The High-Cost Claim Your Benefits Strategy Isn’t Ready For
BY Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza May 07, 2026A new category of pharmaceutical therapy is proving revolutionary for diseases and conditions once thought to be untreatable or inevitably fatal. The downside is their cost, which is bad news for employers and workers already shouldering rising healthcare costs.Some providers are warning that new and novel life-saving treatments could threaten the relative stability of that growth, creating huge volatility for self-insured employers. This was the topic of discussion during a From Day One webinar on the high-cost claim many benefits leaders aren’t ready for: cell and gene therapy. Cell and gene therapy, or CGT, targets disease at the cellular level by introducing new, healthy cells to replace damaged ones. Many cell and gene therapies target conditions once considered hard to treat or even incurable, like sickle cell disease or the brain cancer glioblastoma. Many such therapies are still considered investigational.It’s often cost-prohibitive for patients to pay for these treatments. “They’re new and they’re incredibly expensive,” said Will Shrank, MD, the CEO of Aradigm, a cell and gene therapy carveout provider. “There’s a huge amount of research that goes into designing, developing, and bringing these therapies to market. They’re often used to treat a very, very small number of patients for very rare conditions.” Caitlin Hohman, PharmD, a clinical pharmacist at Quantum Health, spoke during the webinar (company photo)Conversations about CGT are often driven by sticker shock, he says. Cell and gene therapies are a high cost category for self-funded employers, and they can create unpredictable spending spikes, says Caitlin Hohman, a clinical pharmacist at Quantum Health, a healthcare navigation firm partners with Aradigm to provide CGT coverage through employers. Their data shows that a single member can potentially trigger a $4 million claim, which makes it tough, if not impossible, to budget and plan for therapies like these. Plus, she said, “there’s not a pre-existing or industry standard on rates for these drugs.”Claims are often subject to single-case negotiation with no benchmark for what an employer pays. There’s also little infrastructure for post-treatment monitoring, which makes it hard to track the outcomes for patients. Additionally, many CGTs get accelerated approval, and durability is still being studied.“Put all these factors together,” said Hohman, “and you’re creating such a uniquely unpredictable financial landscape for self-insured employers, specifically.”There’s year-over-year volatility too, with per member per month costs fluctuating significantly over time. And it’s not the result of a single outlier, Hohman says. “Over the last five years, we’ve had employers show up consistently across multiple years with cell and gene therapy claims, which tells us this is an ongoing exposure.” Employers of all sizes are feeling the impact. While small companies are disproportionately affected, even large employers are seeing $1 million to $2 million per member per month cost, according to Quantum Health data.Shrank said Aradigm is able to mitigate some of these costs thanks to the volume of patients they manage. They charge employers a monthly premium, where risk is capped, pooling those funds into a larger pool to ensure price stability. Employers pay nothing beyond those premiums.By building a national network of providers, Aradigm guarantees them more volume, and in return, they get discounts from manufacturers, in some cases based on patient outcome, which means some dollars return to the pool when treatments aren’t successful. While Aradigm works behind the scenes, Quantum is a single point of contact for patients, which enables the company to form what Shrank and Hohman describe as a “bear hug” around the patient. “From an operational perspective,” said Hohman, “there is such an identified need in this space to support patients and providers with end-to-end coordination, before, during and after administration of these drugs.”Care navigation is critical, Hohman says. “Employers are coming to us for help navigating applicable benefits and putting the pieces of the puzzle together—because there are so many pieces out there.”Editor’s note: From Day One thanks our partner, Quantum Health, for sponsoring this webinar. Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is an independent journalist and From Day One contributing editor who writes about business and the world of work. Her work has appeared in the Economist, the BBC, The Washington Post, Inc., and Business Insider, among others. She is the recipient of a Virginia Press Association award for business and financial journalism. She is the host of How to Be Anything, the podcast about people with unusual jobs.(Photo by metamorworks/iStock)
What's Going On? How You'll Finally Solve the Age-Old Marketing Question in 2026
BY Paul Kersey May 07, 2026AI has turned marketing into a high-speed content machine. But as the volume of AI-created content explodes, marketers face a new challenge: standing out while maintaining quality, consistency, and a recognizable brand voice.George Huff, CEO of Opal, suggests that marketing leaders fight fire with fire, harnessing specialized computer systems and AI to track output and guide creative professionals. He spoke during a thought leadership spotlight at From Day One’s Silicon Valley marketing conference, sharing his approach to a software suite tailored for marketers, one that enables collaboration and streamlines the organization of content throughout the production process.Huff had long been fascinated by marketing, especially the creation and growth of brands. As a young consultant in Portland, Oregon, in 2012, he had a front-row seat as Nike expanded its footprint in athletic shoes and apparel. One moment that stuck with him was how difficult it was for Nike executives to monitor the output of their large marketing team. As both sponsor and outfitter, Nike was deeply involved in sporting events around the world, yet leaders often struggled to see what their teams were actually producing for those events.That disconnect stood out at a company that otherwise excelled at building and protecting its brand. Recognizing the challenge ultimately led Huff to start Opal, a company focused on helping organizations better manage and coordinate marketing teams and their work.George Huff, CEO of Opal, led the session“We’re almost like anthropologists of marketing teams and marketing workflows,” he said. What the team at Opal has found is that there are serious structural impediments that make marketing teams difficult to manage. The creative people who generate the content tend to work as individuals, and the system has to allow them freedom, he says.But assembling and organizing the material they generate, including text, images, audio, and video, requires a significant amount of time and labor. Information has to be compiled into memos or slide decks. It does not happen automatically. It then has to move up and down a multilevel corporate structure. Meetings can be lengthy, and there are often moments of panic when things go wrong and executives need to be quickly brought up to speed on content they are not familiar with.All of this results in what Huff calls “friction.” The process is laborious, and each level of bureaucracy creates room for misunderstanding. Executives can’t always get a quick response if they want to know what content is being created for a key event. And if they can’t see the material quickly, they can’t respond quickly to problems and shape the content so it fits the company’s marketing strategy.Things will likely get worse before they get better. This year, roughly half of marketing content will be AI-generated, says Huff. Much of it risks turning into slop: images of people with extra fingers, or copy that feels choppy and mechanical. Even if teams are sharp-eyed enough to catch the obvious AI-generated mistakes, the sheer volume of content will make tracking, reviewing, and evaluating everything far more time-consuming than it is today.Opal’s vision is to make content generation a more “multiplayer mode” process, using software that encourages collaboration while simplifying the collection and distillation of content into formats that are easy to review, says Huff. Its platform helps teams organize campaigns and events, making it easier for managers to identify and evaluate content as creative staff collaborate.By streamlining coordination and oversight, the goal is to help executives ensure that marketing output stays aligned with a company’s brand and overall strategy. “We believe that alignment should be a low friction activity” Huff said, as opposed to fire drills. Huff’s goal is to make much of the alignment work automatic, so executives, managers, and content creators can focus on delivering a great experience for customers.Editor’s note: From Day One thanks our partner, Opal, for sponsoring this thought leadership spotlight. Paul Kersey is a former attorney and freelance writer who has covered events for Bloomberg News and other outlets. Paul is based in Chicago, IL.(Photos by Josh Larson for From Day One)
Cutting Through the Noise With Storytelling That Drives Impact
BY Katie Chambers May 06, 2026How much for your Instagram feed, or worse, your email inbox, is filled with AI slop right now? “As our feeds fill up with more mediocre content, and as we’re faced with this information overload, we really need to ensure that our marketing teams are creating messaging that is cutting through,” said Claire Reilly, journalist and moderator of a panel discussion at From Day One’s Silicon Valley marketing conference.In the age of information overload, compelling storytelling can set a brand apart from the barrage of mediocre content. How can marketing teams craft content that truly engages when audience attention is scattered and fickle? Panelists explored this question and more. Unnikrishnan (Unni) KP, SVP, marketing, Americas at Palo Alto Networks, jokes that B2B marketing can easily slump from “business to business” to “business to boring,” depending on the storytelling. “At the end of the day, you’re reaching out to an audience who’s a human being, they are a consumer.” KP says explaining the “nuts and bolts” of a product is important too, but you first “need to connect with the audience and try to see how it attaches to what that person stands for.”Nizzi Karai Renaud, chief brand officer at Zazzle, faces a different challenge: reaching both designers who take their art seriously but also want to make money, and consumers, all who come to the website for a wide range of products and solutions with wildly different tones tied to their personal self-expression. “That’s the core tension in the storytelling,” she said. “The overlap happens at identity,” whether a consumer is buying a product for themselves or someone else. “The product for us is the artifact, but the story underneath is that recognition and belonging is what unites all of this together, that humanity piece.”Panelists shared insights on the topic, "Creative, Results-Oriented Storytelling That Connects"To accomplish this in brand storytelling, Zazzle relies on both user-generated content (UGC) as well as in-house created marketing, all tied back to the humans behind the interactions. “We used to say, ‘Zazzle has millions of designs.’ But what converts much better is saying, ‘Your sister is impossible to shop for—until she isn’t.’ Our technique is to channel the customer’s inner monologue.”Meanwhile, AI is revolutionizing how storytelling reaches customers, as online searching shifts from prioritizing SEO to AEO or GEO instead. “How are you changing your strategy as we go from one of straight clicks to citations and building yourself as an authority in search?” Reilly said. Vidhya Srinivasan, chief marketing officer at Prophix, and her team have been staying ahead of the curve. “Earned media has become very, very important,” she said, citing UGC as one pathway in. “The brand authority is going to go back to the very basics: What are the backlinks? Who are the brands? How are you surfacing?” With AEO and GEO, the priority is now search phrases rather than search words. And KP notes that the bigger challenge will be ensuring that your results land as those “most validated” by AI. Bala Desikamani, VP of marketing at Temenos, offers the three “superpowers” of AI as it impacts marketing: processing massive volumes of data, creating personalized content at scale, and refining analytics to improve forecasting.AI can take that data and help “to triangulate your target and focus on anything that you do,” Desikamani said. “It also gives very useful insight into which type of audience is in [your] market, looking for solutions that you can leverage, and then gives you attributes that help you build stories that resonate to that market set.” AI can provide extremely detailed attributes for the ideal client profile and help dig down to different geographic regions or specific products within a company. It can also help with A/B testing in social media and copywriting. With AI becoming increasingly powerful, it is also inspiring the same fear in workers in all departments from marketing to HR to legal: Will my job be replaced? “AI [is] spewing out 100 creative ideas to everybody and anybody can democratize [them],” Desikamani said. “If anybody can come up with a bunch of creative, how do you create that differentiation? And that is why the human element still comes in,” he said. “Collectively in this room we have so much more intuition than all of AI across the world can ever possess. That intuition is your superpower as human beings. Leverage that intuition, but leverage AI for what it can do, which is to do the grunt work, but eventually you make the decisions.”AI is allowing brands to produce masses of content quickly and cheaply, but that doesn’t mean it’s all high quality, Reilly says, and cynical consumers are getting wary. KP says that working with AI should be similar to the learning process of children—meaning it takes time, practice, and challenge, not just accepting the first answer to your first prompt to an LLM.Srinivasan sees the value of using LLM’s or other creative platforms to create copy, social media posts, and even full webinars. But humans are still needed to “retain the authenticity of the brand. My team uses Claude every day, and every PowerPoint looks the same. There are things that become templatized and boring.”Using AI to increase productivity is fine, Renaud says, “but that final touch, that creativity, it can’t do it yet, and I’m not sure it will get there.” She notes that science has proven consumers make decisions based on their salience or their “gut,” and their gut is often put off by AI, or even human-created content that they wrongly suspect is AI. “That gut check has to exist with humans.”AI still cannot replicate the true authenticity of humans. “Do whatever scientific process you follow to ensure authenticity of your stories and messages,” Desikamani said. “The lines are blurred now between sales and marketing. The biggest barometer of your actual engagement in terms of the quality of your funnel is your conversations and the feedback that comes from sales. Keep it authentic and measure it through the influence that marketing exerts on the actual funnel.”Katie Chambers is a freelance writer and award-winning communications executive with a lifelong commitment to supporting artists and advocating for inclusion. Her work has been seen in HuffPost, Top Think, and several printed essay collections, and she has appeared on Cheddar News, iWomanTV, On New Jersey, and CBS New York.(Photos by Josh Larson for From Day One)
