Brand Authenticity and Purpose: Aligning Values With Marketing Strategy
BY Grace Turney October 20, 2026Web traffic to seed brand Golden Harvest has dropped about 80 percent, but its marketing chief says that’s not a crisis. Younger farmers are increasingly turning to AI tools to diagnose struggling crops from photos rather than clicking through to company articles. And those who do visit the site are filling out “learn more” forms at higher rates than ever.“We’re still getting more output from the website,” said Eddie Kahle, head of marketing for Golden Harvest at Syngenta. “We’re just getting a lot less traffic to the website.”Kahle discussed this shift during a panel discussion at From Day One’s Chicago marketing conference. Mariah Rush, a staff reporter at the Chicago Sun-Times, moderated the conversation among four marketing leaders from very different industries on the topic of “Brand Authenticity and Purpose: Aligning Values With Marketing Strategy.”Trust Looks Different EverywhereFor Golden Harvest, which sells corn and soybean seeds to Midwest farmers, trust starts with weather no one can control. Kahle says the company’s seeds outperform competitors only about half the time, depending on when rain falls. So Golden Harvest focuses on helping farmers manage risk. “It’s about backing up your products when things go well or go poorly,” he said. The company uses AI models to track rainfall, sunlight, and wind, then alerts field sales teams when something happens in a farmer’s fields.Heidi Sullivan, VP of marketing at Equity LifeStyle Properties, manages more than 400 brands, one for each RV resort, marina and manufactured housing community. She divides the work into what stays fixed and what bends. The community feel and brand promise stay constant, while a campground near Yosemite can look nothing like a retirement community in Florida, she says. Panelists spoke about "Brand Authenticity and Purpose: Aligning Values With Marketing Strategy"At Aparium, an independent hotel company, authenticity is simpler and harder. Dina Fenili Niekamp, the company’s SVP of brand marketing, says the marketing has to match what a guest finds when they check in at 11 p.m. after a long day of travel.For Benjamin Svarczkopf, SVP of global marketing at Biocartis, a molecular diagnostics company focused on cancer, trust looks different. “We’re in a business where you can’t be wrong,” he said.Let Customers Do the TalkingAparium found a stronger approach by shifting its marketing strategy. Rather than relying on in-house campaigns built around road trips and family vacations, Niekamp’s team launched “As Told By,” a program that spotlights local makers, artists and contributors in each hotel’s city. “Nobody really wants to hear from a brand,” she said. “They want to hear from the partners, the customers, the people that made that brand.” The program has performed roughly 25 times better than the earlier campaigns, she says.Regulation pushes Svarczkopf toward the same approach. Pharmaceutical advertising to patients is illegal in the European Union, where most of his business sits, so Biocartis relies on pathologists and laboratory directors to carry its message. His budget goes mostly to case studies. “A really good day is finding a customer that is super excited, and they start putting out LinkedIn posts,” he said.The content that works also varies from industry to industry. Scientists don’t want polish. Svarczkopf says pathologists skip the slick slides and head straight to the footnotes and peer-reviewed evidence, so Biocartis leads with data and adds style afterward.Kahle faces a similar bar from a different direction. Golden Harvest’s products take decades to develop, and university studies often need five or more years to confirm that a product works. His team then boils the findings down into pieces a busy farmer will read.Though farms run on business-sized budgets, Kahle says the decisions often come down to one person in a family operation. That’s why consumer tactics tend to beat business-to-business ones. Golden Harvest borrowed the idea of a rewards program from the hotel industry.Community Is the ProductELS focuses on creating a community for guests, says Sullivan. “We don’t manufacture those relationships; we just facilitate the conditions that allow that to happen,” she said. Pickleball tournaments, campfire s’mores and golf cart parades give people reasons to return. The company’s annual “100 Days of Camping” campaign, which runs from Memorial Day to Labor Day and hands out collectible rally towels, now draws more than 100 million social media engagements, Sullivan says. The first year drew only a few million views.Niekamp described Aparium’s version: a hotel lobby built around a bar and restaurant rather than a check-in desk. She called it the “blue flame,” after the hottest part of a fire, because it draws locals and travelers to the same place. Her team teaches the idea to new hires alongside “the fifth meatball,” a story about staff who noticed a table of five has been served an appetizer of four and fixed it without asking permission.The panelists measure success by what customers say back to them. Sullivan tracks reviews, referrals and surveys. Niekamp watches direct bookings, since commissions from online travel agencies cut deeply into revenue, along with repeat guests. Svarczkopf’s favorite sign is a customer who “repeats your value message back better than you can.”All four said marketing can’t sit apart from finance and operations. “Marketing is not a cost center; it is a revenue driver and a growth driver,” Sullivan said. Listen Before You SpeakEach panelist shared a lesson that customers taught them this year, and each one changed how the company talks. Sullivan had always pictured RV guests as travelers. Then she met the annual guests who park for the season and build decks and tiki bars around their rigs, and she began marketing those sites as second homes.Kahle’s lesson came in his first year leading Golden Harvest. His bosses assumed the brand was fading, but surveys showed the opposite. The problem was reach, not reputation. Golden Harvest needs to get onto more farms so new customers can see for themselves.The four panelists, representing vastly different industries, all seemed to reach the same conclusion. Authentic marketing means talking less, listening more, and letting the people you serve tell the story.Grace Turney is a St. Louis-based writer, editor, artist, and former journalist and librarian. She holds a Master of Library & Information Science (MLIS) and has nearly a decade of experience writing both full time and as a freelancer. See more of her work at graceturney17.wixsite.com/mysite.(Photos by Josh Larson for From Day One)
Creating an Employee Experience That Works Across Generations
BY Grace Turney October 07, 2026Tara Karver was pitching a project her team had built to her CHRO when the conversation took a more candid turn. Karver, the head of HR for enterprise learning and skills at Pearson answered questions candidly, telling her CHRO that the questions were making her feel stressed. The call moved on.Days later, her CHRO told her that Pearson’s AI-powered Communication Coach had flagged the exchange as a missed opportunity: Karver’s honesty was a natural cue to pause and ask what was going on. Karver’s own copy of the coach had a suggestion for her, too: Be more direct and assertive when presenting material.“That’s where AI is so powerful, where it really connects humans and makes us better communicators,” Karver said, during an executive panel discussion at From Day One’s Philadelphia conference. Panelists shared how companies can create positive experiences for workers across generations, from benefits and recognition, to learning opportunities, and more. “People want to do a good job, and they want to be recognized for it,” Karver said. Preferences differ by career stage, though. Early-career employees want skill building, mid-career workers want leadership opportunities, and veterans want to mentor.Josette Jean-Francois, VP of talent management at B. Braun, sees younger employees reshaping how feedback flows. “They’re not waiting for feedback. They’re asking for feedback,” she said. They also want short, on-demand learning in place of eight-hour classes, and career moves that go sideways as well as up.Benefits for Every Life StageAllison Russell, VP of total rewards at Lincoln Financial Group, says generational labels do little for benefits design. Two Gen X employees can live very different lives: One cares for young children, another for aging parents, one is healthy and another is managing chronic illness. Employees now expect support well beyond the workplace, she says, at every life stage and event. The answer is a flexible ecosystem of programs, even though personalizing everything is administratively daunting.Panelists spoke about "Creating an Employee Experience That Works Across Generations" in PhiladelphiaAI could make that personalization practical. “We expect everything to be instantaneously at our fingertips,” Russell said, describing the shift from yesterday’s “Amazon experience” to today’s ChatGPT standard. The ideal, in her view, is a benefit that surfaces itself at the moment someone needs it, rather than a flyer that arrives after surgery.Transparency as a Focal PointMatt Sandler, global head of executive and equity compensation at Kenvue, focused on the importance of transparency. “If you’re removing a benefit or adding a benefit, just be transparent about why you’re making that change,” he said. He urged plain language over corporate lingo.He speaks from experience. Kenvue cut long-term incentives when it spun off from Johnson & Johnson, and it is now being acquired by Kimberly-Clark, a deal expected to close within months. Some employees’ pay will rise and some will fall. Sandler said the first cuts barely dented retention because the company explained them. “Amazingly, our attrition really didn’t go up,” he said.Sandler also offered a pay philosophy. If a company can exceed the market median on one component of compensation, he says, make it base salary, because cash matters in anxious times and base pay feeds into 401(k) and other benefits. He prefers giving larger long-term incentives to fewer people, noting that Kenvue’s all-employee equity award produced grants as small as $600 for some of its 22,000 recipients.Moderator Earl Hopkins, features reporter at the Philadelphia Inquirer, asked the panel about “the tension between what employees say they want and what the organizations themselves believe they need.” When employee preferences and business needs diverge, leaders have to make the case for what the organization needs while helping workers understand what’s at stake. That means spelling out the risks of standing still alongside the opportunities that change can create.Skills as a Business MetricCaitlin Collins, director of program strategy and outcomes at Betterworks, rejected the idea that development competes with performance. “They’re not really competing priorities,” said Collins, an organizational psychologist. She called evidence of skills a leading indicator of business outcomes. Companies that decouple the two see development fade, she said, because nobody tracks it.Karver urged leaders to name the skills they want, whether AI fluency or agility, and decide how to measure them. Sandler’s advice was to pick one or two tools to prioritize instead of eight.Measuring What AI DeliversMost employers can’t yet tell good AI use from busy AI use, says Russell. Lincoln Financial allocates tokens to employees and tracks consumption. “I don’t think most companies are doing that well yet,” she said. A worker who burns through every token may add less value than one who nails a few high-impact uses. Leading organizations are moving past utilization toward measuring value, and toward rewarding employees who share what they learn, says Collins. AI brings its own stress, panelists agreed. Karver finds that tasks that once took days now take minutes, yet she has no spare time, because everyone produces work faster. Her leadership team now puts well-being first, helping staff prioritize tasks. What Comes NextAsked what leaders will need to rethink in three to five years, panelists shared different priorities. Collins predicted higher talent density as AI lets teams do more, which makes people matter more. “Managers are going to be the most important,” she said.Karver and Jean-Francois both chose learning agility. “We’re all going to need to fall in love with learning,” Karver said. Jean-Francois added that leaders must learn to guide others through ambiguity, since waiting for answers means nothing gets done.Russell pointed to a harder constraint, the rising cost of healthcare, including GLP-1 drugs, which is pushing employers toward painful cuts. She urged companies to reinvest savings in other benefits so employees don’t feel their overall value has shrunk.For all their differences on pay, benefits, and the pace of change, the panelists emphasized the same point: The tools will keep changing, and the human habits around them matter more. Karver’s missed pause is a small example. Software spotted the moment, but only a person could act on it, by stopping to ask what was going on.Collins put the stakes plainly. “I don’t think we ever lose sight of the value that our people drive,” she said, “because the competition is just going to get harder and harder.”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)
