Valence CEO Parker Mitchell recently sat down with four pioneering HR executives at the Conference Board’s latest CHRO Summit in New York for a candid conversation about harnessing the power of AI to cultivate a workforce that’s not just efficient, but also resilient.

Each of the panelists — Rachel Kay, SVP and Chief People Officer at Hearst; Raúl Valentín, EVP & CHRO at ABM; Maree Prendergast, Global Chief People Officer at creative agency VML; and Vicki Walia, Chief People Officer at Prudential — face unique organizational challenges, from distributed workforces to major workforce transformations to lean HR teams. But each of them has also seen the transformative power of AI coaching to steer their workforces through those challenges and reimagine how work gets done.

Watch the panel or read along with the transcript below.

https://youtu.be/JQ5K16xTTY4

Panel Transcript

This transcript has been edited for readability and clarity.

In the AI era, HR’s role is R&D

Parker Mitchell: I think the challenge of our day is going to be, five years from now, if you look back: how well did I set up my workforce and my company to ride the impending AI wave? And I think that is going to—if we're here together in this room in June, 2030—I think that is gonna be the question because AI has incredible promise and potential in so many ways.

I'm focusing on the work side of things. So many ways of work. And there's gonna be some perils to the speed of the transformation that's gonna happen. The speed of changes to jobs, and the ability for workforces to be able to navigate all that. And so there were two or three thoughts that—We've had a few speakers at our AI & the Workforce Summit, and one of them was Ethan Mollick. 

How many folks here? Not as many hands as I would think. Ethan Mollick, I think, is one of the leading thinkers on the implementation of AI. And there were two or three ideas I wanna share with you. So number one is he said that as AI becomes more ubiquitous in the workforce, the role of HR is really R&D. And I think that's such a transformative shift in mindset.

How will HR leaders allow, and enable, and encourage, and promote workers, employees, leaders, managers to use AI in such an experimental way? We're not used to that. An experimental way to discover the use cases that matter the most. So what would it be like if one of the dominant themes for HR over the next two to three years is this R&D lab?

We're gonna explore some of these ideas. And the second thing that I thought was inspiring and provocative and really powerful is he said he spends hours, hours every week testing all the different models and the different ways to guide them. And he said the number one skill to be able to guide a model in the right way—does anyone wanna take a guess what it is?

Basically being a good manager. The same way you would describe a task or describe a situation to someone on your team and ask them to go try to solve it. That is what you do with models. And if you can do that with people well, you can do that with models well. So I think there's an inspirational element there to say it's not just—this isn't actually just a technology that sort of goes in a technology box. This is, it is like interacting in some ways with humans. And that is what we in the HR world are exceptionally good at. 

And so with that, I want to welcome my fellow panelists and talk about some of these provocative themes. And so, as folks I think here in the room know, we are the builders of Nadia. It is not just a leadership coach, but, we are seeing, a work coach. A work coach that is gonna understand, as you as an individual interact with it, as much as possible about you and your world and help guide you, coach you, mentor you, support you through that, the day-to-day, week-to-week, month-to-month of your journey.

But it'll also try to understand your teammates and how you get work done. And most importantly for the HR world, your, your talent and leadership landscape, the values of your company, the talent moments. And at the intersection of all three, I think there's some magic there. 

So we're gonna kick it off with Vicki. Now, Lucien mentioned, I think it was almost exactly 12 months ago, it was in June, in Palo Alto, that you were exploring a number of different technologies, AI-focused primarily. And I had a chance to join you and share a little bit about Nadia. What was it, this is 12 months ago, remember? What was it that caught your eye about that, that sort of first glimpse that you saw of Nadia? 

Prudential rethinks leadership with AI coaching at scale

Vicki Walia: Yeah. So I've, I've been a long proponent of technology and, and specifically the role that technology plays in democratizing access.

And we all know as people and HR practitioners that one of the great resources we provide to our people is hands-on coaching, right? That one-on-one experience that helps build their capabilities and their knowledge and skills. But that's very hard to provide. And when you started talking to us about Nadia, I got really excited because I was like, this is our chance to democratize access to executive coaching or leadership coaching.

