00:00  AI Joining the Org Chart: A New Reality

Das Rush: Thank you so much for joining today, Larry, Diane, Lucien. We've had a lot of conversations about various topics. And this might be one of the biggest ones at the moment, at least, that I've been hearing, which is, you know, AI is joining the org chart in 2025. Maybe it already has for a lot of organizations. So I wanted to start there getting each of your takes with what does it actually mean for you when you hear somebody say AI is joining the org chart? 

Larry Emond: Well, you know, as you know, my central life activity is bringing CHROs around the world together in meetings. And I saw I had three meetings in May, Denver, New York, and Boston with about 45 CHROs total. And in all three of those meetings, of course, we spent time in AI and HR. And in all three of those meetings, we ended the meeting talking about what is the future of this thing and what are we gonna call the function because the term human resources or even people is already antiquated. Right? And so my point is that that all those CTOs have fully embraced the idea that that AI agents in particular are going are already becoming like parts of their workforce. And, of course, most of them are personified with names like Nadia, and they're becoming, you know, part of the team. 

Diane Gherson: You know, when I was at IBM, we had agents. We gave them names, but we weren't receiving emails from them. Now we're receiving emails from them. So, you know, so they're becoming a little more personified. But I think at the end of the day, you know, back to the point that Larry made, there is a need for us to think about how to fit them into how work gets done. And so we haven't really thought through when it's on the org chart, as you say, what does that, you know, what, they don't have to do this to us. We don't have to be sort of back in the industrial era where you organize work around the machines. Right? If you put the human at the center, then maybe the org chart would look very different than if you didn't. 

01:59  CHROs as Chief Work Officers in The AI Era

Das: Yeah. And, Lucien, I wanna get you in here because I think this leads in really well with something that you very presciently said at our last summit in November. And you had said, like, you know, CHROs are gonna become Chief Work Officers because AI is this new way that work is getting done. And for HR leaders, it's all about thinking how work, technology, and talent come together, and that you find most people aren't thinking enough about the work in that equation. How should CHROs right now be thinking of the work? 

Lucien Alziari: Yeah. I think the most encouraging thing is, is that even over the last few months, I see this notion of the work is really coming much more mainstream into the discussion. And I think catchphrases like, you know, there's an AI agent on the org chart. Okay. It's fine. But like you guys, I said, well, what's really underneath that? Because an org chart is basically how does work get done in the organization, how does an organization sort of organize itself to do the work. 

And I still feel that, if the future, and this is my view of the future, is it's basically an optimization game, which we can manage very dynamically between the people and talent that we've got, the capabilities that technology can bring, and many of those are now real, whereas before they were like a gleam in the eye. But now they're scalable. They're with us. And then the third part of the equation is understanding of the work. The big still void for me is, like, who's taking control of the work? And I don't want to be misunderstood because people have said, oh, okay. So it's about the work, not about the people. No. It's about both. Alright? And it's about the technology. And I don't see, the heads of HR or people, whatever you wanna call them, becoming the Chief Work Officer exclusively, but I just want us to kind of own that space. Nature fills a vacuum, and if we don't step up and sort of own this space, then somebody else will do that. And I'm not sure that's the right answer for the organization. 

04:08  Organizational Change with AI Integration

Das: So how do organizations change as AI joins the org chart? You know, Lucien, you made that point that the org chart itself is really just how you're architecting your organization to get work done. How is that architecture changing as AI comes on? 

Lucien: There has been a trend, but I think it's gonna accelerate fast now in terms of minimizing the number of layers in the organization because that drives speed and adaptability. I think AI supercharges that. So I think there will be fewer layers in organizations. I think there's gonna be a big rethink about the role of managers, as we get much more granular and forensic in terms of understanding how work gets done. And I think some of that, the work is gonna get managed and done with heavy technology use. 

So, I think there's gonna be quite a debate about what's the role of managers, what's the span of control that we should expect of managers. The old model of the middle manager who managed the work, coached the people, and communicated messages for the organization: I think that sort of, trio of themes is gonna get rethought. And so, fewer layers, fewer managers, probably bigger spans of control, but more focused on the development and communication than on the management of the work. 