Keeping Talent Engaged and Growth Opportunities Within Reach
BY Grace Turney October 05, 2026When Central Health went looking for medical assistants, it didn’t post a job and wait. It built its own pipeline, hiring community members as apprentices and paying them while they trained, then retaining 95% of participants within the organization, says Jeannie Virden, EVP and chief people officer at Central Health.That story anchored a wide-ranging conversation on talent, growth, and burnout. At From Day One’s Austin conference, Kelsey Bradshaw, editor at City Cast and the panel’s moderator, guided HR and workforce leaders through questions about career development, financial pressure, brand identity, and the growing role of artificial intelligence at work. She noted that “one of the most important things for many employees is seeing opportunities for growth,” a theme that ran throughout the discussion.Growth Means Movement, Not Just TitlesAparna Samuel Balasundaram, PhD, global head of well-being, resilience, and inclusion and belonging at Wipro, says her company has changed the way it talks about advancement. “Instead of saying there’s a career ladder, we’re kind of talking about a career journey,” she said, describing a shift toward expanding employee capability rather than climbing a fixed hierarchy.Emlyn De Leon, who leads tasks and skills redesign, strategic workforce planning at USAA, agreed that growth only works when business strategy and employee understanding move together. Mary Wicks, talent acquisition partner, HR, North America at Tiffany & Co., says her team listens directly to employees through quarterly surveys, then builds new roles around what they hear. “We would rather keep who we have than bring in external,” she said.Benefits Only Work If People Can Use ThemPanelists shared the importance of effective and innovative benefits as a means of keeping talent engaged. Virden of Central Health, pushed the panel past the question of what benefits exist and toward whether employees can actually access them. Tuition reimbursement is meaningless, she says, if workers can’t front the money or find time outside their shifts. “We have to make the time and the effort to make it accessible for them to go and use it,” Virden said.Tricia Erickson, national sales director, financial wellness, at Norton LifeLock Benefit Solutions, connected that accessibility gap to the financial pressures workers face when weighing a job change. She described employers losing workers to jobs offering a dollar more an hour, only for some to return after discovering that the new employer offered weaker benefits, such as higher health costs or no 401(k) match.That experience points to a broader challenge for employers: Benefits can have significant value, but workers may not always understand that value when making decisions about their jobs or finances. Financial wellness programs can help bridge that gap by giving workers a clearer picture of how their benefits contribute to their overall financial well-being. When workers better understand and use the resources available to them, employers can see gains in both benefit utilization and retention, she says. Communication Builds Trust From the TopSeveral panelists pointed to visibility from leadership as the connective tissue between benefits, growth, and belonging. Wicks described Tiffany & Co.’s new president touring every North American store within his first few months to introduce himself and explain the company’s direction. She said the effort helped reassure workers during a period of organizational change, giving them more context and confidence in their roles.Central Health takes a similar approach internally, Virden says, using an education calendar that includes benefits fairs, on-site tabling, and recorded sessions for workers who can’t attend live.Executive panelists took the stage to discuss "Keeping Talent Engaged and Growth Opportunities Within Reach" in AustinClear communication can also help address burnout. Asked how employers can protect frontline workers from burnout, Virden pointed to three levers: reminding staff of the impact of their daily work, removing friction from their work environment, and encouraging them to make real use of benefits such as paid time off and employee assistance programs.Balasundaram added that Wipro built a manager’s toolkit focused on empathetic listening, recognizing that a worker’s sense of well-being is often shaped more by their direct manager than by company-wide policy.AI Is Changing the Job, Not Ending ItThe panel’s final stretch turned to artificial intelligence. Balasundaram said Wipro has framed AI deliberately as “human plus AI,” emphasizing how employees can reinvest the time AI saves into upskilling and higher-value work rather than simply treating AI as a productivity shift.Wicks says AI has freed her up as a recruiter to spend more time evaluating candidates who might not look right on paper but fit the brand in person. De Leon described AI’s role as “the maker” and the human as “the checker,” meaning judgment and validation remain squarely human responsibilities even as tools handle more of the output.Take Initiative, Don’t Wait for TenureClosing out audience questions, Wicks addressed employees who expect promotion for years served or a certification earned. The best approach, she says, is to encourage employees to take initiative by raising their hands and having direct conversations with their leaders about growth. They should ask questions such as, “What does growth look like in this role?” and “What can I do to get there?” Erickson offered a parallel focus: “What are the things you can do right now that’ll make an impact. What’s something you need now in your organization that’s going to help build towards the future and the next steps?”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)
Building an AI-First Culture Is a People Strategy
BY Grace Turney October 02, 2026A physician can tell in an instant when a patient is scared, even if the patient never says so. No algorithm can do that. For Brittany Podolak, chief people officer at athenahealth, that gap between what technology can compute and what a human can perceive is the starting point for everything the healthcare technology company is building around artificial intelligence.During a fireside chat at From Day One’s Austin conference, moderated by Dan Solomon, contributor at Texas Monthly, Podolak shared how athenahealth has approached AI adoption not as a technology rollout, but as a cultural shift. The conversation covered leadership development, skill erosion, bias auditing, and what she calls the “non-negotiable professional skill” every worker now needs.A People Initiative, Not a Tech OneWhen athenahealth began shaping its approach to AI, leadership made a deliberate choice to frame the effort around people, not tools. “AI isn’t about replacing human capability; it’s about amplifying it,” said Podolak. In healthcare, that amplification applies directly to empathy, judgment, and trust, the qualities she considers core to the company’s mission.That framing influenced how the message landed internally. Rather than pitching AI as a mandate, Podolak’s team asked employees to consider which problems they were already trying to solve, and how AI might extend their reach in solving them. Curiosity followed, she said, but buy-in remained an ongoing effort rather than a one-time achievement.Podolak’s team also used AI to change how it develops leaders. Traditional coaching programs, she noted, tended toward a one-size-fits-all approach. By partnering with a strategic consulting firm and giving leaders access to a large language model for on-demand coaching, athenahealth introduced a level of personalization that hadn’t existed before. The shift also redefined what leadership now requires: supervising AI-generated output, not just people, and building the skill to coach the prompts behind it.Brittany Podolak, Chief People Officer at athenahealth, spoke with Dan Solomon, Senior Writer at Texas Monthly, during the fireside chat Asked whether AI adoption threatens core professional skills, Podolak described three categories: skills that erode quickly without daily use, skills that stay dormant but return with practice, and skills that fade harmlessly, like handwriting. She pointed to a decades-old case in aviation, where pilots who relied heavily on crew resource management lost some hand-flying ability, as a caution for high-stakes skills like critical thinking. Those, she says, cannot be delegated to AI without deliberate practice.Making AI Literacy Everyone’s JobPodolak compared AI fluency to earlier shifts in workplace technology, like the move to PowerPoint and Excel. Holding out, she said, isn’t a viable strategy, since someone who does use AI will eventually outperform someone who doesn’t. Rather than issuing static prompting guides, athenahealth built a curriculum meant to develop what Podolak called “prompting muscle,” paired with lessons on responsible use, including matching the tool to the task rather than defaulting to the most powerful model available.She also spoke to the importance of understanding bias in the technology. Inclusivity, Podolak said, has to be designed in rather than assumed. She urged leaders not to take vendor claims about algorithm auditing at face value, and to instead maintain direct oversight of how systems are evaluated. She also pointed to representation among the people training AI models as a factor shaping how equitable the resulting output becomes. athenahealth's employee resource groups, she added, play an active role in product development and customer research, feeding directly into how the company designs for accessibility.Moving Past the Experimental PhaseTraining also became a tool for managing anxiety. By pairing structured learning with hackathons, ambassador programs, and an internal event called Growth Week, athenahealth found that quarterly sentiment around AI improved as employee knowledge did. Confidence, Podolak said, tracked directly with competence.Solomon pressed on whether companies have moved past the trial-and-error stage of adopting AI. “Have we moved past that?” Solomon asked. Podolak said athenahealth has, pointing to how the company’s own measurement of success has shifted from an early fixation on token usage to a focus on the quality of output produced.One correction has emerged along the way, she noted: reminding employees that being AI-first doesn’t mean using AI for everything. Output that skipped human thinking and creativity was noticeably weaker. Keeping that distinction alive, Podolak says, remains a continuing effort as the technology evolves.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)
Sydney Sweeney’s “Just Sports” Campaign Starts a Marketing Conversation Beyond Sports
