Key Takeaways

• The AI adoption bifurcation is already happening — and the gap will widen: Larry has run over 100 CHRO workshops on AI agents and observes that organizations are splitting into two groups: those who have gone deep with at least one specialized agent and can't wait to expand, and those still treating AI as an experiment. There is almost no middle ground — and organizations leaning out are likely to stay out for another one to two years.
• AI coaching is the unlock for manager development at enterprise scale: Cushman & Wakefield has approximately 10,000 managers across 60 countries. Holly frames Nadia as a democratization tool — giving managers who have never worked for a great manager access to best-practice coaching in their own language, with the ability to role-play real conversations before they happen. The GXO Logistics CHRO now uses Nadia daily and says she would never return to a human coach.
• The window for strategic procrastination on AI has closed: Holly built her career on being a "fast follower" — watching others learn to walk before she ran. She has reversed that position on AI, warning that the pace of change is now too fast for organizations on the sidelines to realistically catch up.
• Nadia's value compounds beyond coaching: Jordana at Corning identified three phases of Nadia's organizational impact — first as a coaching and development tool, then as a scalable business partner reinforcing company values across all HR functions, and finally as a catalyst for rethinking entire HR processes from first principles in a world with fundamentally different capabilities.
• The CHRO's role at the board level is to frame AI as a strategic portfolio decision: Holly and Jordana both describe the board conversation as one of stakeholder stewardship — helping directors understand AI's implications for investors (competitive disruption risk), customers (value creation opportunity), and employees (sustainable, values-aligned transformation). The key is approaching it from both the growth opportunity and the culture preservation sides simultaneously.
• The most actionable thing CHROs can do with board members is get them to use AI tools themselves: Larry's straightforward advice — find a way to hook senior leaders and board members into actually using Nadia or another agent personally. Sharp people who engage with the tools directly will get it immediately, and their advocacy changes the pace of organizational commitment.

Full Transcript

2026 AI Priorities: From Experimentation to Enterprise Scale

[00:00:00]

Levi: We've got people who are playing very senior roles trying to deal with the challenge that, as Das mentioned, we're moving into a world where AI is potentially going to be employees and agents impacting organizations heavily. The pace of technological change is very rapid. Can organizations keep pace with that change as you're managing not just people but also AI? And can we make sure we do that so it's not only cost cutting and productivity, but delivering value in other ways? As you head into 2026, what are some of the focuses related to AI that your organizations are running? Jordana, we'll start with you.

[00:00:54]

Jordana: Right before I left Corning, we were doing the strategic planning for the year. We had been early adopters of Nadia and of Corning GPT — which was ChatGPT brought in-house. Last year was our year of experimentation, piloting, and getting some comfort with it. This year was gearing up to be one in which we would take on bigger pieces of work from an agentification standpoint on the business side — to expedite revenue, profitability, and some of our bigger growth businesses.

From an HR side, we were really thinking about: how do we now augment the tools we have, like Nadia, to put it across all avenues of HR and talent management? And how do we create a more fertile ground for all of our people to really embrace capability with AI — beyond just dabbling in 'hey, can you ingest this data and give me some insights?' How do we help them start to know how to create GPTs, how to create mini workflows? That was the focus going into this year for Corning.

[00:02:08]

Levi: Okay, great. And Holly at Cushman & Wakefield?

[00:02:11]

Holly: We've got two approaches. One is launching, learning, and experimenting on a lot of AI things — particularly in our commercial real estate world, where a lot of what we do is heavily administrative. A real estate lease is 100 pages long. We're using AI capabilities for lease abstractions, to help people monitor and manage real estate portfolios — really using it as an augmenting tool to do the work.

On the HR side, Nadia is a big initiative for us. Individuals are using AI to experiment. We're a Copilot shop, but I'm a Claude user, and we're encouraging folks to build prompting capabilities broadly.

And then we are preparing heavily for the launch of agentic AI. HR is actually going to be the first function in the organization to move to agents. A lot of the work we're doing right now is launching and learning on the AI side while significantly prepping on the agent side — particularly around talent, culture, and governance, to make sure we're anticipating a whole range of scenarios and being prepared for them.

▶ How Leading Enterprises Are Structuring Their 2026 AI Priorities

Enterprise HR leaders entering 2026 are moving beyond experimentation toward deployment at scale. At Corning, the focus shifted from piloting Nadia and internal GPT tools to agentification across business functions and building AI fluency across the full workforce. At Cushman & Wakefield — a 54,000-person global firm — HR is slated to be the first function to transition to agentic AI, with parallel tracks running on AI tool adoption and agent governance preparation. Both organizations describe 2026 as the year of moving from learning to doing.

