After announcing Jim Darragh as Chair last week, I’m very excited to share that Faith Forster is joining Charlie as our Board Advisor for Product and AI.

Faith is a seasoned Product Executive, with a career focused on B2B SaaS and fintech, including Wise, Dext (owned by Hg, exited to IRIS Software Group) and Legl. She has extensive experience building and scaling digital products from early-stage, VC and PE-backed businesses through to exit. 

Her experience also includes building and launching AI-native products, like Discoveree.com, a shared context layer for product teams. She’s transformed the operating model and ways of working, including AI adoption, across multiple organisations, with a strong focus on driving customer and commercial value. 

“This is a really exciting time for CharlieHR. Their brand and new value proposition, to be the first HR hire for small businesses, sets up a compelling promise that we can now deliver on exceptionally well with agentic AI. All of the ingredients are there to create a really positive growth story.”
– Faith Forster, Board Product and AI Advisor

For the past 10 years, Charlie has been hyper-focused on small businesses. It’s not always an easy mission, but like the customers we work with, we’re passionate and determined about it.

Whilst AI has made it easier than ever to start a venture, we know it doesn’t solve the biggest problem small businesses face: a lack of resources that can easily hold them back. With so many priorities and so little time, HR understandably gets pushed to the bottom of the pile.

And yet, HR is often where it all starts. Whether it’s onboarding a new hire or staying on the right side of employment law, HR lays the foundations for stability and growth. Getting it wrong can be costly and risky. Getting it right helps you keep the best people and win back precious time. But for most small businesses, sorting out HR has too often felt out of reach.

Historically, larger organisations have had the resources to build high-performing teams, giving them an edge over their competitors. Now, AI reshuffles the cards. A 10-person business with the right tech stack has the opportunity to outshine big names: structured performance reviews, better employee relations, watertight compliance and more, all at a fraction of the cost. That was unimaginable before.

This shift is why AI needs to play a larger part in our product. By combining AI with the human expertise HR needs to navigate challenging and multi-faceted situations, we’re opening the door to a wealth of opportunities, giving small businesses the chance to outperform much larger organisations. And that’s exactly what our new offerings, like Charlie Grow, are designed for.

As Charlie’s CEO, part of my job is bringing in the right expertise to help us drive growth. Faith understands small businesses, knows how to build great products, and gets what AI can really do for them. She’s the right person to help us strike the balance between AI and human support, and to help Charlie become the first HR hire for small businesses.