BY Grace Turney September 17, 2026Novig, a sports prediction market, just launched its first national “Just Sports” campaign, starring Sydney Sweeney. The Euphoria star is not only the face of the campaign, but also a strategic partner and equity holder. One ad shows Sweeney posing with sports equipment just barely covering her nude body. Some female athletes have called it a step backward for how women’s sports are marketed.Novig’s marketing tactic isn’t anything new. Brands have long used shock value and celebrity endorsements to grab attention and generate buzz. But the visual language the company chose is doing more than catching the eye of sports fans who happen to like Sydney Sweeney. It’s become part of an ongoing conversation about how women’s sports are depicted in the media.In a press release announcing the campaign, Novig described it as a way to present its “Just Sports” message with “confidence, humor and a playful edge.” As Sweeney’s ad circulated widely online, backlash was swift. The overall consensus is that the ad has little to nothing to do with sports trading, and instead primarily highlights Sweeney’s body. Female athletes are among the loudest critics.Four-time Olympic gold medalist swimmer Ariarne Titmus called out Novig’s marketing for sexualizing women’s sports. “I can’t describe how infuriated I feel when I watch this,” she wrote on Instagram, per The Guardian. She added that the ad undermines every woman who has built her career on skill rather than image, and questioned why monetizing women’s bodies still passes as acceptable marketing.Former college gymnast Gracie Kramer also took to Instagram to criticize the ad. She posted a highlight reel of her own athletic career, captioning it with a line aimed squarely at the Novig campaign: “idk what Sydney Sweeney was doing, but this is what a woman in sports looks like.”This is not Sweeney’s first time facing controversy for a marketing campaign. Selling soap made from her bath water in a partnership with Dr. Squatch garnered criticism for what some deemed vulgar exploitation. Her series of short video ads for American Eagle similarly used her sexuality as a marketing ploy. In one clip, Sweeney said, “My body’s composition is determined by my genes.” The camera then panned down to her chest, and she said, “Hey, eyes up here.” For marketers, the Novig campaign offers a case study in a tactic that’s becoming increasingly common: using controversy as a way to drive engagement. Novig set out to build a reputation as a platform for serious sports fans, but the campaign has generated conversation well beyond the world of sports trading. Sweeney’s controversial American Eagle campaign and Novig’s latest campaign suggest a broader pattern in celebrity marketing: sex appeal can be an effective way to capture attention, while also creating reputational risk when the underlying message is perceived as regressive.The bigger risk for brands isn’t the backlash itself, but what the backlash reveals about audience trust. A campaign can rack up engagement and still erode the thing marketers actually need long-term: the sense that a brand understands and respects the people it’s trying to reach. As more companies lean on star power to break through a crowded feed, the Sweeney campaigns are becoming a reference point for what happens when a “bold” creative choice reads as out of touch instead.Grace Turney is a St. Louis-based writer, artist, and former librarian. See more of her work at graceturney17.wixsite.com/mysite.(Photot by ElenaMist/iStock)
How Employers Are Rethinking Worker Well-Being
BY Grace Turney September 14, 2026Tim Leier’s household runs on two directions of care at once. He looks after a parent and a child; his manager does the same for a parent, a child, and a grandchild. Leier, director of HR international benefits at Ecolab, described his own “sandwich generation” experience and said the company has leaned into on-site healthcare, wellness providers, and caregiving support that spans generations.It’s the kind of arrangement benefits leaders now build entire strategies around, as employees across multiple generations and life stages bring different needs, responsibilities, and expectations to the workplace.That reality was the starting point for a panel on holistic and inclusive well-being strategies for a multigenerational workforce at From Day One’s September virtual conference. “I believe this is the first time we have five generations working side by side in the workforce,” said session moderator Courtney Vinopal, a senior reporter for HR Brew. Populations Are Bigger Than Age GroupsThe panelists agreed early on that generation alone rarely explains what an employee needs. Jacki Schwartz, a global people solutions business partner at Concentrix, says her company of roughly 450,000 employees worldwide focuses less on age and more on life circumstances such as caregiving, family status, and financial well-being. “We approach it from a lens of inclusion and flexibility,” she said.That view held across industries. Julie Lawrence, VP, HR business partner, at ISS Facility Services, says that about 80% of her company’s workforce delivers services directly at client sites. With the majority of our workforce serving clients in operational environments, ISS has focused on creating an omnichannel employee experience that meets employees where they are. Whether through mobile technology, multilingual communications, manager-led engagement, or digital self-service tools, our goal is to ensure every employee has equitable access to information and support regardless of work locationMamie Wheaton, CFP, CFDA, CCC, and director of financial planning at LearnLux, put a finer point on it: two employees from the same generation can have completely different financial situations, so her team weighs life stage, income, and financial complexity ahead of age. “We don’t assume that someone’s generation tells us exactly what their financial needs are,” Wheaton said.The Importance of Supporting CaregiversSupporting workers with caregiving responsibilities also comes with difficult decisions about how much employers can afford to provide. Leier says the company has been looking for ways to provide meaningful support while keeping a close eye on costs. “The money’s not growing on trees, so we’re getting a lot of pressure every day to make sure we’re not overspending,” he said.Panelists spoke about "Holistic and Inclusive Well-Being Strategies for a Multigenerational Workforce" during the virtual conference (photo by From Day One)Lawrence also pointed to the growing need to support workers as they balance caregiving with their own health needs. ISS Facility Services introduced women’s health benefits covering reproductive care and menopause, along with specific benefits supporting men’s health, as employees navigate caregiving responsibilities alongside their own health needs, she says. “They’re not only trying to take care of kids at home or aging parents, but they also need to be prioritizing their own health,” Lawrence said. “We view well-being as both a people strategy and a business strategy. When employees have access to resources that support their health, financial wellness, and caregiving responsibilities, it contributes to engagement, retention, attendance, and ultimately the quality of service we deliver to our clients,” she said. Personalizing Choice Without Creating OverloadEvery panelist described some version of the same tension: employees want choice, but too many options create confusion. At Concentrix, leaders use a tiered flex benefit system paired with an AI-enabled benefits portal so employees can ask questions and select what applies to their families, says Schwartz. Leier said Ecolab is looking for opportunities to offer evergreen elections, so employees who are happy with their choices don’t have to revisit them every year. But even a well-designed benefit only helps if employees know it exists, the panelists agreed. Wheaton described sending LearnLux teams directly into manufacturing facilities to reach shift workers, planning around shift changes and offering support in other languages, including Spanish, rather than relying solely on a benefits website. Leier says Ecolab has found some shift workers prefer an on-site kiosk while some office employees favor a mobile app, so the company avoids a one-size-fits-all channel. He added that Ecolab wants personalization to remain associate-driven rather than relying too heavily on AI, and that the company is cautious about using AI for decisions involving HIPAA or other regulatory considerations.Cost Pressure Is Reshaping Every DecisionWith health care costs continuing to put pressure on benefits budgets, the panelists described approaches including preventive care, simpler access to benefits, and financial guidance to help employees make informed choices. “We focus on simplifying the employee experience because benefits only create value when employees can easily navigate and utilize them. Reducing fragmentation improves access, drives greater utilization, and helps ensure we’re maximizing our investment while delivering meaningful support to employees,” said Lawrence. Wheaton noted that LearnLux increasingly helps employees weigh premiums against deductibles and out-of-pocket maximums so they choose a plan suited to their actual needs rather than defaulting to the cheapest option.Utilization Isn’t the Only Measure of SuccessAsked how they judge whether a benefit is working, the panelists pushed back on relying solely on usage data. Leier, who described himself as “a recovering actuary,” said Ecolab’s employee assistance program has modest everyday participation but proved essential during crises in Ukraine and Venezuela, when utilization spiked sharply. Schwartz described bringing a leave-administration process back in-house after employee surveys showed the outsourced version added stress during already difficult moments, a decision driven by sentiment rather than usage numbers.Looking ahead, Wheaton predicted that the biggest shift will be rising expectations for personalization, as employees accustomed to tailored experiences elsewhere in their lives expect the same from their benefits. For a workforce spanning multiple generations and life stages, that growing expectation for personalization may be one of the most important challenges, and opportunities, facing benefits leaders.Grace Turney is a St. Louis-based writer, artist, and former librarian. See more of her work at graceturney17.wixsite.com/mysite.(Photo by AKart Design/iStock)
Ghost Jobs Are About to Get Expensive for Employers
BY Grace Turney September 09, 2026Ghost jobs, online job listings for positions that do not actually exist or that a company has no immediate intention of filling, are becoming more than just an annoyance for job seekers. While eager applicants took the time to personalize and submit their resumes, portfolios, and cover letters, anxiously hoping for a call that could lead to their dream job, the company was really looking to build a talent pipeline, signify growth, placate current employees, or meet compliance rules. But ghost jobs may no longer help companies fulfill compliance requirements, and are turning into a compliance risk.New York’s Senate Bill S8877, which passed the state legislature in June and was delivered to Gov. Kathy Hochul, would fine employers $2,500 per publication or digital platform for failing to disclose real hiring intent. If the bill passes, it would have a major impact on the job market, for both hiring companies and job seekers alike.Ghost jobs have gone from an open secret to a measurable epidemic. Criteria Corp’s 2026 Candidate Experience Report shows that more than half, 53%, of job seekers experienced ghosting within the last year. That figure comes amid a three-year rise in employer ghosting: 48% of applicants were ignored by employers in 2025, up from 38% in 2024, according to Fortune. Pennsylvania’s proposed Ghost Job Postings Prevention Act and Ontario’s new job posting requirements (effective Jan. 1) indicate that this isn’t a one-state phenomenon. Other states, including California and New Jersey, are considering anti-ghost job legislation, as well.Meanwhile, employers are facing another challenge: application volume. Robert Half reported that 67% of HR leaders say AI-generated applications are slowing hiring. The volume problem that makes ghost postings tempting (pipeline-building, optics of growth) is intensifying, not easing.New York’s S8877 would require employers to state in job listings that the post is for a current vacancy with a specific fill date. If they don’t plan to fill the position within 90 days, they must specify that as a “no sooner than” date. Employers would also have to specify if the job is not for a current vacancy but the employer is seeking resumes for potential future openings. Employers and third-party advertisers must take down a job advertisement within two weeks after it’s filled. If companies advertise jobs violating the statute, they could be fined $2,500 for each publication or digital platform where the posting appears, with the fine doubling if the violation is not rectified within 30 days.For HR teams, that means ghost-job compliance could become an operational issue, not just a legal one. Employers would need to know exactly where each job posting is listed, distinguish active openings from pipeline postings, document intended hiring dates, and create processes for removing filled positions from every platform. A job posted simultaneously on a company careers page, LinkedIn, Indeed, and a third-party recruiting site could rack up multiple potential violations from a single stale posting.But the stakes go beyond fines. New research suggests that repeated negative experiences with the labor market can shape how people view work itself. According to a June 2026 NBER working paper, men’s labor-force participation is influenced by beliefs about the returns to working, which are shaped by their experiences with the labor market. Those effects can persist even when men move to different states, and the researchers argue that short-term declines in labor demand can produce long-term declines in labor supply.Ghost jobs are not the only factor influencing those beliefs, and the NBER study does not specifically examine ghost postings. But the implication for employers is worth considering: If workers repeatedly encounter jobs that appear available but never lead anywhere, they may learn that pursuing work is less worthwhile than they once believed.That matters at a time when the labor force is already under pressure. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the labor-force participation rate fell to 61.5% in June, while 6 million people who were not in the labor force said they wanted a job. And Lightcast projects that the U.S. could face a shortfall of roughly 6 million workers before the end of the decade.Ghost jobs are evolving from a convenient recruiting tactic into a serious liability with legal, operational, and potentially long-term talent-pipeline consequences. As the competition for workers intensifies, companies may want to think twice before asking candidates to invest their time and trust in a job that was never really there.Grace Turney is a St. Louis-based writer, artist, and former librarian. See more of her work at graceturney17.wixsite.com/mysite.(Photo by FangXiaNuo/iStock)