The AI Adoption Bifurcation: Leaning In vs. Leaning Out

[00:03:41]

Levi: I feel like the agentic piece might link to what you've seen, Larry. You meet with CHROs constantly, you were at Davos recently. Tell us what you're seeing not just for one company, but across the landscape.

[00:04:02]

Larry: A little context. For about a decade, I've been building one of the largest big-company CHRO communities in the world. I've done about 400 in-person meetings in the last decade, and the single most popular meeting topic has been HR technology and automation.

It wasn't until April of 2023, at a meeting in Zurich with global manufacturing CHROs, that the Schneider Electric CHRO, Charise Lee, said, 'Is anybody playing with this generative AI thing?' That was less than three years ago. The first time AI was ever verbalized in one of those rooms.

Since then, I've done about 90 meetings with AI and HR on the agenda every time. And then the last year I've done 100 workshops specifically on AI agents for HR. Here's what's interesting: you can tell right away which group you're in. If they've gone down the road with one agent like Nadia, they can't wait to hear about the other agents. But most of the time, you realize within five minutes that they think you have witchcraft — companies that should know, like Airbus — and immediately it's 'Oh, but the data...' and they're leaning out. You realize they're probably going to be leaning out for another year or two. You either go in early or you don't. There's really nobody in the middle right now.

[00:05:52]

Levi: I assume you have predictions on where the ins and outs will go?

[00:05:56]

Larry: When you finally go in with one specialized agent, the meetings never talk about experiments in ChatGPT anymore. That was 1.0. It's always named, specified agents that do specific things. That's where the whole market is — unless you've never gone there, and then you don't even know what they are. 'You know Nadia?' 'What's Nadia?' I'm talking about some of the biggest companies in the world that just haven't touched it yet. The companies that lean in are the ones that are going to lean in more and more — and they're going to get way ahead of the others.

[00:06:24]

Holly: I've always been a personal fan of strategic procrastination. My sister walked first, and I sat and watched. About three weeks later, I got up and walked across the room — and then I was running before my sister was. There is value in being a fast follower, in letting others be on the bleeding edge. My hypothesis is that AI is going to change all of that. I believe those who are on the sidelines — as you see that bifurcation — are going to find it really hard to keep up or catch up. The world is changing too fast now. It's changed my point of view: if we procrastinate too long, we'll be left behind.

▶ The AI Adoption Bifurcation: Why There Is No Middle Ground in Enterprise AI

Organizations are splitting into two distinct groups on AI adoption, with virtually no middle ground. Those who have deployed at least one specialized AI agent — like Nadia for coaching — are eager to expand and can immediately understand the value of additional agents. Those who have not leaned in are likely to remain on the sidelines for another one to two years, often citing data security or governance concerns. Larry, who has run over 100 CHRO AI agent workshops, describes this bifurcation as self-reinforcing: early adopters compound their advantage, while laggards fall further behind as the pace of change accelerates.

[00:07:55]

Larry: I had one CHRO — German, who became CHRO of a big French company — she told me, 'They're going to whine.' And I said, 'When they do, tell them: why are you people whiners?' And it worked. I said, 'If this is all impossible, why are all these famous big global companies two years into this? It's not impossible.'

AI Coaching as Manager Development Infrastructure

[00:08:28]

Levi: Within this AI landscape, where does AI coaching specifically fit into your strategies? Holly, maybe first.

[00:08:37]

Holly: This is already starting to be a huge unlock for large global companies. Cushman & Wakefield has about 54,000 people across 60 countries. We all know: people join good companies, they leave bad managers. How do you learn to be a good manager? You work for a good manager. If you haven't worked for a good manager, Godspeed. What Nadia is doing is incorporating all of those best practices and using it to help inform people who've never experienced what great management looks like.

It's a huge democratization. We have about 10,000 managers, and I can't wait for them all to be using it. The language capability alone is incredibly powerful. I'm actually going to be showcasing it at our European sales conference on Wednesday — our head of Germany will demonstrate it in German, then switch to English. Live on stage.

There's something really powerful about being able to role-play in the moment before a real conversation. The hypothesis that Nadia will soon know your people better than you do — I fully agree with that. 'Last time you talked with Joe versus Sally, Sally got upset and Joe was fine. Let's role-play how Sally is going to take this news versus Joe.' Giving managers who've never seen what good looks like not only the knowledge of what should be approached, but a practice session — and then feedback — right before they go into that conversation. We're already seeing it be fantastic.

