The AI Revolution Starts Outside of Engineering - Eynat Guez - Ahead of the Herd - Episode #5
#5

The AI Revolution Starts Outside of Engineering - Eynat Guez - Ahead of the Herd - Episode #5

Yair Weinberger sits down with Eynat Guez, co-founder and CEO of Papaya Global, the platform that helps companies pay and manage workers in more than 180 countries. Eynat has spent years inside the messiest corners of global payroll and compliance, where Fortune 500 teams still run on dozens of spreadsheets, and where AI is finally making the economics of solving nuanced problems work. In this conversation, she explains why Papaya is trying to bypass its own system, how a “not even a product” knowledge base became the fastest adopted tool she has ever seen, and what it took to push a whole company toward 3x productivity. She also takes on the hard questions: which jobs disappear, what to tell your kids to study, and why her biggest AI fear is a very human one..
 
Takeaways:
  • Remove the task, don’t shave it. Taking 20% off someone’s plate changes nothing, so Eynat measures AI wins by tasks eliminated entirely and hours saved. Her non-engineering teams are chasing a 3x productivity target and were at about two-point-something heading into Q4.
  • “Not even a product” can be the win. Engineering pushed back on an agentic knowledge base built from Papaya’s expertise and verified governmental data. Clients adopted it faster than anything Eynat has seen, and many of them have no AI access through their own organizations.
  • Kill your own software. Eynat believes the future is not getting people to log into your platform but meeting them in Slack, email, or WhatsApp. Papaya’s next challenge is consuming data wherever it lives, even a handwritten note, and going straight to the outcome.
  • Transformation starts with a blunt mandate. Eynat’s playbook: a tough CEO statement, a skills map of every employee, a champion in every department, monthly show and tell, and a cap on token spend so nobody burns $10,000 overnight with good intentions.
  • Some jobs go, but builders rise. Data entry roles, in her view, should not exist, much like the typewriter. But she sees HR and finance teams building what they never had resources for, and she wants her kids to be self-learners.


Quote of the Show:
  • ““If I’m just taking 20% of something off your table, from your perspective, nothing has really changed.” - Eynat Guez

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