Solving Before Sourcing: A Smarter Model for Executive Hiring
BY Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza May 05, 2026The best hires often come from unexpected places. This might be most surprising at the executive level.A few years ago, Bert Hensley, the CEO of executive search firm Morgan Samuels Company, was working with a young and newly installed head of a Fortune 500 healthcare company. Because of his age, he wanted to pack the C-suite with highly experienced leaders, and the board insisted they come from within the industry.But the goals they set for the role—mostly to do with operational excellence—weren’t reflected among healthcare leaders at the time. Hensley recommended they look outside the field at people with experience working in highly regulated industries, managing huge, cybersecurity risks, and handling billions of transactions per day. The new hire, who came from telecom, was such a success that a few months later, the CEO told Hensley that “every board member swears it was their idea to look outside the industry.”“There’s an illusion that prior experience is a proxy to future success,” said Sandy Gould, the chief people officer at LGBTQ advocacy organization GLAAD, who joined Hensley for a From Day One webinar about better strategies for executive sourcing. Such a limited view creates tunnel vision that excludes some of the most capable and adept candidates. Bert Hensley, CEO and chairman of Morgan Samuels, pictured, spoke with moderator Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza during the virtual session (company photo)When recruiting for the C-suite, or at any level of an organization, you’re seldom looking for a resume, “you’re looking for their ability to solve a certain set of challenges with certain variables in play that are inherently different at every organization,” Gould said. “It’s about adaptability and capability.”The two met decades ago when Hensley was hired to help recruit for high-level positions at the financial institution where Gould was working at the time. The company wanted to change the way it had been conducting executive search, moving away from traditional, narrowly focused ways of recruiting and toward building deeper, long-term relationships with talented leaders of all backgrounds.Hensley’s strategy was new from the word go. Gould described previous search partners who would show up to the meeting with their minds made up about who should fill the role and what their goals should be. “I’m like, ‘Wait, how do you know? Are you psychic?’” he said with a chuckle. “Having somebody come in with curiosity is important.” Hensley arrived eager to learn about the organization. “It takes a lot of effort up front to really define the problem you want an executive to solve,” said Hensley. While it’s important to identify the frustrations with whoever previously held the role, the focus should be on future results: What does this person have to get done in the next 24 months? In what market(s) will they work? How many deals do they need to make? Of what size?Company culture matters too. That is, an honest, clear-eyed view of company culture. To do the job well, new executives must be privy to the good and bad parts of culture, and that means the current leaders need to face the problems too. Every company has them. Does one department tend to clash with another? Are there deep-running office politics? Identify it, talk about it.One of the most common traps of traditional executive search is that “almost all clients confuse confidence with competence, but there’s zero correlation,” Hensley said. “Zero.” In fact, Gould and Hensley said, humility and willingness to say I don’t know are marks of the best leaders. And you can ask for specifics. In fact, you should. “You need to go deep into granular details and examples after you give principles about how you work,” Gould said. “A lot of people stay at a high level, which is not satisfying or helpful.”It’s not unlike ordinary behavioral interviewing. Gould suggested this exercise: “Talk about a situation where there was a tremendous amount of change going on. How did you adapt and respond to it? What part did you contribute to driving change?” And if you’re looking for a leader who’s not afraid to change the way things are done: “What permission did you have? What did you do when people opposed you? How did you convince them?”“What we have found through thousands and thousands of searches is that candidates who do the best are really into the details, even if they’re the CEO,” said Hensley. They can talk about what they were doing a decade ago. They’re ready to talk about mistakes they made and what they learned. “Nobody ever sets a perfect plan. None of us.”Hensley has found a correlation between executives who can work in the details and those who are inspiring leaders. Those with command and control personalities, who want to preside over teams rather than lead them, tend to resist dealing with the small stuff and are unwilling to learn.Gould’s mindset is that “learning is always right, knowing is always wrong.” Because learning means you remain curious. And if you want to know who’s curious, you have to spend time with them. “Some of our absolute best placements,” Hensley said, “are people whom we took the time to really get to know.”Editor’s note: From Day One thanks our partner, Morgan Samuels Company, for sponsoring this webinar. Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is an independent journalist and From Day One contributing editor who writes about business and the world of work. Her work has appeared in the Economist, the BBC, The Washington Post, Inc., and Business Insider, among others. She is the recipient of a Virginia Press Association award for business and financial journalism. She is the host of How to Be Anything, the podcast about people with unusual jobs.(Photo by mesh cube/iStock)
AI in Marketing: Scaling Personalization Without Losing the Human Touch
BY Ade Akin May 04, 2026While other brands were racing to automate every email subject line, blog post, and social media caption during the height of the generative AI boom, Unilever, Vaseline’s parent company, took a different approach.Instead of using AI to accelerate the launch of new products, Unilever used it to listen to consumers, which led to an unexpected discovery that their base didn’t need a new product. Instead, they needed validation, and sometimes correction, on how they were using old products. These insights led to the “Vaseline Verified” campaign, an initiative that deferred a costly R&D rollout in favor of celebrating consumer “hacks.” The campaign went on to win 11 Cannes Lions awards, including the Titanium Grand Prix.This story, shared by Heather Bollinger, the chief revenue officer at Vurvey Labs, set the tone for a panel discussion focused on AI’s optimal role in marketing at From Day One’s Silicon Valley marketing conference. The conversation, moderated by Rosalie Chan, a senior tech editor at Business Insider, made one point clear: the most effective AI strategies focus on reimagining workflows and breaking down silos between data, compliance, and content—not replacing humans.The Augmentation MindsetThe panelists drew a sharp distinction between using AI to scale processes and using it to improve human capability. James Kessinger, the group VP of marketing at SolarWinds, says his team leverages AI agents for heavy data lifting, scraping funnel metrics from initial click to closed revenue, but remains cautious about removing the human touch in communications aimed at technical buyers.“You’ve got to humanize that, at least in our world, talking to engineers,” Kessinger said. “You’ve got to be able to give them relevance of somebody who’s actually doing this job. It’s hard sometimes for AI to capture that essence.” Panelists spoke about "AI in Marketing: Scaling Personalization Without Losing the Human Touch"AI serves as an editor for brand voice and trademark compliance at SolarWinds, freeing content marketers from tasks such as proofreading so they can focus on more important aspects of content, such as fluency and tone.Henrique Loyola, head of content & discovery for Play Games Go-To-Market, Google, echoed the theme of augmentation, describing AI as an enhancer. “If a task would take you a few hours to do, we think AI can have it done in a few minutes,” Loyola said. He highlights the use of AI to tag game metadata not just by genre, like “action” or “RPG,” but by emotional and behavioral traits like “engaging” or “long play session,” allowing Gemini to organize the Play Store in ways human curators never could, given how time-consuming it would be. Redefining Compliance and Generative SEOThe conversation shifted to a growing tension in the marketing industry: the rise of “no AI” disclaimers in consumer advertising versus the wholesale adoption of AI in B2B content creation. Kumar Rathnam, the SVP and head of global products, digital, sales & marketing solutions, at Dun & Bradstreet, says his employer has a pragmatic approach to AI adoption. “In B2B marketing, anything that is not human, we are absolutely fine,” Rathnam said, adding that the company draws the line only at synthetic human imagery and video. “The disclaimer doesn’t have to be there, as long as there are no humans involved.”However, the influx of AI-generated content is forcing a complete overhaul of how marketers approach search engine optimization (SEO). Rathnam described a shift from keyword stuffing practices to a “question and answer” architecture that’s designed specifically for AI crawlers and chatbots. “Agents are looking for people to answer questions fast,” he said. This means prioritizing FAQ structures and comparative content that allows large language models to easily cite and synthesize a brand’s authority.Kessinger says the way AI algorithms approach source citations is now evolving. While Reddit once dominated AI summaries, platforms like G2 are gaining ground because they offer verified, bounded audiences. “They get a higher citation because it’s a bound audience. We know who they are,” Kessinger added.Vibe Coding for MarketersA surprising trend emerged when the panel addressed the democratization of software development. The panelists admitted to embracing “vibe coding,” the practice of using natural language prompts to spin up quick, disposable software tools, to solve marketing bottlenecks.Loyola described using vibe-coded solutions for short-term curation problems, such as suppressing game titles related to sensitive global events. “It’s easier to get to a product team with a new feature you need if you have something ready,” Loyola said. “You can just bring them a product instead of 15 pages of technical requests.” Rathnam notes a similar phenomenon, where marketing operations teams build their own agents to analyze campaign data in real-time, bypassing lengthy customer relationship management change processes to prove a concept before scaling it.Yet, with this new power comes a warning about AI’s tendency to please its user. “AI has a bias towards completing the task as quickly as possible. It wants you to say, ‘Great, thank you,’” Loyola said. “It may start to hallucinate or lie just to get it across the finish line. You have to trust it, but you have to check.”The Human at the CoreThe panel’s advice for marketing leaders is to prioritize data integrity and human judgment over loyalty to any platform. Rathnam urges to avoid locking into monolithic “end-to-end” AI platforms that may be obsolete within a year. Instead, he advises focusing on the underlying data pipeline and feedback loops. “Get your data story right,” he said. “Anything you do around data, the accuracy, the coverage, the completeness, is going to help anything that changes in the future.”For Bollinger, the Vaseline story serves as a perfect metaphor for the current moment. Artificial intelligence is powerful enough to simulate human behavior, but its greatest ROI comes from understanding actual humans. “Don’t be afraid,” Bollinger said. “Dive in. There are so many opportunities to augment your teams, but the human has to be at the core of that.”Ade Akin covers artificial intelligence, workplace wellness, HR trends, and digital health solutions.(Photos by Josh Larson for From Day One)
Brand Worlds Are the Next Marketing Frontier
BY Grace Turney April 29, 2026Chad Reynolds spent 25 years traveling the world to understand consumers. He interviewed people in their homes, in markets, in unfamiliar cities, only to return and watch those hard-won insights get second-guessed in a conference room. The problem was never the ideas; it was the room itself.“I always dreaded entering this room,” Reynolds recalled, describing the classic focus group setup. “It wasn’t the people, I love people. It was just, they had no real context for what we were trying to solve. It was luck of the draw.”That frustration became the foundation for Vurvey Labs, the AI company Reynolds founded and now leads as CEO. During a thought leadership spotlight at From Day One’s Silicon Valley marketing conference, Reynolds laid out a sweeping vision for what he calls “people models,” or AI systems built not from scraped internet data, but from millions of real human voices, emotions, and behaviors. His argument: companies that keep treating AI as a productivity tool are missing the bigger opportunity entirely.Real, Synthetic, and SurrealReynolds frames the current AI landscape as operating across two modes: the “real” world, where human beings live, feel, and act irrationally, and the “synthetic” world, where AI agents and simulated environments do what they’re programmed to do. Most companies, he says, are stuck at one pole or the other.The more interesting territory, he says, lies between them—a space he calls “surreal.” Borrowing from the artistic movement that sought to surface unconscious, dreamlike states, Reynolds uses the term to describe a mode of thinking and building where human experience and artificial intelligence genuinely synthesize.Chad Reynolds, CEO & Founder of Vurvey Labs, led the thought leadership spotlight in Silicon Valley “Surrealism actually started as a writing movement, not painting,” he said. “When you think about how we experience the world in different ways, to truly take advantage of what AI can do, you have to live in that surreal space, because that’s where all the messy stuff happens. Where a consumer likes something one minute, and completely changes their mind the next.”Most AI systems, Reynolds says, are optimized for language but not for people. Large language models are trained on internet data that skews toward the average, producing what he calls “the mean,” the top of the bell curve. “That’s great,” he said, “but I want the edges. I want the whole bell curve. That’s where the gold lives—in the people who see the world differently.”Building a Haystack of NeedlesVurvey Labs takes a different architectural approach. The company, whose name is short for “video survey,” holds a patent on a video-based survey method that pushes questions to the phones and devices of more than 3 million people around the world. Their responses, including not just text but also video and emotional expression, feed into what Reynolds calls a “people model” rather than a conventional language model.From that foundation, the platform generates synthetic consumer populations, not single AI personas, but thousands of distinct individuals drawn from real behavioral and contextual data. The goal is to move consumer insight beyond the familiar archetype of “Jane,” a persona trapped in a PowerPoint deck, and into something dynamic.