Diane: Yeah. I would second that. I actually, authored an article in the Harvard Business Review this month about that topic of middle management. And I think, you know, more than anything, now that we've got AI, we have to be thinking about, reframing for our people what work is about and what we expect of them. What is the end game? I mean, you said optimization, Lucien. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. But, you know, let's be clear. The old game was to reduce headcount and to outsource. That was an industrialization game. The new game has so many more possibilities, and work does not have to be fixed, right, into fixed jobs. We're looking for much more fluidity. Okay? So let's start talking about what that looks like. Maybe more variation in the kind of work that you do. Maybe it's your skills that matter more than your job, etc. 

So, I mean, having those kinds of conversations, that's what we expect of middle managers now. I thought, you know, the Shopify CEO, you know, throwing the gauntlet down to his employees was exciting, but there's a lot of fear, and middle managers have to think through what does this look like for you guys, you know, my organization, my piece of the organization, and, and what could you expect? And I think that reframing part, framing for people is a role that middle managers still need to play, often they're not, but that they don't have to do the coordination work and all of the stuff that you mentioned, Lucien, on that passing along of messages. You can go to a town hall and, you know, directly talk to your CEO from whatever country you're in. 

So things have changed dramatically for what middle managers do, and there will be fewer of them, but I think their jobs will become actually more important. 

Lucien: Many of these discussions that we're having now are very reminiscent of when the Internet came in. You just think about, how did the Internet change the world? And a lot of jobs went away, and a lot of jobs were created. And so, at a macro level, I'm actually quite optimistic. Now clearly, if you're caught in the transition, it can get very challenging, but that's why I think organizations need to be helping employees and potential employees adapt to this. And the adaptation isn't gonna be deep technical skills, because the half-life of any deep technical skill is getting shorter and shorter. But the human skills, I think, are gonna sustain. 

So, I would always encourage CHROs to sort of go back and say, well, what really matters in this debate? And then, you know, what are the things that you can do? Because I do think this is, as I said before, a huge invitation to just be creative and invent playbooks because there is no playbook at the moment, and that to me is really exciting. 

08:21  Driving AI Adoption Through A Culture of Experimentation

Das: And that might actually be the most important message for anybody to take away right now is, like, there is no playbook. Diane and Larry, I'm curious what you're seeing. What are the best organizations doing, and how are they getting creative? Especially when it comes to this moment, you know, our theme is, like, driving adoption. We're really in this moment where the task is to help people find their ways to these tools and to be in good partnership with them. What are you seeing the best organizations do? 

Larry: I think the ones that are leaning in the best, and I, you know, I know it through the HR organizations with all these CHROs I know. It's the ones who let's say their head of talent is literally like, their head of talent or talent management is like almost an AI first mindset. And you so you're testing every possible you know, you try Nadia. You try another one. You try another one. You mess with some stuff. You program yourself in ChatGPT Microsoft Copilot. You're technology first, AI first. And those are the companies that have gotten way out ahead on this. And it's interesting. 

There's a woman, a woman my firm, actually, my firm placed as the Head of Talent in a company. And she's been a guest a couple of times at CHRO meetings, and she does a little thing on some of the experiments, you know, she's kind of a mad scientist, that she's been working on. And every time she's done it, the reaction by the CHROs is: that's who, I need that persona as my Head of Talent. That's the future. And I think it's those that in, let's say all the COEs that have an AI kind of first mindset. They're just gonna get way out ahead of everybody else. 

Diane: I think it starts at the top, but it also starts at the bottom. Right? You need to have a culture of experimentation. So you're saying to people, we, you know, we want your ideas. And I've seen companies do a great job of crowdsourcing saying, hey, you know, what's the best use of AI for us? So I think that's something that helps. I think the other thing is that the more HR uses AI to give people agency, the more people start to understand that it's actually a really cool thing. Because, you know, in the old days, HR used to sort of do things out of being experts. Right? And then here's the program, and we're rolling it out. We'll do change management. But now we can cocreate with our people using AI. And even if we have, you know, a hundred thousand employees, we can get all of their responses, summarize the pros and cons that, you know, the different points of view by AI in a matter of minutes. 