And that was really the genesis, I think, for Lucien and myself and the team to say, this is a path we wanna follow. 

Parker Mitchell: And fast forward, we're now 12 months later. Share with us a little bit about both this idea of democratizing coaching and some of the other use cases that you're exploring. 

Vicki Walia: So it's interesting. So we very quickly launched into a pilot. At that point, we were coaching about 400 people a year. And we're a pretty sizable company, so 400 isn't that many people. But we immediately launched Nadia to 1,500 people, and it was a really important time for us. And that's why it's so weird because it's been a year, but it feels like so much and so little time has passed at the same time. 

We were really trying to get our people to start thinking differently about leadership. and we'd been launching a DNA that helped people understand kind of the push and pull that all leaders have to deal with and contend with. And we also had career partners who were helping to coach and guide people, and all of a sudden we were able to extend this capability, this incredible resource, to 1,500 people. 

And very quickly what we started seeing is, as people started engaging with it, as people started working with it, it was making, kind of ingesting more and more of our content around who we were as a culture and who we were as a people in terms of purpose, in terms of things that got reinforced in our environment, and was able to start really helping to provide counsel and, and in a very confidential, credible way to, to all of our employees. And so now we're at the point where we're gonna roll it out and provide even broader access. 

And we continue to think about what else can we tell Nadia and help Nadia do to help us with our people. And so, you know, we've been thinking about, do we start having Nadia take our trainings? And then gives, that gives a framework to being able to: This is how you have difficult conversations. This is how you lead with candor. This is how you coach. And so helping kind of her use our frameworks and tools to have those conversations. 

Navigating “change on steroids” at VML

Parker Mitchell: I love that analogy of sort of you have Nadia be a participant in the training and then be able to repeat that in that customized, personalized way at, at scale.

Maree, I wanna turn to you because there's, I think, some similarities in use cases of this idea of a transformation, a new set of mindsets. I think two themes. One, a merger and trying to bring together two cultures. And then two, ways of particularly impactful on creative industries, knowledge industries. 

Before you share the implementation of Nadia, can you give us a little context? What were the business challenges over the past 12 months, sort of leading up to the, the moment as you began integrating Nadia? 

Maree Prendergast: Yeah, sure. So for those who don't know, VML is a creative agency, it was born out of an advertising agency, but really on the, on the intersection of, we deliver services to grow brands on the intersection of creativity, commerce, and technology. And so I would say maybe even a couple of years ago, our organization, which was part of WPP, which is one of the larger holding companies around advertising and marketing services agencies. We were already thinking about, you know, how are we going to continue to deliver value to clients? We have a range of technologies, and how that can augment and help us deliver services to clients. 

So I guess about January of  2024 is really when this hit a peak at both VML and WPP. WPP embarked on bringing our own proprietary platform in to help us deliver services to clients. So our expectation on our employees is that they are augmenting the way they work. So if you are a copywriter, for example, you're gonna be using our AI tools to help you deliver efficiently and, and create more value for clients.

And at the same time, as we often do in our industry, we merged two very large agencies together. That was Wunderman and Thompson. And what was VMLY&R became VML. About 26,000 employees, 55 countries around the world. 

Parker Mitchell: So tremendous change. I know change is the constant, but when I hear that story, it feels like it's change, you know, almost on steroids. Share with us a little bit more about your Nadia deployment. I know Jon Cook was very excited about it personally. Got involved. How did that come about? 

Maree Prendergast: Yeah. So, much like Vicki mentioned, we had already been thinking as an HR organization about democratizing coaching and how do we scale that and give people—being a client services business, our assets are our people.

So great managers help us deliver great results. And so we had already been talking about that. With Nadia, our initial pilot, if you like, was to offer it both to the executive team—you might think that's crazy—but I gave it to the executive team and I also gave it to our Business Resource Groups around the world.