Aligning Brand Promises With Customer Experience
BY Grace Turney July 21, 2026When Kentucky Fried Chicken ran out of chicken at its United Kingdom locations in 2018, the company didn’t hide from the blunder. It took out a full-page apology ad with its logo rearranged to spell “FCK,” admitted the mistake, and let the joke land. It’s the kind of recovery that sticks in Nizzi Karai Renaud’s mind years later as a great example of authenticity: not a flawless brand, but one that bridges the gap between what it promises and what it delivers, even when that means owning a very public mess.Renaud, Chief Brand Officer at Zazzle, the global print-on-demand marketplace headquartered in Menlo Park, California, explored that idea during a fireside chat at a recent From Day One’s July virtual conference. In a discussion moderated by marketing journalist Lisa Lacy, the two examined how brands earn consumer trust by keeping the promises they make, and why authenticity has become such an urgent topic across industries.Renaud traced the current consumer fixation on authenticity to a widening gap between what companies say, what they do, and what they actually value. “Authenticity is very unique in content, but universal in mechanism,” she said, noting that what feels authentic to Zazzle looks nothing like what feels authentic to a bank, even though the underlying test is the same everywhere. That test, she says, is whether a decision would still make sense traced back through a company’s history, or whether it only makes sense because it happens to be trending.Tone and alignment are related but distinct, Renaud added. A company’s tone, whether buttoned-up or unhinged on social media, is simply the outfit it wears. Alignment is the character underneath. She pointed to Duolingo’s owl mascot as an example of a chaotic tone that still tracks honestly with the app’s famously persistent reminders. Consumers forgive an unconventional outfit, she said, but not a character that doesn’t add up.Nizzi Karai Renaud, chief brand officer at Zazzle, spoke during the session moderated by journalist Lisa Lacy (photo by From Day One)At Zazzle, where customers design and personalize their own products, Renaud says every order is a promise either kept or broken. This makes authenticity as much an operational question as a marketing one. That philosophy shows up internally through what the company calls CHIA: creativity, heart, integrity, and amaze, a shorthand Renaud’s team uses when navigating difficult calls, including content moderation decisions and the rollout of Zazzle’s AI shopping agent, Z.Trust itself, Renaud says, is built over time through repeated interactions rather than a single standout moment, meaning brands should design for the hundredth customer interaction, not just the first impression. She recommended making fewer promises and keeping them consistently, while also planning in advance for the moments when a company inevitably falls short. Nothing collapses public trust faster than hypocrisy caught out in the open.Renaud also urged brands to hand storytelling over to their customers rather than narrating on their own behalf. She cited Lego’s fan-designed product line and GoPro’s use of customer-shot footage as examples of companies that let real users become their most credible advocates. The underlying psychological concept, she said, is “mattering,” a framework popularized by the late scholar Isaac Prilleltensky, built on the idea that people need to feel both valued and capable of adding value in return.As for brands that exemplify sustained trust, Renaud pointed to Costco, a company she described as a quiet master of brand integrity that has avoided reinvention or gimmicks in favor of relentless consistency. “Marketing can just be the mirror, not the mask,” she said. No amount of messaging can manufacture authenticity if the underlying operation doesn’t support it.In the end, Renaud’s advice circles back to a single idea: authenticity isn’t a campaign a brand launches, but a discipline it keeps. The companies that last, she suggested, are the ones willing to hold their values fixed while everything else, tone, channels, even the tools they build with, keeps changing around them.Grace Turney is a St. Louis-based writer, artist, and former librarian. See more of her work at graceturney17.wixsite.com/mysite.(Photo by skynesher/iStock)
Reassessing Benefits, Reimagining Value for Today’s Workforce
BY Grace Turney July 17, 2026Ask a benefits leader what employees want most right now, and the answer may surprise you: it’s not just health coverage or retirement matching, but help simply making sense of the healthcare system itself. That was the message from Lenka Sloman, executive director and head of total rewards at WPP Media. Sloman spoke during a fireside chat at From Day One’s June virtual conference. The conversation about “Reassessing Benefits, Reimagining Value for Today’s Workforce,” was moderated by Megan Ulu-Lani Boyanton, a business reporter for The Seattle Times. A Navigation Problem, Not Just a Cost ProblemOne of the most persistent challenges Sloman hears from brokers is how to control costs, but she traced much of that cost pressure back to a navigation gap. Employees increasingly self-diagnose online before ever consulting a doctor, she says, then choose specialists based on guesswork rather than guidance. That pattern drives up claims because people end up seeing the wrong providers and undergoing tests that were never necessary in the first place.Lenka Sloman of WPP Media spoke with moderator Megan Ulu-Lani Boytanton of the Seattle Times (photo by From Day One)“If there was some sort of assistance for employees to seek and actually be guided in what doctors they should see, I think it would prevent a lot of the unnecessary costs that are happening to employers,” Sloman said. Boyanton could relate. “I am so guilty of the quick, “Let me check with WebMD and see where my symptoms align with,’” she said. Communication and Innovation as a Retention ToolBoyanton asked how Sloman keeps employees informed during periods of organizational change. “I just try and be as transparent as possible,” Sloman said. “I’ll send out proactive messaging, share links in real time, make sure that I’m always available. I’ll coach my team. I’ll tell them just to be good listeners.”When WPP Media recently sunset a physical-exam benefit that had become redundant with standard health coverage, her team treated the change as a teaching moment rather than a simple announcement, walking employees through how to get the same care through their existing medical plans.“Both utilization and disruption should always be considered when reviewing any type of changes to benefits,” Sloman said. A change that trims costs but unsettles a large group of employees, she argued, often ends up costing more once a company accounts for the exceptions it has to make to soften the blow.Sloman also described how her team is experimenting with AI agents to help answer employee benefits questions. “It’s a logic-based data source that we’ll use to answer the questions that’s positioned directly from the employee that is asking the question,” Sloman said. Rather than offering generic responses, the system is designed to pull from each employee’s specific plan elections, so a worker enrolled in a PPO with dental and vision coverage receives answers tailored to those exact benefits. Staying within HIPAA guidelines, she says, is central to how her team evaluates any new AI tool.Rethinking What Counts as a Family BenefitAsked about innovative offerings, Sloman pointed to something less conventional than the usual stipends and perks list: pet care.“It’s really something that goes a long way, because we do support so many family building benefits,” Sloman said. “This now also supports employees that may not have families, but have pets, and that’s their family, so it now encompasses the entire population.” “I had never heard of that before, so that’s a little bit mind blowing for me, but would be great for my cats,” Boyanton said.Sloman also detailed WPP Media’s approach to parental leave, which pairs standard bonding time with a part-time, full-pay phase-back option for parents returning to work after an extended absence, giving them a gradual reentry to their client work rather than an abrupt return to a full schedule.Closing out the conversation, Sloman offered a simple piece of guidance for other leaders balancing employee needs against business priorities: “Don’t go at this alone. Lean on your vendors, on your carriers, your brokers, whoever it is that you work with, and make sure that you work hand in hand with your leaders,” Sloman said.“The more that they understand what you’re trying to provide the company, the more that can be done for your employees,” Sloman said.Grace Turney is a St. Louis-based writer, artist, and former librarian. See more of her work at graceturney17.wixsite.com/mysite.(Photo by dusanpetkovic/iStock)
Future-Proofing HR in the Age of AI
BY Grace Turney June 29, 2026Julia Johnson marked her second day on the job at Cognizant with a history lesson. As the company’s new SVP, global talent management leader, she reminded the room that IBM, which spent 115 years building one of the world’s most recognized brands, was once called Computing, Tabulating and Recording Company. The rebranding happened in 1924. The lesson? What we call things matters, and the names we give new technologies shape how we use them.“If we had a time machine,” Johnson said, “we would rename it augmented intelligence, because it really requires having a human complete it—not being a rubber stamp,” Johnson said during an executive panel discussion at From Day One’s Manhattan conference. Moderator Lydia Dishman, SVP of content strategy, narrative and thought leadership at Method Communications, opened by citing a striking data point: 88% of HR leaders say their organizations have not yet realized significant business value from AI tools, according to a recent survey. The question the panel had gathered to answer wasn’t whether AI would transform work, it’s already doing that, but how to move from experimentation to real transformation while keeping the human part of work intact.Job Elimination Is the Wrong FrameThe most persistent misconception about AI, panelists agreed, is the idea that it eliminates jobs wholesale.