Frances Hughes is co-founder and CEO of Starch. She leads the company: which desks it works with, which workflows get built first, and what a firm should expect once the manual version is gone.
She comes to this from inside the desks, not from the outside looking in. She has done their recurring work by hand, and saw the same picture at firm after firm: capable people spending their weeks on work a machine should carry, and tools that demanded months of customization only to stall one customization short of production. Nobody had to explain the problem to her; she had lived it.
From there she moved to the other side of the problem, leading engineering and product at startups and building an AI company of her own. That is both halves in one seat: a desk she has actually worked, and the systems she knows how to build.
Her argument about the work is that the model is not what decides whether automation succeeds; the process is. Automation amplifies whatever process it is given, which is why Starch builds from how each desk already works. That is the argument behind the RFP work and the due diligence.
Outside the company she has directed the internship program at Ada's Cafe in Somerville since 2012, and coached basketball at the Boys and Girls Club there.
What Frances Hughes writes about. How a desk actually runs, what firms measure, and what is left for a person when the manual work goes.