Day 1 — The Excited Sponsor

You open your laptop at 8:30am from your home office in Mountain View. Your Google Chat shows 6 unread messages — three from Nina Patel with onboarding links, one from Anika Desai's EA confirming a 10am video call, one from someone named Raj Mehta at Eightfold AI introducing himself, and one from Marcus Chen: 'Heard you're running the AI recruiting PoC. We should talk before anyone touches the Google Hire API. Ping me when you're settled.'

You spend 30 minutes reviewing Nina's preliminary scope document and the vendor selection summary. The scope is clear but the evaluation criteria are undefined — Nina's document explicitly flags this as an open question for you. The vendor selection was lightweight: Anika's team picked Eightfold AI after a conference demo and three vendor reviews. Not sloppy, but not the rigorous procurement process you'd see for a $5M commitment. That's the point of the PoC — validate before committing.

At 10am, you join the Google Meet with Anika Desai. She's in her office at the Googleplex, a whiteboard behind her covered in circles and arrows labeled 'AI Recruiting Vision — 2026.' She's smiling before you even say hello. 'Welcome! I've been waiting weeks for a dedicated PM on this. Let me tell you why I'm so excited about this project.' She spends the next 10 minutes describing her vision: AI screening across all hiring teams globally, real-time candidate matching, predictive time-to-fill modeling, and eventually an AI-assisted interview scheduling system. The scope she describes is roughly 10x the PoC budget.

'But first,' she says, pausing, 'we need the PoC to work. That's your job. Prove it works with Engineering and Sales, and I'll get us the $5M for the full build. The SVP is watching — she approved the budget but she's skeptical about AI in hiring after the Amazon fiasco. We need results that are bulletproof — especially on bias. Jordan Hayes will be all over us on that, and honestly, they should be. I want a system that's not just efficient but fairer than what we have today.' She leans forward. 'What do you need from me?'