“AI is really, really good at doing certain tasks,” said Scott Turner, partner at Mercer, who previously built agentic AI systems at Disney. “A job is a whole stack of tasks. Replacing a job is a human decision. If all those tasks in a job can be easily replaced by AI, perhaps you didn’t design that great a job for the human in the first place.”Owen O’Neill, executive director of HR technology and operations at Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, pushed back on the broader pressure and market noise around AI: “Everybody needs to do what’s right for the culture and readiness of your organization, at the pace that works for you” he said.The flip side of that caution is not ignoring AI’s genuine implications. “What I cringe at is when people talk to their employees like, ‘Oh, this isn’t going to have an impact at all,’” Turner said. “That’s just disingenuous. It’s going to have an impact. Let’s try to do this thoughtfully.”Transformation Begins With the Right QuestionWhen organizations approach Mercer wanting to deploy AI in HR, Turner says the first question he asks is deceptively simple: What are you trying to improve? That question is the antidote to FOMO-driven adoption—the tendency to implement AI because competitors are doing it, or because a vendor has a compelling pitch. The most successful AI transformations he’s seen share a common trait: they identify specific, high-frequency workflows, redesign them around what AI does well, measure the results against clear KPIs, and keep humans meaningfully in the loop.Johnson echoed this, pointing to one of IBM’s earliest high-impact use cases. Employment verification letters, the kind a senior manager needs urgently when closing on a home, used to require up to two days of back-and-forth. Now they’re generated in any country, in about 30 seconds, around the clock, which made a significant difference for employees. “Be pragmatic, have the use case, look at the ROI, embrace what will be used,” she said about the experience in her former role. O’Neill put it plainly: “Tell me what your HR priorities are and what your strategy is, and I will tell you what our AI roadmap is to enable that. Start with what those priorities are, not the technology.”Panelists shared their perspectives and best practices on the topic, "Future-Proofing HR With AI: How to Lead, Adapt, and Keep the Human Touch in a Tech-Driven Era"Efficiency gains are real, but panelists were candid about areas where the business case doesn’t always hold up under scrutiny.Resume screening is one. O’Neill noted that Regeneron could received 1000’s of applications for a single role, making AI-assisted screening appear essential. But he was quick to identify the risk: “How we’ve hired in the past doesn’t necessarily reflect how we want to hire in the future. A good hire two years ago is not necessarily a good hire two years from now.”Performance management is another. AI can remove some bias, consolidate feedback, and save managers time, but, O’Neill says, that misses an important point. “Performance management can be seen as a social contract between an employee and a manager. Automating that risks dehumanizing it. It’s about the conversation, not the document.”The Talent Pipeline Problem No One Is SolvingDishman raised a concern that has received less attention than job elimination at the entry level: what happens to the pipeline that feeds middle management when the entry-level roles that have historically developed that talent disappear?Paul Tiesler, SVP of talent development and learning strategy at Moody’s Corporation, offered a structural answer. The traditional pyramid-shaped org chart, he says, may need to become an hourglass. Under that model, entry-level employees sit alongside AI, learning from it and compressing their career timelines. Middle managers are elevated into more senior-level thinking as AI handles the processes that currently bog them down. The people organizations hire at both levels share a trait: strong judgment, discernment, and critical thinking, skills AI cannot replicate.“You’re going to be hiring for exactly the same thing,” Tiesler said, “more so than technical skills, especially as AI is able to automate some of those technical skills.” Moody’s has already seen this play out within software and product development. “We sat down with them and said, ‘How can we make AI do this better for you,’” Tiesler said of its middle managers, “and they’ve been able to elevate their role, and juniors on their team are now getting to do more interesting work.”Putting the Human In the Loop—IntentionallyBill Beegle, senior global business solutions architect at Degreed, offered a different model for how AI can augment rather than automate: scenario-based role play. Degreed uses AI to help employees practice high-stakes conversations, difficult performance reviews, sensitive feedback, the transition from peer to manager, in a low-risk environment where they can make mistakes and receive structured feedback.“Unlike automating a process, this is putting it like a flight simulator,” Beegle said. “You get to try, you get to practice, you can make as many mistakes as you want. You’re not really going to crash a plane, you’re just talking to AI.”The use case has found particular traction in regulated industries like biopharma, where the wrong word in a conversation with a physician carries real consequences. And it represents something the panel returned to repeatedly: using AI not to remove the human, but to make the human better at the distinctly human parts of their job.Johnson crystallized the logic: “What are humans no good at? Finding needles in haystacks. What does LLM do really well? They find needles in haystacks, or find trends. Look at what the human is good at and amplify that.”Building Trust in Times of ChangeThe panel converged on change management as the most underrated element of AI adoption. Tiesler was direct about what doesn't work: “Edicts from down on high don’t work. Arbitrary ‘we’ve got to cut X percentage of headcount, we have to automate Y number of processes’ – that doesn’t really work.”What does work, panelists agreed, is co-creation with employees – sitting down with business teams, mapping their actual processes, and identifying genuine opportunities for relief. Transparency matters too. Johnson described the framework she used at IBM: “We’re going to tell you what we are doing, why we are doing it, when we’re doing it, and how it will impact you. It’s not hard, but it’s so often overlooked.”Beegle pointed to one practical lever organizations underuse: making skills transparent. When employees can see how their skills map to other internal roles and what would help them get there, the internal mobility conversation stops being abstract. “It’s a really important part, so people understand that it can benefit them.”Closing the session, Dishman asked the panel directly: can leading with AI and keeping the human touch actually coexist? Every panelist said yes, with conditions.Turner returned to the limits of what AI can actually do. Its model of truth is built entirely on language. “It has no concept that this is actually a chair and I’m touching it.” That gap between what AI can know and what humans embody through experience is permanent, and it’s where design comes in. “We are going to have a completely different set of knowledge than the LLM can ever have,” Turner said. “It’s about trying to find that balance of where it can be applied safely.”O’Neill said on a closing note: “We’re at step zero of a race that is going to go a million miles. We’re right at the beginning.”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)
Tailoring Workplace Wellness: Designing Personalized Benefits for Today's Workforce
BY Grace Turney June 25, 2026When Rebecca Liebman took the stage for a panel on personalized workplace well-being, she pointed out something the audience hadn’t yet noticed: unlike her fellow panelists, she was holding a handheld microphone instead of wearing a clip-on. The reason was simple: clip-ons don’t attach well to dresses, and she’d asked for an alternative that worked for her. It was a small moment, but it captured the panel’s larger message. For years, employee benefits have been designed for one default kind of worker, and everyone else has been left to make it work anyway.The panel at From Day One’s Chicago half-day benefits conference, brought together five benefits leaders for a wide-ranging conversation moderated by Kim Quillen, business editor at the Chicago Tribune. The discussion covered why generic benefits packages fall short, how data and communication strategy can close that gap, and what it takes to actually move the needle on employee engagement.Meeting Employees Where They AreLara Johnson, senior director of employee growth and well-being at Netskope, a global cybersecurity company, says personalization at her company starts with acknowledging how different employees’ lives look. With a workforce spread across roughly three dozen countries and a limited well-being budget, her team built a “growth labs” program offering workshops on psychological safety and burnout, paired with platforms like LinkedIn Learning for professional development. The goal is to treat well-being and career growth as connected rather than separate priorities. “We believe when our employees grow, NetSkope grows,” Johnson said.Joe Park, director of benefits at The Aspen Group, parent company of Aspen Dental, shared a story from earlier in his career that reshaped how he thinks about communication. A leader once told him about a family member who didn’t learn he had stage-four lung cancer until it was too late, a moment that pushed her team to stop sending the same “vanilla” wellness message to everyone. Instead, they hired a communications specialist, studied workforce demographics, and tailored messaging and visuals by audience. According to Park, engagement rose significantly within a year. “It’s about meeting people where they are,” he said. “It’s important to really look at your data, look at your population demographics, and think about how you personalize that to meet your workforce.”In Chicago, panelists spoke about "The Power of Personalization in Workplace Well-Being"Rahul Rajvanshi, director of benefits and total rewards at Montefiore Health System, framed the stakes in plain terms: a nurse working overnight shifts, a physician balancing patient care with family obligations, and a remote scheduler all need different things from their benefits. “We need to deliver benefits, what our employees want versus what is easy for HR administrators to admin,” Rajvanshi said. When Montefiore noticed physicians missing summer appointments because of childcare conflicts, the health system added dependent care and elder care benefits, and saw utilization of related services jump by half.Holistic Wellness, With Budgets in MindJane Lyons, SVP of customer success at SmithRx, a pharmacy benefit manager built around price transparency, says pharmacy benefits are often the most frequent point of contact employees have with their health plan, sometimes a dozen times a year, compared with an annual doctor’s visit.That frequency, she says, makes every interaction an opportunity to educate members about cost-saving options, copay assistance, and alternative medications. “It’s really understanding where they are on their health literacy journey,” said Lyons. “We want to maximize those moments that matter.”The same principle applies beyond healthcare: employees often need guidance not just in accessing benefits, but in making complex decisions about how to use them. Personalization and timely support can be just as critical when workers are navigating their financial lives. “Financial planning is just life planning,” said Rebecca Liebman, co-founder and CEO of LearnLux. “Financial well-being is just how do I want to live my life, and how can I put a plan together that makes sense for me.”Two employees with identical salaries and debt loads might want completely different approaches: one focused on aggressively paying down debt, another comfortable investing while paying it off slowly. LearnLux’s certified financial planners field everything from questions about employee stock plans to urgent situations, like someone facing repossession of their car within days, says Liebman. When her organization rolls out programs across dozens of countries at once, the priority is offering consistent access to services while adapting the messaging to fit local financial norms and attitudes toward money.The conversation around financial well-being also extends to healthcare spending, where rising costs are forcing employers to rethink how they support employees and manage expenses. Lyons of SmithRx also addressed the rise of GLP-1 medications for diabetes and weight management, noting that in some cases these drugs now account for roughly 30% of a company’s pharmacy spend. Pairing access to the medications with nutrition support and other wraparound services, she says, is essential to sustaining results.Letting Data Guide the StrategySeveral panelists pointed to data as the foundation for personalization. Johnson described noticing a sharp spike in mental health service usage among Netskope’s Taiwan-based employees and tracing it back to an HR manager who had actively promoted the program. This finding helped the company refine its broader approach to reducing stigma around mental health support. Rajvanshi says Montefiore expanded its employee assistance program to round-the-clock availability after recognizing that nurses working overnight shifts couldn’t access support during standard daytime hours.On reaching employees who don’t open benefits emails, panelists emphasized simplicity and channel diversity. Johnson says her team relies heavily on Slack to share curated updates, while Park encouraged stripping benefits jargon entirely. Johnson also runs an annual “Benefits 101” session that breaks down basic terms like deductibles and health savings accounts in plain language, which she said resonates especially with younger employees and those new to the U.S. health system.Asked for a final piece of advice, the panelists largely agreed: start with data, not vendor pitches; treat well-being as inseparable from performance; and remember that the goal isn’t to hand every employee the same microphone—it’s to make sure they all have one that works for 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)
Skills That Stick: How Tech and Tools Are Boosting Learning and Development
