At Guru, we've always believed in saying the quiet parts out loud. Anonymous town hall questions? Encouraged. Candid answers in office hours? Expected. So when AI started moving faster than any editorial calendar could keep up with, we knew it was time for something new: Unfiltered Office Hours. It's unscripted, barely prepared, and thanks to our cofounders Rick and Mitch, kind of funny?
As our host (and Director of Marketing) Christine put it: “AI is moving too fast for perfectly crafted content. By the time you write an article or polish a script, the moment's already passed.”
This series gives our cofounders a space to speak freely about the things keeping leaders up at night—from the chaos AI is introducing into the workplace to why knowledge still breaks down inside orgs.
AI isn’t a magic wand—and that’s a good thing
The hype around AI often makes it sound like a plug-and-play miracle. Just connect your data and boom: instant answers. But as Rick and Mitch pointed out, it's not that simple.
"It's only as good as the data you feed it. Workday's president of product called it out directly as a classic case of 'garbage in, garbage out.'" Christine noted.
Mitch joked that he once wanted to rename Guru to GIGO: garbage in, garbage out. The point? AI needs help to work well. Guru doesn’t just surface information; it builds in transparency, lets you see where answers are coming from, and makes it easy to improve content in real time.
It’s not about having a perfect knowledge base on day one. It’s about launching with the right feedback loops in place—so the system gets smarter as your team uses it.
The Confluence confession: Why “simpler” is a strength
Guru often gets compared to Confluence. And as Mitch quipped, "If people love Confluence so much, then why are they switching off it?"
He and Rick shared some backstory: When they worked together at Boomi, they actually loved Confluence—at first. Mitch rolled it out for engineering documentation, Rick hyped it at a company town hall, and they even got featured in an Atlassian case study. Then? Crickets. Nobody used it.
"And then we got to a point where the documentation wasn't being updated enough…we started to put Confluence updates as part of people's performance reviews." -Mitch Stewart
What followed was a realization: teams don’t just need a place to put knowledge. They need help keeping it accurate, accessible, and useful. Guru’s simplicity isn’t a limitation—it’s a design choice to prioritize what matters: trustworthy, in-the-flow answers.
Why human-in-the-loop is here to stay
One of the most important takeaways from the episode was that automation alone won't solve the knowledge problem. In fact, it can make things worse if teams don’t have visibility into what AI is doing.
“The core thing these systems exist for is to express the collective expertise of the company, and that expertise comes from a human’s brain.” -Rick Nucci
Mitch added that even if AI is watching every meeting, reading every Slack message, and indexing every document, it still can’t resolve conflicting information. Only a human can do that.
If you don't have a human in a loop, you’re doomed. And if you don't have AI helping you do the audit as you go, you’re probably wasting too much time.
This first episode of Unfiltered Office Hours reinforced why Guru exists in the first place: to bridge the gap between people and the information they need, especially as that information grows more complex, and to make it easy for them to improve and trust it.
If you're navigating the same challenges, or just want to see Mitch get roasted over his Slack habits, we highly recommend watching the full episode.
What sparked this series in the first place?
At Guru, we've always believed in saying the quiet parts out loud. Anonymous town hall questions? Encouraged. Candid answers in office hours? Expected. So when AI started moving faster than any editorial calendar could keep up with, we knew it was time for something new: Unfiltered Office Hours. It's unscripted, barely prepared, and thanks to our cofounders Rick and Mitch, kind of funny?
As our host (and Director of Marketing) Christine put it: “AI is moving too fast for perfectly crafted content. By the time you write an article or polish a script, the moment's already passed.”
This series gives our cofounders a space to speak freely about the things keeping leaders up at night—from the chaos AI is introducing into the workplace to why knowledge still breaks down inside orgs.
AI isn’t a magic wand—and that’s a good thing
The hype around AI often makes it sound like a plug-and-play miracle. Just connect your data and boom: instant answers. But as Rick and Mitch pointed out, it's not that simple.
"It's only as good as the data you feed it. Workday's president of product called it out directly as a classic case of 'garbage in, garbage out.'" Christine noted.
Mitch joked that he once wanted to rename Guru to GIGO: garbage in, garbage out. The point? AI needs help to work well. Guru doesn’t just surface information; it builds in transparency, lets you see where answers are coming from, and makes it easy to improve content in real time.
It’s not about having a perfect knowledge base on day one. It’s about launching with the right feedback loops in place—so the system gets smarter as your team uses it.
The Confluence confession: Why “simpler” is a strength
Guru often gets compared to Confluence. And as Mitch quipped, "If people love Confluence so much, then why are they switching off it?"
He and Rick shared some backstory: When they worked together at Boomi, they actually loved Confluence—at first. Mitch rolled it out for engineering documentation, Rick hyped it at a company town hall, and they even got featured in an Atlassian case study. Then? Crickets. Nobody used it.
"And then we got to a point where the documentation wasn't being updated enough…we started to put Confluence updates as part of people's performance reviews." -Mitch Stewart
What followed was a realization: teams don’t just need a place to put knowledge. They need help keeping it accurate, accessible, and useful. Guru’s simplicity isn’t a limitation—it’s a design choice to prioritize what matters: trustworthy, in-the-flow answers.
Why human-in-the-loop is here to stay
One of the most important takeaways from the episode was that automation alone won't solve the knowledge problem. In fact, it can make things worse if teams don’t have visibility into what AI is doing.
“The core thing these systems exist for is to express the collective expertise of the company, and that expertise comes from a human’s brain.” -Rick Nucci
Mitch added that even if AI is watching every meeting, reading every Slack message, and indexing every document, it still can’t resolve conflicting information. Only a human can do that.
If you don't have a human in a loop, you’re doomed. And if you don't have AI helping you do the audit as you go, you’re probably wasting too much time.
This first episode of Unfiltered Office Hours reinforced why Guru exists in the first place: to bridge the gap between people and the information they need, especially as that information grows more complex, and to make it easy for them to improve and trust it.
If you're navigating the same challenges, or just want to see Mitch get roasted over his Slack habits, we highly recommend watching the full episode.
Experience the power of the Guru platform firsthand – take our interactive product tour