Just to, you know, play around in, have some conversations with, you know, use it. The purpose behind giving it to our executive team was many of those people had traditional coaches, but I wanted them to experiment to see how that would be. And Jon Cook, who was our CEO, came out when we then introduced Nadia to the organization. I can explain how we did that, but he did come out and sort of position Nadia as a strategic asset, a strategic asset for our people. And we kind of look at her as a real growth partner and a partner, a personalized partner to our people for their own growth, but then also our business growth. 

How Hearst is shifting its coaching culture

Parker Mitchell: And we'll double click more on sort of how this fits into the THRIVE program. But it's just been, it's been great sort of seeing the momentum there. Rachel, I know that Hearst is a decentralized, federated organization and leading decentralized organizations through times of change.

Could you share some of the business challenges facing the group of companies. And how did you begin to experiment with how Nadia might be able to tie that to the, you know, those business moments? 

Rachel Kay: Yeah, so Hearst is not Hertz. We're not the car rental company. We are the media company. I get that question sometimes.

It's actually a really interesting company because we're known for our historical assets, our newspapers, magazines, television. As you can imagine, there are some interesting existential threats posed by AI writ large on those industries. You know, just as an example, for a second, just to underscore this because I didn't really appreciate this. But, you know, magazines today, obviously there are some magazines that still thrive based on print subscriptions, but most magazines are funded based on website clicks.

So if you go to, you know, Google, and you search for what's the best air fryer, the first link will be Good Housekeeping. That's one of our brands. You’ll go to Good Housekeeping, you’ll look at the website, maybe you'll even click on the air fryer link we recommend, right? And that's what drives revenue is the advertising on that webpage. And then it's that link, that click, when you go through to actually purchase the product. That is completely gone in the world of AI, right? Because now when you go to Google and you search for best air fryer, you get that AI summary at the top, and that's it. You don't look at our webpage, you don't click on our link. That's the end, right? 

And so if you think about that as the context for one of our businesses, it really poses a tremendous threat to our revenue streams. We also have three businesses that are not as well known. One is we own a collection of healthcare companies to provide data and to offer to healthcare businesses. So, for example, if you go to a CVS pharmacy and you get a bag with a prescription on it, and there's that paper that's stapled to the bag that says all the drug interactions, that's a Hearst product. And I can go on. There's a few other businesses like that in transportation industries and also financial services.

What we do is we provide data, synthesize data, make it applicable to clients, and that, that barrier to entry, obviously, has gone way down in this world. Okay, so that's the context. All of our businesses are under tremendous threat from AI. 

I think what's interesting to me as we think about this in the HR landscape is there's a lot of discussion about what AI can do to help productivity, reduce costs, make things more efficient. But the other part of AI that I've been very intrigued by is what's the net new that can come out of it, and what can we offer now that we could not offer before? So, you know, there's a lot of things around customization, personalization, learning journeys, all that's great. This is another example, I think, of, of that, of something net new we could offer from this center at Hearst was an asset people didn't have before.

You know, coaching in a box. And it's been interesting because Hearst doesn't really have a culture of coaching. Coaches at, you know, just if I can speak honestly, coaches at Hearst are sometimes seen as punishment, right? You're given a coach if you need. I mean, that's the exact word, honestly, our CEO has used, right, of like, their, so-and-so's punishment is you've given them a coach.

But what's great about this is it's not visible, right? You haven't been assigned a coach, you've been given a resource you can choose to use or not. And it's much more broadly accessible. 

And so I operate an HR organization that is centralized, or, decentralized, as Parker said. I have a central team, and my primary mode of interaction with our businesses is what's the carrot I can give the business? Like, what's the gift I can give? What's the nugget that they will find value in, that then they will come to us for more? And so this has been one example of, I can offer you this technology that's really valued by our colleagues and provides you with both a way to make your workforce stronger but also to kind of destigmatize something that has been historically viewed as not necessarily positive.

‍Nadia’s ROI for ABM: frontline retention and client satisfaction‍

Parker Mitchell: And Raul, when we first chatted hearing about the drivers, the business drivers of what makes or breaks, you know, the profitability for ABM, and how you're thinking about how Nadia can impact that. I really enjoyed that conversation because of the mentality you were bringing. Can you share more about ABM’s drivers? 

