Reshaping the Workforce: How AI and HR Technology Change How Things Get Done
BY Katie Chambers April 28, 2026“What’s fundamentally changing in how work gets done in your organization because of AI?” asked moderator Subadhra Sriram, founder and host of Workforce Observer. The answer? Well, almost everything. Leaders explored this topic during an executive panel discussion at From Day One’s Silicon Valley conference, moderated by Sriram. One of the most marked differences AI has made in the workplace already comes down to scale. “Every individual’s impact has changed a lot. So what one person could do before, it just means something very different with all the tools that we have now,” said Maggie Zhu, people partner at Anthropic. The tools allow employees to compound their work so that the pace of output is ever-increasing.Samanntha DuBridge, SVP, chief talent officer a t HPE, says AI isn’t necessarily replacing work, but instead allowing workers to focus their attention in new ways. “It’s an exciting time to take some of the more mundane tasks kind of out of the way, and think about data and what you want to spend your time on a little bit differently,” she said. The big changes come with mixed emotions, says Dutta Satadip, chief business operations officer at Pebl, “It’s this interesting balance of excitement and fear,” he said. LLM’s, large language models, are changing workflows for so many people in the office, not just with writing but with coding. “Whatever is in your head is going into AI, into code, and you’re seeing the application,” said Allan Brown, VP of total rewards at Snowflake. “Excel is going to be a thing of the past for presenting something to a senior leader.”Panelists spoke about "Reshaping the Workforce: How AI and HR Technology Change How Things Get Done"This is a good way to frame AI adoption for people who might be afraid of it, says Seema Daryanani, people and culture partner, Gemini App, Google DeepMind. “It will cut down these manual tasks so that you can spend more time innovating and creating,” she said. Fortunately, employees are generally not yet in danger of being replaced. “The efficiencies are being shared by both employees and the company,” Brown said. “The company gets more productivity, but the people are having work-life balance. You start reducing the amount of work you can do, and you’re suddenly going to find yourself a little bit of time.” Communications strategies promoting AI adoption can be built around this notion, encouraging employees to think about their mental health and how they would best like to use their time, both at work and at home. The Future of HR For HR professionals in particular, AI is helping them save time, especially when it comes to attaining, sorting, and delivering reports on data. “We do our annual voice of the workforce survey, and it used to [be] you’d get the summary data pretty quickly, but all the sentiment would take a really long time. [With AI], it’s the same day,” DuBridge said. “You can get things [instantly] that would take a team of people to review, analyze, [and] categorize a couple months.”Daryanani finds that AI can help get “an overall picture of the organizational health and then also dig down line by line.” It can also supplement employee recognition tools. AI agents, meanwhile, are being deployed by various organizations to provide everything from administration support to deep analysis of customer interactions to better understand how to improve the service experience. For a practical example of how AI technology can ease the HR process, Brown shares how his organization used AI agents to answer questions about a new payroll system. “We’ve got 35 locations all over the world. The [number] of questions that were probably going to come in was insane. Somebody came up with the idea: let’s take all these payroll documents and policies, and the health benefit documents, put them all into Notebook LM, and they created a little AI agent that employees could just ask their questions,” he said. “And it answered all the questions. It eliminated that work. Those questions didn’t even come in.”Contrary to popular belief, AI is actually managing to make the hiring process more personalized, DuBridge says, as tools and systems take over a lot of the boring, menial back-and-forth of reviewing resumes and scheduling interviews. “It’s more about building that relationship with the applicant, trying to find out more about them, sharing more about the company, and finding that right fit in the right team,” she said. “It’s more about that person in that role, and it’s less about, ‘Are you available at three o'clock on Friday?’”With AI causing rapid changes across all aspects of the workforce, HR needs to keep adaptability, upskilling, and growth in mind when hiring. “What you thought you were hiring for six months ago could be different from what you’re hiring for now,” Zhu said. “Thinking about