Brands That Endure: Authenticity in Action
BY Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza August 04, 2026Companies once made public commitments to ethics and responsibility, but it became “acceptable, and maybe even a little trendy, for brands to quietly neglect those commitments,” said Sandra Moerch, global head of content and customer marketing Autodesk, which makes industrial design software. “That behavior just won’t cut it anymore. Authenticity is making a comeback because people are craving honest and pure and authentic transactions again.”During a panel discussion on brands’ enduring authenticity at From Day One’s July virtual conference on brand strategy, Moerch and a panel of additional marketing leaders spoke about the risks and rewards of brand realness.Marketers have to reach outside their own department to achieve authenticity in their messages. “Some of our best ideas really come from our sales teams, our engineers, our product management field teams, and most importantly, our customers,” said Diana Sanicki, head of North American marketing at construction technology company Doka. “We regularly talk with them and visit job sites, and those conversations help us create marketing that’s relevant instead of promotional.” Journalist Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza moderated the session among marketing leaders (photo by From Day One)Even the most global and wide-reaching brands need some level of localization to achieve authenticity, said Emma Riley, director of marketing and growth for the Americas Global at creative firm AKQA. “Backstory,” the Levi’s commercial that debuted during the 2026 Superbowl, features shots of the brand’s iconic back pockets and red tab on musicians, dancers, rock climbers, and even cartoons, with cameos from Grammy-winning rapper and singer Doechii and Woody from Toy Story, and a nod to the iconic cover of Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A.. Riley said that these “influencers speak to who it is that we needed to talk to, but they are true. They are who they are. They really use the product.” Even Woody.‘Customers Don’t Buy the Story You Tell About Yourself’Customers aren’t looking for a sales pitch. They want an experience, like Levi’s can offer, or, as is more common in the B2B world, they want a solution.Yet customers aren’t always aware of the problems they have, said Todd Brown, VP of marketing for the financial institutions group at Fiserv, “not until they read a piece of thought leadership or they hear from someone on the team about a new solution.” Fiserv, which makes the technology underlying much of the financial services industry, expands mostly by selling into its existing customer base, so Brown must deliver a constant drip of education and customer testimonials. When a client has a particular need, they know Fiserv can meet it. “The best advocates for us are our clients who are telling the stories about the impact our partnership has not only on their business, but also on the communities they serve,” he said.Authenticity requires giving up some amount of control over the message and presentation of your brand—attaching your logo to a celebrity or handing the mic to a customer carries inherent risk. But any authentic relationship requires vulnerability. Believability begins with deferring to the customer point of view, which means letting the buyers say it for themselves. “Customers don’t buy the story you tell about yourself. They believe the story your customers and employees tell about you,” Sanicki said. “Years ago, companies owned the message, and today the customers own the conversation.”Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is an independent journalist and From Day One contributing editor who writes about business and the world of work. Her work has appeared in the Economist, the BBC, The Washington Post, Inc., and Business Insider, among others. She is the recipient of a Virginia Press Association award for business and financial journalism. She is the host of How to Be Anything, the podcast about people with unusual jobs.(Photo by julief514/iStock)
What We’re Learning from Real AI Deployments in HR
BY Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza July 30, 2026Dina Siclovan’s HR team was spending far too much time on emails. As the director of team member experience at Breeze Airways, she knew that while the company would keep growing, the size of her team would not. “We spent a lot of time just answering repetitive questions, even though the information already exists on our intranet. There are hundreds of policies, and many answers depend on the context,” she said during a From Day One webinar. “So we saw a need.” For many helming an HR department today, “the strategic work is often done in the leftover hours,” Jim Barnett, CEO and co-founder of HR tech platform Wisq. AI can now handle the repetitive tasks that gobble up valuable hours, but Barnett believes it can do even more.Together, Siclovan and Barnett—plus Wisq’s AI-powered HR teammate Harper—have changed not only the way Breeze’s HR team gets done, but the work that’s theirs to do. Context Is EverythingHR is seldom short on documentation. Any given team might have reams of policies about employee leave and PTO, performance reviews, performance improvement plans, rewards and recognition, benefits packages, and payroll. Then there’s the information on individual employees, like location, performance, team structure, skills, and tenure.But it’s usually just that: Reams of paper (digital or otherwise) with little relation to each other and plenty of room for error and interpretation. So when a long-tenured employee is moving from one city to another and in the midst of that has a medical emergency that requires complex surgery—what do you do? Situations like this may be governed by a policy, but they’re handled under precedent and case specifics. Jim Barnett, the CEO and co-founder of Wisq, the Agentic HR Platform, spoke during the webinar (company photo)“The AI opportunity is so large and so diverse,” Barnett said. “It’s not talking to a bot about whether you have President’s Day off. These workflows are complex and compliance-ridden with lots and lots of risk. You have to have HR reasoning because you want to get this right, and it’s going to get more complex over time.”There’s also opportunity in finding gaps in all those policies. When their AI agent Harper started identifying patterns in employee questions at Breeze, Siclovan realized that in some cases no process, policy, or guidance existed. AI is equipped to assist there too, says Barnett. The right AI agents are capable of fielding context-dependent questions, identifying patterns, finding policy gaps, and now—building the processes that underlie the policies. “There should be both manual and automated learning loops,” he said. As questions come in, “patterns emerge, which can trigger an alert that there’s a missing policy. It’s really important that you put these learning loops into your system so it can get smarter and grow and get better over time.”Barnett said he often finds that HR teams are operating on ambiguous and conflicting policies, but “your system should be able to fix this for you.” AI can tell you what the workflows are and recommend what that flow should be, and then it should tell you the integrations you need. It can even help you build a business case and line up the resources to build it. But it’s smarter than to take an idea and run with it. Harper knows “when to escalate, triage, and hand off to a human,” he said.The airline industry is heavily regulated at both the federal and state levels, so Siclovan can’t simply hand the reins to a disembodied agent. Breeze employs a complex and varied workforce of maintenance crew, flight attendants, and pilots distributed across airports around the U.S., plus the folks, like her, in corporate headquarters. “Essentially, HR has to support the operation that runs 24/7, and we work a standard eight-to-five Monday-through-Friday schedule.”Siclovan’s team once spent a lot of time answering questions from all directions about benefits, payroll, recruitment, and onboarding, “and now they’re coaching leaders,” she said. “They’re solving team member relations issues. They’re helping with workforce planning and reorganization design.”This has been a successful partnership because, Siclovan explained, we started with a clear problem to be solved. “Ask yourself, ‘Where do you spend too much time? What questions are on repeat every day? What work doesn’t actually require human judgment?’ That’s where you start.”Editor’s note: From Day One thanks our partner, Wisq, for sponsoring this webinar.Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is an independent journalist and From Day One contributing editor who writes about business and the world of work. Her work has appeared in the Economist, the BBC, The Washington Post, Inc., and Business Insider, among others. She is the recipient of a Virginia Press Association award for business and financial journalism. She is the host of How to Be Anything, the podcast about people with unusual jobs.(Photo by S and V Design/iStock)
The Trust Economy: Marketing in the Age of AI-Generated Sameness
BY Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza July 23, 2026The attention economy has been flipped on its head. Creating highly polished, precisely targeted ad campaigns was once an expensive endeavor, requiring teams, time, and budget. But suddenly, artificial intelligence has flooded the channels with cheap content that’s mass-produced and poorly valued.Trust is now almost as important as awareness, said Renaye Edwards, the global chief operating officer and managing director at the ad firm Ammunition, and it’s relevant earlier in the buying cycle. Consumers have grown skeptical of brands that make grand promises, whether about product value, environmental responsibility, authenticity, or workplace culture. Companies that published road maps toward five- and 10-year goals about corporate values tended to invite scrutiny, opening themselves to accusations of “greenwashing,” “diversity washing,” or “pinkwashing”—labels for the gap between what a company says and what it actually does.Consumers in 2026 are savvier and maybe a little more cynical. Tired of handing their attention to disingenuous companies, they’re looking for brands they can trust, but proving credibility is harder than it’s ever been.‘Today, Customers Own the Conversation’In the trust economy, marketing no longer covers for a brand’s operational or ethical failures. “If your brand is promising something it fundamentally can’t deliver, then you have a much more systemic problem,” said Robin Harrison, CMO of customer-experience technology company Concentrix. Some brands make loftier promises than others, simply by the nature of the business: While a budget airline may be able to get away with an AI-powered chatbot, a home security company would not. “When you’ve got a brand that is premium or it’s high-value or it’s quirky, letting AI do the work for you feels like the wrong thing.”Achieving authenticity is a matter of hewing closely to brand values, according to Angela Johnson, the CMO of Edible Brands, the parent company of Edible Arrangements, known for its fruit bouquets. “Edible has its ‘wow’ factor to protect,” she said. “We have a $75 check average, and it comes in beautiful wrapped branding, red packaging. It’s handcrafted, it’s very personal, and it’s hand-delivered.”While Edible is active on social media and often comments on cultural moments like the World Cup and Love Island, it passed on the 2025 Labubu craze, which didn’t feel elevated enough for the brand, as well as this year’s tongue-in-cheek “bad news for my wallet” meme in which content creators confess their indulgent spending habits. High quality doesn’t mean high-polish, though, and given the personal nature of gift giving, Edible has found better success working with content creators that deliver candid, unpolished exposure. As it builds awareness among Gen Z consumers, the brand has increased its influencer marketing budget by 27% since the initial investment in 2024, while at the same time pulling budget from linear-TV ad buys.