts that we look at from, like, when we go into the company.

19:11One, no one has any data. So we're already coming in and we promise the customer that we know 80 % of your work without even like touching your systems because we've already spent 40 million dollars building these models, you know, over the years before even like large language models were like a real thing. We had already built out a view of work and then we've like upgraded that over time. So like, that's kind of like we make work visible, which becomes like incredible data for your CFO, for your CIO, for your CHRO. It's kind of like one of my other customers described it like a COVID moment where now like these leaders have to get back around the campfire together to solve a problem because it's not the CIO's responsibility.

19:49It's actually a collective group of leaders that need to become AI first, right? So we're giving you the data to like make good and informed decisions of where to even go. And then the fastest value impact is, you know, We're not an agent, like builder ourselves, we're orchestrator. So like we partner up and are agnostic to all agents. So we will connect you to Copilot if Copilot is the right one, whether it's Salesforce, whether it's Claude, like we're actually, we know the performance of the agents. We know how they perform, how to perform them. We know how to deploy that and how to build it.

20:21And then we measure like the before and after. So like we don't think the unit of value to a customer is agent performance. We believe that the AI workflow is the unit of value. So if we can take out this workflow and reinvent it, and there may be a service now component, there may be a co-pilot moment. There is like several different agents that could sit along one workflow. We're basically telling you that we can take your time from five hours to four. What is really interesting, though, Jeff, in your question, it used to be two years ago, it was all about cutting costs. Everybody was doing AI for cost cutting.

20:54We've seen a really big shift now in probably the last 12 months. Most customers are saying there is a pocket to be clear in every org where there is some pressure. But generally speaking, the CEO narrative is we want to keep costs flat and then we want to make more money. How do we increase our margins, like reduce our cost, but also make more money? So one of the other things that we've spent a lot of time and money building on our side is like, I know I know every task, what it's connected to. So I know which tasks make you money. I know which tasks will reduce risk. I know what tasks are connected to like low joy, low value work so that you're kind of getting this like view of like this is our business strategy.

21:32Here's the opportunity. Here's where I go. And we drive them. Already that is like instant impact. But for us, like we want to make sure that you are reinventing over and over. So it's going to be a forever change. So think of us like an operating system. We call it the work operating system. So we sit as critical infrastructure and we play in between all of those major leaders, whether it's in the IT space, the HR, ops, and they all use our data for redesigning the organization. But it's a live, dynamic plug-in and out of all of your systems and feed system as well. How do you make the case to a CEO that is only interested in cost-cutting still?

22:10So there's one of the things that I think we've done pretty well is, you know, there's cost cutting, sure. But then there's how do we reallocate that cost into more higher value work, like making you more money. Any CEO I sit in front of, and I get to have the greatest access at the moment just because of the way we're thinking, right? And my challenge is always like, but why would we want to make more money? Don't just go after cost. In my business, we focus on amplification of the things that we know make me money. and we also look at areas where we could, you know, reduce cost or there's stuff that people hate doing in our company.

22:42Like, why wouldn't we take that off? And then the employee will stay longer in my company because we've created like a really great like rule for them to play in. All three of those connect to money. But like, we're not like, we're not selling this in a way which is like this fluffy thing. We're selling it based on like, you care about making more money, saving money and reducing risk and keeping your people longer, which also connects back to cost. this is the way that we would push you to do it. And it's working because we're seeing now that we're able to move customers into, I would call it stealth change management is what we're doing.

23:13So I really do not love this whole like theater of transformation where everyone spends millions of dollars stabbing up a program and it's a 12 month program of 40 million costs and then everyone gets judged if things don't work. What we're doing with customers is we go in, we take five workflows a week and we compound. And you constantly keep adding and no one gets freaked out at an employee level. Think about it like an iPhone upgrade. They're getting upgraded to like, here is actually how this invoice is paid. It's very subtle. It's very ambient to the employee. It kind of creates this like different experience where, you know, it's not as threatening.

23:50But also like over time, if you can see like five workflows that are really high value, over time, you keep adding more and more in one department. Imagine two departments. Imagine your full org. You start to see that our customers like, why are we not doing this everywhere? And like, we get this like really rapid, like, why is this not scaled across the whole org? And you're starting, one final thing I'll say, you're starting to see a team being built around this capability, which doesn't exist typically. It's not IT, it's not HR, it's this like workforce innovation, work architect thing in the in-between, which is like a blend of being an architect, but also a builder.

24:24And when we're talking to customers, we're saying like, you know, the architect designs the house, but the builder will bring it to life. And you need both in your world with work being the house, right? So it's like, how do we connect those two things in? And then when you're, you know, re-architecting the work and tasks are getting completed, maybe by an agent, what are you helping the organizations understand from an upskilling their employees perspective? So whenever companies roll out prompt training to all their employees and they expect that the employee suddenly knows how to pay the invoice in a different way, it's madness.

24:58Like, how do you think that that employee will translate that into this is not how you pay the invoice? It just doesn't make any sense. Yeah. And it's like so silly. But when you say it out loud to a customer, they're like, oh, we've just spent all this time picking use cases and doing prompt training. And I'm like, what did you prompt train on? Like a chat of like copilot? Like that's just like that is no one like brains can't consume that. So that is like a thing that I get really annoyed about with customers. But what you typically see, and I'll give you an example using the invoice example.