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Imran Syed joined the fireside chat Rethinking the Human Enterprise: Agentic People Operations, Architecting the AI-Native Workforce, presented by Founders Foundry and hosted at Solana SF as part of Tech Week by a16z.
The panel
- Imran Syed, Founder, Hatch
- Anton Hantel, Co-Founder, Sona8 (YC F26), formerly BCG
- Dr Josh Elmore, organizational scientist, founder of Court Street Consulting and host of the Land and Lead podcast
The session followed an executive roundtable on the future of the people tech stack, hosted at Finix. Sponsored by All Good HR, with community partners Vibe Space, Raisi, flowstate, Opulentia.AI and The AI Collective.
The question on the table
What does people operations become when a meaningful share of the work is done by agents?
Most of the industry answers that at the tooling layer: which agent, in which workflow, replacing which task. The panel pushed at the layer underneath. If an enterprise now runs on two workforces, one on the payroll and one on the cloud bill, then the org chart, the job description and the performance review are all describing something that no longer matches reality.
That is not a tooling problem. It is a problem of what you count as work, who gets credit for it, and whether you can prove any of it happened.
What Hatch brought to it
The argument we make everywhere, which lands differently in a room of AI founders than it does in a room of HR buyers.
Agentic operations do not fail because the agents are bad. They fail because nobody can say what the combined system produced, so nobody can tell a working deployment from an expensive one. Build the measurement layer first and the rest of the architecture becomes a series of answerable questions. Skip it and you are running a roster you cannot see.
Thanks to Rami A and Founders Foundry for putting it together, and to Solana SF for the room.