“Years ago, companies owned the message. Today, the customers own the conversation,” said Diana Sanicki, head of marketing in North America for construction technology and materials firm Doka, during a From Day One panel discussion in July on authenticity in marketing.Consumers are quick to scold companies that show up uninvited. Just a few years ago, social media users might get a kick out of a witty comment from Oreo’s official Instagram account on another brand’s post or even one from an ordinary user. But tolerance for this attention-seeking behavior is now incredibly low. Comments from brands are often met with a string of replies from annoyed users.If the public no longer really believes the stories that brands tell about themselves, trust can be borrowed from the people consumers already know, like creators and peers. Of course, “the risk of working with content creators and user-generated content is that it requires some surrender of control,” said Sandra Moerch at 3D-software company Autodesk, during the July panel discussion. But when it works, the trust is more likely to last.Highly digital consumers are hungry for the real world and its flaws. Edwards, of the ad firm Ammunition, said that her recent appearance on an uber-polished video podcast didn’t garner nearly as much engagement as an off-the-cuff, low-fi video she made with her front-facing camera. “It feels like we’re almost regressing back to the unpolished version of everything,” she said. “The two are night and day in terms of the way that they perform.” Now that AI makes it possible for a brand to do anything, “everybody’s questioning whether something’s real or not.”Where Trust Is LostIf authentic companies don’t deliver what they stand for, then trust erodes in the gap between the two. AI is proving most valuable in operational infrastructure, not as a substitute for original content or brand identity. In many cases, AI shouldn’t be customer-visible at all, asserts Harrison of Concentrix. “Remember that AI can make operations more efficient and more effective by sitting in the background.”Companies using AI to generate content or marketing insights are just on their way to irrelevance, he says. If everyone is getting their ideas from the same place, then everyone will look and sound the same.As campaigns, products, and even companies become easier to replicate, “the only thing that then differentiates you is your brand and the people you’ve got within the business,” said Edwards. Consumers are easily fatigued, and they’re quick to spot copycats. Once a trend catches on—whether as a meme, a product, or a claim—“people are like, ‘it’s kind of everywhere, so it’s like anything, isn’t it?” she said.In an environment where brands are looking more and more alike, the ones that deliver on their brand promises will stand out. The problem is that when money’s tight, companies often spin up quick campaigns and neglect the hard work of brand-building, which may need a rebrand itself, said Edwards. Given the choice between “brand marketing” and “performance marketing,” which would an executive choose? The temptation is to go for the latter. But Edwards believes the focus on performance is short-sighted, especially when content is abundant but credibility is scarce. “These short-term kind campaigns feel like a means to an end,” she said. “A race to the bottom.”Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is an independent journalist and From Day One contributing editor who writes about business and the world of work. Her work has appeared in the Economist, the BBC, The Washington Post, Inc., and Business Insider, among others. She is the recipient of a Virginia Press Association award for business and financial journalism. She is the host of How to Be Anything, the podcast about people with unusual jobs.(Photo by atakan/iStock)
Making Total Rewards a Strategic Retention and Engagement Tool
BY Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza July 08, 2026“As HR professionals, we think in terms of compensation, health, retirement, well-being, and recognition, but employees think about things in terms of, ‘Can I afford my life? Do I feel valued? Does my company care about me?’” said Joshua Lemon, head of AI and compensation at smart home tech company Resideo. Lemon and four other leaders of HR and benefits were part of a panel discussion about using total rewards for engagement and retention during From Day One’s June virtual conference.And, indeed, communications matter. According to Mercer’s 2025 Health on Demand Report, 79% of employees that receive communications about their benefits say the company cares about their health and well-being. To better tailor their outreach, Resideo created personas for employee groups, like employees with young families, for instance, and target communications programs based on common needs and concerns, says Lemon. “That makes it much more approachable, much more relatable, and the messaging really hits a lot stronger,” he said. But, Lemon says, it takes more than just mailers and email blasts, no matter how segmented. “How well are your HR business partners and your managers scripted to talk about benefits?”Benefits access should also slide nicely into the flow of work, said Kate Duncan, the chief people office at benefits technology company Nayya. “If your employees are using Slack, can you get benefits information distributed in that way? If everyone knows to go to your intranet or your hub, make sure your benefits information is available there and accurate.” There are plenty of tech platforms meant to make benefits access as easy as possible, but can they nudge employees based on preferences and needs? And if they’re AI-powered, how accurate is the LLM?A company might have a robust package, but in a crisis, no one can shuffle through a dozen point solutions to find what they need. That’s why global business services provider APi Group uses a concierge service that connects employees to what they need when they need it. The point isn’t to sell vendors by their brand names or their value propositions, says VP of total reward Eric Roesner, it’s about meeting a need.Employers should consider those elements beyond healthcare and retirement plans, said Stacey Olson, who focuses on the physical environment for clients at the design firm Gensler. “You can provide all the opportunities for mental and physical health, but if the people don’t feel they have the capacity to make use of those things, whether it’s because they don’t have the time in their schedule, the space, the privacy, or a sense of security, then they will go unused.”Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza, journalist and From Day One contributing editor, moderated the session (photo by From Day One)“Do they feel a sense of purpose when they come into their space—physical, intellectual, and so forth?” she said. “How are we designing space that allows people to connect?” Workplace relationships, especially with one’s manager, have an impact on employee engagement and retention, and Olson says employers should design physical spaces—whether offices or hospitals or shop floors—that facilitate those relationships.The small things matter too. “Finding and capturing bright moments to engage with your team is probably one of the most important things, and it doesn’t always have to be something huge,” said Micha Berkuz, CEO of employee recognition company Gifted. “If someone is sick at home, we will send them a small gift with a DoorDash, Uber Eats, or a Grubhub gift card, just to save them the trouble of cooking lunch. If you capture those special moments at the right time, it’s a low-cost, high-impact way to connect.” Personalization goes a long way, especially when it comes to messaging. More than half (54%) of employees say they want personalized benefits communications, according to MetLife’s 2023 Employee Benefit Trends study. Panelists agreed that AI can help make that possible. “All of our employees are at different stages of their lives, have different needs, and are in different circumstances,” said Duncan at Nayya. “We can’t expect them to remember the benefits that they enrolled in at open enrollment time, let alone the benefits that were newly rolled out two years ago.” Access to an informed GPT can remind them at the right moment.“You have a workforce, who, somewhat regardless of generation, understands what an LLM is, and they use it in their personal lives,” said Roesner at APi Group. “The part I find so interesting is the ability for it to retain and build on history.” LLMs learn an employee’s unique circumstances and what’s important to them. “It’s really powerful, and I also think it’ll be transformative.”Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is an independent journalist and From Day One contributing editor who writes about business and the world of work. Her work has appeared in the Economist, the BBC, The Washington Post, Inc., and Business Insider, among others. She is the recipient of a Virginia Press Association award for business and financial journalism. She is the host of How to Be Anything, the podcast about people with unusual jobs.(Photo by Benjamas Deekam/iStock)
Can AI Teach Workers to Be More Human?
BY Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza July 01, 2026It started as an experiment. A little over a year ago, the chief talent and development officer at pharmaceutical firm Novartis ran a pilot. Paula Landmann, who’s responsible for making sure the company has the skills it needs, wanted to know: Can we use AI for the personal development of our workforce?Employees already had access to internal coaches, but humans are limited by time, and so it could be weeks before a coaching session was available. They also had access to tools like Copilot and ChatGPT, which they could consult about any number of things. But what if they put some real power behind it? If Novartis could roll out an AI-powered coaching program specifically designed to interact with employees the way a personal coach might, could the workforce actually develop itself?Apparently, the answer is yes. Last October, Novartis rolled out its AI coaching platform, called Mira, which it developed in conjunction with coaching platform BetterUp. Unlike traditional coaching programs, which are provided only to high-ranking managers and those headed for the C-suite, every employee at Novartis, at every level, has access to Mira—whenever they need it. Less than a year later, 14,000 employees, or just over 18% of Novartis’s workforce, are using the tool, which remains optional, and many of them keep coming back. They’re getting better at making decisions, talking to one another, and working together.Novartis is hardly alone. Customer-experience platform Qualfon developed its own AI-powered roleplay simulator to help employees improve communication, and media company Scripps licensed an AI coach that gives feedback to reporters on drafts and sourcing. Twenty percent of the newsroom employees use it daily, said senior L&D director Ginger Summers during a From Day One webinar. Those employees now use the tool one to two hours per day, saving roughly 20 minutes of work each time.These are what might be considered uniquely “human” skills, like critical thinking, communication, cooperation, collaboration, and conflict resolution—things typically developed only through interaction among humans.The interpersonal friction that begets these skills can, in theory, cost a business time and money, so companies are looking at AI and wondering if it would be faster, possibly even more effective, to develop those same skills with AI. The promise is great: AI could effectively furnish each employee with a personal coach whose sole focus is that employee’s development. But are these skills, when developed in collaboration with AI, as strong as they could be? And what’s lost when the experience with humans is removed from human skills?A Closer Look at AI-Powered Skill DevelopmentTo answer those questions, AI for skill development is being heavily studied by academics and by the companies building the technology. Consulting firm BCG put its own program to the test, placing human trainers (in virtual classrooms) head to head with virtual AI coaches and found that “the gen AI tutor delivered results that were on par with the classroom session, but with significant improvements in terms of personalization and efficiency.” And not only did the BCG researchers favor AI, learners themselves said the AI was better than humans at supplying personalized notes. BCG lauds AI’s ability to tailor the learning based on individual work context in a way a human just can’t.AI can be more succinct than humans, making for time savings, and it can also make learners less fearful of making mistakes. It’s far less embarrassing to fumble in front of a bot than a person, especially if you might sit in a meeting with them later. Landmann of Novartis said employees were “very loud and clear” about this advantage. “AI doesn’t judge me,” they told her.Paula Landmann, chief talent and development officer at Novartis (company photo)Employees at Novartis also prefer the AI coach to human coaches for their availability. While the company does make human coaches available, their time is limited. So if your coach isn’t available for another month, but your difficult conversation happens tomorrow—Mira can offer help right away. And users can practice in their preferred style: via keyboard, like an instant messenger, or via voice, like a phone call. Employees can start with a theme, take a personality assessment, engage in role play, or simply jump into conversation about their problem—these coaches don’t need time to prepare. They’re always on and always ready to go.Still, some skeptics