“What if Jane could talk back?” Reynolds said. “What if it wasn’t just Jane, but thousands of other Janes with all different types of lived experience, from all over the world, who could give you feedback?”The platform is already in use at scale. Unilever, an early adopter, has rolled it out across more than 30 markets and all major categories—generating AI populations of consumers for brands like Dove and Hellmann’s, says Reynolds. Rather than restricting consumer insights to research teams, the approach lets product, marketing, and innovation staff across the company test and develop ideas directly with simulated consumer segments.“We always talk about being consumer-centered or consumer-obsessed,” Reynolds said. “This has been an amazing way for companies to have their senior leaders say: here is the consumer. We’re distributing them to everybody in the company.”Focusing on Audience Specificity and PreferencesOne of the more striking applications Reynolds shared was what Vurvey Labs calls the “neuroverse,” a population of neurodivergent consumers built from recruited participants across the autism spectrum, with ADHD, dyslexia, and other conditions, including non-verbal individuals and those who contributed via sign language.The motivation, Reynolds says, goes beyond inclusion as a value. More than 53% of Gen Z identify as neurodivergent, he noted. For any brand targeting that generation, ignoring the neurodivergent population means missing roughly half the audience, and potentially designing communications that simply don’t land.During this past year’s Super Bowl, Vurvey Labs ran the entire ad lineup through the neuroverse population in parallel with the general public. The results diverged significantly. The Budweiser commercial ranked first in USA Today’s Ad Meter among the general audience. Among the neurodivergent population, it scored far lower. The gap, Reynolds says, is precisely the kind of signal that traditional focus groups and even most AI tools would never surface.“It wasn’t to critique the ad,” he said. “It’s just to understand, as you’re trying to design stories, how do you actually engage the entire audience? You don’t need to be relevant for everyone, but you should understand how to be more accessible and how to deliver a message that lands.”The same logic drives other niche populations the company has built, including a database of nearly 47,000 contractors for a major home improvement retailer, enabling that company to test concepts, loyalty programs, and product ideas with a hard-to-reach audience at scale and in real time. Simulation as Standard PracticeReynolds predicts that within three to six months, the word “simulation” will become ubiquitous in business conversations—a shift as significant as when “cloud” or “platform” entered the mainstream lexicon. The analogy he reaches for is Sim City: a world you build, control, and test inside before committing to it in the real one.“Rather than the rest of the world having access to it, you and your team have access to it,” he said. “You can test ideas. You can build things. You can explore the future.”He was careful to frame the technology not as a replacement for human research, but as a complement to it. Vurvey Labs runs ongoing validation studies, comparing what its populations surface against findings from interviews with actual humans. What has surprised even Reynolds’ team is that the AI populations sometimes raise themes that humans don’t explicitly name – but immediately confirm when those themes are reflected back to them.“They just didn’t want to talk about them,” he said. “So what can we learn by understanding what’s in the subtext of what our consumers are saying? Can we actually increase what we’re discovering?”The design school metaphor Reynolds keeps returning to captures the spirit of what he’s building: a system where you put your idea on the wall and let a diverse, critical audience tear it apart, not to discourage creation, but to sharpen it. The difference is that the audience now numbers in the thousands, spans the globe, and is available at any hour.“For us to get somewhere new,” Reynolds said, “we need people models to exist. It’s less about a tool, and more like entire worlds we’re building.”Editor’s note: From Day One thanks our partner, Vurvey Labs, for sponsoring this thought leadership spotlight. Grace Turney is a St. Louis-based writer, artist, and former librarian. See more of her work at graceturney17.wixsite.com/mysite.(Photos by Josh Larson for From Day One)
Reshaping the Workforce: How AI and HR Technology Change How Things Get Done
BY Katie Chambers April 28, 2026“What’s fundamentally changing in how work gets done in your organization because of AI?” asked moderator Subadhra Sriram, founder and host of Workforce Observer. The answer? Well, almost everything. Leaders explored this topic during an executive panel discussion at From Day One’s Silicon Valley conference, moderated by Sriram. One of the most marked differences AI has made in the workplace already comes down to scale. “Every individual’s impact has changed a lot. So what one person could do before, it just means something very different with all the tools that we have now,” said Maggie Zhu, people partner at Anthropic. The tools allow employees to compound their work so that the pace of output is ever-increasing.Samanntha DuBridge, SVP, chief talent officer a t HPE, says AI isn’t necessarily replacing work, but instead allowing workers to focus their attention in new ways. “It’s an exciting time to take some of the more mundane tasks kind of out of the way, and think about data and what you want to spend your time on a little bit differently,” she said. The big changes come with mixed emotions, says Dutta Satadip, chief business operations officer at Pebl, “It’s this interesting balance of excitement and fear,” he said. LLM’s, large language models, are changing workflows for so many people in the office, not just with writing but with coding. “Whatever is in your head is going into AI, into code, and you’re seeing the application,” said Allan Brown, VP of total rewards at Snowflake. “Excel is going to be a thing of the past for presenting something to a senior leader.”Panelists spoke about "Reshaping the Workforce: How AI and HR Technology Change How Things Get Done"This is a good way to frame AI adoption for people who might be afraid of it, says Seema Daryanani, people and culture partner, Gemini App, Google DeepMind. “It will cut down these manual tasks so that you can spend more time innovating and creating,” she said. Fortunately, employees are generally not yet in danger of being replaced. “The efficiencies are being shared by both employees and the company,” Brown said. “The company gets more productivity, but the people are having work-life balance. You start reducing the amount of work you can do, and you’re suddenly going to find yourself a little bit of time.” Communications strategies promoting AI adoption can be built around this notion, encouraging employees to think about their mental health and how they would best like to use their time, both at work and at home. The Future of HR For HR professionals in particular, AI is helping them save time, especially when it comes to attaining, sorting, and delivering reports on data. “We do our annual voice of the workforce survey, and it used to [be] you’d get the summary data pretty quickly, but all the sentiment would take a really long time. [With AI], it’s the same day,” DuBridge said. “You can get things [instantly] that would take a team of people to review, analyze, [and] categorize a couple months.”Daryanani finds that AI handles the “how” of the presentation, the layout and structure, so we can focus on the “so what”: the deep-dive analysis and the story the data is telling us. For a practical example of how AI technology can ease the HR process, Brown shares how his organization used AI agents to answer questions about a new payroll system. “We’ve got 35 locations all over the world. The [number] of questions that were probably going to come in was insane. Somebody came up with the idea: let’s take all these payroll documents and policies, and the health benefit documents, put them all into Notebook LM, and they created a little AI agent that employees could just ask their questions,” he said. “And it answered all the questions. It eliminated that work. Those questions didn’t even come in.”Contrary to popular belief, AI is actually managing to make the hiring process more personalized, DuBridge says, as tools and systems take over a lot of the boring, menial back-and-forth of reviewing resumes and scheduling interviews. “It’s more about building that relationship with the applicant, trying to find out more about them, sharing more about the company, and finding that right fit in the right team,” she said. “It’s more about that person in that role, and it’s less about, ‘Are you available at three o'clock on Friday?’”With AI causing rapid changes across all aspects of the workforce, HR needs to keep adaptability, upskilling, and growth in mind when hiring. “What you thought you were hiring for six months ago could be different from what you’re hiring for now,” Zhu said. “Thinking about what their role might be today and how it might evolve is changing how we’re thinking about hiring in general. [It] needs to be an active conversation.” That means employers may start to value foundational abilities above all else, Satadip says. These include “core problem solving, general cognitive ability, curiosity, he said “because those will persist regardless.” Willingness to experiment is also key. No matter the changes to come, people can, and should, always be prioritized. “I think it’s really important to remember that your organization is composed of people and to be human first,” Zhu said “It comes down to values—you have to keep those values at the forefront.”Katie Chambers is a freelance writer and award-winning communications executive with a lifelong commitment to supporting artists and advocating for inclusion. Her work has been seen in HuffPost, Top Think, and several printed essay collections, and she has appeared on Cheddar News, iWomanTV, On New Jersey, and CBS New York.(Photos by Josh Larson for From Day One)
Navigating Superintelligence at Work: The Role of Leadership, Trust, and Organizational Readiness
BY Grace Turney April 28, 2026At her dentist’s office not long ago, Sandy Carter found herself in a surprisingly futuristic conversation—not with a doctor, but with a dental hygienist who was explaining how AI was creating a digital twin of Carter’s teeth. The hygienist, eager to keep up with the technology that had entered her workplace, had enrolled in a community college course so she could answer questions from curious patients.For Carter, it was a perfect illustration of the moment we’re in. AI isn’t arriving; it’s already embedded in the everyday tasks of ordinary workplaces, from dental chairs to marketing departments to customer service queues. The question isn’t whether to engage with it, but how to lead people through it.Carter, chief business officer at Unstoppable Domains and author of AI First, Human Always: Embracing a New Mindset for the Era of Superintelligence, shared that conviction, and a great deal of hard-won practical wisdom, during a fireside chat at From Day One’s Silicon Valley conference. In conversation with Steve Koepp, editor in chief and co-founder of From Day One, Carter explored AI adoption, organizational change, and the role of leadership in the AI-era. A Long View on a Fast-Moving TechnologyCarter has been working with AI since 2013, well before the concept became popular and well-known. She was part of the IBM team that deployed AI for Jeopardy! and later helped produce what she calls the first AI-generated cookbook, a collaboration with the Culinary Institute that she describes as an early glimpse of generative AI. “It was kind of like the first taste of Gen AI coming way long ago,” she said.That long view shapes her perspective on the current moment, which she described in her book using a chapter titled “Exponential Baby.” Change is accelerating, she acknowledged, but she’s skeptical of the anxiety it produces. To put the pace of adoption in context, she cited a chart tracking AI usage across millions of people. What it shows surprised even her: roughly 80% of people haven’t used AI at all. About 15% have tried it, but only the free version. Just a small fraction (around 2.5%) have used paid tools that allow them to actually build with AI. And the share developing agents, the most sophisticated form of AI deployment, is barely 1%.Carter signed copies of her book AI First, Human Always for session attendees Her point wasn’t to minimize the urgency, but to dispel the panic. “You’re not behind,” she said. “Everybody doesn’t have the pink cup today.” She was referring to her daughter’s conviction that all her classmates owned a coveted limited-edition Stanley Cup, until Carter called around and discovered that nobody actually had one. “The same thing applies here.”The Trust GapThat doesn’t mean AI adoption is going smoothly. One of the most significant obstacles Carter identified is what she calls the trust gap: a disconnect between how executives perceive AI’s capabilities and how employees experience them on the ground.She pointed to forthcoming research from WalkMe, recently acquired by SAP, which found a 4x trust gap between executives and employees in their confidence around AI. Carter illustrated the problem with a story. She was invited to review an AI dashboard at a Fortune 50 company. The executives walked her through it, everything was green. After they left the room, she turned to the team leads. “I said, ‘Really surprised that your dashboard was all green. I’ve never seen an all green AI dashboard before.’” The team leads confirmed her suspicion. Workarounds had been built; manual processes had been quietly substituted; but the dashboard continued to reflect optimistic metrics. The contrast she offered is Mercedes-Benz, where senior leaders have developed their own agents and brought employees across the entire organization, from assistants to car painters, into rooms together to evaluate where AI works and where it doesn’t. “That’s the best practice that we should be looking at,” Carter said.Agents as TeammatesAt Unstoppable Domains, Carter has put her philosophy into practice. Rather than deploying AI as a tool or using it as cover for layoffs, her team has built a structure in which AI agents function as named teammates, reporting to human managers in an expanded org chart.Inspired by Alice in Wonderland, the team’s 12 agents (including the Red Queen, who handles campaign analysis, and the Mad Hatter, who serves as a brainstorming engine) were chosen collectively, not handed down from the executive suite. The agents report to people managers, and the team has grown its roster from 12 to 45. To incentivize collaboration, when an agent produces something valuable, the human team it supports receives a bonus.The most striking data point from this experiment involves Gen Z workers. Citing a recent survey, Carter noted that 47% of them said they would prefer an AI manager. “It doesn't speak well to the quality of bosses,” said Koepp. But Carter’s explanation was more nuanced. “Why do they want an agent as a manager? Not political. They’re fair. And they don’t care if I work from home.”She sees this as an early sign that agents will eventually take on managerial roles, and that HR needs to be ready for the people questions this raises: Who owns agents? Do they have performance plans? How do you coach managers who are managing both people and AI?The Customer Use CaseFor businesses still on the fence