Raúl Valentín: Hopefully I can remember that. We should have written it down. But ABM, a little bit like Johnson Controls, we're in the kind of facility engineering solutions space. Now, what’s a little different is, 60% of our population, we have about 130,000 employees, are frontline, doing cleaning real estate across five or so different verticals: aviation, education, manufacturing, distribution, commercial real estate, which has had some wins, just to name a few.

So the business challenge is, you know, we have a hundred thousand people spread out over 20,000 sites. They never walk into an ABM facility because they work at our client sites and supporting the client sites. And they are typically first or second generation in this org, in this country. They will speak English as a second or third language. Turnover incredibly high, as you might imagine. We've taken it from maybe close to 70 at one point down to like 55, with a goal of getting into the forties for that front line, which is pretty typical at that level. That's actually very good at that level. 

And it comes down to the manager's role often, right? So when you think about that kind of turnover, it drives incredible client dissatisfaction because the employees normally have a really good relationship with the clients because they're working in and out of their building. We had huge drop-off rates at the hiring piece which you were struck with, I remember, Parker. We would, we were going through a fallout rate of about 70%. So 70% of the people we interviewed did not show up on day one after being made an offer, right? And, and again, when they showed up, they would leave within the first month. So when you think about the effort, the dollars to spend, the taxing that we were putting on the HR systems and the other business systems was tremendous.

So when I was learned about Nadia, it was like, wait a second. This is a way— as strong as my team is, we're really lean. I've got one HR field person for every one hundred-plus managers. They’re spread out. They normally start their days at night, or if they're in aviation they’re 24/7, or manufacturing. So how do we provide that support to that front line?

So for us, it wasn't about the senior levels. They get the executive coaching and all the other stuff. It was how do we support that engagement for our team members and try and reduce turnover. And that was really the ROI pitch, right? 

Because of course, like many of you have heard, it was like, well, how many heads are you gonna give up, Raul? And I said, I'm not gonna give up any heads. Here's my hypothesis. We're going to provide better coaching. And the manager will have access to coaching. So their interactions with our frontline team members will improve, which will drive engagement and better retention. Fairly simple, but we've done some other kind of more analog training and stuff with frontline managers and we’ve seen some of the benefits of that.

So this is really pushing it forward. We launched only about a month ago. We've got about 500 people in a very focused pilot, another thousand people that we're trying to just do more organic, like, “Hey, FYI, Nadia’s here.” The 500 are getting more hands on. We're trying to see how much effort is required to drive adoption. The effort is driving bigger adoption. We had a 64% increase last week to this week in terms of usage, which is really great. 

The side benefit, or the other benefit base that I'm promoting is back to client satisfaction. What we're seeing clearly is when we teach our frontline managers how to have better discussions, difficult discussions, that plays into the client relationship.

Our managers are sitting at a site, working with the facility manager, the project leader for the client, and they have difficult discussions. We've recently rolled, rolled out an ERP, which has been very bumpy. And one of the early use cases was a manager saying, “This is really good. I was really challenged with how to have another conversation with the client around billing challenges, and I used Nadia. Nadia really helped me role play how to have that conversation and gave me some alternatives.” 

So these are really big wins for us and now starts helping me think about ROI. Ultimately the lagging indicator, I think, will be retention or turnover. But we'll see some of these comments that I think will drive engagement.

Parker Mitchell: It's fascinating to hear sort of that distributed workforce and how important their interactions, whether it's manager with employees, employees with sites that they're in, and that, the scale of that. You know, you can't reach that as someone who's got a hundred thousand frontline workers. 

Raúl Valentín: And we have about seven core languages. We're not global. We have operations in the UK and Ireland, so not global, we’re international, perhaps. But, you know, just here we have seven core languages. 

So finding our support mechanism, provide language support. That's been another real positive. And talk about engagement and values. You know, it really says a lot when a team member or manager or someone is able to converse in their comfortable language or mother tongue, if you will, to interact and get some development. So that's been tremendous. 

