How to Prepare for the AI Workforce Revolution

Full video transcript

Hey, what’s going on guys? Darby here, Gen AI University, joined today by the founder of Howdy.com, Jacqueline Samira, who is going to share a bit about the vision behind Howdy and training an AI-enabled global workforce. Howdy is one of the platinum sponsors of the Scale with AI Summit and truly one of our partners in making this event possible — free for you to attend and learn how you can grow your business with AI. Jacqueline’s going to share a little bit about her vision and what got her to start Howdy in the first place.

Jacqueline, so glad to have you here, welcome. Thank you so much, Darby, super excited to be here, thanks for having me and thanks for allowing us to sponsor. Very excited — absolutely. We’ve been working with Howdy for contacts for everyone: I’ve hired through Howdy our full-time team member Franco, who works hand in hand with building out the markets app you guys are going to see in action at the Summit, and he’s a hire through Howdy and instrumental in the growth of our community this year. When I reached out to Jacqueline and her team about the possibility to partner on the Summit I saw so much alignment, especially with the vision of where you guys are heading. So I’d love if you could share a little bit about your background, what got you into Howdy and starting it in the first place, and now that you’ve seen the shift in AI, where is that affecting how you guys operate now and where do you see things going in the future?

Absolutely. So I started Howdy in 2018. I’m based in Austin, Texas, and one of the things I started to notice was more and more companies and more and more capital coming to the city, but we weren’t getting a bigger and bigger crop of experienced technical talent — especially in 2018. So what ended up happening is all of the companies started to compete for the same talent pool, but the companies got bigger while the talent pool didn’t. If you weren’t a Fang company and weren’t offering half-a-million-dollar compensation packages, it was really hard to hire senior technical talent. I thought that was stupid — there are smart people all over the world who would be ecstatic for this opportunity. Why doesn’t it happen? Why can’t we hire people outside the walls of our city? It’s because logistically it can be hard and scary, with all these different issues. So I wanted to make it really easy for companies who were hiring to hire people outside their city, and that’s what started with Howdy. As things evolved and AI came onto the scene, our business grew so much, and we’re starting to see a lot of new trends in product and software development and global workforces. Super excited to share what we’re observing and what we’re doing.

That’s awesome that you’ve seen the growth firsthand — the need for expanding and tapping into this global workforce, and I think other people are starting to pick up on this, with you guys obviously leading the charge. What are some signals you’re seeing right now for why companies should focus on hiring talent outside of maybe just the US, and why would they work with somebody like Howdy versus the norm? There’s a lot of stipulation — maybe they’re not as talented, maybe if English isn’t their first language they won’t understand the company’s culture. Is there anything you can share about the landscape you’re operating in and how you plan to address these concerns as you grow and scale this AI-trained workforce?

Historically, when people are looking for jobs they put a job req in their location or the greater area they’re in, go through all the applications, and realize there’s no one who’s exactly what they’re looking for — so they settle, or change the role, or shuffle another person into it. There’s a lot of compromising that happens. When you open the applications to a global workforce, you can literally find the exact person you’re looking for. For our own internal team, when we had an open job req, we wanted to “dog food” our own product — every time a role opened, even ones we assumed had to be in-office in Austin, we tried opening it up globally instead. If you look at our team now, we have over 85 people, 95% of them based in South America. I don’t know if it’s a bigger pool to source from or greater cultural alignment, but it gives me, as a founder conscientious about spending, the ability to not settle for the type of person I’m looking for — and I love that I can extend that to other folks too.

The perspective of never wanting to settle is going to resonate not just with me but with other entrepreneurs, founders, people pushing the limits in their industry and always innovating. You don’t want to settle, because it’s hard to find something that costs more in time, energy, and resources than a bad hire — that can hurt a lot inside a business. If you settle, you’re probably setting yourself up to not quite hit the bullseye. I was shocked by how qualified the first employee we hired through you guys was, and how quick it was — within the first 48 hours. You guys have a great system for this, but what I’ve been most impressed with, from what we talked about before hitting record, is how the role of AI-enabled people is changing — not just hiring someone to manage day to day, but everyone effectively tapping into their role and being their own CEO, their own CTO, of that role. Can you talk more about that?