are sounding the alarm, or at least seriously questioning the hype over using AI to train people to do people things. Constance Noonan Hadley and Sarah L. Wright, both academic researchers, posit that overuse can cause social skills to atrophy by making it easier to choose relatively frictionless AI interactions over humans that might push back or simply make us uncomfortable. “Talking with an always reachable, sycophantic AI chatbot can be more appealing than conversing with real people,” they write in Harvard Business Review. And “by removing the need to go to colleagues for help, AI can undermine opportunities to build trust.” They recommend that “coaching, mentoring, conflict resolution, and team building remain primarily human functions and be conducted in person to build relationships.” In other words, leave the human skills to the humans. “The friction, the back-and-forth, even the occasional miscommunication—these aren’t bugs in the system, they’re features,” writes HBR editor Amy Gallo. And the less interaction we have with our colleagues, the lonelier and more socially isolated we can become.The Sycophancy TrapZoë Wigan, a former employment attorney and current head of the resolutions team at consultancy Byrne Dean, worries that AI is making it too easy to escalate problems that are better dealt with face-to-ace. One sign is the number of grievance letters HR leaders receive. She told From Day One that grievances—that is, formal letters of complaint that an employee submits regarding a colleague or manager—are overwhelming people teams. “Almost every time I have coffee with someone in HR and you say, ‘What’s keeping you busy?,’ almost everybody says ‘AI grievances.’”This may be the result of AI sycophancy. Someone who suspects their manager is being unfair will almost certainly hear that reinforced by an AI coach. And it might even push them along, offering to write up a grievance letter then and there. Qualms escalate to the level of formal grievances more quickly than they otherwise would have—qualms that, in another time, may have been handled without HR at all.Landmann was concerned about this from the start. “I always worry that AI can be very nice to us, very soft,” she said. “It wants to please us constantly, right?” But a good coach doesn’t do that. When testing tools for Novartis, she was keen on finding one low on sycophancy and willing to challenge users both during the coaching session and after the fact, following up to find out how it all played out.Managers in a PinchWhen Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong announced that the company would be laying off 14% of its staff, he noted that there would be “no pure managers,” and anyone who remained must be “a strong and active individual contributor,” and managers everywhere cradled their heads in their hands.People managers are under tremendous stress, being asked to take on more responsibility, which lately includes rolling out AI tools, if not finding use cases to begin with. Many are handed AI and told to use it, but they’re often not told what to use it on. The time-consuming act of coaching employees seems as good a use as any.Given the pressures, they can hardly be blamed for what some are calling overuse. “I think most organizations are probably sleepwalking into just how complex it’s becoming for managers,” said Byrne Dean’s CEO Nick McClelland. “Work has just got more complex, and AI itself actually increases the complexity in terms of managing people.” He told From Day One that he expects to see a significant increase in the number of difficult conversations managers are asked to have—“with their team, with peers, with senior members of teams because of the complexity of work”—and AI can be a huge help.AI has and will always win when it comes to scalability. While no organization can afford a personal coach for each employee, it probably can afford universal AI licenses. Byrne Dean, which will still continue offering its traditional classroom training sessions on difficult conversations, is launching its own AI-powered conversation tool, currently in its beta stage.McClelland explained that this could be the tip of the spear for HR, which “is seen as a cost center as opposed to a profit generator.” Difficult conversations are all too easy to avoid, or at least postpone, to the extent that the company suffers from poor performance, infighting, just the clog of team politics. “HR can start to flip the narrative,” McClelland said. When AI affords ample opportunity for practice and preparation, “being able to have that conversation and rehearse ahead of time feels like a really natural business gain.”But Landmann sees it differently. The Mira platform isn’t actually saving Novartis any money. On the contrary. “It’s an investment in people,” she explained. “The biggest business case is the growth and development of our people.” This is a long play, she said, and it has already been worth it. Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is an independent journalist and From Day One contributing editor who writes about business and the world of work. Her work has appeared in the Economist, the BBC, The Washington Post, Inc., and Business Insider, among others. She is the recipient of a Virginia Press Association award for business and financial journalism. She is the host of How to Be Anything, the podcast about people with unusual jobs.(Featured photo by Style-Photography/iStock by Getty Images)
Hiring Effectively in a Resource-Constrained World
BY Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza June 30, 2026Despite the term “skills-based” being a regular part of HR parlance for the last three years, most companies are still trying to figure out what that means for their organization. Not all companies need to become a skills-based workforce, says Jennifer Burnett, an organizational psychologist and principal solutions architect at talent assessment technology platform SHL. But for large companies that struggle to define and find the talent they need, within the organization and without, it can be hugely beneficial.“Being a skills-based organization probably speaks more to the complexity of the organization, the maturity of their talent practices, and the role diversity,” she said during a From Day One webinar. Those with smaller workforce or with fewer role types may not find much use for a skills-based strategy.The good thing is, skills are “the common data element we’ve been looking for for a very long time in the HR and talent space,” Burnett said. But frankly, this isn’t something that “makes life easier from an HR or talent practice perspective.” This is a business initiative HR is uniquely equipped to support.Most organizations that have adopted a skills-based strategy have incorporated it into workforce planning or into hiring, and some might have applied it to learning and development, “but very few have linked it all together in a cycle, so it hasn’t produced a clean ROI yet,” said Allan Schweyer, principal researcher of the human capital arm of The Conference Board, a non-profit think tank that collects and analyzes data for influential enterprises around the world.Journalist and From Day One contributing editor, Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza, moderated the session with Burnett of SHL and Schweyer of The Conference Board (photo by From Day One)But there are early signs. Some companies report faster time-to-hire, while others tout internal mobility or increased engagement, he said. As for greater ROI, that will just take time. The practice hasn’t matured enough.Companies that succeed in operationalizing skills start small, usually with job descriptions, which can be easily governed, recorded, and replicated. “When you do start with hiring,” Schweyer said, “you’re forced to build a skills infrastructure, a skills library, job architectures, and assessment methods.” From there, employees can build skills profiles, the business can set up internal talent marketplaces, and both can work together on career pathing. Hiring today remains very resume-based, said Burnett, “and we often go from screening resumes into interviews where you’re trying to collect as much information with a variety of interviewers. When it’s a skills-based process, you put an objective assessment between the screening and the interviews. That can help you ask more targeted interview questions.”On the day a new hire shows up for work, you already know their strengths and what needs developing. “In traditional hiring, we don’t have that insight,” she said. “A lot of that information just stayed in the talent acquisition process.” This bleeds into learning and development, then promotions and internal mobility, compensation, and workforce planning more broadly.It takes more than a mandate from on high to make this work, they said. “Companies who are more mature in this space have shared with us that they underestimated the change in behaviors and mindsets required to make this shift,” Burnett said. Managers must balance data against subjective judgements they’re more accustomed to, and there’s more required from employees too, who need to keep their talent profiles up to date.Employees benefit from autonomy. “They’re actually involved in their own development and in identifying their next role,” she said. “That change in thinking—of talent as more versatile and longer-term,” that means that the company is making an investment in the employees, and in turn, the employee is making an investment in the company. Editor’s note: From Day One thanks our partner, SHL, for sponsoring this webinar. Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is an independent journalist and From Day One contributing editor who writes about business and the world of work. Her work has appeared in the Economist, the BBC, The Washington Post, Inc., and Business Insider, among others. She is the recipient of a Virginia Press Association award for business and financial journalism. She is the host of How to Be Anything, the podcast about people with unusual jobs.(Photo by ABRAHAM GONZALEZ FERNANDEZ/iStock)
Getting Buy-In for Your AI Initiatives: Where Technology Supports Human Decisions in Hiring
BY Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza June 16, 2026For HR organizations eager to introduce AI into the hiring processes, the question is: Where to begin?Most companies can’t buy a product off the shelf and roll it out—that’s true even if it doesn’t employ artificial intelligence. There are legal implications, security risks, and feasibility questions to be addressed. There’s also the matter of buy-in from business leaders who hold the purse strings and from the employees expected to use it.“Everybody’s on a different spectrum, from highly regulated to wildly experimental,” said Brenna Lenoir, SVP of marketing and strategy at AI-native skills platform CodeSignal. “When you want to start experimenting with something or conducting a vendor search, first understand legal’s comfort level with risk.” Most legal teams, she says, will raise concerns about ingesting third-party data that hasn’t been validated or checked for quality, disclosure to those interacting with the tools, and the degree of human oversight. When it comes to AI in hiring, “it’s about responsibility, trust, and downstream impact on the talent we bring into the organization,” said Cassandre Joseph, the global head of TA at global pharmaceutical firm Novartis, during a From Day One webinar on how HR can earn buy-in on AI initiatives. To introduce AI, she worked closely with legal and risk partners to ensure “every use case now is evaluated for things like bias, data privacy, and fairness before it scales, ensuring we’re not just moving fast, but that we’re moving responsibly.”Panelists spoke about "Getting Buy-In for Your AI Initiatives: Where Technology Supports Human Decisions in Hiring" in the session moderated by Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza, journalist and From Day One contributing editor (photo by From Day One)Across organizations, business leaders have loved the cost savings that AI affords hiring teams. For instance, Novartis started with high-impact, low-risk experiments, like drafting job descriptions and outreach messages and scheduling interviews. “Very quick wins that you can go back to with the business,” said Joseph. At multinational media company Omnicom, the senior director of HR Allison Roberts said she’s most interested in “efficiency and reduction of the transactional work that recruiters have to do, to help them be more responsive and supportive, and have that custom customer service element improved.”At Unifi, which employs the airport ground employees that load bags and push wheelchairs and refuel aircraft, the business wanted speed and capacity. The company sees more than 100,000 applications and hires tens of thousands of workers every year. And thanks to AI-powered automation that standardizes workflows and evaluation criteria, it now does this with a team of just 18 people. Yet despite heavy automation, “every step is auditable, every step is reportable, and bias mitigation is done on a weekly and monthly basis,” said talent acquisition VP Akshay Loomba. “We don’t leave it as a one-time exercise. There are dedicated team members who are looking at it. We have a dedicated member from the legal team who’s looking at emerging state laws.”But AI isn’t effective as an accessory. “We realized quickly that the access to the AI tools alone doesn’t immediately create the transformation we’re looking for,” said Johanna Bazos, who leads executive recruitment at financial institution BNY. “The real challenge is understanding the workflow integration from a day-to-day perspective and the culture change that needs to happen in order for AI to have an impact.”Recruiters at BNY are spending upwards of 20 hours in AI bootcamps, and “we’re in the process of launching an AI buddy program pairing individuals in the TA organization who are more advanced” to teach skills around prompting and agent creation. Bazos herself is about to begin a 40-hour course on building agents. Once TA teams actually get their hands on these tools, it hasn’t been difficult to get buy-in from the recruiters themselves, said Roberts. “Epecially for the efficiency and the opportunity to fill all of the critical metrics they’re measured on—they’re excited to have a resource to help them meet those objectives.”Editor’s note: From Day One thanks our partner, CodeSignal, for sponsoring this webinar. Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is an independent journalist and From Day One contributing editor who writes about business and the world of work. Her work has appeared in the Economist, the BBC, The Washington Post, Inc., and Business Insider, among others. She is the recipient of a Virginia Press Association award for business and financial journalism. She is the host of How to Be Anything, the podcast about people with unusual jobs.(Photo by tanit boonruen/iStock)
Translating Global Strategy Into Local Impact
BY Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza June 03, 2026There’s too much lag between strategy and execution of global campaigns, says Kelly Heilpern, chief strategy officer at Ammunition. Organizations can spend months, or even a year, developing a global strategy based on timely data that’s stale by the time campaigns roll out.“The brands getting it right,” she said, “are the ones who have figured out how to make those decisions faster, without sacrificing strategic integrity,” and that requires collaboration and trust: among marketing, sales, and the agency partner. The challenge is that truly global campaigns require some degree of tailoring to local markets, and effective localization cannot be handed down from on high. Quick decisions have to be made, with local input. During a From Day One webinar on translating global strategy into local impact, Heilpern and her colleagues discussed how they designed and tested a campaign for one of the world’s largest building products manufacturers across five new markets with unique concerns. Bringing DensDeck to EuropeGeorgia Pacific was ready to bring a stalwart product to a new market.DensDeck, a roofboard that acts as a fire-resistant thermal barrier, is common across North America—it’s in everything from “airports to stadiums, hotels, and high rises,” said Mallory Faust, the director of brand strategy for Georgia-Pacific Building Products—but it’s relatively new in Europe. Leaders from Ammunition spoke about "Translating Global Strategy Into Local Impact" (photo by From Day One)Expansion of solar rooftops and data center construction has developers focused on resilience in building design, “putting more pressure on roofing systems to perform better and be more durable,” and opening a huge market opportunity for Georgia Pacific, she says. They chose five geographies: the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, the UK, and Spain. The challenge for Faust is not just introducing a new product within an existing category, “we’re trying to establish the category,” which meant they had to start with education. “We realized pretty quickly that we couldn’t take a North American approach and just drop it into Europe.”Barriers to adoption vary widely by market: Some buyers need technical proof of performance while others are more price sensitive or prefer a reference from someone they trust. So Georgia Pacific and the Ammunition team brought in local stakeholders “from the outset, so they feel like they have ownership and autonomy,” said Renaye Edwards, Ammunition’s global COO and managing director.They gathered a coalition across product, technical, and regional teams for a weeklong intensive planning session. “A lot of different perspectives went into identifying where the opportunities existed, as well as what the barriers to adoption would be within each market,” Faust said.Right away, the collaboration paid off. The first strategy for the UK market was a “Mind the Gap” campaign—the idea being that DensDeck could close the quality “gap” in roofing systems. But in sales conversations, the tagline was being interpreted as not falling through physical gaps during installation. “Testing is such an important part of the process,” Heilpern said. “That would have been a huge miss for us to deploy this campaign that didn’t connect the way we intended it to.”Pitfalls of Localization, and How to Avoid ThemBut how local is too local? After all, time is of the essence. “The overall positioning really shouldn’t change what DensDeck is: a solution that helps protect the contents inside of a building and extend the life of a roof,” said Faust. “But global consistency doesn’t mean that every market should operate the exact same way.”Some tweaks are simple: Images also have to be localized since roofs in Spain look very different than roofs in the Netherlands. Others require a little more research, like which small proof points to play up—mitigating fire risk might perform better in one area while longevity will perform better in another. Localization also costs money, which isn’t always abundant. If the budget is slim, don’t roll it out in every market at once, Edwards said, but “identify those markets where you have the right to win” and you’re past the education stage with your market. “Once you’ve done that,” she added, “you can test and learn very quickly,” proving your strategy before going back to the business for more funds.Winning requires differentiation, which is often made through an emotional appeal. Easier said than done for roofboard, but by no means impossible, said Heilpern. “[Builders] are accountable for the performance of their roof. We can speak to them as consumers who are making very important decisions and make them feel seen, make them feel heard, and make them feel like there’s a product that solves a problem that keeps them up at night.”Editor’s note: From Day One thanks our partner, Ammunition, for sponsoring this thought leadership spotlight. Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is an independent journalist and From Day One contributing editor who writes about business and the world of work. Her work has appeared in the Economist, the BBC, The Washington Post, Inc., and Business Insider, among others. She is the recipient of a Virginia Press Association award for business and financial journalism. She is the host of How to Be Anything, the podcast about people with unusual jobs.(Photo by Cecilie_Arcurs/iStock)
Turning Executive Potential into Measurable Performance
BY Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza June 01, 2026It’s a common mistake to place the weight of an executive hiring decision on the interview, says Bert Hensley, the CEO of executive search firm Morgan Samuels.Interviewing isn’t inherently wrong, but it is overvalued, he shared during a From Day One webinar on executive recruitment. Naturally, we tend to favor people who resemble us in background, philosophy, working style, and that’s what interviews often reveal, but the C-suite doesn’t benefit from homogeneity. Companies would be well advised to pause and look backward, at the candidate’s career, and forward, at the candidate’s potential.But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Even before candidates are brought in, the hiring team must be in agreement on what success looks like—in great detail, Hensley says. A CFO candidate must have acquisition experience, sure. But how many deals? Of what size? And in what geographies? And on top of that, when they get to your company, what should they be prepared to accomplish? “Be crystal clear on the specific things this human being has got to get done in the next 24 months for us to say, ‘Wow, they were a great success.’”Bert Hensley, chairman and CEO of Morgan Samuels Company, pictured, spoke with journalist Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza during the webinar (company photo)This becomes a scorecard everyone on the hiring team will use. “Otherwise, you’ll end up hiring people that are eminently well qualified for what they’ve done, but not necessarily what you need,” he said.Candidate evaluation begins with a retrospective look at their career, asking “not just what they’ve done, but how they’ve done it,” Hensley said. And anything on their resume is fair game. He goes back as many as 10 or 15 years to probe at how a candidate reduced turnover or cut costs, asking, “how did you think through the problem? Give me the framework of analysis that you used. What data told you this was a problem?”Unique to the process at Morgan Samuels is the written self-assessment, which was born from an unusual request many years ago. The vice chair of a global banking company asked Hensley to subject candidates to a lengthy, written self-assessment of their accomplishments. Hensley assumed the request would never fly among those making upwards of $2 million per year and working 100-hour weeks. “I was completely shocked at how easy it was to get the candidates to do it,” he said.The self-assessment helps companies avoid arrogant candidates, “which is really just a cover for extreme insecurity,” Hensley said, and can hurt a company. Arrogant people are more likely to conceal problems or fail to disseminate information that should go around, and “if you get a self assessment back and it says, ‘I did this, I did that, I did this,’” then you’re not looking at a team player. “The best leaders are those who talk in terms of ‘we.’”When it’s time to look forward, candidates are handed a real problem to solve using real company financials (under an NDA, of course). The transparency and the accountability benefit both sides. Candidates can’t later plead ignorance about a debt problem or a customer retention issue, and they can start planning their first actions in the role, being very frank about the resources they need.You may be surprised who wobbles at this stage. Hensley said he’s seen heavily credentialed candidates with enviable pedigrees request millions of dollars to build teams “without any proof of concept of how he would gradually grow the sales team.” They ask for blank checks, but won’t bother to make a plan for using the cash. This is what Hensley calls a “presider,” who simply issues orders from a distance. “We’re always looking for world-class operators who will roll up their sleeves and get stuff done.” Executives often fail because they’re not suited to the company culture, he said. It’s worth it to take the time to assess their working style, their leadership style, and even their emotional makeup. “Are they a drill sergeant just barking orders, or are they going to be collaborative? Are they going to inspire your workforce and collaborate with the team?”It’s easy to overvalue great performance in the interview, or even a big stumble, but “your entire decision should not be based on one score. We’re talking about human beings, who are very complex.”Editor’s note: From Day One thanks our partner, Morgan Samuels Company, for sponsoring this webinar. Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is an independent journalist and From Day One contributing editor who writes about business and the world of work. Her work has appeared in the Economist, the BBC, The Washington Post, Inc., and Business Insider, among others. She is the recipient of a Virginia Press Association award for business and financial journalism. She is the host of How to Be Anything, the podcast about people with unusual jobs.(Photo by milorad kravic/iStock)
Tech That Connects: Using Tools to Support Frontline Workers