Making learning stick in the flow of work

‍Parker Mitchell: Vicki, I wanna turn back to the, the, the term that you used, sort of the context. How can we train Nadia on this range of different things that matter to Prudential? What are some of the, I know that Matt, we've talked about 2+2 conversations, the talent management. Can you share a little bit more about how you’re thinking about it, how you are thinking about deploying as part of your talent, set of moments in your talent strategy?

Vicki Walia: Yeah, so you know, like all big companies, we have very robust, very in-depth talent development programs, really leadership training for frontline managers, for mid-level managers, and for executives, and those who we see having kind of the greatest potential to help lead the company. This is a tool, Nadia's a tool, a partner in reinforcing all of those things.

One of the biggest challenges with traditional learning programs is the decay that happens from the second you leave the classroom and go back to your job. But now Nadia's there to do the reinforcement. 

And so we have programs like Launch, which is really aimed at our director level. and it's there to help reinforce and say, these are the two or three things you committed to during the training program. Let's see how you're doing. 

And the brilliant thing about Nadia, she remembers probably better than a human coach or a human partner does, right? I mean, we all do coaching as a part of our roles, right? We forget that we had this nuance around this important or tough conversation that our coachee was gonna have. Nadia doesn't forget those things. She's kind of logging it and carrying it around with her. And so she knows to bring it back at just the right time to help drive that reinforcement. 

Parker Mitchell: And just on the technical side, most of what we do with Nadia is offline to prepare for the next conversation.

So she'll take extensive, we call it coach's notes, to have a hypothesis: oh, I should check back in with Vicki in two weeks on this topic, or things like that. And so then she does that planning. So she comes to help you not just—I mean, we talked about the first generation as tools that you have to go to. The second generation of AI will be sort of services that are, that are integrated into everything that you work in, come to you instead of you going to them. That's gonna be transformative as we try to get to scale.

Vicki Walia: Yeah. I think, you know, for us, as we continue to roll out Nadia, how does it get into the flow of work? Because the more that it's in the flow of work—and I can't remember the gentleman, I think he was talking about kind of, you know, how do you find out about how many days off you have and how much—Marlon was talking about this. What's brilliant about that is it's in the flow of work. And as we continue to work with Nadia and as she continues to learn about us, I think it's gonna be about how does she get into the flow of work with us?

Reflecting and roleplaying for career conversations

‍Parker Mitchell: Absolutely. Maree, you launched the THRIVE program. That was a very core part of your culture. Can you share more about that and, and how Nadia has been trying to help bring that scale? 

Maree Prendergast: Yeah, sure. So THRIVE is a bespoke program that we built around career conversations. It's an app, actually, in Microsoft Teams that we built. So we don't have an off-the-shelf career conversations tool like I'm sure many people do. We built that a couple of years ago, pre-merger, in one of the agencies. And then, post-merger, it was like, how do we bring everybody into this app and, and have people having career conversations? 

It's probably one of the hardest things to do. Maybe you agree with me, I'm not sure. But one of the hardest things to do in a services business is to get people to stop what they're doing and delivering to clients and sit down and chat with people about their career aspirations and, and what they wanna do.

And so like many, I'm sure, use AI tools within Microsoft Teams to help summarize 360s and all that sort of stuff. But we decided, when we learned about Nadia, to put Nadia into the flow of work, into the app which is about career conversations. So that meant that if you're a manager, or you're an individual contributor, or you're an employee on a team, and you are preparing for a career conversation, be it you're preparing to talk to your direct report or you're preparing to talk to your manager, there's an opportunity to use that coach not only to help shape that conversation so that it has the impact that you want it to have and the output perhaps that you want it to have, but also even to roleplay some of that conversation. 

And to the points that have already been made, you know, Nadia is an extremely accountable coach, I could say, is some of the feedback that we have. She does not forget. So if you try and avoid that conversation later, she will come back to it and say, you know, you were gonna have this conversation with Parker, Maree. How did that go? And there's this continuous flow.