Yeah, so my whole leadership team got together this past week setting our strategic initiatives for 2025, and one of them is to make our entire workforce AI-enabled. When you zoom out and think about what’s going on in the world of AI, there are two types of people: those, likely part of this Summit, who are excited and inspired about all the good that will come from AI, and those who are scared it will take their jobs or their companies — and plenty of people vacillate between both depending on the day. But the feeling about AI is extreme no matter where you stand, and a lot of my internal team felt it was outside their control, an unknown element. So we did a deep dive into what this actually means for our future, and I’m here to say there’s nothing new here. Looking back through the history of humanity, every major invention caused fear and then turned out better for humanity. The printing press didn’t kill an industry — it created a trillion-dollar one, and today literally anyone can be a book publisher or an author. ATMs, when they arrived 60 years ago, had everyone predicting bank teller jobs would be obsolete, but those folks got to be more strategic and there are more branches than ever. Same with computers in the ’60s — people thought those devices would replace data and administrative positions, which just isn’t the case. My favorite example: when Microsoft Excel was invented, it was assumed all accountants and bookkeepers would be eliminated, but this year there’s a massive accounting shortage. So what I shared with my team is that AI is not going to eliminate software development or jobs — sure, it can take over a lot of the coding, but that just means it’s different. More AI means more software produced, which means more output by humans, and thus more jobs, because as humans we can’t help ourselves — we’re creators, innovators, dreamers, and we’ll never stop building or creating. The future is exciting when you think about it that way. If you think about a company like Amazon, they say it’s a company of a hundred CEOs. If you lean into educating yourself on AI tools, that lets you be a mini CEO or mini CTO, or hire people who are mini CEOs and CTOs. So we’re leaning into this educational element, building a huge database of tools and what they can help with, so people can be the little CEOs or CTOs of their own job — and that’s one of the things I’m excited to share at the Summit: how we’re training our team to think like that, what tools we use, and where you guys can go to get that information for yourselves.

That’s great, and it’s so important — with how much noise there is out there, it seems like the only constant is that things are going to keep changing and get faster, and a lot of what we hear is how overwhelming that can be. Having a place to go for these resources is important, but so is being able to adapt with them, whether you’re your own CEO with a small team or it’s just you. Like you said, some people are 100% for it, some are 100% against it, and a lot of people are in the middle. I think right now we’re in a really interesting moment where those taking advantage of these tools and leaning into upskilling are going to see so much more opportunity and so much more being created. A mentor once told me that for every problem you solve, you create ten more — every solution comes with ten problems, and every time you solve one of those you get ten more. Maybe we can solve these solutions faster with AI, but there will always be new things we as humans want to keep innovating on, and that’s a great intersection — which is really why we put the Summit together. The theme of the Summit is where AI innovation meets implementation.

I’m looking forward to your keynote and all the other presenters at the Summit, and really where the rubber meets the road today — how you, as a founder, small business owner, or CEO, can look at these tools to level up your entire organization, and maybe there’s an entire global workforce out there right now that can help you scale your business faster without sacrificing on talent or settling for anything. For those joining us at the Summit, Jacqueline, is there one takeaway you’re excited to deliver?

Absolutely — let me preface my takeaway by saying this: we surveyed thousands and thousands of engineers, product managers, and CEOs, and even among people building product, only 60% of them have even started thinking about implementing or using AI. So the fact that you’re part of the Summit means you’re already ahead of 40% of the general population when it comes to using AI, because it can be very overwhelming. The main takeaway from my keynote is really relieving that stress and anxiety of feeling like you need to know everything, and giving you clear, actionable tools for how you too can be AI-enabled in your day-to-day life.

Love it. For those of you who want to join this event and get access to the additional replays we’re producing and delivering after all the live sessions, plus all the resources and bonus material included with the event, just head over to scalewithaisummit.com — that link should be somewhere around this video, but that’s scalewithaisummit.com. Go ahead and register, join the community, and get in on the action and get ahead of the game. Jacqueline, I’m looking forward to your session at the Summit, and we’ll see everyone on the other side.