Amy Gurske, CEO and founder of sayhii

Athelas Team

February 25, 2026

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In this episode, Amy Gurske, CEO and founder of sayhii, shares how her 20+ year career in corporate leadership—including roles at Amazon—shaped her perspective on burnout, engagement, and leadership. She discusses the inspiration behind building sayhii and why giving employees a real-time voice is essential to creating healthier, more connected workplaces.

Transcript:

Manish Shukla (Host): And welcome back to the Athelas Taking Back Healthcare podcast. Today we are joined by the founder of Sayhii, Amy Gursky. Thank you so much for being here.

Amy Gurske (Guest): Yeah, so great to be here.

Manish Shukla (Host): So just would love to hear about your journey of how you got here today, just your background and everything.

Amy Gurske (Guest): Yeah, so whenever I talk about my journey, I always say that everything was by accident. And it started with walking in the wrong info session my freshman year of college. I was trying to find a summer internship, and I knew that Harris, I'm from Rochester, New York, I knew that Harris was in Rochester, so I found Harris, found the room number, and then walked in the room and realized very quickly that it was the wrong company. They were hiring full-time people, but I was raised in a family where I'm not going to get up, embarrass myself, cause a scene. So I stayed. And at the end of it, they went around and did introductions and everyone's like, senior looking for full-time employment. This rotational program sounds great. And they get to me and I was like, freshman walked in the wrong room, looking for an internship. Totally know you don't have them. I'm just going to slide out the side door. And everyone's like, So I do. I slide out the side door and then two people come chasing out after me and they said, we don't have an internship, but do you want to create one? And that literally has been the entire story of my career. No job that I ever applied to because I technically haven't applied really to a job. Never really created before or never really existed until I was like, have we thought about, have we thought about. So it started with a company that had no internship to being in a rotational program and getting pulled off two months into it saying like, I think we can optimize the processes in DCs. We're not using technology at all. Can I take a look at that? And they're like, yeah, yeah, go play. So it's been this series of like, be aware, find a problem, know that you can provide a solution. And then just going to people empowering and saying like, hey, I noticed this, here's the solution. And they're like, yeah, go run with that. So literally story of my life for 22 years, no job. Literally, I never like said, I'm going to go do this. It was here's a problem. I know that I can fix it. Let me try.

Manish Shukla (Host): Right. And so, you know, when it comes to, you know, creating Sayhii, I know there's, you know, background history with, you know, Grainger and Amazon. So tell me how your experiences of those two places really led to the creation of Sayhii.

Amy Gurske (Guest): Yeah. You know, everything in life kind of leads up to where you are. And I was so grateful that I did work for some really great companies in corporate. So Granger, I was with for about 17 years. And that was one of those roles where like, hey, here's a problem. I've got the solution. Great. Go do it. They were really great with autonomy and letting you just go explore things. So that allowed me to be really curious. What that also allowed me to realize was my engineering degree. My undergrad got me so far, but I was working on streamlining process and implementing technology. Now, what I learned the hard way is people follow process and people utilize technology. So I knew nothing about people. So I actually went back to school to study industrial and organizational psych, behavioral analysis. Like I'm making all these great recommendations. No one's doing anything different. I need to learn that. So because Granger allowed me to be curious, that allowed me to go from very analytical skill set to understanding the extreme dynamics of humans and how those interplay. So fast forward, why would I leave this company after 17 years? They treated me great. They raised me. One of the consulting clients I was working for at the end of my tenure at Grainger was Amazon. And I'd gotten these degrees in IO and development, and there was a role reporting to the C-suite. And so I called my boss and I said, hey, can I apply for this role? And he said, you're a top producer. You're the only one doing global consulting. You're not married and don't have kids, HR issue. And I can't let you apply for the job because if I applied, I probably would have gotten it. I'd been there 17 years and it was a perfect fit. And so I remember being frustrated and I was with a client, Amazon, and they were like, hey, we have been trying to poach you for years. Like, would you consider coming? And it was because I had a glass ceiling put on me after 17 years that I ended up leaving and going to find another opportunity. So I would probably still be a Granger if it wasn't for that opportunity. but everything happens exactly as it should. So learned that I needed to understand more about people at Grainger. And then at Amazon, it's kind of that tech startup feel, right? Everything's moving so quickly. I go from the slow moving kind of very steady steamship company, right? Grainger stock is like this. And then you go to Amazon, that's like this and crazy. And we're splitting and doing all that stuff and forming divisions, moving very fast. I learned the importance of listening because everybody is moving so quickly that it's so easy to overlook the gaps that either individuals have or teams have because it's always the loudest voice or who's most in your face.