about AI investment, Carter offered a concrete example from her company’s customer service operation. Unstoppable Domains has 4.8 million customers, and its AI agent now handles 48% of all customer service inquiries, without any layoffs. But the story she found most compelling wasn’t the efficiency gain. It was that the company moved to number one in customer satisfaction in its category.The key was rethinking what customer service could do, not just automating what it already did. “Why does customer service just identify a problem?” she asked. Now, when an agent identifies an issue, it can also resolve it, logging the fix in GitHub for an engineer to approve. The agent also flags incoming new customers who run into trouble, prompting personalized outreach from the community support team. New customer acquisition has risen as a result.This is the potential Carter returns to repeatedly: not AI as a cost-cutting mechanism, but AI as a means of raising the ceiling on what’s possible. She cited Deloitte, McKinsey, and a BMW report finding 38% higher productivity when humans and AI work together. “AI plus humans yield stronger results,” she said.What AI-First Leaders Look LikeCarter outlined three qualities she believes define effective AI-first leaders. The first is authenticity: knowing what you understand and what you don’t, and being willing to say so.The second is the capacity to reimagine. The most successful companies she works with don’t start by asking how to automate what they already do. They ask: if we were a startup today, with access to AI, how would we build this function from scratch?The third quality is what she calls being “fearless,” or, in her framing, shifting from brainstorming to what she calls “playstorming.” Executives who want to lead with AI have to be willing to get their hands dirty and fail in front of their teams. “This is not a technology that you can just think about theoretically,” she said. She described vibe coding the AI agent for her own book across 17 different platforms herself, learning from the experience rather than delegating it.Carter closed with what she considers the most important strategic reframe for organizations navigating AI. Most companies approach transformation in the wrong order: they select a platform, then redesign processes, then figure out what to do about people. The companies that fare best flip the sequence entirely: starting with readiness at the human level, then process, then technology.And in that people-first model, she says, HR is central. “I’m going to argue that I think the most important person in the transformation is you guys,” she told the room of HR leaders. “You deal with the people. And I think people is really where it’s at.”Grace Turney is a St. Louis-based writer, artist, and former librarian. See more of her work at graceturney17.wixsite.com/mysite.(Photos by Josh Larson for From Day One)
Stop Chasing AI, Fix Your Content Foundations First
BY Kristen Kwiatkowski April 28, 2026Chasing AI at scale can just as easily create problems at scale. That’s why you need to focus on your content foundations first before putting AI to good use. There is pressure as AI raises expectations, but a clear gap remains: most content foundations were not built to scale. The good news is that this creates an opportunity. With the right foundation in place, AI can deliver on its promise. These topics were explored during a thought leadership spotlight at From Day One’s Silicon Valley marketing conference, in a conversation between Misti Vogt, SVP of engagement at Orange Logic, and Kathleen Cameron, senior digital asset operations manager in marketing operations at Google.“Everyone is being pushed to adopt AI faster,” said Vogt. “From your perspective, what do marketing leaders need to understand before they invest further?”Cameron highlighted that the importance of understanding the underlying architecture and making sure those foundations and governance are in place are key components. “You’re going to want to string all of that data together from all of your different tools and that's where you’re going to get a lot of that benefit from those AI tools to get either the analytics or understand how to make those quick changes to those assets to improve performance out in the market,” said Cameron. Without those foundations, you’re making things up as you go without the benefit of the data, Cameron says. As for the difference between an organization that experiments with AI and one that builds the foundation to benefit from it, Cameron says the two can exist in parallel. Experimentation is valuable, but organizations also need to account for regulatory compliance, which requires a more careful approach. You can experiment in a controlled environment and figure out where AI can benefit you. If you don’t have a strategy, look at what your information architecture is.Misti Vogt, SVP of engagement at Orange Logic, spoke with Kathleen Cameron, senior digital assets operations manager, marketing operations at GoogleMeanwhile, there is a strong push to deploy AI widely while personnel budgets are being cut, but information security teams are urging caution, saying it is not ready for broad use yet, Vogt says. That leaves operators stuck in the middle. “So, this is where experimentation and creating those guardrails allows you to continue to move forward while you're making sure that the security team has all the information they need to feel comfortable,” said Vogt.“I think we’re all feeling the friction of the tools evolving so quickly,” said Cameron. “I’ve had the experience of tools changing throughout my career, but not at this speed. And we want to embrace new tech, and I think we just need to do it more responsibly and thoughtfully,” she said. When people come to Vogt with questions about AI, she first asks what problem they are trying to solve. Once that is clear, the path forward becomes more focused and manageable.How Content Is Created and ManagedAs for what assumptions marketing teams should rethink, particularly around how they create and manage content, Cameron says the way content is produced is changing rapidly. It is important to examine every component, including copy, video, and photography.She emphasized the need for caution, especially when it comes to existing agreements and rights holders, in order to protect the brand and its reputation. Teams also need to stay alert to new regulations as they emerge.“Every piece of content that exists for your business should understand when it was created, why it was created, how much it cost to create, which teams engaged with it, how it went to market, and how it was recomposed,” agreed Vogt. “Throughout the entire content journey, there’s a lot of value there, regardless of the audience or channel,” said Vogt. “Localization is a big one. I think everyone in this room has some kind of localization effort underway, and many are working with third-party localization agencies, but the rules are pretty similar. As long as we track those rules and can dynamically compose the elements, it starts to streamline the process and allows creatives to do what they love to do, which is be creative.”Editor’s note: From Day One thanks our partner, Orange Logic, for sponsoring this thought leadership spotlight. Kristen Kwiatkowski is a professional freelance writer covering a wide array of industries, with a focus on food and beverage and business. Her work has been featured in the Bucks County Herald, Eater Philly, Edible Lehigh Valley, Cider Culture, and The Town Dish. (Photos by Josh Larson for From Day One)
Marketing at the Speed of Light: How to Get the Pitch Across When the Product Is Changing Fast
BY Ade Akin April 27, 2026What does it take to market a company that may not be a household name, but powers the technology people rely on every day—from Face ID in your smartphone to the undersea fiber optic cables connecting continents?When Dr. Sanjai Parthasarathi stepped into the Chief Marketing Officer role at Coherent in 2019, he expected a conversation about traditional market segmentation. Instead, he received a piece of advice that reshaped how the company thinks about marketing. He recalls being told that Coherent effectively serves two types of customers: those who buy its products, and those who buy its stock.The idea broadened the scope of marketing beyond end customers to include the investment community—emphasizing that the company’s story must resonate not only with engineers and procurement teams, but also with investors evaluating its long-term potential.Parthasarathi shared this and other insights during a fireside chat about, “Marketing at the Speed of Light: How to Get the Pitch Across When the Product Is Changing Fast” at From Day One’s Silicon Valley marketing conference. Parthasarathi offered a closer look at a company whose products are everywhere in a conversation with Steve Koepp, co-founder and editor in chief of From Day One. His mandate, he says, is to crystallize the story of technology quietly powering the AI revolution, data centers, and modern manufacturing, and tell it to two very different audiences.From the Periodic Table to AI Data CentersParthasarathi started the conversation by demystifying “photonics,” which he describes as “the science of light, the technology that goes into creating light and manipulating light and sensing light.” The examples were as tangible as they were ubiquitous. “When I wake up, the first thing I do is I look at my phone, and you know the magic of Face ID and the phone completely opening up by looking at your face,” he said. “That’s made possible in photonics.” Those signals don’t stop there. They travel from your phone to an RF tower, where an optical transceiver converts electrical signals into optical signals, sending them through fiber optic networks, including undersea cables, to reach a friend in Singapore.Coherent’s story started in 1971, in Pittsburgh, with a name so esoteric it requires a chemistry lesson. Originally called “II-VI,” a reference to the group's two and six on the periodic table, the company was founded on materials like zinc selenide and cadmium telluride, designed to shape and direct beams for the then-new carbon dioxide laser. Sanjai Parthasarathi, CMO at Coherent Corp., was interviewed during the fireside chatOver the decades, the company evolved into a diversified photonics powerhouse, acquiring Bay Area-based Finisar in 2019 and later adopting the name of its 2022 acquisition, Coherent, a brand synonymous with laser excellence. Today, Coherent’s technology is a cornerstone of the AI boom. As Sanjai put it, “Optical connections are rapidly growing inside the data center. Today all the connections between the racks and leaving the data center facility are 100% optical. Excitement in the optical community is around connections within the rack moving to optical.” One Portfolio, Two ExtremesMarketing for such a diverse company presents unique challenges. Coherent serves both “hyper-scale” data center customers, each of which, Parthasarathi noted, is “a market by themselves,” and then on the other end thousands of industrial and academic customers who buy standard products. “For our hyper-scale customers, it’s all a very high-touch, technical marketing activity that goes on,” he said. “We’re talking about long design cycles. We’re talking about partnerships and developing new platforms and technology.” On the other end of the spectrum, the team relies on more traditional demand generation and content campaigns.Dealing with this technical complexity requires a marketing team that can speak the language of engineers and scientists. While Parthasarathi jokes about his doctorate, he emphasizes that technical competence is non-negotiable. “You don’t need to be an expert in the technology, but you need to understand it deep enough that you can have a productive dialog with your customer,” he said.Coherent has centralized its marketing “brains” in a small Bay Area team to streamline its global operations, while a larger group in Malaysia handles content execution, a model that has proven efficient since its launch less than a year ago.The Next Optical FrontierOne of the most significant shifts underway in the tech industry is the migration from electrical to optical signals, even within the tight confines of a server rack. “When you need to go fast, and we need to go long distances, you have to go optical.” He paints a picture of future circuit boards with fiber traces instead of wires, a transformation that pundits estimate could multiply the market opportunity tenfold. This future is already being underwritten. In March 2026, Nvidia announced a $2 billion investment in Coherent as part of a multi-year partnership to advance optical technologies used for AI data center infrastructure. That early directive, to market the company to both customers and investors, has made investor communication an important part of Parthasarathi’s role. “Ours is a complex story, and trying to simplify it for the investor audience is something that I spend significant time on,” he said.While the messages differ, the fundamental task remains the same: crystallizing the company’s technological story for a specific audience. “It’s ultimately about taking the technology and taking the story and crystallizing it for the audience. That’s marketing, right, whether it’s an investor audience or customer audience or a supplier.”Strategy, Storytelling, and the Limits of AIParthasarathi offered a grounded perspective as the conversation turned to artificial intelligence’s role in marketing. Coherent uses AI extensively for content generation and demand creation, but it’s clear about its limits. “AI is not going to tell me a story that has not been written yet,” he said. “Us as marketing folks, we’re writing the story. AI helps us refine the story.” For Coherent, AI remains a powerful tool in a highly technical B2B industry, where understanding customer pain points and translating complex technology into value is paramount, but it’s not a replacement for deep market knowledge.He emphasizes that successful marketing at Coherent is fundamentally a strategic function, sitting at “the intersection of markets, technology, and strategy.” This approach has underpinned the company’s ambitious growth, from a sub-billion-dollar revenue base a decade ago to a consensus estimate of around $7 billion for the current fiscal year. “Strategy is not done in a vacuum by two people from the executive team,” Parthasarathi said. “It’s done with multiple functions, and it’s a long-term plan.”Parthasarathi left the audience with a simple but powerful reminder as the session concluded. “Ultimately, it’s about the customers—what are the pain points that they’re having, what are the challenges that they’re trying to solve. And the realization of that is perhaps the most important thing that you can do as a marketing professional.” Ade Akin covers artificial intelligence, workplace wellness, HR trends, and digital health solutions.(Photos by Josh Larson for From Day One)
How to Support Employees Through Rapidly Changing Times: Top HR Priorities
