I am four weeks into a new job where I actually boomeranged back to the company I was at 12+ years ago. This is my first time onboarding to a new company in the age of AI since I hadn’t onboarded somewhere since 2022.
I decided to boomerang back to Seer Interactive for two reasons. First, for its growth and learning culture. It aligns deeply with who I am to my core. And also given the time we’re in with search and broader AI technology, I wanted to prioritize learning over anything else. I knew I’d get it here.
Second is I wanted variety. What does that mean? To me, it means the variety of what I see (i.e. challenges, problems, opportunities), who I work with, and the pace in which we’re moving. After 11+ years driving organic search strategy in-house, I knew that beat so well it felt like it wouldn’t be much variety.
It’s been great so far for a lot of reasons but one I want to share today is because of AI.
Onboarding to a new company that has proper AI infrastructure in place (i.e. Seer) has been amazing. The point I am making is AI clearly drives ROI for employee onboarding. Assuming the company has the infrastructure in place.
Within the first four weeks, here’s a few AI things that have helped me ramp quickly:
- Daily Briefings: my daily briefing agent helps synthesize context, priorities, and what matters across my portfolio.
- Client Pulse: Getting up to speed on client sentiment, nuances, historical goals, and current standing quickly versus sifting through old threads and having tons of internal meetings.
- Quick sounding board for acronym checks, team structure and basic questions.
All the above preserves internal team members time, lets me have more strategy conversations with people, and allows me to add value faster.
So a faster ramp within a company that’s made the right AI investments, doesn’t just benefit the business; it accelerates an employee’s ability to lean into growth, learning, and impact on day one.
How to measure this for anyone who needs to see the numbers?
- Time to First Value: think of something like date of first shipped deliverable, test launch, test read. Things that help drive actual impact. Metric: Date of First Shipped Deliverable – Start Date
- Time to Full Utilization / Standard Output: Days until the hire reaches the target output expected of a tenured peer in that role. Metric: Date Target Output Sustained for 30 Days – Start Date
- Time and Cost of Existing Employees Training New Hires: When tenured staff train a new employee, the true cost consists of direct time plus opportunity cost (billable or strategic work not completed).
This is a clear AI ROI case to me.