And people can see the different points of view, then you could turn it into a poll, and people can respond and say what they liked and didn't like. And suddenly, you're using AI as a force for good in terms of people having a sense of agency, and it gets them excited. It's not something being done to them. It's something that they're part of. So I think that's part of creating a world where AI belongs to all of us, and, you know, let's us all participate and learn and get something out of it. And I think that kind of a headset is really important to get it going. 

Lucien: If I can sort of pile on, because I just so agree with what both Larry and Diane have said. I see two approaches with AI, and I'm not a technology person at all. But I think some of the focus is, okay, which jobs are they gonna replace? It's kind of an efficiency thing. It's a new way of driving productivity. And, look, we're business leaders. We can't deny those possibilities, and we should go after them just like any other business leader does. But the most interesting stuff is, well, what can we now do that we always wanted to be able to do but never could? 

So we're here because of our interest in Nadia. Now imagine five years ago if we'd have said, how about let's give everybody in the organization a coach. Alright? Or let's give everybody in the organization a work assistant so that they can get some of their work done more efficiently. And we'd have said, that's a brilliant idea, but we can't afford it. Now we can do both of those. Alright? And those are just the first thoughts that we've had. 

12:25  AI’s Challenge to the Talent Pipeline

Larry: I think one of the big challenges going ahead is how are we gonna develop senior people, and I'll use an example. I did a couple meetings last year with Chief Legal Officers, just kind of for fun as an experiment. I thought they were gonna be horrible. They were actually great meetings. Not as much love in the room as a bunch of CHROs, but they were actually they were still pretty warm and funny. I found them quite entertaining. We talked about how the law firms are openly saying, you know, that they buy their services. You know, we're not, we're gonna need a lot fewer junior lawyers because AI agents will do discovery and research and blah blah blah. To which, of course, the question is, well, how are you gonna develop senior lawyers? Right? And that's gonna be true across the board. There's gonna be the same thing in finance. It obviously is the same thing in HR. Those are fascinating challenges. I mean, opportunities, but also real challenges. 

Diane: You know, I think this question about the loss of the entry level rung on the ladder is probably the first most important question for HR leaders to be thinking about because it's real, it's here today. You know, maybe with some of the stuff you described, you know, we're not sure when that's gonna happen, but it's here already. And so the question that we've got to ask ourselves as HR leaders is that okay? Is that okay that we're having a whole generation of people graduate from university with no access to entry level roles because, you know, they're being taken over by AI, you know, over a shortish period of time. And what does that mean for our pipeline of talent as an organization? 

That is something we could design into our organization. We don't have to be victims of this. We can be in the driver's seat and say, this is how we want it to work. We are going to have an intake of this many people, this kind of training, these kinds of, you know, hands-on roles, and this is going to be the role of AI. We don't have to say AI is gonna take on all the, you know, entry level legal work or whatever. But I'm not seeing enough to, back to your earlier question, Das, I'm not seeing enough HR people actually say, I'll take that one on. Right? We're gonna design that. Don't worry. It'll be good. Right? It's more, you know, tell us what the technology can do and, you know, we'll hire around it. 

Lucien: Yeah. I think one of the worries, I think, and we're still in the very early innings of this debate. But, if you just take what AI does, you're basically just taking what anybody else, any of the companies that you compete with, you're just taking industry standards. So you're not building anything that's competitively advantaged. And so I'm still actually quite optimistic about this combination of humans and technology because, if you're just taking kind of the B-minus AI answer that applies across the board, and in many cases, that's fine. That's enough. But it's sure not gonna make your business win competitively. And so I think it does come back to the creativity, the critical thinking, the curiosity of humans to actually ask the right questions, pose the right problems for, and then the technology is there to help solve it for you. But the technology is not gonna, help your company figure out how to win versus others. I still think that's the human piece, and that's why I'm still overall quite optimistic about this. 