BY Grace Turney June 02, 2026When Christine Karel, head of enterprise learning at Ameriprise Financial, joined early conversations around enterprise adoption of Microsoft Copilot, she pushed for learning and development to be included from the outset to ensure the investment translated into real business value. She observed that many AI rollouts are initially centered on technology, risk, and compliance, without a clear strategy for how employees would apply these tools to drive performance and productivity outcomes. Karel emphasized that deploying AI at scale is only part of the equation. Organizations are now focused on closing the gap between access and impact by helping employees build the capability to use AI in meaningful, role-specific ways. When done well, this shift enables faster decision-making, improved productivity, and a stronger return on technology investments“If you launch a massive investment like Copilot across an organization,” said Karel, “how are we, as talent and learning and HR, supporting that initiative?” That question, and the lessons behind it, set the tone for a lively panel discussion at a From Day One’s Minneapolis conference. A panel of leaders dug into how companies are scrambling to build AI fluency among employees, why the pace of change keeps outrunning their strategies, and what it will take for L&D to earn a permanent seat at the table. The panel was moderated by Evan Ramstad, business columnist for the Minnesota Star Tribune.When the Tool Launches Before the TrainingThe story Karel told about Copilot wasn’t unique. Michelle Anderson, VP of global learning & development at AmTrust Financial Services, described almost the same experience. “A couple years ago, we launched Copilot to the entire company without us, they didn’t come to L&D at all, and then they wondered, ‘Well, why did this fall flat? Why isn’t anybody using it?’” The company pulled the tool back and is now building its own internal solution. L&D has a seat at that table now, Anderson says, but only because the first attempt failed.The pattern reveals something important: AI adoption isn’t primarily a technology problem. It’s a learning problem. People arrive with wildly different baselines: some treat AI like Google, others are genuinely uncertain what it can do. And without a deliberate strategy to meet them where they are, even well-funded rollouts stall.Anderson’s team at AmTrust has responded with a framework called Grow, designed to weave learning into employees’ daily workflow rather than tacking it on as a separate task. The system uses job descriptions and self-reported skills to recommend relevant development, surfacing nudges through Microsoft Viva Learning directly inside Teams. Managers are expected to reinforce the habit (a minimum of one hour of learning per month is company policy) because, as Anderson put it, “if your manager doesn’t support something, you’re not going to find the time to do it.”Measuring Comfort, Not Just CompletionOne of the sharper debates among panelists was how, and whether, to assess employees’ comfort with AI tools. Anderson said AmTrust deliberately chose not to survey its workforce on the topic. “We were worried that there would be fear associated with it,” she said. “And I don’t think we’re ready to address that fear yet.”Panelists shared insights on "Skills That Stick: How Tech and Tools Are Boosting Learning and Development" during the discussion in Minneapolis Carita Hibben, VP of HR at C.H. Robinson, took a different approach. About two years into what she described as a comprehensive AI transformation at the logistics company, her team conducted a pulse survey asking employees to rate their comfort with AI in their daily work. Around 73% said they were comfortable—a result Hibben called encouraging, and one that also yielded “actionable insights on areas that we might need to dive deeper into.”C.H. Robinson has also leaned into AI-powered role-play simulations. Using a platform, employees and managers can practice challenging conversations by either playing themselves or switching roles to see the scenario from the other side. The same kind of simulation is used by the company’s sales and account management teams to prepare for difficult customer conversations. Hibben noted that utilization spikes during performance review periods and other high-stakes moments, even without formal requirements to use the tool.AmTrust has built out similar functionality through LinkedIn Learning, with the added ability to create custom simulations tailored to specific roles. The platform scores participants and recommends follow-on coursework based on performance. Anderson’s team is now exploring how to embed those simulations into new-hire programs for claims associates.Closing the Loop at the C-Suite LevelMoses Berkowitz, chief revenue officer at Censia AI, works closely with CHROs, CFOs, and CEOs on workforce strategy. He offered a bird’s-eye view of what’s driving urgency at the top of organizations. “This is a CEO and board-level conversation right now,” he said, “and the conversation in 10 out of 10 rooms is that this is going to have a massive impact on our workforce. Not in a scary way, but jobs are really going to change.”What gives him optimism, Berkowitz said, is that conversations previously happening in silos are now happening in the same room: What skills does the business actually need? What do our employees have? Where’s the gap? That alignment, he says, is the foundation for meaningful progress.Karel echoed that framing, describing how Ameriprise’s AI Leadership Council, originally composed of technology, risk, and compliance leaders, has expanded to include talent, communications, and business unit representatives. The lesson she drew was pointed: you can only get so far with a tool. “The people that run the tool, that think through the tool, and actually work around the tool are really what we need to be thinking about.”Berkowitz added a striking data point from his firm’s work with one of the world’s largest consulting companies: out of 400,000 employees, the single heaviest user of their internal AI tools is the CEO. “That sends a message to everyone that we take this seriously.”The Half-Life ProblemSkills are expiring faster than ever, and AI is accelerating that trend at a remarkable pace. Berkowitz says that the half-life of a skill has collapsed to under five years, and for anything AI-adjacent, it’s compressing even faster.The implications for L&D are significant. Berkowitz described working with a university that invested $250,000 in an AI training program. Six months after launch, the program was obsolete—the underlying technology had moved on. “As the half-life of skills compresses, we need to think about how we build programs differently,” he said.The panelists largely agreed that the answer isn’t to build more programs faster, but to build differently. That formal, comprehensive training curriculum may simply become too time-intensive to justify, says Anderson. “We’re going to have to get to the point where we’re not building big giant formal programs anymore. We’re building more in the flow of work, in the place that they need it.”Karel put it plainly: AI makes it faster and easier to create content, but that won’t solve the structural problem if organizations are building around the wrong model entirely. What will endure, Karel says, are the foundational capabilities: critical thinking, adaptability, ethical judgment. “Those are old skills. If you could just base the foundation on some of those things, those are going to be the things that take you along the way.”The Human Element Doesn’t DisappearAs the conversation turned to productivity, Berkowitz gently pushed back on the framing that tends to dominate headlines. “The topic of productivity, it’s all we want to talk about in the media, and we’re replacing workers, but I think it’s a bit of a red herring.” The more useful question, he says, is how organizations can deliver more value to customers per unit of human capital. He cited the example of bank tellers after ATMs arrived: The work changed, but the role didn’t disappear. Tellers shifted from handling cash to greeting customers, and the experience actually improved.Anderson made a similar case, pointing to research suggesting that some roles could see 40% to 50% productivity gains through automation. But she was quick to add the counterweight: “There has to be a human at the center of it. How do we teach people to be better critical thinkers and thought partners?” She envisions a future where managers become more important, not less, not because AI will replace their authority, but because coaching, psychological safety, and human judgment will matter more as digital tools handle more routine tasks.What L&D Looks Like in Five YearsClosing the session with a rapid-fire look ahead, each panelist offered a vision for where learning and development is headed.Karel predicted that the function will shift its focus from teaching specific topics to shaping workforce design, with learning as one lever among many, grounded in deep knowledge of what skills the business actually needs.Hibben emphasized agility above all else. “What we know is that there’s going to be continuation of skills needed, and those talent practitioners need to be flexible and agile.”Anderson was less focused on where L&D sits in the org chart than on whether it maintains strong partnerships with the business and stays aligned on outcomes.Berkowitz offered a challenging take: the United States spends roughly $150 billion annually on upskilling and reskilling, he says, and he believes that figure still dramatically underestimates what’s needed. “If I were to wave the magic wand, we’re going to invest a lot more in L&D.” The catch is that it will be managed like a business. “We’re going to run it like a P&L.”Anderson’s response was immediate: “I would be okay with that.”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)
Leading Through Digital Transformation: Redesigning Work and Keeping People Connected
BY Grace Turney May 18, 2026Todd Reeves spent years running payroll early in his HR career. “Don’t ever do that,” he joked to the audience at From Day One’s Seattle conference. “There’s no good outcome other than perfection in payroll.”The joke landed, but it also illustrated something true about the function Reeves now leads at the highest level. Human resources has long been defined by operational precision, by getting the details exactly right. What Reeves, chief people officer at Zoom, described in his fireside chat was a profession on the cusp of shedding much of that burden entirely.The conversation, moderated by Megan Ulu-Lani Boyanton, business reporter for the Seattle Times, covered Zoom’s pandemic-era transformation, its evolving AI strategy, and what it means to lead a global workforce through a period of relentless technological change.From Video Calls to Completed WorkZoom turns 15 this year, and Reeves is quick to note how much the company’s ambitions have expanded since its founding. “We started out with the mission of just making video communications easy, accessible, and simple,” he said. Today, the company is focused on something it calls “C to C to C,” conversation to completion.The idea is that AI can turn the things people say in meetings into action, without anyone having to follow up. Reeves offered a simple example: if someone in a call says they want to schedule a meeting, it’s already on the calendar before the call ends. A request to send a proposal might generate a draft presentation on the spot. “How do we make that conversation turn into work during the meeting, shortly thereafter, or provide intelligence for you to use later on?” he said. “It’s a real transformation.”The Pandemic’s Lasting ImprintNo conversation with a Zoom executive sidesteps Covid. The company tripled in size within 24 months of the pandemic’s onset, expanding from an enterprise-focused platform to a tool used for weddings, parliamentary sessions, and school classrooms around the world.Reeves wasn’t at Zoom during that period, but the culture it forged is one he inherited and described with evident pride. When schools scrambled to shift to online learning, Zoom’s CEO Eric Yuan made the decision to distribute licenses to 125,000 schools globally, at no charge. “That’s emblematic of how we think about Zoom and what we do for the community,” Reeves said.The operational intensity of those years also left its mark. A bias toward speed and a low tolerance for bureaucracy became embedded in the company’s culture, and Reeves said both remain defining traits today.Todd Reeves, the chief people officer at Zoom, spoke with moderator Megan Ulu-Lani Boyanton, business reporter at the Seattle TimesBoyanton asked Reeves about competition in this changing space, not just from Microsoft Teams, but from the expanding universe of AI companies entering the communications space. His answer pointed to three areas where Zoom believes it has an edge.The first is ease of use, a principle the company treats as a core competency rather than a feature. The second is AI capability: Zoom uses what Reeves described as a federated AI