Listening and Connection

Amy Gurske (Guest): What I learned with working for a very busy, very hectic, we were onboarding 650 people within a couple of years for one specific team. So talk about adding all those people. I learned that I had to do a better job listening if I expected the teams that worked for me to be able to show up at work because I had to help them figure out what they needed to be successful. Because when you're moving that quickly, sometimes you can't even slow yourself down. So my job as a leader became really trying to figure out what every single person needed to be successful and helping them get that.

The Importance of Being Present

Amy Gurske (Guest): Honestly, it's going to sound harsh, but we are selfish as humans, right? Like, so that example of I don't want to go work out because if I go to the gym, everyone's going to be looking at me and, you know, my arms shake when I run or my bum or whatever it may be. Like, we're so worried about ourselves. And what does your friend say to you? Hey, Amy, no one's looking at you. They're worried about themselves. And one of the problems with listening is typically we're listening to respond. Like, I'm taking what you're saying, but I'm already thinking about how I'm going to respond, how I'm going to solve your problem, how I'm going to fix this. And that may not even be what the person's looking for. So I think for listening, the biggest piece is to really try to be present in the moment.

Hypothetical Workplace Scenario

Amy Gurske (Guest): So I could have an employee sitting across from me saying, you know, I got these projects done. I had 12 projects. I got 11 done. I have one more left. And I see them like grimacing. They've got bags under their eyes. You know, maybe they're tapping their fingers a little bit. And what that tells me is like this person isn't OK. I don't know what's wrong with them, but they're uncomfortable. They're fidgety.

Training Emotional Intelligence

Amy Gurske (Guest): The one thing can be as a leader, if you're noticing that people aren't being attentive to their team, sitting down and saying, here are the things that I do want you to try to focus on. So for instance, I have an employee at SayHi that tends to be very negative. That can actually rub off on other people. So you're talking about emotional intelligence.

The Human Element in Technology

Amy Gurske (Guest): I believe it can make us more efficient, but I do not believe that it can replace human connection. And so I am a huge believer in using AI to listen, diagnose, but always connect. Very similar to what you guys do. We always want to make sure that humans feel connected, that they don't feel like they're just working with tech, that there is something behind that, that there are humans there.

Organizational Trust and Culture

Amy Gurske (Guest): We need to be able to help them get there. And to do that, again, we need this real-time data so that we know where our gaps are. Because I can tell you what I think my gaps are, and I'm a pretty aware person. But I can tell you that I checked our Sayhii scores for Sayhii itself. And I'll be surprised sometimes at some of the answers.

Measuring Employee Sentiment

Amy Gurske (Guest): We actually look at everything under the iceberg. Traditional annual surveys that most companies or healthcare do are typically asking about things that the company can change. What we know is those aren't the things that are tearing organizations apart. The things that are tearing organizations apart are things like broken trust on teams, bad culture, lack of autonomy, poor communication, a lack of development.

Applications in Real-time Denote

Manish Shukla (Host): So what have been some of the biggest challenges in scaling Sayhii?

Amy Gurske (Guest): You know, I made a conscious decision to move back to Rochester, New York to launch Sayhii. We don't have a unicorn female in the state of New York yet, and I do want to break some glass ceilings. Like I said, I wasn't able to move back to Rochester after I graduated college. I had to leave essentially upstate New York to be able to get a job. And I wanted to bring higher paying jobs back to a place that I call home. So deciding to move from Boston, Massachusetts, or San Francisco, which is also where I lived, all these markets known for startup, I decided to literally move to a more rural community to try to break some glass ceilings, but also change the culture of the community as well.

Conclusion

Amy Gurske (Guest): At the end of the day, we can connect human to human. My hope is that we just cultivate a better connection with each other. If we can help people feel more connected, and that will create healthier workplaces, and hopefully that will lead to better lives overall.