Theresa Cortese runs total rewards at Nirvana Insurance, with twenty plus years across retail, semiconductors, ed tech and HR tech. Her business operations team owns the metrics and can't see pay data, so every quarter two spreadsheets got checked against each other by five senior people. Too expensive to keep doing by hand, not big enough for an enterprise platform to make sense.
Her CEO had told the company that experimenting with AI wasn't optional and that everyone should build something that week. So she did. The system she shipped runs Google sign in at the database query level, compares any two calculation runs, generates payout letters explaining how each number was reached, and passed Q1 actuals for every employee. She had never opened Terminal on her Mac.
The frame she uses is the useful part. She treats it as an entry level headcount she finally got approved. She teaches it, checks it, and coaches it forward when it gets something wrong. She is clear that it cost her time before it saved any, and that her own knowledge of all eleven variable comp plans is what makes any of it safe.
00:00 Who Theresa is 00:55 How far she trusts the output 01:19 The first thing she built 02:39 Fifteen years of merit spreadsheets 03:10 Where the ideas come from 04:25 No mentor, a team that experiments together 05:10 Shipping V1 to IT 06:35 Version thinking and imposter syndrome 09:00 Whether Claude Code is actually hard 11:03 They process, they do not think 13:04 Does AI save time or create more work 15:34 Why startups underinvest in total rewards 21:14 The story behind the tool 24:24 Screen share walkthrough 30:03 Advice to her earlier self 31:40 What comp teams look like in a year
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