On my second day at Blank Metal, I sat in on a live Claude Cowork training, a service our team runs for clients every week. Typically, as a Training Producer, I would be the one running it, but because I was less than halfway into my first week on the job, I was just there to observe. I witnessed participants experience the tricky parts of AI adoption: deciding which tool to reach for, recognizing which parts of their work are delegable, figuring out the right language for prompts. With my one day of experience at the company, I couldn’t help but feel that the people best equipped to utilize these tools were the very engineers developing them.
Yet, by the end of the week, I had used Cowork to build a working sketch of a scheduling solution for Shippy, our internal operation-tracking platform, aimed at real problems we’re seeing in how training gets staffed and scheduled. You might be wondering what changed the Day 2 version of me into the Day 5 one. It wasn’t that I had suddenly acquired a new technical skillset over the course of a few days. What changed was what I’d been given: the tools to work with, the context to use them well, and enough trust to act on what I found. That combination—tools, context, trust—is what let me go from spectator to builder in a matter of days, and it’s a key part of our company culture at Blank Metal.
A company always building itself
Blank Metal’s Training and Enablement team gives clients the tools they need to implement AI effectively, starting with the people we teach to become AI-fluent builders in our trainings. We just celebrated our first birthday as a company earlier this year. Most companies would treat being young as something to outgrow. But we see it as one of our greatest strengths: staying in motion is what lets us keep handing new people something real to build from day one. A system that stops evolving is already behind what the tools underneath it just became capable of. So we don’t get to build something once and defend it. We rebuild constantly, with the same energy we ask clients to bring to their own systems, because staying at the frontier requires it.
Blank Metal’s perpetual quest to do things better and more efficiently with bleeding edge tech is not what surprised me. It was that I was expected to help contribute to it only days into the job. Nobody asked me to wait until I’d “earned” it. Tools, context, and trust arrive together here, on day one, not as something you accumulate tenure toward.
What enablement feels like
Being on the receiving end of the service I provide for others, I noticed precisely what makes it work. Blank Metal doesn’t just hand users a tool and walk away. We make sure people have the context to use it well. My manager, Teresa, gave me a complete picture of the current state of training, including struggles, successes, and what’s being left on the table. That’s a lot more comprehensive than just a task list. In a conversation with our Chief Growth Officer, Elli Rader, she gave me a piece of advice that has completely reframed the way I think about my work: she told me to look at our existing systems with fresh eyes, because the fact that we’ve been doing something one way doesn’t make it the right way. She wasn’t onboarding me—onboarding just tells you where things are. Instead, Elli was actively handing me the judgment to question what I found, not just a map of where to find it. Between Teresa and Elli, I’d already been given two of the three things that make enablement work: context and trust. The tools turned out to be the easy part.
The same tools, different responsibilities
A few days later, I went and took a stab at a working sketch of a scheduling solution for a real issue we had with Shippy using Cowork, Notion and Granola, the same way an engineer might prototype one. Then I checked it against my team’s own written spec for the project, line by line, and found gaps in my first pass. The tools didn’t just help me to produce something fast. They helped me to understand the problem well enough to see exactly where my own first answer fell short, and fix it before anyone else had to point it out. I’m thinking about problems the way our engineers do, because we’re using the same tools as teammates of a shared mission. My responsibilities are just pointed at a different problem: making sure clients and their people can do the same thing with these tools that I just did with mine. And that expectation isn’t a special allowance for a new hire with an engineering background. It’s the same one placed on everyone at Blank Metal, whatever their title or however long they’ve been here: don’t just use the system, improve it.
What this says beyond my own week
I don’t think my week was special because of me. I think it’s evidence of something Blank Metal built on purpose: an environment where the right tools, the right context, and the right trust let a capable person contribute for real, fast, regardless of what’s in their title.
That’s the best argument for AI-native operations, as opposed to “we move fast.” Moving fast is the result. What produces it is a company that treats enablement as infrastructure. I didn’t get here by being unusually capable. I got here by being unusually enabled, with the same tools as everyone else in the building and enough trust to use them from the start. That trust isn’t a courtesy extended to new hires. It’s the same thing that lets Blank Metal operate at the frontier at all: a company that can hand someone real problems on day one is the same company that can move as fast as the tools underneath it change. I happened to be this week’s proof. Someone else will be next week’s.