BY Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza May 28, 2026“In most workplaces, tech fails on the front line, not necessarily because the interface is wrong, but because nobody really engaged with the frontline workers about the problems they’re actually struggling with,” said Anita Jivani, global head of innovation at digital and cloud services firm Avanade. “It’s a design-thinking failure, not necessarily a budget failure.”In fact, small budgets can be “clarifying,” she said during a panel discussion at From Day One’s May virtual conference on frontline workers. Constraints steer the focus toward problems that need solving. “Picking one workflow or one friction point, and then co-designing it with [frontline workers] produces both adoption and relevance.”Jordan Lewis, the senior director of product at workforce management software Deputy, has recently watched companies move away from “top-down implementations where the senior leadership decides on the tool and then rolls it out, and employees have to work with the tools they’re given,” he said.Instead, he pointed out, companies are choosing a consultative approach “where the employees and those frontline workers are actually part of the evaluation process.” Businesses are recognizing collaborating on tools can reinforce engagement and retention—and that’s what they want, especially right now. Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza, journalist and From Day One contributing editor, moderated the session titled, "Tech That Connects: Using Tools to Support Frontline Workers" (photo by From Day One)Good tech also requires good access points. Facilities management provider ABM has a frontline workforce distributed across stadiums, airports, geographies, and buildings, “and oftentimes they don’t have access to meeting rooms or technology or desktops,” said Amber Rabo, the company’s VP of learning and development. In fact, many frontline workers don’t have access to devices of their own, or they may be first-time tech users, and some may be working in multilingual workplaces, so the company came up with its own easy-to-use in-house platform, called ABM Connect, which links frontline workers with operational and enterprise leaders for two-way communication, offers short training sessions, and simplifies log-in with facial recognition.Companies are building better tech for the frontline workforce by listening carefully. In June 2026, pharmaceutical firm Takeda will inaugurate a new CEO, and head of talent intelligence Heather Sepulveda has been taking part in listening tours with the new leader to “understand and hear things firsthand, instead of them funneling up through a game of telephone.”First, everything has to be mobile-friendly, said Sepulveda. She heard “loud and clear” from employees that they were missing out on company-wide announcements and job opportunities due to ineffective tech that wasn’t designed for frontline workers’ needs, working styles, and schedules. “Whatever it will take,” she said, “we have to make it easier for them.”At TeamSense, which uses text messaging to facilitate communication with the front line, VP of product, Alvaro Soto pointed out that “we didn’t choose SMS because it’s clever, we chose it because it works. “Someone on a 5 a.m. shift at a meat packing plant or a manufacturing floor may not have a company email,” said Soto, so TeamSense requires neither app nor log-in credentials, just the ability to text message, and it can currently support more than 30 languages.“We see the adoption of TeamSense become so fast and so powerful because we’re removing all that friction.” Why? Because it’s a tool built specifically for the frontline workforce, first.Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is an independent journalist and From Day One contributing editor who writes about business and the world of work. Her work has appeared in the Economist, the BBC, The Washington Post, Inc., and Business Insider, among others. She is the recipient of a Virginia Press Association award for business and financial journalism. She is the host of How to Be Anything, the podcast about people with unusual jobs.(Photo by Patamaporn Umnahanant/iStock)
Bringing Leadership Closer to the Frontline Experience
BY Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza May 27, 2026“Most organizations are trying to solve the right problems,” said Courtney White, the head of HR for the North American agricultural solutions arm of BASF. “It’s just that many start in the wrong place.”For instance, he says, companies might focus on engagement and retention, but those are the reactions from workers to the employee experience—and that’s where companies should start. “People decide pretty quickly if something works, and so the experience has to show up early, not in a promise, but in the reality of what people are living day to day.”White spoke during a fireside chat at From Day One’s May virtual conference on frontline workers, where he spoke about how companies can bring business leaders closer to the frontline experience.The goals of the worker and the goals of the business are not mutually exclusive—they seldom are—and companies lose sight of that. “Workers are trying to build something that works for their life. They want stable schedules, they want steady income,” White said. “Companies are trying to run efficient and reliable operations. Both of these things are correct.”Journalist and From Day One contributing editor, Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza, moderated the session with Courtney White of BASF (photo by From Day One)The problem is that when companies design systems for the business, they often do so in their own favor, and don’t always consider the frontline employee experience. And the result is harmful to both—in productivity, efficiency, engagement, retention, and morale. If leaders were to pause and listen to the concerns of the front line, they would find that their goals are concordant.Both parties must be transparent about what they need. “If the company is worried about reliability, and the workers are worried about maintaining a stable schedule, then transparency between both will hopefully result in fair scheduling practices.”White said that what many frontline workers want, but don’t often get, is autonomy, which is “less about removing structure and more about being thoughtful about where it matters,” he said. “We hold tight in places that probably don’t need it.” For example, matters of process or safety conditions shouldn’t simply be handed down from on high—those workers and their managers are often the most qualified to address those problems. Not everything can, or should, be solved in the boardroom. “It typically needs to be solved by the people who are working closest to it, and local problem solving is one of the best forms of empowerment.”This goes for things like learning and development too. Leadership may mandate universal skills training but fail to tweak its delivery for frontline workers who seldom have the flexibility to spend hours in a classroom, nor do they tend to have regular access to email, “so when learning is long or outside of the flow of work, honestly, it just doesn’t get used,” he said. At BASF, skills training for frontline workers is delivered in small, 15-minute segments during the workday, and when it’s built into a shift, it doesn’t feel additional or interrupting. The purpose, he said, must also be clear. “People need to understand how what they’re doing is clearly tied to skills, access, or pay. When learning fits the job, people use it, and that’s when it matters the most.”In many cases, frontline managers are left out of the equation, but that’s exactly where companies should focus. When an email comes from the C-suite, what is the first thing an employee will do? They go to their manager to find out what it means and how it will affect them. That’s a huge amount of power—even more so than the powers that be, he said. “That tells us how important [managers] are.”White closed by encouraging leadership to loosen the reins, on workers, but also on themselves. “Companies sometimes think that the employees’ expectation is that the company is going to be perfect. I’ve not found any employee who, at the end of the day, really expects the company to be perfect.”Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is an independent journalist and From Day One contributing editor who writes about business and the world of work. Her work has appeared in the Economist, the BBC, The Washington Post, Inc., and Business Insider, among others. She is the recipient of a Virginia Press Association award for business and financial journalism. She is the host of How to Be Anything, the podcast about people with unusual jobs.(Photo by JackF/iStock)
Aligning HR and Finance for Better Decisions and Stronger Outcomes
BY Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza May 12, 2026Human resources and finance teams tend to diverge when it comes to two things, says Ken Matos, director of market insights at HR software platform HiBob. That’s decision-making and data. When there is a decision to be made about workforce planning, does HR go to finance for permission or a check? And how are those decisions made? HR and finance often have different data, sometimes to describe the same thing, so when they look at the same problem from different angles and don’t agree, they start questioning each other, sometimes suspiciously. Where does this disagreement show up in the organization? “All the way down at the manager level,” Matos said. And it can be disastrous. In a 2026 survey, HiBob asked managers for examples of what happens when missing or conflicting data damages the people decision process, “and we saw some scary things,” he said, like people being put in the wrong pay grade, missing necessary pay raises, or two candidates hired for the same job—and showing up on the same day. During a From Day One webinar on how HR and finance can align for better decisions and stronger outcomes, Matos described in detail where HR and finance often disagree, and how HR leaders can change the story. The misalignment is a time-waster. Almost half (46%) of managers told HiBob they spend three to four hours stitching together data before making decisions, and 62% of managers simply make educated guesses to avoid missing deadlines. The results? Three in four managers say their talent decisions have been challenged in some way in the last year. These are managers making frequent decisions about promotions, pay raises, bonuses, and access to skills training. As Matos put it: “all the things that cost money in your organization.” “That’s where you’re really bleeding money and bleeding engagement,” he said. “When you’re wondering, why is there frustration and burnout for managers? Well, if they spend all this time trying to put together the right info, and they’re struggling to do that, they’re going to end up getting challenged. That sounds like the perfect recipe for burnout.” Journalist and From Day One contributing editor Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza moderated the session with Ken Matos of HiBob (photo by From Day One)But if HR and finance can recognize that they’re trying to solve the same problem, and achieve the same goal, it “allows you to have a much more rich conversation,” Matos said. He gave some advice on how HR can make better appeals to the finance team: Show them money made, money saved, and risk resolved.And in terms of lead time, the more the better. It can take a quarter or two to gather data and make a plan, he said, but if you involve stakeholders early, you’ll earn social capital. “If you’re building it with them, they’ll be like, ‘of course, it took you that long because I needed to get this information, and I didn’t have time to give it to you, but I’m behind it, so let’s make this happen.’” Editor’s note: From Day One thanks our partner, HiBob, for sponsoring this webinar. Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is an independent journalist and From Day One contributing editor who writes about business and the world of work. Her work has appeared in the Economist, the BBC, The Washington Post, Inc., and Business Insider, among others. She is the recipient of a Virginia Press Association award for business and financial journalism. She is the host of How to Be Anything, the podcast about people with unusual jobs.(Photo by Jacob Wackerhausen/iStock)
The High-Cost Claim Your Benefits Strategy Isn’t Ready For