One quick example: I mentioned we're a Copilot shop. We tested a change management scenario — coaching someone on how to best exhibit our DRIVE values: driven, resilient, inclusive, visionary, entrepreneurial. Copilot came back with how to find something on a computer drive. Nadia came back with: 'Here's what you can talk to her about around entrepreneurial and inclusion.' The institutional knowledge that Nadia absorbs, learns, and feeds back — it's going to be a huge game changer for our managers.

[00:11:51]

Levi: That's great. And Jordana, how do you see AI coaching?

[00:11:54]

Jordana: Let me talk about my own development journey with Nadia and AI in general, because it actually reflects three distinct phases I think a lot of organizations go through.

Phase one: when we first started piloting, the obvious value was democratizing coaching — having high-quality, personalized coaching available at scale, in people's own language. But the aha moment came when we realized this was also taking away the fear of AI and agents for our entire workforce. One of our engineers — a very prickly engineer, the reason we put him in the pilot group — when we ended the pilot, he was upset because Nadia had become his new best friend. His wife kept asking, 'Who's Nadia?' We started to realize: you have this two-fold thing. Great coaching — and a way to soften change resistance and get people genuinely comfortable with AI.

Phase two: the realization that once you train Nadia to emphasize company values and enable specific organizational priorities, she becomes a super business partner — consistently, in all languages, in real time, reinforcing the things you would normally have to distribute through individual HR business partners with varying results. Not replacing, but amplifying.

Phase three: once you have these new tools and capabilities, you start asking whether you even need the processes you have today. Could you take a blank sheet approach to performance management, for example? Not 'how do we do a better performance appraisal?' but 'if we have this capability, how do we actually design a process that delivers the real objective — customized development of people?' Any HR process becomes an opportunity to strip it back to first principles: what is the intent, what is the simplest path, and how do we design it in this new world?

And going back to something said earlier — we have a responsibility as HR leaders. Most of us went into this work for a purpose-driven reason: to amplify people's capability. We owe it to people to include AI skills and capability in their development at a much faster, more progressive rate than we currently are. We owe that to people so they keep pace with this change, and have the ability to move into the roles of the future.

▶ How AI Coaching Transforms Manager Development at Enterprise Scale

AI coaching delivers three compounding benefits for large organizations. First, it democratizes access to high-quality, personalized manager development in any language — giving the 10,000 managers at Cushman & Wakefield, for example, access to coaching that was previously available only to a select few. Second, it functions as a scalable HR business partner, reinforcing company values consistently across functions and geographies. Third, it challenges organizations to rethink HR processes from first principles — asking not how to do existing processes better, but whether those processes are even the right ones given fundamentally new capabilities.

The CHRO Using Nadia to Prepare for Her First CEO Meeting — and Never Going Back

[00:15:42]

Larry: One of the clients you saw earlier was GXO Logistics — a 200,000-employee logistics firm. The CHRO is Corinna Refsgaard, a German who lives in Copenhagen, offices out of London for a US company. She called me in October: 'I've got a great story.' They had already rolled out Nadia to a few thousand managers, and she had a new CEO coming in. She'd met him in the interview process, but this was her first big meeting. And she decided to use Nadia to prepare.

She started talking to Nadia, asked it to tell her about the CEO, then they role-played the conversation extensively. She had the meeting. And she told me: 'It's like the greatest first meeting you could ever have with a new CEO. There's no way that happened without Nadia.'

In the holidays, we're texting back and forth, and I asked: 'Are you continuing to use Nadia?' 'Yeah, every day.' 'Could you ever imagine using a human coach again?' She said, 'Why would I do that? Nadia is so much better at every aspect of it.'

Now you're talking about the CHRO of a 200,000-person company sharing publicly that she uses Nadia every day and that it helps her be a better leader. That kind of story, told from the very top, is going to cascade all the way down to the front line.

▶ Why the CHRO of a 200,000-Person Company Says She Would Never Return to a Human Coach

Corinna Refsgaard, CHRO of GXO Logistics, used Nadia to prepare for her first meeting with an incoming CEO — role-playing the conversation, researching the leader, and stress-testing her approach. She described it as the best first CEO meeting she had ever had. When asked months later whether she could imagine using a human coach again, her answer was direct: 'Why would I do that? Nadia is so much better at every aspect of it.' She now uses Nadia daily. Her public advocacy — as the CHRO of a 200,000-person global company — illustrates the cascade effect when senior leaders personally experience and endorse AI coaching.