what their role might be today and how it might evolve is changing how we’re thinking about hiring in general. [It] needs to be an active conversation.” That means employers may start to value foundational abilities above all else, Satadip says. These include “core problem solving, general cognitive ability, curiosity, he said “because those will persist regardless.” Willingness to experiment is also key. No matter the changes to come, people can, and should, always be prioritized. “I think it’s really important to remember that your organization is composed of people and to be human first,” Zhu said “It comes down to values—you have to keep those values at the forefront.”Katie Chambers is a freelance writer and award-winning communications executive with a lifelong commitment to supporting artists and advocating for inclusion. Her work has been seen in HuffPost, Top Think, and several printed essay collections, and she has appeared on Cheddar News, iWomanTV, On New Jersey, and CBS New York.(Photos by Josh Larson for From Day One)
Navigating Superintelligence at Work: The Role of Leadership, Trust, and Organizational Readiness
BY Grace Turney April 28, 2026At her dentist’s office not long ago, Sandy Carter found herself in a surprisingly futuristic conversation—not with a doctor, but with a dental hygienist who was explaining how AI was creating a digital twin of Carter’s teeth. The hygienist, eager to keep up with the technology that had entered her workplace, had enrolled in a community college course so she could answer questions from curious patients.For Carter, it was a perfect illustration of the moment we’re in. AI isn’t arriving; it’s already embedded in the everyday tasks of ordinary workplaces, from dental chairs to marketing departments to customer service queues. The question isn’t whether to engage with it, but how to lead people through it.Carter, chief business officer at Unstoppable Domains and author of AI First, Human Always: Embracing a New Mindset for the Era of Superintelligence, shared that conviction, and a great deal of hard-won practical wisdom, during a fireside chat at From Day One’s Silicon Valley conference. In conversation with Steve Koepp, editor in chief and co-founder of From Day One, Carter explored AI adoption, organizational change, and the role of leadership in the AI-era. A Long View on a Fast-Moving TechnologyCarter has been working with AI since 2013, well before the concept became popular and well-known. She was part of the IBM team that deployed AI for Jeopardy! and later helped produce what she calls the first AI-generated cookbook, a collaboration with the Culinary Institute that she describes as an early glimpse of generative AI. “It was kind of like the first taste of Gen AI coming way long ago,” she said.That long view shapes her perspective on the current moment, which she described in her book using a chapter titled “Exponential Baby.” Change is accelerating, she acknowledged, but she’s skeptical of the anxiety it produces. To put the pace of adoption in context, she cited a chart tracking AI usage across millions of people. What it shows surprised even her: roughly 80% of people haven’t used AI at all. About 15% have tried it, but only the free version. Just a small fraction (around 2.5%) have used paid tools that allow them to actually build with AI. And the share developing agents, the most sophisticated form of AI deployment, is barely 1%.Carter signed copies of her book AI First, Human Always for session attendees Her point wasn’t to minimize the urgency, but to dispel the panic. “You’re not behind,” she said. “Everybody doesn’t have the pink cup today.” She was referring to her daughter’s conviction that all her classmates owned a coveted limited-edition Stanley Cup, until Carter called around and discovered that nobody actually had one. “The same thing applies here.”The Trust GapThat doesn’t mean AI adoption is going smoothly. One of the most significant obstacles Carter identified is what she calls the trust gap: a disconnect between how executives perceive AI’s capabilities and how employees experience them on the ground.She pointed to forthcoming research from WalkMe, recently acquired by SAP, which found a 4x trust gap between executives and employees in their confidence around AI. Carter illustrated the problem with a story. She was invited to review an AI dashboard at a Fortune 50 company. The executives walked her through it, everything was green. After they left the room, she turned to the team leads. “I said, ‘Really surprised that your dashboard was all green. I’ve never seen an all green AI dashboard before.’” The team leads confirmed her suspicion. Workarounds had been built; manual processes had been quietly substituted; but the dashboard continued to reflect optimistic metrics. The contrast she offered is Mercedes-Benz, where senior leaders have developed their own agents and brought employees across