BY Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza May 07, 2026A new category of pharmaceutical therapy is proving revolutionary for diseases and conditions once thought to be untreatable or inevitably fatal. The downside is their cost, which is bad news for employers and workers already shouldering rising healthcare costs.Some providers are warning that new and novel life-saving treatments could threaten the relative stability of that growth, creating huge volatility for self-insured employers. This was the topic of discussion during a From Day One webinar on the high-cost claim many benefits leaders aren’t ready for: cell and gene therapy. Cell and gene therapy, or CGT, targets disease at the cellular level by introducing new, healthy cells to replace damaged ones. Many cell and gene therapies target conditions once considered hard to treat or even incurable, like sickle cell disease or the brain cancer glioblastoma. Many such therapies are still considered investigational.It’s often cost-prohibitive for patients to pay for these treatments. “They’re new and they’re incredibly expensive,” said Will Shrank, MD, the CEO of Aradigm, a cell and gene therapy carveout provider. “There’s a huge amount of research that goes into designing, developing, and bringing these therapies to market. They’re often used to treat a very, very small number of patients for very rare conditions.” Caitlin Hohman, PharmD, a clinical pharmacist at Quantum Health, spoke during the webinar (company photo)Conversations about CGT are often driven by sticker shock, he says. Cell and gene therapies are a high cost category for self-funded employers, and they can create unpredictable spending spikes, says Caitlin Hohman, a clinical pharmacist at Quantum Health, a healthcare navigation firm partners with Aradigm to provide CGT coverage through employers. Their data shows that a single member can potentially trigger a $4 million claim, which makes it tough, if not impossible, to budget and plan for therapies like these. Plus, she said, “there’s not a pre-existing or industry standard on rates for these drugs.”Claims are often subject to single-case negotiation with no benchmark for what an employer pays. There’s also little infrastructure for post-treatment monitoring, which makes it hard to track the outcomes for patients. Additionally, many CGTs get accelerated approval, and durability is still being studied.“Put all these factors together,” said Hohman, “and you’re creating such a uniquely unpredictable financial landscape for self-insured employers, specifically.”There’s year-over-year volatility too, with per member per month costs fluctuating significantly over time. And it’s not the result of a single outlier, Hohman says. “Over the last five years, we’ve had employers show up consistently across multiple years with cell and gene therapy claims, which tells us this is an ongoing exposure.” Employers of all sizes are feeling the impact. While small companies are disproportionately affected, even large employers are seeing $1 million to $2 million per member per month cost, according to Quantum Health data.Shrank said Aradigm is able to mitigate some of these costs thanks to the volume of patients they manage. They charge employers a monthly premium, where risk is capped, pooling those funds into a larger pool to ensure price stability. Employers pay nothing beyond those premiums.By building a national network of providers, Aradigm guarantees them more volume, and in return, they get discounts from manufacturers, in some cases based on patient outcome, which means some dollars return to the pool when treatments aren’t successful. While Aradigm works behind the scenes, Quantum is a single point of contact for patients, which enables the company to form what Shrank and Hohman describe as a “bear hug” around the patient. “From an operational perspective,” said Hohman, “there is such an identified need in this space to support patients and providers with end-to-end coordination, before, during and after administration of these drugs.”Care navigation is critical, Hohman says. “Employers are coming to us for help navigating applicable benefits and putting the pieces of the puzzle together—because there are so many pieces out there.”Editor’s note: From Day One thanks our partner, Quantum Health, for sponsoring this webinar. Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is an independent journalist and From Day One contributing editor who writes about business and the world of work. Her work has appeared in the Economist, the BBC, The Washington Post, Inc., and Business Insider, among others. She is the recipient of a Virginia Press Association award for business and financial journalism. She is the host of How to Be Anything, the podcast about people with unusual jobs.(Photo by metamorworks/iStock)
Solving Before Sourcing: A Smarter Model for Executive Hiring
BY Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza May 05, 2026The best hires often come from unexpected places. This might be most surprising at the executive level.A few years ago, Bert Hensley, the CEO of executive search firm Morgan Samuels Company, was working with a young and newly installed head of a Fortune 500 healthcare company. Because of his age, he wanted to pack the C-suite with highly experienced leaders, and the board insisted they come from within the industry.But the goals they set for the role—mostly to do with operational excellence—weren’t reflected among healthcare leaders at the time. Hensley recommended they look outside the field at people with experience working in highly regulated industries, managing huge, cybersecurity risks, and handling billions of transactions per day. The new hire, who came from telecom, was such a success that a few months later, the CEO told Hensley that “every board member swears it was their idea to look outside the industry.”“There’s an illusion that prior experience is a proxy to future success,” said Sandy Gould, the chief people officer at LGBTQ advocacy organization GLAAD, who joined Hensley for a From Day One webinar about better strategies for executive sourcing. Such a limited view creates tunnel vision that excludes some of the most capable and adept candidates. Bert Hensley, CEO and chairman of Morgan Samuels, pictured, spoke with moderator Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza during the virtual session (company photo)When recruiting for the C-suite, or at any level of an organization, you’re seldom looking for a resume, “you’re looking for their ability to solve a certain set of challenges with certain variables in play that are inherently different at every organization,” Gould said. “It’s about adaptability and capability.”The two met decades ago when Hensley was hired to help recruit for high-level positions at the financial institution where Gould was working at the time. The company wanted to change the way it had been conducting executive search, moving away from traditional, narrowly focused ways of recruiting and toward building deeper, long-term relationships with talented leaders of all backgrounds.Hensley’s strategy was new from the word go. Gould described previous search partners who would show up to the meeting with their minds made up about who should fill the role and what their goals should be. “I’m like, ‘Wait, how do you know? Are you psychic?’” he said with a chuckle. “Having somebody come in with curiosity is important.” Hensley arrived eager to learn about the organization. “It takes a lot of effort up front to really define the problem you want an executive to solve,” said Hensley. While it’s important to identify the frustrations with whoever previously held the role, the focus should be on future results: What does this person have to get done in the next 24 months? In what market(s) will they work? How many deals do they need to make? Of what size?Company culture matters too. That is, an honest, clear-eyed view of company culture. To do the job well, new executives must be privy to the good and bad parts of culture, and that means the current leaders need to face the problems too. Every company has them. Does one department tend to clash with another? Are there deep-running office politics? Identify it, talk about it.One of the most common traps of traditional executive search is that “almost all clients confuse confidence with competence, but there’s zero correlation,” Hensley said. “Zero.” In fact, Gould and Hensley said, humility and willingness to say I don’t know are marks of the best leaders. And you can ask for specifics. In fact, you should. “You need to go deep into granular details and examples after you give principles about how you work,” Gould said. “A lot of people stay at a high level, which is not satisfying or helpful.”It’s not unlike ordinary behavioral interviewing. Gould suggested this exercise: “Talk about a situation where there was a tremendous amount of change going on. How did you adapt and respond to it? What part did you contribute to driving change?” And if you’re looking for a leader who’s not afraid to change the way things are done: “What permission did you have? What did you do when people opposed you? How did you convince them?”“What we have found through thousands and thousands of searches is that candidates who do the best are really into the details, even if they’re the CEO,” said Hensley. They can talk about what they were doing a decade ago. They’re ready to talk about mistakes they made and what they learned. “Nobody ever sets a perfect plan. None of us.”Hensley has found a correlation between executives who can work in the details and those who are inspiring leaders. Those with command and control personalities, who want to preside over teams rather than lead them, tend to resist dealing with the small stuff and are unwilling to learn.Gould’s mindset is that “learning is always right, knowing is always wrong.” Because learning means you remain curious. And if you want to know who’s curious, you have to spend time with them. “Some of our absolute best placements,” Hensley said, “are people whom we took the time to really get to know.”Editor’s note: From Day One thanks our partner, Morgan Samuels Company, for sponsoring this webinar. Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is an independent journalist and From Day One contributing editor who writes about business and the world of work. Her work has appeared in the Economist, the BBC, The Washington Post, Inc., and Business Insider, among others. She is the recipient of a Virginia Press Association award for business and financial journalism. She is the host of How to Be Anything, the podcast about people with unusual jobs.(Photo by mesh cube/iStock)
How Employers Are Using LSAs to Support Business Goals
BY Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza April 09, 2026“We make a point to design our benefits programs to be dynamic and inclusive,” said Zach Mann, the senior benefits program manager at Zillow. “This allows us to meet the needs of our employees, regardless of where they live or what chapter of life they’re in.”Of course, this is often easier said than done. Flexible and adaptive programs are made difficult by the pressures of inflation, shrinking budgets, and by old systems that don’t keep up with employee needs.So, Zillow sought out a new program that can flex with the times. Mann shared this story during a From Day One webinar on how employers are using lifestyle savings accounts, or LSAs, to affect business goals. The discussion, which included insights about LSA platform Forma, was moderated by the company’s own senior customer success manager, Kate Deeny.Mann found a flexible solution in an LSA—a flexible, employer-funded benefit that allocates a specific amount of money employees can use within a defined list of expenses. The employer identifies the amount and the boundaries.At the time, Mann was hearing about other companies cutting their well-being benefits in half, and Mann knew he would likely face similar pressure at Zillow. Leaders spoke about "2026 Global Lifestyle Benefits Benchmark: Insights to Design High-impact Benefits" during the webinar (photo by From Day One)To get buy-in from leaders for the switch from an old reimbursement system to an LSA for well-being benefits, he would have to make a data-driven case. It was easy to see how the old way was taxing the workforce: “Managers were spending almost 3,000 hours trying to approve or understand our policy to approve those expenses,” he said. “On top of that, our HR operations and benefits teams were trying to answer all those questions.”So, the company moved from a gym membership and equipment reimbursement to a $1,000 lifestyle spending account. Employees could then use a single Forma card to cover their gym memberships—no more filing monthly reimbursements, no more filling inboxes with process and coverage questions. Mann likes the flexibility and the option to change the program as-needed, expanding it to cover things like gym clothes or meal subscriptions. The LSA is now one of Zillow’s most utilized benefits, says Mann. “Employers are really getting sophisticated and strategic by thinking of LSAs not just as a perk, but as a strategic benefits infrastructure,” said Danielle Ross, Forma’s head of marketing and the author of the company’s 2026 global lifestyle benefits benchmark report.Many are dealing with the same obstacles that Mann did at Zillow—stipends that get lost in the payroll shuffle, programs that demand a lot of time and input from managers and benefits leaders, and lack of visibility into how those reimbursements are being used. Benefits teams also struggle to juggle the number of point solutions that comprise their benefits ecosystem.As an alternative to traditional reimbursement programs, LSAs are “an efficient structure to help direct benefit budgets toward programs that matter for you, with the built-in flexibility that employees are looking for,” Ross said.LSAs have global capabilities too. Around 50% of employers offering LSAs do so in more than one country, according to Forma’s report. Some employers use them to provide healthcare in countries where they don’t yet have a relationship with carriers, others use it to extend financial support for childcare needs, and in markets with high commuting costs, employers can offer commuter assistance.It’s a common misconception that LSAs are just a nice-to-have tack-on perk, Ross said. “The magic happens when you’re able to ladder-up toward a C-suite priority.” Funds can even be directed toward upskilling, return-to-office incentives, cost-savings, employee well-being, and more. So when leaders knock on the door asking the benefits team how they’re supporting a specific business priority, Ross says, benefits teams can point to their LSA.Editor’s note: From Day One thanks our partner, Forma, for sponsoring this webinar. Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is an independent journalist and From Day One contributing editor who writes about business and the world of work. Her work has appeared in the Economist, the BBC, The Washington Post, Inc., and Business Insider, among others. She is the recipient of a Virginia Press Association award for business and financial journalism. She is the host of How to Be Anything, the podcast about people with unusual jobs.(Photo by Milan Markovic/iStock)