What CHROs Should Bring to the Boardroom on AI

[00:17:21]

Levi: Let's talk about the role of the CHRO and HR as it relates to the board and the senior-most leadership. What role should HR play in helping the board of large companies know how to select, deploy, and utilize AI?

[00:17:43]

Holly: We have a new board chair just coming from Blackstone — and he's arriving with the mindset of what best companies do. The expectations are: let's talk more about culture, talent, and how we are reacting, responding, and proactively planning for a world of AI. It's refreshing to not have to sell up to a leader who is already there.

The best conversations at the board level should address both what we do with this capability to be more productive, and what the shock to organizational culture looks like — approaching it from both sides of the brain. We've created an AI council within the company covering governance, risk, culture, and organizational implications, and we'll be presenting that to the board.

The questions we're pressure-testing: when agents replace a particular role in whole, how much of that goes to EBITDA? How much gets redeployed to invest in growth? Like any portfolio strategy — it's not simply 'cut costs.' It's a portfolio rebalancing that focuses on growing insights and capabilities. In commercial real estate, we gain competitive advantage through insights. More AI capability means more insights per person, which means more client interactions, which drives more revenue.

On the culture side, it's making sure the boardroom conversation includes: who do we want to be, and are the decisions we're making on AI execution keeping that whole? Our DRIVE values, our vision and purpose — pressure-testing how we apply this new capability against: are we still demonstrating who we want to be as an organization?

[00:21:05]

Jordana: If you boil it down, the board is looking at this through the lens of stakeholder management. For investors: is this trend going to disrupt your core competitive advantage, or create disruption? For customers: are you taking advantage of this to enhance value creation, loyalty, and profitability? For employees and culture: are you approaching this sustainably — getting ahead of the concept so you can proactively minimize people disruption, which hurts the reputation of the company if done wrong?

For CHROs, it's an incredible moment to show up as a business leader and partner — thinking alongside your CEO and executive committee about how the board is framing this and how you need to answer it. And it's an incredible moment to amplify your values — tying the AI conversation to who you are as an organization and how that connects to the way you work and your culture. This one happens to land more squarely on the people side than previous disruptive trends. It's not an IT thing. It's a people, culture, and business thing simultaneously. So grab that moment and lead those conversations.

[00:23:05]

Larry: With the board and the executive committee, there's a simple, actionable thing: get them to play with the tools themselves. Find a way to hook board members into using Nadia, or whatever agent your company has built. These are sharp people. They just may not have engaged with the agents personally yet. Once they do, they'll get it right away. I think it'll move quickly when we get the most senior people to actually use it.

▶ How CHROs Should Frame AI for the Board: A Stakeholder Stewardship Framework

CHROs bringing AI to the boardroom should frame it through three stakeholder lenses: investors (will AI disrupt or enhance competitive advantage?), customers (is the organization capturing AI's value creation potential?), and employees (is the transformation being managed sustainably, with minimal people disruption and strong cultural alignment?). Holly at Cushman & Wakefield adds a portfolio rebalancing frame — positioning AI not as a cost-cutting tool but as a growth investment, asking what portion of AI-driven efficiency gains should be redeployed into insight generation, client capacity, and revenue growth.

Advice for HR Leaders Navigating the Human-AI Era

[00:24:19]

Levi: Final question for our audience — a lot of senior HR folks here. What is your piece of advice for navigating the human-AI era? Larry, Holly, Jordana.

Larry: Easy one for me. Nadia in 2028.

Holly: This is a key moment for almost all organizations in terms of managing through ambiguity. They say the number one competitive differentiator for CEOs is their ability to manage ambiguity. And I think it's our time as heads of HR to help sculpt the fog — to create tangibility in what can be a very intimidating change. Just play with it. It's really not hard. Bring tangible examples and help lay the groundwork for people to navigate this moment. Lean into it and have fun. Don't be a strategic procrastinator.

Jordana: There are so many smart people in this room with great advice to share. Just keep speaking to everybody, hearing what's going on, and thinking about how you want to apply it and drive it. Echoing everyone: just jump in. We're all figuring it out. Have some fun. Unleash your inner child. All that curiosity and creativity — get in there.

Levi: That's great. Bring the spirit, guys. Bring the spirit.