Kate Stewart reveals the trade secrets on building AI for HR tasks

SummaryOn this episode of the WorkOps Podcast, host Jeet Mukergi talks with Kate Stewart, Staff People Operations, AI and Automations Lead at Horizon3.ai, about what really happens when you put an AI agent into a live people-operations workflow. Kate shares the story of the offer-validation agent she built in Slack to check every job offer against approved comp bands and job architecture, how a Slack update broke it after two months, and the two weeks she spent secretly becoming the agent herself to keep the quality bar from slipping. Along the way she unpacks why a hallucinating agent is more dangerous than a silent one, why automation raises the bar instead of lowering it, and how to ship, break, and maintain automations without burning out. It's a candid, practical listen for anyone in people ops, HR tech, or operations moving from curiosity about AI to actually running it in production.Chapters00:00 From the retail floor to people ops06:30 Staying curious without a second job07:45 The broken process behind every offer09:45 Building the offer validator in slack11:45 Two months in, the agent breaks12:45 Becoming the human agent13:45 Why a hallucinating agent is a liability14:55 Automation raises the bar15:45 From perfectionism to shipping V128:45 Build it, let it break, protect the timeTakeaways-When an automation breaks, you don't fall back to your old baseline, you fall below it, because automation raises the bar for what your team considers acceptable-A silent agent is confusing, but a hallucinating agent is a liability, a confident wrong answer is far more dangerous than no answer at all-Job architecture is not a data hygiene problem, it is an IT provisioning problem, the wrong title in the HRIS means the wrong system access on day one-Build one agent to do one job at the right moment, rather than spreading the same check across three people and three separate touchpoints-Ship V1, let it break, and protect the time to maintain it, the build teaches you the problem and the break teaches you what you actually builtConnect with the GuestLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kate-stewart00/ Website: https://www.horizon3.aiSponsorThis episode is brought to you by Kinfolk, the AI service desk built for HR.See more at kinfolkhq.com