But that sort of helped us. And we have about, we probably have close to 5,000 people that have engaged with Nadia through that process. Which, I think again, in the absence of other people and it's—you know, I think we're still early on in the ROI. But I would hope that the ROI out of that is that whoever's been on the receiving end, or perhaps giving those, in those conversations, they're being more effective, and they're having more of an impact. And perhaps that's impacting retention. Perhaps that's impacting better results for our clients, happier people. 

Parker Mitchell: I think that point about the learning, I think we've talked about sort of the decay that happens after the training. How many people here have read, are fans of The Leadership Pipeline? I know that's a pretty, pretty popular book. 

I remember, the first time I read it, just this epiphany of sort of actually what, what's required of you as you make the transition to manager, manager of managers, et cetera, is not necessarily the new, you know, skills, but it's the new mindset and the new habits, and it's unlearning the old habits.

And that happens in the course of the day to day. That doesn't happen in a training program. And so we really try to help Nadia encourage people to break those old habits. And there's different levels of strength that you can have. But I remember talking to someone, a user, and she said, “You know, I told Nadia I wanted to do something. She sent me an email, and I ignored it. She sent me an email, and I ignored it. Then she booked 15 minutes on my calendar and asked me why I was ignoring it.” And we didn't realize people would want a coach to hold them accountable that way. But that's one of the stories that comes out over and over. 

Rachel, I know that you are beginning to put the training programs, the leadership programs, the frameworks, all those elements that are a core part of bringing, bringing new managers and, you know, training new managers, that to life. Can you share more about how you've been trying to train Nadia on those materials and some of the early reactions as you think about integrating into training programs? 

Building accountability without a cohort

‍Rachel Kay: Yeah, I mean, so: a nascent effort. Actually, I guess we're fully launched now. But it, historically at Hearst, the way our central training had been done was it was invite only. It was highly restricted and was very programmatic, right? So you got invited to come to this program, and that was a commitment over the course of the year. And it was, it was anti-democratized training. So what we've done over the last few years is rip that totally apart and tried to open up our training so that it's much more accessible. And we have them running all the time. Anyone can join. 

But part of what we're trying to address is since we've moved away from that cohort model, you know, one thing a cohort model does do is it helps with accountability, right? You're in with a group of people, that group of people you're gonna see again in a month. And you're gonna feel obliged to have done something or at least remember what you talked about last time.

So moving away from that, one of the downsides—there's a lot of upsides—one of the downsides is that when you lose the cohort, you do lose that sense of group accountability. So what's been nice about, you know, this concept of an AI coach is you can replace the accountability and post-session learning with a tool as opposed to that group of people.

And so when we moved away from cohort learning to one-off, you know, go if you want, it's always available learning, we were able to replace some of that discipline with, with Nadia. As we've developed this entire curriculum, all of our courses, all of our courses are being loaded into Nadia. So we do have our ways of thinking about driving… .

And so now when people go in and ask questions that pertain to the training we deliver, the responses they get will have the Hearst lens, which is helpful. So we're also speaking the same language, whether it's about how you get feedback, I think Vicki gave that example. You're using it, you're doing it in the way that Hearst teaches.

So what we're trying to make sure is, across all of our learning ecosystem, whether it be our learning programs, how leaders talk, coaching, that we're using the same language, that people start to get that vernacular into our heads. 

Reinforcing culture in daily coaching moments

‍Parker Mitchell: Terrific. And Vicki, I know you and I just were chatting about your planned rollout to, I think it's, is it all managers or all employees coming up in the fall? Can you share more about why, the, the reason behind that? 

Vicki Walia: Yeah. So we're gonna move it to all leaders of people and then go from there and offer it to all employees. I think, you know, the thinking behind it is, a little bit like, she learns your vernacular, right? She learns the way of doing, giving feedback in your way. 

If you think about it, she becomes a partner in helping you reinforce the things that matter the most to your business and to your company, right? So what is the strategy? How does it constantly remind people of what the strategy is? What is your purpose? What are your customers’ needs? What are the tools and frameworks that you want reinforced to support your cultural messages? She, she helps do all of those things. 