model, selecting from among the best available AI systems depending on what a user needs, an approach he said has produced top scores on rigorous academic benchmarks. The third, and perhaps most durable, is context. Because so much workplace communication runs through Zoom, the platform accumulates a rich layer of conversational data that can power AI tools in ways a newer entrant can’t replicate.The Future of HRWhen Boyanton asked where the HR profession is headed, Reeves didn’t hedge. He sees much of the transactional work of HR, such as tier-one employee support, routine queries, and administrative processes, being fully automated within five years. Zoom is already redesigning its internal knowledge base to be read by AI, and he expects a conversational HR chatbot to absorb 20 to 30 percent of his team’s workload.What remains, he says, is the work that genuinely requires a human: talent strategy, organizational design, leadership development, employee relations, culture. “Spend more time on the parts of the job that really require a human to influence and be a factor,” he said. “The other things will get taken care of.”The advice extended to how HR leaders make decisions in general. Reeves described himself as a data convert: someone who has learned to bring numbers and evidence into discussions that typically run on opinion and intuition. When a recent internal policy debate arose, he asked how many employees it would actually affect. The answer was 12. “I said, okay, then I think we can make a simple decision around this.”Even without formal metrics, he encouraged his team to find ways to gather information. Talk to 20 employees, run a small experiment. “There are ways to get data even if you don’t feel like you have the specific metric.”Connection in a Changing WorldWhen Boyanton asked how Zoom manages its worldwide workforce, spanning R&D teams in China and India, sales organizations across multiple continents, and employees in dozens of time zones, Reeves answered with a laugh: “We use Zoom.”The practical answer was more layered. He described a design philosophy built around local, intact teams that can operate largely independently, without requiring a manager on the other side of the globe to make decisions. Clear goals, recorded meetings, and accessible documentation help overcome the obstacle of distance. And as a leader, he said, accessibility has to be intentional: he runs town halls in the evening and again in the morning to make sure employees across regions can participate.The session ended with an audience question about keeping teams meaningfully connected amid constant noise and digital overload. Reeves’ answer was simple: don’t overcomplicate it.Have a team meeting. Start with something enjoyable. Make room for humor. The nature of work will keep changing, he said, but people are still people—-trying to solve problems together, trying to connect.“Have some fun,” he said. “Remember the Zoom happy hour chats? Just do stuff like that. And I think everyone will be fine.”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)
Delivering Large-Scale Frontline Workforce Development
BY Grace Turney May 15, 2026From the vast warehouse to the loud machinery, the first day inside a Humana pharmacy dispensing site can be jarring. Workers who walk in expecting something quieter and more clinical may feel shocked. “You don’t want the first time they see the inside of a dispensing site to be the first day on the job,” said Laura Bartus, head of learning at CenterWell Pharmacy, a division of Humana. That moment of surprise, she says, is a fully preventable failure of recruitment.Bartus joined moderator Megan Ulu-Lani Boyanton, a business reporter for the Seattle Times, for a fireside chat closing out From Day One’s May virtual conference. The conversation covered how learning and development (L&D) can drive both recruitment and retention, what it takes to earn organizational buy-in for training programs, and how large companies like Humana can preserve human connection across sprawling teams.Closing the Preview Gap“Job shock is real,” Bartus said, describing the moment new hires realize a role is harder or different than advertised. Her solution is straightforward: show candidates what the job actually looks like before they accept it. Humana’s pharmacy team now offers virtual tours of dispensing sites during the interview process, walking candidates through the physical environment, daily workflows, and the path a prescription takes through the system. Clinic teams are building similar previews for front-office staff.The goal isn’t to screen people out; it’s to let them opt in with full information. “I want them to realize that when they’re interviewing,” she said. Candidates who self-select based on an honest picture are more likely to stay.Retention, Bartus noted, is just as much about trajectory as transparency. Pay matters, and frontline workers are rarely compensated generously. But so does the sense that a current role leads somewhere. Replacing an employee can cost an organization $10,000 to $15,000 when recruiter time, posting fees, and leadership hours are factored in. The math makes career pathing a business imperative, not just a cultural nicety.Laura Bartus of Humana spoke with moderator Megan Ulu-Lani Boytanton of the Seattle Times (photo by From Day One)“Where you want to go is not divorced from where you are now,” she said. A call center agent, for example, is developing empathy, active listening, negotiation, and de-escalation skills daily. Those translate directly to sales, team leadership, and beyond. Bartus’s job, as she sees it, is to help employees see those connections and build a bridge.Winning Stakeholder Buy-InEven the best-designed learning initiative can fail without the right support. Bartus is direct about what separates programs that succeed from those that quietly disappear: senior leader investment. Not passive approval, but active championship.“If the senior leader over that area isn’t personally invested and doesn’t own it, that program is always going to fail,” she said. Her approach when launching something new is to secure that alignment before building momentum. She seeks a seat at executive leadership meetings, shares what’s being proposed and why, and makes the value explicit. “If you don’t show them the value of what you’re building, they’re not going to buy in.”She frames L&D not as a service function waiting to be funded, but as a strategic partner that earns credibility by speaking the language of outcomes. Learning leaders who want organizational support, she said, have to go get it proactively and in person.Building a Team That Talks to ItselfBartus leads a team of 67, and collaboration across that group doesn’t happen by accident. A few years ago, facilitation, design, operations, and product functions operated largely in isolation. The resulting training was fine, but it reflected the siloed thinking that produced it.Her fix was structural: a pod model that pulls people from different roles into biweekly working groups organized around a specific learning audience. Designers, facilitators, education leads, operations partners, and product partners now share a room and a common goal. The training they build together is more coherent because everyone is solving for the same end user.The social byproducts matter too. “They develop their own in-jokes and their own subculture,” Bartus said. “They champion each other and they cheer each other on.” At all-team meetings, the clinic side of her organization dedicates time to kudos—peers publicly recognizing each other’s contributions in front of the full group. In an environment where raises aren’t always possible and bonuses depend on the fiscal year, recognition becomes its own form of compensation.“We can always recognize the people around us for doing great work,” she said. “We can make them feel appreciated, and we can show them: your work is important to our success.”Cross-Training as a Competitive SkillThe same flexibility Bartus builds into her team culture applies to her staffing model. When facilitation demand drops and design work spikes, she doesn’t wait. Facilitators on her team have been cross-trained as designers, allowing her to redirect capacity without disruption.That model showed its value when Humana’s contracts with telehealth providers expanded GLP-1 offerings and the volume of related patient calls increased. Operations staff stepped up to handle the new call load, learning what the medications are, how coverage rules work, and what patients need to know. “People have been really wonderful about flexing new skills,” Bartus said. She credits strong frontline leadership for creating an environment where employees raise their hands for new challenges rather than waiting to be assigned.The throughline connecting all of it, recruitment honesty, stakeholder alignment, team cohesion, adaptive staffing, is permission. Permission to fail in training before the stakes are real, to grow in a direction that wasn’t on the original job description, and to be seen, recognized, and valued for work that often goes unnoticed. “We need to give them practice,” Bartus said, “and we need to give them space to fail while they’re with us.”Grace Turney is a St. Louis-based writer, artist, and former librarian. See more of her work at graceturney17.wixsite.com/mysite.(Photo by nortonrsx/iStock)
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)
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)
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)
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)
Smart Tools, Smarter Hiring: How TA Leaders Can Leverage Their Human Judgement
BY Grace Turney April 09, 2026Soha Kadam-Masudi recently sat down for a series of senior-level reference checks; and she barely picked up a pen. Microsoft Copilot recorded the calls, summarized the conversations, and handed her back something she hadn’t had in years of recruiting: her full attention. “It was such a meaningful conversation because I was focusing on the questions and what was actually coming back as a reference,” said Kadam-Masudi, director of talent acquisition for Aramark Canada.That shift from administrative executor to thoughtful evaluator is exactly the evolution talent acquisition leaders are chasing right now. AI tools have moved well beyond the novelty stage and into the daily rhythms of recruiting, automating the repetitive and liberating the human. But the technology still can’t do the most important things: read a room, sense reluctance in a team, or vouch for a candidate with conviction.This was the topic at hand during a panel discussion at From Day One’s March virtual conference. Corinne Lestch, journalist and founder of the Off-Site Writing Workshop, moderated the conversation with five talent acquisition leaders from companies spanning multiple continents and industries.Streamlining the MachineryFor many TA teams, AI’s first and most visible contribution has been streamlining daily functions. Angie Lombardo, VP, global director of operations for talent acquisition at Arcadis, described layering an AI system on top of her company’s applicant tracking system to compensate for its clunkiness. The tool automates workflow steps, surfaces qualified candidates from a database of a million people, and handles interview scheduling; a task that used to eat hours. “It saves the recruiters a lot of admin time and helps them focus on finding the right person,” she said.Leaders spoke on an executive panel during From Day One's March talent acquisition virtual conference (photo by From Day One)Kadam-Masudi echoed that—at Aramark (where the team recruits roughly 2,000 to 3,000 employees annually in Canada alone), AI screening tools and chatbots help manage the volume by answering candidate questions around the clock, routing applications, and reducing the administrative burden on frontline managers who would otherwise be doing a great deal of recruiting themselves. “Qualified candidates just go into the system, get interviewed, and then really the attention span for managers is: do a good job at the interview and get them hired,” she said.Pradeep Nair, AVP, global head of TA and talent center at Collabera, summed it up neatly: “AI should remove repetition, not the responsibility.”What’s Genuinely Useful, and What Isn’tNot every AI tool earns its place. The panel largely agreed that the clearest value comes from tools that handle high-volume, low-complexity tasks: screening questions, scheduling, workflow analytics, candidate matching. Skill-based assessment tools—which evaluate a candidate's capacity to keep learning rather than just their resume—generated real enthusiasm, with Nair flagging them as a strong emerging category for frontline and retail roles.Natalia Botero Penagos, senior director of talent acquisition at Publicis Sapient, pointed to an agent her team built that helps recruiters with interview preparation and candidate communications. The