BY Kristen Kwiatkowski April 27, 2026When priorities shift, structures evolve, or new expectations take hold, employees are often left figuring out what to do first and how to keep up. That’s where HR can make the difference, helping turn uncertainty into something people can actually navigate.Janine Yancey, founder and CEO of Emtrain, an online compliance and culture training with workforce analytics company, provided insight on this topic during a thought leadership spotlight at From Day One’s Silicon Valley conference. She offered insight into four distinct ways that HR professionals can help their team adjust to rapidly changing times. Business transformation, especially when technology begins to automate roles once handled entirely by people, forces employees to adapt quickly. At the same time, HR leaders are navigating a mix of new workforce technologies, reorganizations and reductions in force, gaps in management skills, and growing pressure on culture and engagement.The Top HR PrioritiesNew technology is the first top HR priority, especially with AI. As more companies utilize AI, it’s important to ensure your team is proficient with AI tools and determine what the work ratio looks like and what the outcomes are. Go to other departments and teams to shadow, assist, and observe what’s going on in these other teams.Once you feel confident that your team is proficient with the new technology, the next step is to see how the employee roles might shift, says Yancey. “My recommendation is to be proactive,” she said. Yancey recommends that HR leaders assess what their teams can do differently with new technology in place, then evaluate each role to redesign the organization accordingly and bring that plan proactively to the C-suite. “For decades, HR leaders have been wanting to be the true business partner to the executives,” said Yancey. “And there is no year like this year that gives us all an opportunity to do that.”The next priority is to understand the capabilities of your managers—they’re the glue that basically holds the organization together, says Yancey. “Can the managers lead a diverse, multigenerational team?” asked Yancey. “Do they know how to develop? Do they know how to coach?”Managers who appear to have the strongest leadership skills, based on employee feedback, are often those with the fewest compliance issues. Strengthening these outcomes can be supported through targeted management training.Janine Yancey, founder and CEO of Emtrain, led the sessionManagement training can also help leaders more accurately identify compliance issues and address them effectively with their teams. As organizations invest in management and leadership development, the focus should be on both measuring and building leadership capabilities so managers, leaders, and individual contributors can operate in the most productive and effective way possible, she says.It’s important to try to ask periodic questions in annual management and compliance training. Ask people what’s happening on their teams and map the employee sentiment to behaviors and teams. This will help you know what’s really going on among the teams.Finally, a culture of respect often requires additional attention during periods of business transformation. It’s important to be intentional about integrating programs so they work together in a more holistic way. For example, initiatives like annual culture surveys, leader and manager training, and coaching and development should be viewed as part of a connected system that provides a clearer picture of what’s really happening across the organization, says Yancey. It’s also essential to use data to identify which managers need the most support. With better insights, HR leaders can be more strategic about where they focus their time and effort, ultimately driving stronger outcomes.Editor’s note: From Day One thanks our partner, Emtrain, for sponsoring this thought leadership spotlight.Kristen Kwiatkowski is a professional freelance writer covering a wide array of industries, with a focus on food and beverage and business. Her work has been featured in the Bucks County Herald, Eater Philly, Edible Lehigh Valley, Cider Culture, and The Town Dish. (Photos by Josh Larson for From Day One)
Workplace Wellness and Engagement When Employees Feel They’re at a Breaking Point
BY Grace Turney April 24, 2026Athar Siddiqee still remembers how thrilled he was when he got his first company-issued cell phone. “How cool is this?” he recalls thinking. But he had no idea he was stepping onto a treadmill that would never stop.That moment of innocent excitement captures something essential about the modern workplace: the tools meant to make life easier have steadily erased the boundary between work and rest. For HR leaders, that erosion has become a defining challenge—one that Covid forced into the open, and that no single app or assistance program has fully solved.The question of what genuinely supports employee well-being, and not just what looks good in a benefits brochure, was the focus of a panel at From Day One’s Silicon Valley conference, moderated by Rachael Myrow, senior editor of KQED’s Silicon Valley News Desk. One Size Fits No OneSiddiqee, head of total rewards at Micron Technology, was candid about the limits of standard benefits packages. During the pandemic, Micron rolled out an employee assistance fund, a home-office setup stipend, Headspace subscriptions, virtual fitness classes, and one “Innovate and Invigorate” Friday off per month. All of this was useful, yes—but not universal.In India, for instance, the employee assistance program went largely unused. Mental health struggles are handled within extended families, and the stigma of seeking outside help made formal EAP channels a non-starter. Micron responded by building flexible benefits programs in India, Singapore, and Malaysia that let employees allocate funds toward whatever they actually needed, such as childcare, gym memberships, or other priorities. “We realized that one size didn’t fit all,” Siddiqee said. Those localized programs have stayed in place.The Quiet Cracking ProblemMyrow introduced the phrase “quiet cracking,” or employees buckling under sustained pressure, and asked for a clinical perspective on what the early warning signs look like.“The term might be rather new, but this has been going on for a long time,” said Inderpreet Dhillon, MD, senior medical director at Grow Therapy. A board-certified adult psychiatrist with 20 years in practice, Dhillon says what has changed is the intensity. The commute that once served as a mental buffer between work and home has vanished for many people. “My living room is on the first floor and my office is on the second floor. I used to drive 20 or 30 minutes to get back home. That used to be my time to unwind.”Leaders spoke about "Workplace Wellness and Engagement When Employees Feel They’re at a Breaking Point"Without that buffer, personal stress and professional pressure have merged into a single, unrelenting weight. By the time people reach clinical care, the situation is often already serious. The challenge, Dhillon says, is reducing friction well before that point—making it easier to find a provider, understand insurance coverage, and sustain treatment rather than seeking help only in crisis and disappearing once the acute moment passes.Preventive Care Over Reactive FixesAt VIAVI Solutions, musculoskeletal claims have ranked among the top two cost drivers for years, a problem compounded by a workforce that skews older than the broader tech industry. “Once musculoskeletal issues become significant, it’s hard to reverse,” said Nancy Yang, VP of total rewards at VIAVI Solutions. Working with medical providers and benefits brokers, Yang’s team developed a virtual physical therapy program that employees can access from home, combining guided PT sessions with routine stretching, designed to interrupt that trajectory early rather than treat it after the fact.Dhillon reinforced the logic from a mental health angle. Patients who drop out of care after one or two sessions, then return months later in the next crisis, never complete a full episode of treatment. At Grow Therapy, the company has developed coaching tools to support patients between weekly sessions, helping them stay engaged across the full arc of recovery. “The ROI shows up,” Dhillon said, in reduced healthcare costs, lower absenteeism, and recovered productivity, but only if employees stick with care long enough to get there.Connection, Trust, and the Importance of Being SeenOlga Bobin, head of global talent mobility at EPAM Systems, relocated from Belarus to the United States 18 years ago, raised two daughters, and spent most of her career working remotely across time zones and cultures. When Myrow asked what actually carried her through the hardest moments, she didn’t mention a single program.“It was three things,” Bobin said. “Real human connection, people who genuinely cared, not because the system told them to check in. Real flexibility, when my company truly trusted me in how and when I work. And recognition, knowing that my work mattered.”She was blunt about what that trust costs when it’s absent: the energy employees spend proving their availability instead of doing their best thinking. “When organizations remove that tax through genuine trust, people become better, feel better, and perform better.”Bobin also issued a challenge to the audience: “When was the last time you told someone on your team specifically what they did and the real impact it made?”Building Systems That Surface the Human Moment“That small moment, which compounds across many people across an organization, those small moments are what lead to greater disengagement,” said Katie Cunningham, director of product at Augeo Workplace Engagement. She pointed to a pattern most people recognize: a moment of going above and beyond that passed without acknowledgment. The technology question her team is trying to answer is not how to automate recognition, but how to surface the right signals so that managers can act on them in a genuinely human way.“We’re not talking about removing humans from acknowledging that,” Cunningham said. “We’re talking about how do we surface those moments and make them very, very easy to act on.” She noted that managers are already stretched thin, responsible for both cultural cohesion and business outcomes, and that AI tools can help by handling the preparatory work, freeing managers to focus on the actual human interaction.AI as Accelerant, Not ReplacementThe panel closed with a question about AI and job security. Siddiqee pointed to a program Micron created that keeps the human element central: a licensed behavioral therapist stationed at each major location, available for 20-minute drop-in sessions. The slots book out a month in advance. For that kind of support, he says, AI needs to step aside.Yang described her team’s use of AI-generated video skits that turn compensation conversations into coaching moments, short scenarios drawn from real VIAVI situations that help managers explain pay structures, leveling decisions, and promotion criteria in plain language.Cunningham’s team built an AI-assisted coaching tool to help product staff communicate more effectively with executive stakeholders, raising the baseline before those conversations happened rather than replacing the mentorship that follows.Dhillon offered a caution. The human need to feel seen, heard, and connected is not a feature that organizations can automate away. If rising productivity expectations (enabled by AI) come at the cost of psychological safety and cultural connection, “we’ve got a little problem on our hands.”The through line in every answer was the same: technology can reduce friction, surface signals, and scale support. But the moment of recognition, the expression of trust, the sense that one’s work matters—those still require a real person to deliver them.Grace Turney is a St. Louis-based writer, artist, and former librarian. See more of her work at graceturney17.wixsite.com/mysite.(Photos by Josh Larson for From Day One)
Personalization Is the New Standard for Employee Well-Being
BY Katie Chambers April 23, 2026“We have people that are just starting out in their careers, parents, and people who are ready to retire. Some are salaried desk workers. Some are people out in the field and working hourly. There are people from across the world and many different nationalities,” said moderator Katie Johnston, reporter at the Boston Globe. All of these people come together at work.Thanks to data analytics technology, organizations have the opportunity to hone in on their specific needs to provide personalized benefits that leave them feeling engaged, supported, and seen. This was the topic of conversation during an executive panel discussion, moderated by Johnston at From Day One’s Boston benefits conference. Benefits That Reflect Cultural TrendsOrganizations are finding that more employees value meaningful work than ever before, especially post-pandemic. Aravind Menon, senior director of HR at Procter & Gamble, shares that his organization created a framework called the Employee Value Equation (EVE). “The primary focus of EVE is that employees at the core want to make an impact. They want to do meaningful work. They want to feel valued and rewarded,” he said. The organization uses surveys and data analytics to get feedback on what is working for employees, and what isn’t. With more than 100,000 employees, having a way to gather opinions en masse is crucial. Guided by feedback data, Procter & Gamble began offering a health plan with more transparent pricing and flex benefits, such as optional classes or services tailored to employees’ needs. Much of employee feedback, in one way or another, comes down to money. Offerings that support financial well-being have become integral to a well-rounded benefits package. “It is one of the only topics that touches every single person. Almost every single decision that you make on a daily basis,” said Rebecca Liebman, CEO and co-founder of LearnLux. Financial well-being now goes beyond traditional retirement planning, Liebman says, and also includes preparation for emergencies, childcare, elder care, and general financial resilience as the cost of living skyrockets. A well-rounded package should offer personalization for every life stage and be paired with an internal communications plan that educates employees on how best to maximize the offerings. Panelists spoke about "The Power of Personalization in Workplace Well-Being," at From Day One's Boston benefits conferenceSuch messaging can be particularly challenging for large organizations like Securitas, which has employees of all ages spread across the globe in a variety of roles. “I might have one guard sitting behind a desk at an office building, another one standing at a bank. I might have a group of them at a stadium. In most cases, they’re generally not co-located,” said Amy Noelle, senior director, benefits, North America at Securitas. But they must nonetheless receive clear, personalized information. Madhavi Vemireddy, CEO of Cleo, shares that in the U.S. alone, nearly 60 million people identify as caregivers and frequently hesitate to disclose this to their workplaces for fear of repercussions, such as being passed over for a promotion. “Family caregivers in the workforce, who are often women, deal with so many combinations of stressors: it could be pregnancy, parenting, menopause, elder care, [or] all of the above,” Johnston said. “How can employers identify who’s dealing with these issues and, before they get to the breaking point, what can they offer them?” Cleo works to help caregivers overcome the stigma and access the support they desperately need. “We’re supporting families across pregnancy, parenting journeys as well as adult caregiving, and we’re doing that holistically,” Vemireddy said. Early intervention can help workers stay healthy—and that depends on transparency and psychological safety to combat the stigma. “We need to start talking about it more, just like how we’ve been talking about mental health in the workplace, about menopause in the workplace, we need to start talking about caregiving in the workplace,” Vemireddy said. Sharpening Communications StrategiesDifferent workers may be receptive to different types of communication styles. But always, “there has to be an openness to the information before we decide on the delivery method,” said Kelle Colyer-Brown, head of office of accessibility programs at PSEG. Training internal stakeholders, in addition to engaging with outside vendors, is key. “We know that employees will go to the people that they talk to most often first, so ensuring that our managers have that information [is important],” she said.In terms of delivery, “our salaried office-based employees are most likely going to go to things like our blogs, newsletters, and email blasts. That is extremely unlikely for our field employees,” Colyer-Brown said. Field employees might be more reachable through all-hands meetings, daily stand-ups, fairs, or even apps. In difficult times, wellness offerings can help maintain engagement and retention. “This year, a lot of companies can’t give more money,” Liebman said. “So, they’re bringing in financial coaching as a benefit to help people understand what they can do with their paycheck. If we can’t give you more money, let’s empower you to make a plan for your life. And really, financial planning is just executing on the life that you want to live.” Looking ahead, Colyer-Brown recommends relying on survey data to understand what employees are seeking, then consistently reviewing and meeting with current and prospective vendors to ensure those trends are addressed. If your current vendors don’t offer adequate support, consider “what’s my buy, borrow, build, mix to fill in some of those gaps? Am I going to build internal services? Am I going to do outreach to government entities? Am I reaching out to nonprofits?” she said. “If I need to spend money, at least I can go to my leadership and say, ‘I looked at our internal resources first before I asked you for a check. I’ve done my due diligence.’”Katie Chambers is a freelance writer and award-winning communications executive with a lifelong commitment to supporting artists and advocating for inclusion. Her work has been seen in HuffPost, Top Think, and several printed essay collections, and she has appeared on Cheddar News, iWomanTV, On New Jersey, and CBS New York.(Photos by Josh Larson for From Day One)