And it's not just our leaders of people who need to be able to hear that and have that reinforced for them. It's all of our people. And so it becomes an incredible way for us to do that. 

The other thing I'm really excited about is, you know, we're, we're highly regulated. There's tons of compliance requirements, tons of training pieces. It may be, over a period of time, a different way for us to make sure that those requirements are met. And there’s still a long way to go between where we are today and that. 

But think about something that is doing this micro-doses. That is those very important requirements and credentialing that we need for our employees at the center, and how they show up every day. Not just once a year they go through a 30-minute training and it's done, right? That kind of like, we all know, they all kind of have it on in the background and they're multitasking doing something else on the other side, maybe listening to it at like two and a half times speed. But what if Nadia is just kind of gently prompting around that and constantly keeping it in the ether of how they conduct themselves? That's a much better outcome for us. 

Navigating complex compliance processes

Parker Mitchell: And Raul, you and I talked a little bit about that, around unionization and how to avoid potentially grievances and meetings associated with that. Could you share a little bit about that vision if, you know, when that's possible, how important that could be for your workforce?

Raúl Valentín: Yeah. I mean, about 40% of our population is organized. We probably have 250 contracts. So one of the challenges sometimes is just a manager doesn't even know what's in their contract, right? I mean, it's, you know, I was talking to some folks last night, and we all agreed, they’ve not read it.

So a future state where someone can go in and say, I’m about to talk to someone, and Nadia is able to, like, understand what's the procedure, what are the rules, is there, is there an issue there that could be avoided proactively? How do they coach around that? How do they follow the right steps? It's really, really important in terms of staying true to that and maintaining a good relationship with the union.

So not just really running into something that we had no reason to do because, candidly, we did a bad job training the manager to learn the work environment that they're leading in, right? So it becomes another asset, another tool. 

One piece of advice: don’t wait

‍Parker Mitchell: So we've got a few minutes left. I wanna go back to this theme of HR as R&D. And R&D involves experiments, and it involves things that don't work and being able to acknowledge and talk about that.

So maybe I'll, I'll ask this question to everyone to just sort of wrap, and I'll start with you Maree. What’s one either lesson learned or tip you'd have for other CHROs about how to embrace this mindset of, of being willing to experiment and, and being on the front lines of R&D with AI and the workforce?

Maree Prendergast: Yeah, I think, I think it's, I guess my tip is don't wait. It sounds really obvious. But I think you have to sort of dive in and embrace things. You know, I was cautious when we did some experiments first. But I think you can do that with small groups of people. Do it with the right people, you know, people that are gonna be provocative and give you, you know, really constructive feedback.

And I think you continue to evolve it. You know, like, we've used Nadia, but also other tools. But we've evolved it to use it, you know, with respect to return to office policies and helping people have sensitive conversations around that. Maybe they require accommodations, et cetera.

So I think it's the idea of not waiting. I heard someone on the previous panel say, you know, we were thinking about: we've gotta get it right first before we can roll it out. I think if you wait, it'll be too late. 

Parker Mitchell: Rachel, I bumped into you in the speaker room. Love the sort of leadership from the front that you were sharing on the experimentation side. Do you wanna share at least a little bit of that story or another anecdote? 

Rachel Kay: Right, you ran into me in the middle of trying to create a bot. So I'm thinking about the advice. I think my advice is—So this was, as Parker knows, getting this in particular approved was very, very difficult. At Hearst, our legal team was incredibly nervous about having employees go to a bot in order to ask questions about how to have difficult conversations. You know, they were worried about the record that would be created by those chats, et cetera. And so I guess my biggest learning from that was: find an ally in the organization. And don't be afraid to break some things. So I basically, I got our Chief Operating Officer to agree that this sounded like a good idea and he just said, “We hear you, Office of General Counsel. We’re doing it.”