15:57  AI Coaching for Manager Development

Das: A lot of times we've got in the habit of doing something for the sake of doing it. Right? Like, we're gonna deploy technology to deploy technology. We're gonna do performance reviews to do performance reviews, and we've kind of lost sight of, like, why do we do performance reviews? It's to make us better at the work. Why do we deploy technology? It's to make us better at the work. And I think that's a common theme. And this disruption of AI is really kicking up a lot of that dirt. You can't hide anymore. It's really clear when you're doing work for the sake of work. 

So what are you seeing there with kind of especially AI coaching and the role of it in helping organizations both bring in these opportunities for entry level talent, but also get back to the purpose of, like, driving business impact and doing work that's actually meaningful and moves the needle? 

Diane: You know, the role of managers changed dramatically with the pandemic, and it also changed with the generations that are coming into the workplace. And the role of managers has changed dramatically. They need to have empathy. They need to understand the whole person. They are dealing with people who are working both remotely and on-site, so they don't have the same ability to pick up on things the way they might have before. They need to resolve conflict, not putting them in the same room, but actually resolve conflict in different ways. And so they need AI coaching, but the manager in particular needs AI coaching to help develop collaborative work environment and so forth. 

So I think it rises to all the new challenges that managers are facing today in a way that I was very concerned, you know, when I was looking at it through the pandemic, because so many managers were falling apart and just burned out, not able to do it, and people didn't want to be managers. And I think now what you've got are, you know, you've got a different situation because you're enabling them in a very new way. 

Lucien: I just think it's really exciting what Nadia can do, the whole field of AI coaching. And I think it started on the development side, and that is the right place for it to start. But I think over time, it's gonna be around coaching high performance, not just coaching as an end in itself. And so I think it is going to go into the adjacencies around the management of the work, the management of performance, all of those areas. And again, that's always been the work of HR, but I think this is a great new capability for us to become even more effective of that. 

18:31  Final Advice for HR Leaders on AI

Das: What's your kind of bottom-line advice? Don't lose sight of this in the next six months, twelve months. 

Larry: I'll just make one comment to CHROs and other senior HR leaders that might hear this. You have to take the time to meet these agents yourself. You have to spend time. You know, as you know, I've had Nadia as a guest in many CHRO meetings. We always do this kinda last thing in the day. Imagine you're a frontline manager in your company. What would you ask? And when they engage with her, I'm always shocked how many of them are like, "You're kidding me." Well, that's on you for not having already taken time to see what's possible with these agents. 

Diane: Well, I would double down on Larry's comment about, learn yourself, like, get your hands dirty. You know? Because it's, it's really important to be on top of the technology. So I would add to that by saying there's some really, really good, you know, Substack, LinkedIn newsletters that you can find that keep you on top of the latest technology and the thinking about it. There are way too many sort of well-curated ones in in in the HR/AI space, but I think David Green's, in the talent space, is exceptional. And if anyone isn't reading that every month, they should be, because it really does go quite broad in terms of looking at all the different research that's been done and the impact of AI on, on work and on people and so forth. So I highly recommend that. I just think it's an important part of every HR leader's day to be staying on top of what's happening in AI, in HR, and the work. 

Lucien: For kind of a 60,000-foot perspective, think about what really makes the best CHROs the best CHROs, and I think there are three things that come to mind. One is that they just have an intellectual curiosity about, sort of, what's really happening here, and they can get to the underlying cause of issues. The second is that they have a passion around the business and how they can bring all of the capabilities that are available to them to help their businesses succeed and remember that that is their fundamental purpose as an organizational leader. And then the third is they're always able to bring this kind of outside-in perspective so that you keep your own organization in the right context, and we don't become guilty of sort of wishful thinking. 

And so here's a great opportunity now to say, it's for you to show thought leadership because nobody else in the organization owns this right now. Right? So it's an opportunity for you to lead and to say, what's the potential of these amazing new capabilities? But your job is not to deploy technology. Your job is to help the business win, and I think the next path to help the business win is this really granular understanding of the work and how the work best gets done with this combination of people and technology. And it's unlocking a whole new game for us. So I think we just need to go there. And nobody's got a playbook, so think about it and then lead on it. 

Das: Fantastic note to end on. So, Diane, Lucien, and Larry, like, thank you so much, for joining today.