Guest: Kanika Choudhary, Chief of Staff, People IX

Host: Scott Amenta, Founder, Chief of Staff Network

Episode Overview

Most companies are buying AI tools before they understand how their own company actually works, and Chiefs of Staff are getting handed the mess to fix. Kanika Choudhary argues that Chiefs of Staff are becoming the de facto owners of AI transformation by default, not by design, and the ones who succeed start with a map, not a purchase order. The companies that win do the unglamorous foundation work first.

About Kanika Choudhary

Kanika started her career in finance at PwC, burned out, pivoted to marketing, and relocated to Germany. She spent eight years as a first employee at early-stage startups before joining the BREAK Fellowship, a program that selects 200 women from 4,000 applicants to explore entrepreneurship in Spain. She came out of that experience and joined People IX, a conversation intelligence company that uses AI to interview entire organizations, cross-reference what employees say, and surface what's actually happening inside companies, as opposed to what leadership assumes is happening.

Key Takeaways

- Map before you buy. You cannot automate what you cannot see. Process documentation is not glamorous, but it is the only thing that makes any AI implementation stick.

- The "safest" first project is often the lowest-leverage one. Chiefs of Staff who default to low-risk AI projects to avoid failure end up losing credibility faster than if they had swung bigger and missed.

- Build an MVP before asking for permission. Scope the project, show leadership a bare-bones prototype, then execute. Approval is easier to get when the answer to "what will this look like?" is not a deck.

- Leadership almost never correctly understands how their company works. People IX has not once confirmed a leadership team's hypothesis after interviewing the full organization. The urgency to deploy AI is real; the self-awareness to do it well is rare.

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