People Managing People

Paula Goldman, Salesforce's Chief Ethical and Humane Use Officer, argues that starting an AI strategy with 'what can we automate?' only makes the existing workplace run faster, not better. She and David Rice explore the hidden value of workplace friction, why employees need a seat at the table when work is redesigned, and the danger of measuring AI success exclusively through efficiency: saving time is one thing, preserving the judgment, relationships, and expertise that make an organization effective is another. For consultants: a direct, senior-level articulation of why AI adoption is an organization design problem with participation at its core.

JLL is well past asking what an AI agent should do, with agents running across facilities management, brand communications and corporate functions. Carlin Power, its Global VP of AI, tells David Rice that the hard problems are not technical, they are proving value, building trust and making sure a tool solves an actual business problem instead of becoming an expensive corporate science project. Recorded at AI4 in Las Vegas, the episode is the counterweight to agentic hype: deployment is a management question before it is a technology one.

Recorded live at the AI4 conference, David Rice and Columbia's Dr. Lilian Ajayi Ore ask whether companies are gaining efficiency while quietly weakening their people's ability to think: cognitive debt, skill decay, why seats and login metrics say little about capability, and the loss of institutional knowledge when organizations replace people instead of reskilling them. For consultants: pairs directly with the radar's AI-literacy findings, AI transformation as a talent priority, not a technology one.

Recorded live at the AI4 conference in Las Vegas, David Rice talks with Dr. Jana Brown, CHRO at eHealth, about what happens when organizations optimize so aggressively for today's efficiency that they stop building tomorrow's capability. They cover shrinking entry-level pipelines, why HR needs 'transformation fluency' rather than technical expertise alone, what separates useful AI initiatives from expensive corporate hobbies, and why the technology itself is rarely what sinks an AI project. For consultants: the capability-versus-efficiency tradeoff is a sharp diagnostic question to put in front of AI-eager executives.

Motivosity's Jesse Dowdle and Dano Gillette make the case for 'appreciation intelligence': using AI to remove administrative friction without automating the human moments that make recognition meaningful. The opportunity is not an AI-generated thank-you note but a richer picture of employees, signals surfaced before problems become crises, and data turned into useful action, with one firm line: AI can recommend, filter, moderate, and nudge, humans still own the judgment. For consultants: 'AI recommends, humans judge' is a clean governance principle to carry into people-tech work.

Seema Bhansali calls it the silence tax: the hidden cost companies pay when their environments make self-censorship the safer option, losing ideas, warnings, customer knowledge, and process improvements that never make it into the room. With David Rice she unpacks why 'speak up' advice misses the real problem, since employee voice is shaped by systems, social risk, and management behavior, and why communication should be treated as an operational capability tied to performance, especially as companies adopt AI. For consultants: reading silence as a system property rather than an individual courage deficit is exactly how a self-management diagnostic should work.

Zapier's Chief People and AI Transformation Officer Brandon Sammut argues AI transformation acts like an organizational X-ray: the companies getting real value are not the ones buying the most tools or burning the most tokens, but the ones that know what they are trying to accomplish and which problems are worth solving. He and David Rice cover experimentation that survives contact with actual workloads, why adoption eventually needs to give way to impact, and why the best employers may be defined by how much more capable people become while working there. For consultants: 'AI ROI starts with organizational clarity' is a ready-made opening argument for diagnostic work before tooling.

Dr. Shindale Seale argues that HR speaking the language of the business is not self-defense but leadership: disengagement, poor management, weak culture, and badly handled transformation all carry measurable financial costs that belong in executive decision-making. She and David Rice unpack the 'disengagement tax,' why engagement metrics without business impact become dashboard theater, the impossible job organizations have created for managers, and why AI tends to amplify the culture it lands in. For consultants: 'AI amplifies the culture it lands in' is a one-line case for fixing the operating culture before the tooling.