the entire organization, from assistants to car painters, into rooms together to evaluate where AI works and where it doesn’t. “That’s the best practice that we should be looking at,” Carter said.Agents as TeammatesAt Unstoppable Domains, Carter has put her philosophy into practice. Rather than deploying AI as a tool or using it as cover for layoffs, her team has built a structure in which AI agents function as named teammates, reporting to human managers in an expanded org chart.Inspired by Alice in Wonderland, the team’s 12 agents (including the Red Queen, who handles campaign analysis, and the Mad Hatter, who serves as a brainstorming engine) were chosen collectively, not handed down from the executive suite. The agents report to people managers, and the team has grown its roster from 12 to 45. To incentivize collaboration, when an agent produces something valuable, the human team it supports receives a bonus.The most striking data point from this experiment involves Gen Z workers. Citing a recent survey, Carter noted that 47% of them said they would prefer an AI manager. “It doesn't speak well to the quality of bosses,” said Koepp. But Carter’s explanation was more nuanced. “Why do they want an agent as a manager? Not political. They’re fair. And they don’t care if I work from home.”She sees this as an early sign that agents will eventually take on managerial roles, and that HR needs to be ready for the people questions this raises: Who owns agents? Do they have performance plans? How do you coach managers who are managing both people and AI?The Customer Use CaseFor businesses still on the fence about AI investment, Carter offered a concrete example from her company’s customer service operation. Unstoppable Domains has 4.8 million customers, and its AI agent now handles 48% of all customer service inquiries, without any layoffs. But the story she found most compelling wasn’t the efficiency gain. It was that the company moved to number one in customer satisfaction in its category.The key was rethinking what customer service could do, not just automating what it already did. “Why does customer service just identify a problem?” she asked. Now, when an agent identifies an issue, it can also resolve it, logging the fix in GitHub for an engineer to approve. The agent also flags incoming new customers who run into trouble, prompting personalized outreach from the community support team. New customer acquisition has risen as a result.This is the potential Carter returns to repeatedly: not AI as a cost-cutting mechanism, but AI as a means of raising the ceiling on what’s possible. She cited Deloitte, McKinsey, and a BMW report finding 38% higher productivity when humans and AI work together. “AI plus humans yield stronger results,” she said.What AI-First Leaders Look LikeCarter outlined three qualities she believes define effective AI-first leaders. The first is authenticity: knowing what you understand and what you don’t, and being willing to say so.The second is the capacity to reimagine. The most successful companies she works with don’t start by asking how to automate what they already do. They ask: if we were a startup today, with access to AI, how would we build this function from scratch?The third quality is what she calls being “fearless,” or, in her framing, shifting from brainstorming to what she calls “playstorming.” Executives who want to lead with AI have to be willing to get their hands dirty and fail in front of their teams. “This is not a technology that you can just think about theoretically,” she said. She described vibe coding the AI agent for her own book across 17 different platforms herself, learning from the experience rather than delegating it.Carter closed with what she considers the most important strategic reframe for organizations navigating AI. Most companies approach transformation in the wrong order: they select a platform, then redesign processes, then figure out what to do about people. The companies that fare best flip the sequence entirely: starting with readiness at the human level, then process, then technology.And in that people-first model, she says, HR is central. “I’m going to argue that I think the most important person in the transformation is you guys,” she told the room of HR leaders. “You deal with the people. And I think people is really where it’s at.”Grace Turney is a St. Louis-based writer, artist, and former librarian. See more of her work at graceturney17.wixsite.com/mysite.(Photos by Josh Larson for From Day One)
Marketing at the Speed of Light: How to Get the Pitch Across When the Product Is Changing Fast
