Keri Tietjen Smith on Brainfood Live | Talent Strategy, AI Hiring Systems & Decision Governance

Keri Tietjen Smith is a future of work advisor, applied psychology practitioner, and founder of Wildfire Group. On Brainfood Live with Hung Lee, she explains how talent strategy fails when disconnected from decision governance and why Machine Intelligence reshapes hiring, pay and workforce design at the system level.

Keri Tietjen Smith, Founder and Principal of Wildfire Group, joined Brainfood Live with Hung Lee to talk about why most companies think they have a hiring problem when they actually have a decision problem.

I was invited because my work focuses on how Machine Intelligence reshapes hiring, compensation, and workforce design at the system level, not just at the tooling or execution layer.

Key perspectives I shared in the conversation:

• Why talent strategy fails when it’s disconnected from decision governance and accountability

• How Machine Intelligence shifts where human judgment is required, not whether humans matter

• The hidden risk of compensation misalignment in automated hiring and performance systems

• Why “hiring faster” is often a signal of upstream strategy failure

• How organizations can reduce risk by designing for decision quality, not volume

This conversation sits at the intersection of talent, technology, and power, and it reflects the work I do with leaders who are trying to operate responsibly in an environment of constraint, automation, and permanent change.

If you’re rethinking how hiring, pay, and decision-making actually work inside modern organizations, this one’s worth your time.