From Jobs to Skills: Inside the Shift Transforming Talent Strategy
BY Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza April 07, 2026At eBay, which employs 12,000 people globally, senior director of global talent Zeenath Khan is using a pilot based approach to defining skills, which will support hiring and talent mobility—a newer alternative to traditional notions of hiring people for rigidly structured jobs with narrow and singular paths for growth. Influencing an enterprise of that size to rethink its talent strategy, and then actually execute that change, is a massive undertaking. “So what we wanted to do was start quite small,” she said, focusing on teams already motivated to embrace a skills-based strategy in support of career development or AI transformation.Khan was part of an executive panel on how HR leaders are adopting and experimenting with skills-based thinking, during From Day One’s March virtual conference on talent acquisition. Her team works as consultants to business units, running workshops and helping leaders identify the skills their segments will need now and in the years ahead. “With all of the fabulous AI tools, we’ve also created research projects on those topics to support those leaders in their thinking.”As the capabilities of artificial intelligence grow rapidly, some business leaders may be tempted to skip the foundational work and jump straight to replacing roles with AI agents. But Kathryn Withycomb, a senior learning strategist at Thinkhuman, recommends a different approach, starting with business goals, not headcount reduction. Framing the change this way helps keep expectations realistic and ensures that early pilots are focused on measurable, testable outcomes rather than sweeping assumptions about automation.Panelists spoke during a session titled, "Next-Gen Talent: Spotting Skills and Potential Before They’re Visible" (photo by From Day One)Skills-based thinking has been discussed in HR for several years now, but outside the field, the concept is still unfamiliar to most. To help employees understand the shift, Alorica’s senior director of talent acquisition, Danielle McCaffrey, encourages people to reverse-engineer their roles, asking questions like: What job do you have, and what skills do you bring to the table?“The key is making it clear that this approach creates more opportunity for them and not less,” she said. Where traditional, job-based organizations prescribe singular paths from the bottom to the top of an organization with little room for detours, skills-based organizations open up lateral and nonlinear routes—an approach that resonates with a workforce interested in flexibility and adaptability.“A lot of our positions are entry-level customer service roles, but if they demonstrate, say, analytical skills or training ability or a potential around leadership, we know that we can move them into workforce management, operations, training or even recruiting,” McCaffrey said. “When people realize that their skills are portable and visible across the organization, they start to see a much broader career path than the one that they were hired into.”The skills-based transformation doesn’t just appeal to the newest arrivals to the workforce. While the pace of change is accelerating, more experienced employees have already navigated major technological transitions. “There wasn’t Google when I started working,” eBay’s Khan noted. “That combination of folks who have lived experience of dramatic technological change plus emerging talent who bring in a fresh mindset and a completely different set of skills remains really important for us.”Some companies are taking their very first steps toward skills-based planning. Jay Park, the senior director of talent acquisition at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, is focused on building strong relationships with business leaders.“We’re setting up that foundation as a broader people team,” he said, positioning his function as a strategic partner and building credibility so his team can better understand the skills leaders are missing today and what they’ll need in the future. He’s keen on thinking differently about hiring, moving from traditional ideas of what a resume should include and instead welcoming unconventional candidates who appear equipped for a nonlinear career path.Finding the skills that don’t always show up on a resume is “where recruiting becomes both an art and a science, said McCaffrey at Alorica. “Resumes tend to show experience, but they really rarely capture the candidate's actual capability or potential.”To uncover qualities like empathy, resilience, and critical thinking, her team uses behavioral interview questions and situational assessments that require candidates to demonstrate how they would handle real-world scenarios. Yet human judgment remains essential. “A candidate might score a little bit lower on an assessment, but then demonstrates exceptional problem solving and conversation,” she said. “That would be a signal to a recruiter to see if their career path could take a different turn.”As AI gets smarter, Park added, “it’s going to be that much more important for us to assess candidates for mindset, growth, orientation, adaptability—those things that aren’t obvious on paper are going to require a recruiter.”Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is an independent journalist and From Day One contributing editor who writes about business and the world of work. Her work has appeared in the Economist, the BBC, The Washington Post, Inc., and Business Insider, among others. She is the recipient of a Virginia Press Association award for business and financial journalism. She is the host of How to Be Anything, the podcast about people with unusual jobs.(Photo by Vadym Pastukh/iStock)
How Leading Employers Turn Financial Stress into Measurable Engagement
BY Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza April 01, 2026HR leaders have long relied on engagement surveys to monitor workforce health, but when it comes to financial matters, many are still figuring out the best ways to measure the need, and the impact.“Financial wellness is still a topic many of us are trying to get comfortable talking about,” said Julia Fearn, director of channel partnerships at SoFi at Work, during a From Day One webinar on how employers are tuning financial stress into measurable engagement.Contrast this with growing demand from the workforce. “Employees are more and more asking for their employer to help them,” she said. “But employers aren’t yet comfortable with that.” While 66% employees want some sort of financial well-being support from their companies, only 23% of employers offer it.Even without direct conversations, financial strain leaves a trail. It shows up in increased 401(k) hardship loans, low retirement plan participation, and sometimes in direct deposits, whether into checking or savings.At the same time, benefits leaders are doing everything they can to stretch a dollar. Rising healthcare costs are consuming a larger share of the benefits budget, limiting the ability to expand and experiment with new offerings.Julia Fearn, director of channel partnerships at SoFi at Work, led the session (company photo)“What we’re hearing this year is that the vast majority of benefits leaders are looking to reallocate or maximize efficiency of what they’re spending,” Fearn said. “What can I squeeze out of the ecosystems that I already have to make sure we’re maximizing what’s already there?”Some employers are offering emergency savings programs, which can help employees cover unexpected expenses, like a $2,500 car repair, without borrowing against their retirement savings. And employers are also experimenting with how to drive participation too. Incentives, Fearn said, can be effective if they’re designed for long-term behavior change.“Providing incentives and checkpoints does drive behavior,” Fearn said. Short-term rewards, like winning a FitBit or a gift card do work, but only for a short period of time. Longer-lasting incentives, like employee matching, are more effective because they reinforce ongoing behavior, not just one-time actions. “It doesn’t have to be a huge dollar amount to have a very meaningful impact,” she said, noting that even a $100 match on a $500 contribution can meaningfully shift behavior.For employers, the payoff of financial well-being programs can extend beyond the individual to broader workforce shifts. The key question, Fearn said, is: What are you trying to achieve, and how many people can you impact? In some cases, financial wellness benefits have led to measurable reductions in turnover. According to Fearn, one healthcare organization saw a 21% drop in turnover within the first year of launching a student loan contribution program. A consumer goods company reduced turnover from 13% to 6% after introducing a similar benefit. Notably, even though only 9% of employees enrolled, the impact was felt across the broader workforce.“From a benefits perspective, there’s been a lot happening in the last few years, when it comes to supporting physical and emotional well-being,” Fearn said. “Though there’s a lot of alignment in terms of what employers are doing and what employees expect, we’re seeing one of the biggest disconnects around financial well-being.”Closing the financial wellness gap requires employers getting comfortable with a topic many still feel is taboo, but the payoff is there, what begins as stability in one person’s retirement account can affect the stability of the whole workforce.Editor’s note: From Day One thanks our partner, SoFi at Work, for sponsoring this webinar. Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is an independent journalist and From Day One contributing editor who writes about business and the world of work. Her work has appeared in the Economist, the BBC, The Washington Post, Inc., and Business Insider, among others. She is the recipient of a Virginia Press Association award for business and financial journalism. She is the host of How to Be Anything, the podcast about people with unusual jobs.(Photo by Nanci Santos/iStock)
Learning and Development, Powered by AI: How Innovations Are Bringing the Next Wave
