#192 - Slowing Things Down to Speed Up Research with Jared Forney of Okta

Erin May talks with Jared Forney, Research Operations Principal at Okta, about how the role of research and research operations is shifting as AI accelerates product development. Jared explains why scale and rigor do not have to be opposing forces and why teams need to return to their core goals before adding new tools.

Jared dives into how he builds trust across legal, product, and design teams and why that trust becomes the capital you spend when driving big change. He shares why automating more work actually concentrates human attention rather than removing it, how he approaches knowledge management and orchestration across many data sources, and why written communication and technical skills now matter more than ever. Jared also answers audience questions on governance, getting buy in for research ops, working faster under compressed timelines, AI guard rails, and breaking into the field.

Highlights

• 02:13 Upskilling for scale and rigor
• 04:33 Balancing speed with research quality
• 14:50 Where humans fit in AI workflows
• 25:00 Rethinking knowledge management and MCP
• 32:00 Best tactic for getting governance buy-in
• 41:35 Enabling faster research under pressure

About Our Guest
Jared is a Research Operations Principal based in the San Francisco Bay Area with 8+ years building research infrastructure from the ground up. His work sits at the intersection of governance, tooling, and enablement: building systems that help research teams move faster while keeping data practices sound. He's led repository migrations, developed AI governance frameworks, consolidated tooling ecosystems, and spoken at industry conferences about how operations can amplify — not constrain — great research. Connect with Jared on LinkedIn!

Resources

• The Blueprint for Evaluating AI Across the Research Pipeline
• The State of Research Operation 2026
• State of Synthetic Users Report
• AI in Research Risk Cascade