Beyond AI Literacy: Three Ways People Teams Can Lead AI Transformations
BY Carrie Snider April 22, 2026Leaders know they need to adopt AI. But how to actually make that shift can be unclear. At the From Day One Live 2026 event in Silicon Valley, Tigran Sloyan, CEO and co-founder of CodeSignal, outlined how organizations can move beyond basic awareness to true AI fluency.His core point: AI isn’t just another tool. It’s a technology transformation, which is something every company has faced before.“Every time we’ve created new technology, we have to teach humans how to use that technology, and that essentially became a job,” he said.History backs this up. The printing press technology reshaped work. The same happened with typewriters and computers. Tasks evolved, and people learned new ways of working. AI is simply the next chapter. “The next phase of AI will do the same thing for the jobs today, where many of the jobs today become tasks of tomorrow.”For people teams, that raises a pressing question: how do you prepare a workforce for something that’s changing this fast?The Role of People TeamsTigran Sloyan, CEO & co-founder of CodeSignal, led the sessionHR and people leaders are at the center of this shift, whether they feel ready or not. According to Sloyan, their role comes down to two priorities: First, define how AI applies to their specific organization. Second, use AI to improve workflows, making work better, faster, and more efficient The challenge is speed. AI adoption is happening quickly and unevenly across organizations.“Doing both of these things is incredibly difficult,” Sloyan said, “because the timeline is highly compressed.” Structure matters. His framework breaks the process into three steps: assess, develop, and deploy. Here’s the three steps to lead AI transformations. Step One: Assess SkillsBefore you can train people, you need to understand where they stand.Sloyan compared AI assessment to learning how to drive. A written test might confirm basic knowledge, but it doesn’t prove someone can actually operate a car. “Imagine how much worse the streets would be,” he said. To get a license, a person must actually get behind the wheel and show the instructor their skills.The same applies to AI. Multiple-choice quizzes can measure familiarity, but they don’t capture real capability. Instead, organizations need practical, hands-on evaluation.“At its core, assessing skills starts from: Can you simulate it?”For example, instead of asking recruiters what they know about AI, place them in realistic scenarios: Gathering job requirements, sourcing candidates, closing hires. Then observe how they actually use AI in those moments.The same approach works across functions. Sales teams can practice negotiations. Customer service teams can handle simulated interactions. The goal is simple: see in-the-moment performance, not just knowledge. Because across any workforce, AI ability varies widely, even in companies pushing adoption aggressively. Without proper assessment, you’re guessing.Step Two: Develop AI Literacy at ScaleOnce you know where people are, the next step is helping them improve at scale. Many organizations struggle because employees aren’t starting from the same place, and they don’t learn at the same pace.“Instead of assuming that everybody is going to be learning at the same pace, you have to continuously measure,” Sloyan said.Hands-on learning becomes critical. Simulations allow employees to practice real tasks while building confidence and skill. More importantly, they create measurable progress.AI literacy isn’t one-size-fits-all. What it means for a recruiter differs from what it means for an engineer or a salesperson. It depends on the role, the company, and the context. That’s why ongoing measurement matters. It ensures no one falls behind—and highlights where additional support is needed.Step Three: Deploy AI Across the Talent LifecycleThe final step is continual learning. AI skills are always changing. As technology evolves, so must the workforce. That means embedding learning into the entire employee lifecycle, not treating it as a one-time initiative. Assessment feeds development. Development feeds application. And the cycle repeats.At CodeSignal, this process is supported by an AI assistant named Cosmo the corgi, which guides employees through assessments and hands-on learning. While the tool itself may vary by organization, the principle is what matters: make learning continuous, interactive, and adaptable. Because even once employees reach proficiency, the target keeps moving.Ultimately, says Sloyan, AI reshapes how people work. Organizations that succeed won’t be the ones that simply adopt AI tools, but the ones that invest in helping their people adapt alongside them. That starts with understanding skills, building them intentionally, and reinforcing them over time. Technology transformations have always required humans to evolve. AI is no different. The difference now is speed and the opportunity for people teams to lead the way.Editor’s note: From Day One thanks our partner, CodeSignal, for sponsoring this thought leadership spotlight. Carrie Snider is a Phoenix-based journalist and marketing copywriter.(Photos by Josh Larson for From Day One)
Are Your Employee Rewards Costing More Than You Think?
BY Christopher O'Keeffe April 21, 2026Employee-recognition programs are intended to boost morale, strengthen retention, and reinforce culture. But many organizations may be unknowingly reducing the impact of those efforts through the way rewards are delivered.At From Day One’s Boston benefits conference, Tray Ross, VP of growth at Corporate Traditions, said common incentives such as gift cards, bonuses, and other cash equivalents often create avoidable tax consequences, payroll complexity, and employee frustration. His message to HR leaders: appreciation programs should feel rewarding to employees while remaining efficient and compliant for the business.Ross says he frequently hears from HR leaders who begin the year energized to launch or refresh employee-recognition initiatives. “They get super pumped that this is going to be the year they roll out an employee recognition program or revamp it,” he said. But once rewards begin reaching employees, confusion can follow when the value is reduced through taxation or the program becomes harder to understand than expected. “Employees don’t understand,” he said. That disconnect can turn a positive gesture into a frustrating experience while creating extra work for managers and payroll teams.The Hidden Cost of Cash Rewards and an Overlooked Opportunity Many organizations underestimate the real cost of taxable rewards, says Ross. Employers may choose to gross up the value so employees receive the intended amount, or allow taxes to reduce what employees ultimately receive. He added that when taxes are passed through to employees, “they don't see the entire value or benefit.”Ross pointed to de minimis fringe benefits as a lesser-known tax-code opportunity that may allow certain modest, infrequent tangible gifts to be excluded from payroll tax obligations. “These particular types of gifts can be excluded from payroll tax,” he said.He referenced occasions such as holidays, birthdays, work anniversaries, and service awards as examples of moments where organizations may have more flexibility in how they recognize employees.The Importance of ChoiceRoss acknowledged that many organizations default to familiar branded merchandise because it is easy to approve and easy to repeat. “You guys have enough t-shirts that have your company logo on it, or sweaters, umbrellas, and mugs.”But he says that appreciation becomes more meaningful when employees can choose items they actually want. “They don’t want another umbrella. They want to be able to get what they want off of their Amazon wish list.”Programs built around catalogs or e-commerce-style selection tools, he says, can still remain compliant while improving the employee experience.Recognition systems should also reflect the realities of today’s workforce, whether employees are remote, hybrid, or in-office. Ross said ease of use matters for both employees and administrators. “You want to keep it easy and simple.” The right program, he says, should scale from a single team to an enterprise-wide initiative without creating unnecessary training or operational burden.Ross summarized what effective recognition partners should deliver: practical compliance support without losing the emotional value of appreciation.“The best recognition partners keep the compliance under control, but the gratitude visible, by allowing employees to get what they want.” For employers balancing budget pressure, employee expectations, and tax complexity, that combination may be the real key to successful recognition.Appreciation should not create hidden costs or unnecessary headaches, says Ross. “We want you to win, and tax free gifting is the best way to make it happen.”Editor’s note: From Day One thanks our partner, Corporate Traditions, for sponsoring this thought leadership spotlight. Chris O’Keeffe is a freelance writer with experience across industries. As the founder and creative director of OK Creative: The Language Agency, he has led strategy and storytelling for organizations like MIT, Amazon, and Cirque du Soleil, bringing their stories to life through established and emerging media.(Photo by Josh Larson for From Day One)
Choosing the Right Problems to Solve: It’s Not AI for Something, It’s Something With AI
BY Ade Akin April 20, 2026In an era where many companies scramble to find uses for AI, Raman Achutharaman advocates for the opposite approach.“We always want to solve a business problem,” he said during a fireside chat at From Day One's Silicon Valley HR conference. “But you’ve got to find what value you’re going to generate, and then which tech comes along the way.” For Achutharaman, the SVP of operations, AI and productivity at Applied Materials, this problem‑first philosophy is the guiding principle behind a sweeping digital transformation at one of the world’s most vital technology companies.The Quiet Giant of the Semiconductor RevolutionApplied Materials doesn’t manufacture the tech gadgets that have become part of our daily lives, like smartphones and laptops; instead, it builds the multi‑million‑dollar equipment that manufacturers use to produce the semiconductors inside them. As Achutharaman said to Steve Koepp, co-founder and editor at From Day One, who moderated the conversation, a single advanced logic chip requires roughly 2,000 processing steps and three months to complete, despite being “a thousand times smaller than a human hair.” Founded in 1967, Applied Materials predates companies such as Apple and Intel in Silicon Valley and now employs more than 36,000 people globally. The company’s immense global footprint, supercharged by the accelerating AI revolution, makes digital transformation an urgent directive. To help meet this objective, Achutharaman’s role was created specifically to unify an organization that had grown “very global” and “very vertical.” He frames his team as an “internal consulting arm,” a nimble force that’s embedded in the middle to drive collective growth and navigate the friction of cross‑functional execution.Innovating the Way We InnovateWhen generative AI burst onto the scene, Achutharaman joined forces with the company's CIO and CTO to form a leadership trio that would charter the company's AI journey. Their guiding principle was to avoid using “AI for the sake of AI.” Instead, they focused on re‑engineering decades‑old workflows. They worked to “innovate the way we innovate,” Achutharaman said.Raman Achutharaman, SVP of operations, AI, and productivity at Applied Materials, spoke during the fireside chatThis mindset has led to a deliberate, problem‑centric rollout. The company established rigorous governance structures early on instead of unleashing every new tool on its workforce, addressing cybersecurity, intellectual property protection, and ethical concerns before any technology was deployed. “Almost the [entire] first year was really focused on making sure that anything we do doesn’t break,” Achutharaman said.The Cohort Program: From Office Hours to Change AgentsTraining 36,000 people on technology that evolves “every 15 minutes” requires more than a library of online courses. Achutharaman’s team launched a hands-on cohort program that pairs employees who have specific problems adopting artificial intelligence with mentors who are already advanced users. The program started small with weekly office hours where any employee could drop in with questions. It has since grown into a structured initiative. Last year, more than 1,000 employees applied to participate, and 250 were selected to work one‑on‑one with mentors.“When they solve their own problems using something, they start thinking about what else they can do with it,” Achutharaman said. “And they also act as the change agents going across the organization.” This peer‑driven model has proven to be far more effective than top‑down mandates, creating a self‑propagating network of AI champions throughout the organization.Data Quality and the Scientific RevolutionDespite all the excitement surrounding large language models, Achutharaman emphasizes that the real frontier lies in scientific and engineering data. The publicly available corpus of information, research papers, and technical articles is often biased toward positive results and lacks the calibration needed for rigorous scientific work. “You’ve got to generate your own data,” he added.To that end, Applied Materials is investing billions in a new research and development lab in Sunnyvale, California. The facility will help generate high‑quality data that will fuel the next generation of semiconductor innovation. “Having data at the right rate, using AI to be able to solve complex problems, needs not just AI. You actually need a whole bunch of other things: engineering, physical infrastructure, and actual experiments,” he said. Achutharaman also highlighted how Applied Materials' HR team is applying AI across the talent lifecycle. The technology is actively transforming every workflow, from analyzing Workday data to piloting AI‑powered manager coaching tools. Faster Insights, Better DecisionsAchutharaman remains firmly in the optimistic camp despite the accelerating pace of AI development. He sees the technology as a tool for gaining insights faster than a human ever could, enabling better decisions. He offered a personal example, using AI to digest decades of his aging parents’ complex health records, scattered across paper files and different doctors in India, to identify the right questions to ask their physicians. “Within five minutes, you’re able to at least find what questions to ask,” he said. “It’s not that you want the answers. The most important thing AI gives you is what questions to ask.” That perspective may be the most valuable takeaway for any leader navigating the AI revolution. The technology doesn’t replace human judgment; it equips people with faster insights, allowing for better decisions in an increasingly complex world. As Achutharaman put it, “It’s about faster insights and better quality decisions. It will give you insights that you would have missed.”Ade Akin covers artificial intelligence, workplace wellness, HR trends, and digital health solutions.(Photos by Josh Larson for From Day One)
