Welcome to elite fall weather in Buffalo! Peak foliage is here, and it’s a long weekend for many of us.
Imagine you’re heading out for a hike. Admire the trees. Tall ones, young ones, some just starting to turn.
Now, picture a forest. Hundreds of trees growing side by side, each one claiming its space.
Know what you can’t see?
Underground, roots are tied into vast fungal networks that move water, nutrients, and signals from one tree to the next. A tree in full sun can feed a seedling stuck in the shade. A tree under stress can send a warning down the line.
They look separate from above ground. Underneath, they’re connected.
(“Alright, let’s not get lost in the woods,” you’re probably saying. Fair point.)
Service delivery, sales, finance, IT: each department is a tree in the forest of your business. Separate trunks, separate branches. What grows under the surface is how the work gets done.
And right now, AI is changing how that work gets done.
These tools add capacity to every person on your team, and open the door to new ways of doing the work we do every day. But for everyone to benefit, that knowledge has to be shared. Someone in finance builds a clever workflow and keeps it to themselves. Someone in sales finds a shortcut that saves a couple hours a week, and service delivery never hears about it. IT rolls out the licenses and calls it a day.
That’s a lot of trees growing in parallel, with nothing connecting them.
So how do you make AI something everyone works on together?
Our latest podcast guest got me thinking: people learn together by doing the work together.
Find champions in different corners of the business to carry the message back to their teams. Create opportunities for people to share what they’re trying. Pilot with both your champions and your skeptics. The examples that come out of that group will beat any vendor demo.
This is where the network underneath starts to grow. Connections form between the tech experts and the people just getting comfortable. Between sales and finance. Between the twenty-year veteran and the person who started in August.
A people benefit, layered on top of an efficiency benefit.
Look past the trees for a minute. Tend to what’s growing underneath. That’s where the forest gets its strength.
Hear How One Leader Made It Work
Want to see what this looks like in practice? In episode 4 of The Beacon podcast, Ashley Engl, Director of Technology Learning and Innovation at Walsh Insurance, walks through how she builds habits, shares success stories, and uses technology to bring teams together.
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What We're Hiring For This Week
Our Technology Talent Managers are always tuned in to the market, creating opportunities for technology professionals and innovative businesses to connect!
Here's a few roles we're recruiting for this week:
Vice President, AI Development: Bring an entrepreneurial mindset to an AI agent platform, taking it from concept to real users and launching new ventures along the way. You’ll own a TypeScript and Python agent runtime, lead its migration to AWS, and work every day alongside an autonomous AI co-founder. Direct hire role, remote but preferred in Buffalo, $120,000-150,000.
Technical QA / BSA: Lead end-to-end testing for consumer lending applications as they modernize from XML to JSON-based APIs. You’ll build out test automation in Postman and Zephyr and be the go-to expert on loan origination workflows, from underwriting through booking. 9+ month hybrid contract in Buffalo, $50-58+/hr.
SQL Server Platform Engineer: Go beyond traditional DBA work to build the automation and self-service products behind an enterprise SQL Server environment. You’ll write infrastructure-as-code in Terraform, Ansible, or PowerShell and support databases on-prem, in Azure, and in AWS. A great fit for someone with 10+ years of hands-on SQL Server experience. 2+ year remote contract, $65-75+/hr.