BY Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza March 06, 2026“Already, I can’t go back to not having AI,” said Stephanie Smith-Ejnes, the VP of people and organization at Sony Pictures. “It is so ingrained in my day-to-day work and how efficient I am and how efficient my team is. The path forward is seeing AI as a force-multiplier and not a replacement for learning professionals.”Given the number of creatives employed by Sony, the will-it-or-won’t-it replace-me conversation is one Smith-Ejnes has been having a lot lately. And while she can’t imagine her working life without it, she’s sympathetic to those who still see it as a threat to their livelihood. It’s up to leaders like her, she explained, to lead the way with AI adoption, making the case for it as an enabler, and not a threat.During a panel discussion on how L&D teams are innovating with artificial intelligence at From Day One’s February virtual, Smith-Ejnes and her fellow panelists outlined how they’re pioneering AI in their organizations, setting the standard for adoption and responsible use.Building an AI-Native OrganizationDespite its widespread adoption, many companies and teams are far from proficient in AI. Talent development platform Infopro Learning uses a three-stage maturity model when helping clients advance. The first—and necessary—step is the “bolt-on” stage in which teams are curious and exploring with tools by adding them to existing processes, said CEO Sriraj Malick.The second is when teams are learning how to use AI to save time and money, creating new work capacity. Companies enter the third stage—that is, the AI-native stage—when teams can work within an AI infrastructure. “The infrastructure is learning as your team members are doing, so the knowledge and the intelligence compounds for the organization, for the team, and for every team member,” Mallick said.Journalist Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza moderated the virtual session (photo by From Day One)Companies advance at different speeds, of course, and even the most innovative are still experimenting. For instance, customer-service platform Qualfon has developed its own AI-powered roleplay simulator to help employees master customer conversations. Learners have always asked for more practice, said the company’s VP of learning and development Marvie Wright, and now they can get it. Not only are these sessions measurable (tracking how quickly someone speaks or whether they over-use vocalized pauses like ums and ahs), “it also allows us to individualize and personalize the learning, and it gives immediate feedback,” she said. Personalization is something L&D teams have long talked about, “but finally, it’s a reality.”As AI promises to automate rote tasks that have previously occupied inordinate amounts of time, human skills are becoming the most necessary and coveted, says Brittany Dougan, senior director of L&D at government services contractor Maximus. The good news is, “we’re really good at them, and we know how to develop them in the organization, so it puts [L&D teams] in a position to be true business partners.”The Problem of ComplianceSome leaders in tightly regulated industries, like defense and healthcare, are finding AI adoption a challenge. “Compliance cultures are built on control and documentation, but really meaningful AI adoption requires iteration and failure and learning—it’s structured freedom,” said Heather Lambert, the VP of learning and development at healthcare provider Wellpath.To afford workers with as much freedom as possible, Wellpath uses sandbox environments in which users are given access to tiered permission zones based on clearance and need, with guardrails to prevent users from mishandling data. “When people understand that there is a boundary and why it exists—whether it’s HIPAA or data privacy—they’re more likely to respect it,” said Lambert. “If they know why, they won’t try to work around it.”“L&D teams will be the ones to set the standard for AI use within an organization,” said Smith-Ejnes. “If I sit back and I say, ‘let’s just wait and see what this is going to be,’ then the decisions are going to be made for me. But if we jump in as a strategic partner, then we become decision-makers with the business.”Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is an independent journalist and From Day One contributing editor who writes about business and the world of work. Her work has appeared in the Economist, the BBC, The Washington Post, Inc., and Business Insider, among others. She is the recipient of a Virginia Press Association award for business and financial journalism. She is the host of How to Be Anything, the podcast about people with unusual jobs.(Photo by Kosamtu/iStock)
Building Trust in Hiring: Creating an Exceptional Candidate Experience
BY Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza March 05, 2026“Ninety-one percent of recruiters and hiring managers have spotted or suspected candidate deception at some point,” said Will Leahy, VP of customer success at applicant tracking platform Greenhouse, citing the company’s 2026 AI in Hiring Report. That deception can be as little as fudging skill proficiency to falsifying references to adopting a deepfake likeness or false persona.This presents a challenge to today’s good-faith job seekers, who aren’t only competing against other qualified applicants, they’re now going head to head against bad actors willing to game the system and lie. The challenge for recruiters is remaining vigilant without treating sincere candidates with undue suspicion.This problem—and new solutions—was the topic of conversation during a From Day One webinar on how employers are building trust in hiring while also improving the candidate experience.The ‘AI Doom Loop’Candidates are using AI to apply for more roles, while at the same time employers are using AI to manage the swell of applications. “It’s not uncommon for a recruiter to post a role and, within 48 hours, have over 900 applications,” said Leahy’s co-panelist Erin Walsh-Beguin, senior director of global recruiting operations at GoDaddy. Employers are struggling to sort through the slop without losing great candidates along the way.Will Leahy, VP of people success at Greenhouse, spoke during the session (company photo)The result is an “AI doom loop.” “Candidates are leveraging AI to get themselves out there at an exponentially higher rate, which is causing an extraordinary amount of application influx, and quite a bit of it is spam,” Leahy said. “On the other side of the house are recruiters trying to navigate that and leveraging AI to the best of their ability to try and cut through that noise.”With each side trying to stay several steps ahead of the other, “it creates a doom loop, and no one’s happy, no one’s having a good time, and no one’s satisfied,” he said.To find the best candidates—who are actually real people—recruiters are trying things like identity verification. “Eighteen percent of recruiters that we talk to have had an experience where there was a deep fake in the room,” Leahy said. Greenhouse’s new partnership with CLEAR lets employers verify a candidate’s identity at whatever point they choose. Once that’s out of the way, “you can bypass suspicion and have a real human conversation,” he said.Real human conversations and sincere interactions are invaluable in this moment, when employers and candidates are becoming increasingly distrustful of one another. Walsh-Beguin likes to hold onto those moments by “sending notes, emails, and touching base,” she said. And a lot of that can be aided with automation. But avoid the temptation to over-automate and send blast-emails or status updates that are impersonal or uninformative. “It doesn’t take that long to send out a check-in and say, ‘Hey, thank you for hanging in there. We’re doing our best,’” she said. Transparency matters: Telling candidates upfront what they can expect in the hiring process, how AI will or won’t be used, and when they might hear from you again—these things don’t take much time or technical know-how. Behind the scenes, new applicant tracking tech is helping employers surface the best, most qualified, and most-likely-to-be-real candidates. Greenhouse’s new Talent Mapping feature works like an email inbox’s spam filter, sorting through suspicious applications to find strong matches and those most likely to be irrelevant or fraudulent. And like a spam filter, red-flagged candidates aren’t thrown out, but set aside for human review.The recruiter sets the parameters and reviews the results. “You are going to continuously teach the AI that the parameters that you used did yield the correct match, and you can override it again,” Walsh-Beguin said. That human intervention is key. “Ethical utilization of AI is something everybody has to ensure they’re following through on.”“Any amount of automation that allows more humanness to enter the conversation” is worthwhile, said Leahy. This goes for sophisticated talent mapping as well as simple transcription and summarization features, which lets him focus on the candidate rather than note-taking. “That’s automation making my life easier but also making it more human.”Editor’s note: From Day One thanks our partner, Greenhouse, for sponsoring this webinar. Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is an independent journalist and From Day One contributing editor who writes about business and the world of work. Her work has appeared in the Economist, the BBC, The Washington Post, Inc., and Business Insider, among others. She is the recipient of a Virginia Press Association award for business and financial journalism. She is the host of How to Be Anything, the podcast about people with unusual jobs.(Photo by Ridofranz/iStock)
More Than Efficiency: How Marketers Are Using AI to Deliver the Most Value
BY Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza February 02, 2026Marketers have graduated from the experimental phase in marketing, moving beyond simple efficiency plays and content generation to embed the tech in processes and cross-departmental collaboration, reinventing the way campaigns are designed, funded, executed, and measured. The question facing marketers in 2026 isn’t whether to use AI, but where it delivers the most value. During From Day One’s January virtual conference on AI and marketing tech, four marketing leaders discussed ways they’re using AI to transform marketing strategies and outcomes.The most natural entry point into AI for marketers is content creation, says Honora Handley, VP of global marketing and AI strategy at Thomson Reuters. Drafting emails and crafting messaging are the low-hanging fruit many teams reach for first. But, she said, “a lot of the impact is really around creativity with workflows.” Routine tasks like approvals and ad-buys are all being rebuilt with AI agents that make the process more efficient and effective, especially across departments. While marketing might have workflow for budget requests, accounting and finance has another to approve requests and disburse funds. Good workflows mean those teams can communicate through their processes without inventing a whole new process. On a daily basis, Handley said, “it’s about carving out the time to think differently about how we’re using AI with the plethora of tools that the company has provided.”Tailoring campaigns has never been easier and more precise. This is a coup for account-based marketing. “Now there’s really no excuse not to have specific assets for individual people,” said Jeff Coyle, the head of strategy at Siteimprove and co-founder of MarketMuse. “We went from what was a scarce resource to infinite ability. Now it’s all about making sure everything you do is of the highest quality and editorial integrity.”Panelists spoke on the topic "From Insight to Execution: Using AI to Transform Marketing Strategies and Outcomes" during the virtual conference (photo by From Day One)Panelists agreed that AI has helped them make better, faster decisions. They can now spot underperforming ads and reallocate budget, sort leads, and pick the best calls to action, subject lines, and headlines in record time and with laser precision. There’s no shortage of AI-powered tools for marketers to accomplish these things, but whether a tool is worth the cost is down to business requirements, said Apoorva Shah, who leads marketing at Tata Consultancy Services. The first litmus test is comparing the tool’s capabilities to marketing goals. “Are we trying to improve our pipeline or demand gen? Are we trying to improve our content velocity? Do I want to improve my return on ad spend?”It also depends on whether the tools can connect to other systems and achieve that cross-departmental flow. “Efficiency and time savings alone aren’t as important as also making sure that we’re getting something meaningful from it,” said Michelle Kelly, the VP of digital marketing at Ecolab. Though marketing teams are adopting AI tools with increasing speed—and making great use of them—some are still under the impression that being AI ready means starting over. The most common misunderstanding about AI readiness is that marketers have to build something entirely new, says Coyle. A better strategy is to enrich what you already have, including processes for developing marketing assets and updating them.But make no mistake, every page of the website matters, he says. This is true both substantively (PR content affects product content) and technically (AI engines have to be able to read and interpret your content).As AI becomes infrastructure rather than novelty, the advantage will go to marketing teams that treat it as a connective tissue, not just a content engine. Panelists agreed: the real value comes from improving workflows across systems and teams. AI isn’t replacing marketing fundamentals. It’s raising the bar for how they’re executed.Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is an independent journalist and From Day One contributing editor who writes about business and the world of work. Her work has appeared in the Economist, the BBC, The Washington Post, Inc., and Business Insider, among others. She is the recipient of a Virginia Press Association award for business and financial journalism. She is the host of How to Be Anything, the podcast about people with unusual jobs.(Photo by pixdeluxe/iStock)