The Employees You Don’t Hear From: Why Backup Care Breaks Down at Work
BY Kristen Kwiatkowski April 16, 2026Family care needs aren’t just occasional. Many employees are ongoing caregivers for children, parents, or other relatives. When support falls short, stress rises and PTO gets stretched. So why does backup care break down, and how can employers fix it?This was the topic of discussion at a From Day One webinar titled, “The Employees You Don’t Hear From: Why Backup Care Breaks Down at Work,” led by Jess Brown, vice president of marketing for Cariloop.Employers are turning to solutions such as Cariloop, an employer-sponsored caregiving benefit that helps to provide solutions for working parents and caregivers, and other avenues that help caregiving employees with their multifaceted needs. Caregiving Support IssuesDee Brown, TV personality, freelance reporter, and session moderator, stated that the system isn’t working the way that we had hoped it would. “73% of the workforce is caring for someone and nearly half say finding last minute care is very difficult. Additionally, 48% of employers offer caregiving support but only 36% offer backup child care,” said Dee Brown. As a caregiver, she can relate to the need for caregiving options all too well. The state of caregiving is a multifaceted problem and system under intense pressure due to an increased demand and lessened supply, says Jess Brown. She stated there are two types of caregiving supply including family caregivers and professional caregivers. Family caregivers are individuals caring for their family members and this has a direct impact on employment as these individuals are often pursuing a full-time job while handling caregiving duties. Professional caregivers for adult care have been facing shortages and 48 states have reported shortages, according to AARP. “More professionals are leaving the field than are entering the field,” said Jess Brown. Jess Brown is the VP of marketing at Cariloop, a comprehensive caregiving solution for employees (company photo)“The good news is that data is showing us that new licensed child care centers are slowly coming back and rebuilding a little bit year over year,” said Jess Brown. However, waitlists are an issue for parents seeking child care centers and there is an average of 6 months to 2 years on a waitlist. In addition, the cost issue is problematic as well since higher demand than supply equals higher cost, she says.Beyond caring for children, many people aren’t prepared to care for aging parents, making it a daunting responsibility that employers should take seriously.There have been changes in workforce participation in the past few years, says Jess Brown. Women’s workforce participation rates have reduced whereas men’s have started to slightly increase. This may be due to women opting out of the workforce or not being able to work due to caregiving duties.Employers should pay close attention to employees’ caregiving responsibilities, as added stress can impact productivity and drive costs tied to absenteeism and turnover. Care demands can lead to leaves of absence, burnout, mental health challenges, and exhaustion.There are also early signs of backup care breaking down. Employees dealing with issues at home may be distracted at work and more prone to burnout. More visible signals include missed work, increased claims related to family needs, and employees leaving the workforce altogether, says Jess Brown.Why Caregiving Support Benefits Matter There are three core areas of caregiving benefits. The first is backup care, an employer-subsidized benefit that provides temporary solutions when regular care falls through, helping reduce unplanned time away from work. The second is caregiver support, which addresses broader challenges across all life stages, from navigating a parent’s new health diagnosis to finding child care. Lastly, caregiving benefits can include access to discounts and resources, such as marketplaces and child care centers.Traditional backup care models often fall short because, while they help employees search for care, supply is limited, says Jess Brown. The provider networks employers select may also not meet the specific needs of employees and their families. In addition, she said, “we need to invest in programs where 100% of the dollars allocated to sponsoring caregiving costs go directly to the care provider.”Return on investment is an important consideration with caregiving benefits. It includes soft ROI, such as reducing stress that can lead to health issues for employees, and hard ROI, such as measurable improvements in clinical outcomes. Dollar-for-dollar savings should also be part of the equation, says Jess Brown.As for how employers should get started considering the impact of caregiving benefits, they can compare leave claims between those who used caregiving benefits and those who didn’t. Survey data can also be consulted to come up with information regarding caregiving benefits and unplanned leave. The best way for employers to evaluate new or updated caregiving programs is to take advantage of their benefit consultants and ask the right questions regarding planned investments and desired returns.Providing the Benefits That Matter MostWhen asked how these benefits can be used when they matter most, Jess Brown emphasized the need for strong promotion. Employees can’t use programs they don’t know about, and access must be quick and seamless.For organizations new to caregiving benefits, impact can be measured through cost savings if a program is already in place, or by tracking reductions in missed work if one is not. Surveys and year-over-year analysis can also provide insight, she says. Companies that get these programs right tend to see stronger retention. Success often comes from refining offerings to fit both employee needs and budget, sometimes even resulting in cost savings.Jess Brown also noted a disconnect that can exist between the care networks offered and what’s actually available or comfortable for employees to use. In some cases, people don’t even identify themselves as caregivers, which limits uptake.Finally, she stressed that caregiving challenges aren’t solved overnight. Employers need to invest in support and be patient in seeing results. Employee sentiment can be tracked through engagement surveys and qualitative feedback, alongside honest, transparent communication.Editor’s note: From Day One thanks our partner, Cariloop, for sponsoring this webinar. Kristen Kwiatkowski is a professional freelance writer covering a wide array of industries, with a focus on food and beverage and business. Her work has been featured in the Bucks County Herald, Eater Philly, Edible Lehigh Valley, Cider Culture, and The Town Dish.(Photo by jacoblund/iStock)
Building Benefits That Balance Cost Efficiency With Employee Outcomes
BY Jessica Swenson April 15, 2026As healthcare and benefits costs continue to rise, organizations are under increasing pressure to cut spending while maintaining the employee experience. Jordan Dhillon, VP of sales for SmithRx, suggests that one way to drive cost efficiency is to explore alternative partners and start benefit evaluations early. “Don’t be afraid to have the conversation. Look for the long-term partner that’s aligned with your model and your values, and start the process early,” she said during an executive panel discussion at From Day One’s Boston benefits conference. Dhillon spoke on a panel with four other leaders, moderated by Harvard Business Review contributing columnist Rebecca Knight.Evaluating Benefits ProgramsTo balance utilization, cost, and vendors within your benefits programming, Elizabeth McClure, head of benefits for Lantheus, endorses a full audit approach focused on refining and streamlining your offerings. She recommends looking at utilization rates to determine high-value benefits, and maximizing impact by consolidating duplicative services provided by multiple vendors. “I think it was important to go through and get the full picture of what employees value, and how we can really focus on those [things].”Panelists spoke about "Building Benefits That Balance Cost Efficiency With Employee Outcomes," in BostonWhile ROI is of course a critical part of the decision-making process, Kathleen Harris, head of consultant relations & strategic programs at Forma, emphasized that overreliance on ROI can detract from benefits that are valuable for overall culture even with limited direct use. She told the story of the company’s on-site daycare; it can only serve 250 families out of Forma’s nearly 1,000 employees, but employees across the spectrum are proud to say that they have on-site daycare. She calls this a halo benefit.Harris also cautioned against fragmented evaluation of benefits. “Sometimes we talk about the ecosystem, but then we also look at things in a silo. So we’re not looking at it across, we’re looking at it vertically, in terms of what we’re offering our employees.” Between this siloed view and failing to incorporate employee feedback, companies can wind up with lower-value, fragmented benefit plans.The lack of fiduciary alignment in traditional pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) can be a hidden cause of overspending, says Dhillon. She advocates for partnering with independent PBMs that focus on lower drug costs, transparent pricing, and patient-first outcomes, aligning themselves with employer and employee needs. “I would say you need to find a partner that’s independent and that is operating in your best interest as a fiduciary,” said Dhillon.Inclusion in Benefits DesignMarjory Lake, head of total rewards & people operations at JCDecaux, suggests that companies consolidate vendors, continuously listen to employees to meet them where they are, and design benefits programming for real-life employee needs.JCDecaux recently combined healthcare savings accounts and 401(k) accounts into the same vendor, saving the company money while improving the employee experience, she says.Lake looks at employee benefits holistically to ensure the company is meeting the needs of most employees. “I want to look at something that’s more impactful and more meaningful. That way [you can get] that buy-in for the higher ups, but also you’re meeting people in the middle of where they are in their lives.”Aside from the simple shifting of costs, companies are finding innovative ways to provide value. Harris advocated for lifestyle spending accounts (LSAs) as a core requirement to address the diverse, evolving needs of today’s workforce. She discussed their ability to complement traditional benefit plans by bridging gaps for things like caregiving education, and counseling that are otherwise not covered.The advent of GLP-1 medications for weight loss has created a new benefit-cost challenge for companies, panelists agreed. “What we really focus on is that supportive ecosystem around all of these things. We want to partner with lifestyle vendors and offer these things like gym memberships and other pathways to meet people in the middle,” said Lake. “A healthier and happier workforce will, over time, pay it for itself.”Cindy de Bruin, senior director of benefits and global mobility for Boston Scientific Corp., highlighted the company’s Surgery Center of Excellence, which routes certain procedures through a curated provider network with the goal of lower costs, improved outcomes, and shortened recovery times.However, the workforce had a strong, unexpected reaction to the change, leading the company to realize that they needed better communication. “We had to explain that part of this is not just about cost—this is also about your benefit. This is also about all our employees across the U.S..”Communication as a StrategyNot surprisingly, the need for communication and employee listening around benefits programming emerged as a common theme. Employees need to understand why changes are happening, says Dhillon, or you can run into resistance and engagement issues. “The more you can communicate, the more you can educate your employees as to why we’re doing this—I think it’s powerful, and that’s where I see the most success, honestly.” Communication gaps can impact employees’ awareness of what is available to them. Vendors can help them navigate benefits, says de Bruin, but first there needs to be communication from the employer. “If we do listening sessions, for example, we sometimes hear of benefits that they would like to have offered that are already there. That means we are doing something wrong in the communication.” she said. To help neutralize lack of awareness or slow benefit uptake, Harris recommends multifaceted communications and repeated exposure to visual cues alongside traditional communication campaigns. Using an established color-coded system that categorizes company benefits, Forma draws attention to specific offerings or benefits by adapting its intranet site during seasonal awareness campaigns, but still sends a notification postcard to employees’ homes to notify them of actions like benefits enrollment.McClure achieved a 90% response rate on a recent employee survey by clearly communicating the purpose, “to make informed decisions moving forward,” ensuring anonymity, and allowing open-text responses. Employees are given the message that “this is your big chance to get out everything you want to get out,” she said, “because it’s so valuable [for the company] to hear this feedback.” In that survey, they “had 95% of people say that they rated benefits as the most important thing when determining whether they’re going to get a new job or stay at the one they’re at.” Armed with this employee data, she is able to keep leaders focused on the big picture and avoid quick fixes that could have negative long-term financial implications. Additionally, it’s crucial to balance vocal employee preferences with what is best for most employees, says Lake. “Our job is to always look at the equity—what the greater good is, what the need is,” she said. “The goal is to build a foundation that supports everyone. That’s not always easy, because everyone has different needs at different times, and they’re in different places in their lives.”Jessica Swenson is a freelance writer and proofreader based in the Midwest. Learn more about her at jmswensonllc.com.(Photos by Josh Larson for From Day One)