agent drafts messages calibrated to the company’s employer brand, at the right moment in the hiring process, and then hands them to a recruiter for a final human touch before sending. “The recruiter is the one that needs to review and add the personal touch,” she said. “It creates a more structured way of communication, a better candidate experience.”She also highlighted Claude as a tool gaining ground, particularly for teams outside highly structured corporate environments, pointing to its ability to help build replicable skills and scale the expertise of a strong individual recruiter across an entire global team.What the panel agreed hasn’t worked: giving AI the final say. Several leaders described experiments with fully automated decision-making for junior roles and pulling back quickly. “We were trying to get away with having AI do everything for very basic, very junior roles, and I don’t think we were comfortable to give that decision-making just yet,” Kadam-Masudi said.Lombardo was direct about the legal and ethical stakes: “We don’t have AI making decisions. We have AI automating and making recommendations, but it definitely doesn’t make decisions, because then you get into touchy territory.”Botero Penagos raised a point the group returned to several times: even well-designed AI agents can carry bias. The concern isn’t just about whether to hire a person, but how candidates are evaluated throughout the process. “The human in the loop is 100% needed,” she said.That oversight isn’t just an ethical stance; it’s a structural requirement. As AI begins to shape which candidates get seen, which get screened out, and how they’re communicated with, TA leaders are increasingly responsible for auditing the system’s outputs, not just its inputs.Early Careers in the Age of AIOne of the sharpest conversations of the session came when the topic turned to early career professionals. Chantha Nhem, global lead, new professionals, early careers global TA & development at Nokia, described a growing concern she hears from young workers: will AI take their entry-level jobs before they’ve had a chance to build the judgment those jobs are meant to develop?Her answer was neither dismissive nor falsely reassuring. Nhem referenced Gartner research suggesting AI won’t eliminate jobs so much as reshape them; but she was candid about what that reshaping means. “There’s a loss of natural progression that’s going to happen for early professionals, where you’re going to have to have a higher starting point of complexity in your role, and the learning curve is definitely going to be steeper,” she said.Nokia’s response has been to redesign early career programming from the ground up: shifting the emphasis from purely technical skills to adaptability, critical thinking, and decision-making, and aligning those programs directly to organizational strategy. “We have to make sure that they’re ready for this adoption and give them the confidence they need to contribute faster and integrate faster into our teams,” Nhem said. The talent acquisition and development functions at Nokia were united into a single team last April, a signal of how tightly linked the two have become.The Judgment Calls AI Can't MakeIn the session’s final stretch, Lestch asked each panelist for a recent example of a moment that required human judgment—something AI simply could not have handled.Nhem described looking at a project status dashboard for her early careers initiative and seeing everything marked green. AI would have called it fine. She knew better: team members were quietly anxious about their shifting workloads and new skill requirements. “AI did not flag that, nor could it accommodate the needs of our team,” she said. She organized a collaborative document to surface those concerns and keep the project on track.Nair described introducing AI tools into a recruiting workflow that had operated on Boolean searches and LinkedIn for years. The technology worked, but the people didn’t adopt it without help. “AI could analyze resumes or recommend candidates, but it couldn’t assess the readiness of people to change how they work,” he said. His team redesigned the rollout, leading with training, transparency, and success stories before asking anyone to change their habits.Botero Penagos recalled a talent search across five Latin American countries for creative roles supporting a European team. AI helped compile data and build dashboards. What it couldn’t do was interpret the ambiguity in a creative portfolio, navigate the language and cultural nuances across six countries, or explain the complexity of the landscape to skeptical stakeholders. “All of that comes from experience and from our team,” she said.Kadam-Masudi put it simply: even when AI hands you excellent talking points, you can’t just read them aloud. “It needs the element of you. It needs to be your kind of personality in those words. I’m still me.”Grace Turney is a St. Louis-based writer, artist, and former librarian. See more of her work at graceturney17.wixsite.com/mysite.(Photo by Ridofranz/iStock)
Listening to the Employee Voice to Shape Smarter Benefits
BY Grace Turney March 25, 2026When employees at Pernod Ricard needed to find mental health care for their children after the pandemic, the company heard about it quickly. Parents stressed over long waits for therapy appointments and limited options for younger dependents—and this stress followed them into the workplace.Within months, the company rolled out a digital solution that allowed families to access therapy from home, says Diana Estrada, director of compensation and benefits for Pernod Ricard, North America. The move illustrates a growing challenge for employers: gathering employee feedback is easy, but turning that information into meaningful workplace benefits requires a much more deliberate process.Discussing how organizations can translate employee input into real benefits decisions was the theme of a panel discussion at From Day One’s NYC half-day benefits conference. Moderated by Tania Rahman of Fast Company, panelists explored how HR leaders and benefits experts gather feedback, analyze data, and communicate decisions back to employees.Listening Beyond SurveysEmployee feedback often begins with surveys, but many workplace needs go unspoken. “Some people have trouble being direct about their needs because they feel ashamed or like they’re being needy,” said Jenny MacKay, partner, SVP, employee benefits consulting at Alera Group. Leaders therefore need to look beyond formal responses and pay attention to subtle signals from employees.“You have your extroverts who will tell you exactly how they’re feeling,” MacKay said. “But you’ve also got a quieter population. Unless you’re visible and present with employees, you may not know what they need.”Building trust across the workforce makes those conversations easier. When employees know HR leaders personally, they are more likely to share concerns, whether about healthcare, finances, or work-life balance.Panelists spoke about "Listening to the Employee Voice to Shape Smarter Benefits"For organizations with highly vocal workforces, the challenge can be less about encouraging feedback and more about managing the volume of it. “At my company, employees are very vocal,” said Estrada of Pernod Ricard. “They use all the channels available, surveys, business partners, leadership conversations, to share their feedback.”Estrada’s team analyzes multiple data streams, including HR case-management systems and employee surveys, before evaluating potential benefits changes with outside advisors. “We take all that data and determine what’s going to have the biggest impact and what’s feasible financially,” she said.Understanding What Employees Actually WantThe phrase “better benefits” can mean very different things depending on the workforce. For global organizations, the diversity of employee roles and life stages makes benefit design especially complex.“It depends on the population you’re talking about,” said Eduardo Mennocchi, director of compensation, benefits & HR operations, at LVMH Fashion Group. Retail staff working in stores, he says, often have different priorities than corporate employees. Life stage matters just as much as job type. “For some people it’s all about medical coverage,” Mennocchi noted. “For others, it’s flexibility.” In many cases, employees aren’t asking for higher pay or more expensive benefits. Instead, they want policies that allow greater control over their time, such as more flexible scheduling for paid time off. “That flexibility sometimes doesn’t cost the company anything,” he said.Searching Beyond Surveys for InsightEmployee feedback is just one piece of the puzzle when designing benefits. Organizations must also analyze behavioral data to understand how workers are actually using the benefits available to them.“We don’t just look at employee surveys,” said Noora Garnett, VP of global benefits at Hasbro. “We also look at claims information and employee behavior.”For example, an increase in hardship withdrawals from retirement accounts can signal financial stress among employees. A spike in maternity-related claims could highlight the need for stronger family support. “If we see those patterns,” Garnett said, “we know we need to adjust our programs.”Financial data can also reveal insights employees might not openly discuss. “Money is incredibly private,” said Jeff Miller, VP at the financial well-being platform nudge, whose work focuses on employee financial health. Because of that privacy, organizations often need to analyze trends rather than rely on direct disclosures.“If you look at the data deeply, like 401(k) loans or financial-health scores, you can start to understand what employees are dealing with,” Miller said. Those insights can help employers tailor communications and benefits to the groups that need them most.Balancing Employee Needs and Budget RealityEven when companies understand what employees want, cost constraints can complicate the decision.MacKay encourages employers to look at the existing data before sending out new surveys. Workforce demographics and healthcare claims information can reveal issues that even employees themselves may not recognize yet.“You can see the demographics of your workforce and what’s happening in your claims data,” she said. “That helps you build a budget before you go to employees and ask what they want.”This approach helps organizations avoid a common mistake: asking for feedback on benefits that the company ultimately cannot afford to provide.Follow-through, MacKay emphasizes, is crucial for building and maintaining trust. “If you run a survey, you need to be prepared to implement what you said you would,” she said.Economic downturns or changing priorities can sometimes force companies to reduce or delay benefits. In those moments, transparency is critical. Mennocchi says organizations must identify which benefits are essential before making cuts. “There are some benefits that are non-negotiable,” he said. “And if you’re in a tough situation, your priority should be keeping your staff.” If trade-offs are unavoidable, honest communication helps employees understand the reasoning behind the decision.Garnett echoed that view, noting that openness can sustain trust even during difficult changes. “You have to be transparent and vulnerable with your people,” she said. “Explain the due diligence that was done and why this is the only way forward.”Well-Being as a Performance DriverBeyond cost and logistics, panelists emphasized that benefits play a crucial role in employee performance.Garnett described well-being programs as the engine that supports pay-for-performance strategies. “If you don’t support employee well-being, how can you expect them to perform well?” she said.Well-being programs have come to extend beyond physical health to include financial, mental, and social support. At Hasbro, employees participate in community volunteering and charitable initiatives that strengthen social connections within the company. Garnett noted that those programs help employees stay motivated, even during challenging periods.Closing the Feedback LoopThe panelists agreed that the most important step in the feedback process happens after data is collected. Employees want to know what became of their input.Estrada says HR leaders work closely with employee resource groups to communicate decisions—whether a suggestion results in a new benefit or not. “It’s not about making sure everyone agrees,” she said. “It’s about making sure they understand the why.”When organizations clearly connect benefits decisions to employee feedback, workers are more likely to participate in future conversations. “Make a big deal about it,” MacKay advised. “Tell employees: we heard you, and we acted.”Without that closing step, even the most detailed surveys risk becoming just another form employees fill out, without expecting anything to change.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)