And, you know, so there was a moment of—I'm generally a consensus builder. I like to get everyone on board. How can we get to yes? What's the right answer? But I think in this space, sometimes, to Maree's point, you can't always wait. And so even if it involves some personal risks, don't be afraid to go for it. And find the person that's gonna help you blow through, because there's a lot of reasons to say no, in some of these cases. But there's probably more reasons to say yes. And you just need to be willing to take a chance. 

Parker Mitchell: Terrific. And Raul?

Raúl Valentín: Yeah, I think, building off of what you've heard, plus maybe earlier, like, I viewed it—I've got to be a champion for what's going on in AI. And it's not just from an HR perspective, it's for the company. We were talking, you know, I've been, I've been hounding my sales and marketing leader about how can we use Nadia to support all the things that are going on in the sales organization as we pivot the company to do more integrated selling. And we've hired a hundred new sales reps this year. How do they really learn everything about our business? The technical side, the non-technical side? How do they have just-in-time access to coach and role play before they… 

So I've been kind of a pest to him to say, we've gotta try this. This is really important. Plus the existing sales force that—you know, talk about decay, right? It's been, it's been a long time, right? They've gotta teach them a lot. 

So I think being an advocate, pushing it. You can't wait. And I think it's always my motto: We wait, or we're getting ready to get ready, and you've missed the opportunity. And you wait for perfection and by the time you're perfect, you're actually not perfect. So have fun and push it, enjoy it. I'm on our AI council for the company. I’m pretty vocal and, you know, I keep pushing to try things. 

I happen to run continuous improvement as well. So brokering, how do we build process in, which someone said before, really making that part of it. We've identified key roles that I've kind of used HR to like role model it, saying, you know, there's a lot of things in TA. We're gonna assign a continuous improvement person who's just gonna map all the tasks and all the workflows. And then we'll start identifying where there are hidden gems that we might be able to automate and use technology and AI and Nadia to help, right? And then how do we do that to other large job families in a very prescriptive and kind of intentional way? And know that we'll learn as we go. 

Parker Mitchell: That point about being on the AI council makes a good—How many CHROs here are on the AI council for your companies? There’s a few. I mean, that might be a sort of takeaway. You know, can we get CHROs on the AI Council? Because that's gonna be such an important voice in the room of recruitment and talent acquisition. Vicki, what would your advice be?

Vicki Walia: I think the biggest thing that we can do is show them that we are also going out and experimenting with these tools, and they don't have to be tools that are related to work. Because sometimes that can be intimidating to our people. You know, they're worried about what it might mean for them over the long term of their career.

But I talk about tools that I'm using kind of at home, right? We're planning a trip to Europe. Okay. MindTrip, this is how it worked. Oh, have you tried it? Tell me. Ask them for recommendations on what they're doing. Because what it shows is that there's, for other use cases that they can go out and experiment and try with, without worrying about how it’s affecting their job.

And I think that's really important because this is a mindset shift. Above and beyond anything else, this is about getting our people comfortable with: work is changing, and the way we're gonna get things done is changing. So let’s get ready for it.

Parker Mitchell: I just wanna say a special thank you to everyone here. I think Rachel commented on it, but I know it's true with all of our partners. It's not always easy to get things through your AI council. It's not always easy to get that experimental mindset shift. And just a deep appreciation to everyone here.

And I think our vision is that everyone that is interacting with each other in a business and in, in sort of the collaborations that occur, are gonna have a time to be coached by an AI coach. And just hearing your stories, like Rachel, you work with CVS, that's a customer of ours. That frontline person might have been coached by Nadia. While the sales person coming in, would've been VML, we talked about Coca-Cola and VML, they were both on the same team, and they both discovered they were using Nadia and wanted their Nadias to talk to each other to be able to guide them. We talked about that with Delta, we work very closely together. I'm sure, Prudential, there's a connection there, but I think there's a world where there will be, you know, an opportunity to have these coaches helping your collaboration, not just starting with an individual, but how do we, how do we, how do we bring in a collaborative world where AI plus human is going to be, is going to be the future?

So thank you all for being experimenters. Thank you all for being at, you know, at the forefront of R&D, and thank you for coming here today to share your thoughts with everyone. Really appreciate it.

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