Building Meaningful Support From Maternity Leave Through Return to Work
BY Grace Turney April 14, 2026As soon as Lauren Smith returned from maternity leave after her first child, she encountered a question that still makes her shake her head: “Is your baby sleeping through the night?” She had just come back after four months away. Her baby was barely old enough to begin sleep training. “That’s impossible,” she remembered thinking, “unless you have one of that very small percentage of babies that do.”It sounds like a small moment, a well-meaning but clueless question from a colleague. But for Smith, senior director at Maven Clinic, it represented something fundamental about how companies misread the return-to-work experience for new parents. They think the hard part is the leave itself.They’re wrong.That insight anchored a From Day One webinar titled, “From Maternity to Return to Work.” Shern-Min Chow, journalist and founder of Smart Media Content, moderated the conversation with Smith, who drew on more than seven years at Maven, during which she also had two children, to share what meaningful postpartum and return-to-work support actually requires.Fragmented Care Is a Core ProblemFor HR leaders, the challenge of building family benefits often resembles what Smith called “a game of Whack-a-Mole,” pulling one lever to address breastfeeding support, another for mental health, another for parenting resources, none of them connected. The experience for employees on the receiving end is just as disjointed, she says.Lauren Smith is a senior director at Maven Clinic, the world’s largest virtual clinic for women and families (company photo)“When your baby is born, frankly, that’s when the healthcare system forgets about you,” Smith said. New parents are left to navigate on their own between OB-GYNs, pediatricians, mental health providers, HR teams, and managers. And that’s before even accounting for complications like preeclampsia or a NICU stay.The consequences are predictable: avoidable emergency room visits, extended leaves, and what Smith called “quiet attrition,” employees who reduce hours or leave entirely because they never felt like they had a plan.Her prescription is a single integrated platform where employees can access postpartum care, mental health support, lactation consulting, pediatric guidance, and return-to-work resources in one place. “You have to ensure that those benefits span clinical, emotional, and practical needs and are not a one-size-fits-all solution,” she said. “Having a benefit like Maven checks a lot of boxes, but it doesn’t just check a box.”Mental Health Doesn’t Announce ItselfOne in seven women report severe depressive moods postpartum—a figure most HR professionals know. What’s less understood is that symptoms can last up to a year and frequently appear in people who have never experienced anxiety or depression before. Among Maven’s own members, nearly a quarter report experiencing anxiety when they join the platform, and the numbers include fathers and non-birthing partners.Smith recounted filling out a pediatrician’s intake form after her son was born, and encountering a mental health questionnaire. “I kept thinking, there is no way I am going to tell this pediatrician that I’ve known for an hour about any of my mental health needs,” she said. She checked boxes to move the process along.That same instinct, to hide vulnerability rather than ask for help, plays out in workplaces every day. The antidote, she says, isn’t just offering mental health resources. It’s proactive outreach: a manager, an HR contact, or an onboarding buddy who reaches out and says, simply, ‘How are you doing?’ “Without that, it feels like, as the individual, you are the one knocking on the door,” Smith said.Return to Work Is a Phase, Not a DateManagers often believe that once they’ve secured paid leave and childcare assistance, they’ve done their job. Smith pushes back hard on that framing. “Women are juggling physical symptoms during pregnancy and then postpartum physical recovery, emotional health challenges, breastfeeding logistics, and just overall identity and career questions,” she said. “Can I be on a promotion track, and how do I do all of this?”When those challenges go unaddressed, women come back without a plan—and they are far more likely to reduce hours or leave entirely.What does a real return-to-work plan look like? Smith said it starts before the employee leaves. A strong pre-leave transition should align on dates, clarify flexible-return policies, build a genuine coverage plan, and (crucially) discuss career path and performance expectations before the leave begins. “It really sets the stage on, we value you as an employee,” she said.That support shouldn’t end when the employee walks back in the door. Maven originally offered three months of postpartum support, which Smith called groundbreaking at the time. “Very quickly after we realized there was a huge gap in needing to extend that even further.” The platform now supports families through the first year postpartum and beyond.The Business Case Is ClinicalFor HR professionals who need to make the case to a CFO or board, Smith offered a direct framing: addressing maternity spend is not a perk—it’s a risk management and equity strategy.Maternity-related costs rank in the top five expenditures for most employers she has worked with. A vaginal birth versus a C-section represents a cost difference of $10,000 to $12,000. A NICU admission can run $30,000 to $70,000 per case. Across more than 25,000 births studied over a decade, Maven has found a 15-20% lower C-section rate and a 28% lower NICU admission rate among its members.In one case study, a Fortune 10 company enrolled nearly 2,000 families in Maven’s maternity and return-to-work program, says Smith. The result: 95% of members returned to work, more than half specifically crediting Maven, and the company saved over $1.2 million annually from increased productivity and reduced attrition.Identity-Matched Care Builds TrustMaternal mortality rates in the U.S. have doubled over the last decade, and Black women face disproportionately higher risk of complications and death during childbirth. Many arrive in the healthcare system already carrying distrust, Smith noted, and with good reason.Maven addresses this through what it calls care matching: using clinical data and personal preferences to pair members with specialists who share their background, identity, and language. A Black female member, for example, would be matched with a Black female care advocate, OB-GYN, doula, mental health provider, and career coach. “What that really does is build trust in a system that has a lot of distrust in it,” Smith said.Across Maven’s provider network, 40% of providers identify as BIPOC and 11% as LGBTQ+, and care is delivered in 35 languages. About 6% of mental health providers in the U.S. identify as Black; at Maven, they account for more than a quarter of mental health specialists.The platform also uses virtual doulas, a concept that sometimes raises eyebrows. But with 36% of U.S. counties lacking an OB-GYN, and maternity wards closing in underserved areas, in-person care is often simply unavailable. Two appointments with a virtual doula have been associated with a 40% decrease in C-section rates at Maven.Leave Equity Matters TooDuring Q&A, Smith was asked about disparities between leave offered to birthing and non-birthing parents. She didn’t hedge. “I am a big fan of equity when it comes to leave,” she said. Shorter leaves for non-birthing parents signal that their caregiving role is secondary, creating long-term effects on family involvement and gender equity at work.Research from Maven finds that 90% of non-birthing parents report parenthood-related anxiety. Same-sex couples, adoptive parents, and parents through surrogacy face the same caregiving challenges as birthing parents and deserve policies that reflect that reality.The thread running through Smith’s advice is consistent: stop treating maternity and postpartum support as a checklist and start treating it as the high-variance, deeply personal medical and emotional experience it actually is. The employers who do that, she says, end up with not just healthier employees, but also stronger teams, better retention, and a measurable return on investment.Editor’s note: From Day One thanks our partner, Maven Clinic, for sponsoring this webinar. Grace Turney is a St. Louis-based writer, artist, and former librarian. See more of her work at graceturney17.wixsite.com/mysite.(Photo by JLco - Julia Amaral/iStock)
Delivering Personalized Benefits for a Multigenerational Workforce
BY Ade Akin April 13, 2026Verlinda DiMarino didn’t spend hours researching her options when her 86-year-old mother asked for a getaway to New York to watch Broadway shows for her birthday. Instead, she called her company’s travel concierge, the same service she had previously used to plan a Harry Potter World excursion in London. “They take that work off the shoulders of our employees,” DiMarino, the Head of Benefits at Liberty Mutual Insurance, said. “So they can basically function and be more productive in their work as well as in their life.”DiMarino sat down with Wall Street Journal columnist Callum Borchers at From Day One’s Boston benefits half-day conference to lay out a vision for employee benefits that treats workers as whole people across a multigenerational workforce.Wraparound Benefits for a Multidimensional WorkforceThe old model for benefits packages, health, a 401(k), and dental, no longer cuts it. “Employees today, no matter where they are in their life journey, are looking for programs and benefits that support them holistically,” she said. “It’s really a part of the value proposition today.”Borchers, who also teaches at Bentley University near Boston, drew a parallel to the shift in higher education toward “wraparound services.” Just as students need more than classroom instruction to succeed at higher learning institutions, employees need other things besides a paycheck to thrive. Verlinda DiMarino, head of benefits at Liberty Mutual, spoke with Callum Borchers, columnist at the Wall Street JournalThe challenge becomes deciding what to offer a workforce that includes everyone from recent college graduates to employees in their 80s. DiMarino says the answer starts with data. Liberty Mutual uses employee surveys, focus groups, and employee resource groups (ERGs) to determine what workers really want. “We partner with them regularly in terms of understanding the needs of their community and the allies in their communities,” she said.Listening to employees led Liberty Mutual to expand its fertility program to include perimenopause and menopause support. “When women get to the top of their license, and they’re going full throttle and hitting all cylinders, their hormones start to kick in, and they’re starting to have some brain fog,” DiMarino said. “We don’t want to lose those women from the workforce.” The fertility program now covers more needs, such as family-forming fertility benefits, menopause support, and testosterone replacement therapy for men. One Program, Multiple Life StagesDiMarino highlighted Liberty Mutual’s retirement program as a prime example of benefits designed for everyone. It’s a standard 401(k) on its surface, but it also provides financial counseling, which includes unlimited, one-on-one sessions on budgeting, retirement strategy, and draw-down planning. The company also launched a student loan match package. “Some of our employees coming right out of school are challenged with some student loan debt,” DiMarino said. The program matches student loan payments with matching contributions, helping early-career employees to pay down their debt and build retirement savings. The same program offers mid-career employees an emergency savings benefit and support for home buying. “Within that one program, we are meeting the needs of early career employees dealing with student loan debt,” she added. “We’re helping our mid-career employees as they plan to buy homes, as well as providing support for retirement planning.”Where Artificial Intelligence Helps and Where Humans StayBorcher asked DiMarino about how Liberty Mutual navigates around AI in HR as an increasing number of workplace interactions become automated. “We don’t think of AI as a replacement. We understand that it’s generative, it’s not creative,” she replied. “That’s what our talent is. We’re creative.”Liberty Mutual uses AI for tasks like consolidating dense vendor decks or pulling salient points from documents. “That’s a great use case for AI,” she said. As for employee appetite for AI? That depends on the generation. “My daughter would rather never talk to a person if she could,” DiMarino said. “And then there are employees that want paper, they want to read something and see that it resonates and it makes sense, and then they want to call and clarify.”Covering GLP-1s as a Strategic InvestmentBorchers asked about one of the hottest topics regarding benefits today: GLP-1 coverage. He recalled that DiMarino had recently told a room of her peers that, “AI and GLP-1s were like the two big things on the bingo card.”Liberty Mutual covers GLP-1s for both diabetes and weight loss. “It really aligns with our philosophy that we want a healthy workforce,” DiMarino said. “If you’re at a healthy weight, you’re likely going to have fewer comorbidities. You’re going to be able to sleep better, you’re going to be more productive.”DiMarino acknowledges the high cost of GLP-1s, but frames it as a long-term investment in lower cardiac risk, reduced diabetes spending, and improved cholesterol management. Liberty Mutual built in wraparound lifestyle support when it moved to a new pharmacy benefits manager in 2026. “We wanted to give them the tools and the support around lifestyle management, being able to eat appropriately,” she said, especially for employees who want to titrate down or come off the medications.That coverage has now become a recruiting tool. “We do occasionally have employees. When they’re considering employment with Liberty, they’ll say, ‘Do you offer these medications?’” DiMarino added. “We’re happy to say that we do.”Benchmarking for Top TalentBorchers asked how much employers should keep an eye on competitors when designing benefits. “That’s important, because you want to be the employer of choice,” DiMarino said. Liberty Mutual benchmarks against a peer set that includes other insurance companies as well as “the most admired companies and the top 100.”Regarding hybrid work, which is another popular benefit, Liberty Mutual requires employees within 50 miles of an office to come in two days a week, allowing them to work from home on the remaining days. “That is extremely popular with our employees,” DiMarino said. The company also offers “virtual weeks” around holidays like winter break and back-to-school time, when everyone works from home.DiMarino’s message, delivered through stories of fertility benefits, travel concierges, and Broadway trips, suggests that the companies that invest in true wraparound support will be the ones employees remember.Ade Akin covers artificial intelligence, workplace wellness, HR trends, and digital health solutions.(Photos by Josh Larson for From Day One)