BY Ade Akin April 27, 2026What does it take to market a company that may not be a household name, but powers the technology people rely on every day—from Face ID in your smartphone to the undersea fiber optic cables connecting continents?When Dr. Sanjai Parthasarathi stepped into the Chief Marketing Officer role at Coherent in 2019, he expected a conversation about traditional market segmentation. Instead, he received a piece of advice that reshaped how the company thinks about marketing. He recalls being told that Coherent effectively serves two types of customers: those who buy its products, and those who buy its stock.The idea broadened the scope of marketing beyond end customers to include the investment community—emphasizing that the company’s story must resonate not only with engineers and procurement teams, but also with investors evaluating its long-term potential.Parthasarathi shared this and other insights during a fireside chat about, “Marketing at the Speed of Light: How to Get the Pitch Across When the Product Is Changing Fast” at From Day One’s Silicon Valley marketing conference. Parthasarathi offered a closer look at a company whose products are everywhere in a conversation with Steve Koepp, co-founder and editor in chief of From Day One. His mandate, he says, is to crystallize the story of technology quietly powering the AI revolution, data centers, and modern manufacturing, and tell it to two very different audiences.From the Periodic Table to AI Data CentersParthasarathi started the conversation by demystifying “photonics,” which he describes as “the science of light, the technology that goes into creating light and manipulating light and sensing light.” The examples were as tangible as they were ubiquitous. “When I wake up, the first thing I do is I look at my phone, and you know the magic of Face ID and the phone completely opening up by looking at your face,” he said. “That’s made possible in photonics.” Those signals don’t stop there. They travel from your phone to an RF tower, where an optical transceiver converts electrical signals into optical signals, sending them through fiber optic networks, including undersea cables, to reach a friend in Singapore.Coherent’s story started in 1971, in Pittsburgh, with a name so esoteric it requires a chemistry lesson. Originally called “II-VI,” a reference to the group's two and six on the periodic table, the company was founded on materials like zinc selenide and cadmium telluride, designed to shape and direct beams for the then-new carbon dioxide laser. Sanjai Parthasarathi, CMO at Coherent Corp., was interviewed during the fireside chatOver the decades, the company evolved into a diversified photonics powerhouse, acquiring Bay Area-based Finisar in 2019 and later adopting the name of its 2022 acquisition, Coherent, a brand synonymous with laser excellence. Today, Coherent’s technology is a cornerstone of the AI boom. As Sanjai put it, “Optical connections are rapidly growing inside the data center. Today all the connections between the racks and leaving the data center facility are 100% optical. Excitement in the optical community is around connections within the rack moving to optical.” One Portfolio, Two ExtremesMarketing for such a diverse company presents unique challenges. Coherent serves both “hyper-scale” data center customers, each of which, Parthasarathi noted, is “a market by themselves,” and then on the other end thousands of industrial and academic customers who buy standard products. “For our hyper-scale customers, it’s all a very high-touch, technical marketing activity that goes on,” he said. “We’re talking about long design cycles. We’re talking about partnerships and developing new platforms and technology.” On the other end of the spectrum, the team relies on more traditional demand generation and content campaigns.Dealing with this technical complexity requires a marketing team that can speak the language of engineers and scientists. While Parthasarathi jokes about his doctorate, he emphasizes that technical competence is non-negotiable. “You don’t need to be an expert in the technology, but you need to understand it deep enough that you can have a productive dialog with your customer,” he said.Coherent has centralized its marketing “brains” in a small Bay Area team to streamline its global operations, while a larger group in Malaysia handles content execution, a model that has proven efficient since its launch less than a year ago.The Next Optical FrontierOne of the most significant shifts underway in the tech industry is the migration from electrical to optical signals, even within the tight confines of a server rack. “When you need to go fast, and we need to go long distances, you have to go optical.” He paints a picture of future circuit boards with fiber traces instead of wires, a transformation that pundits estimate could multiply the market opportunity tenfold. This future is already being underwritten. In March 2026, Nvidia announced a $2 billion investment in Coherent as part of a multi-year partnership to advance optical technologies used for AI data center infrastructure. That early directive, to market the company to both customers and investors, has made investor communication an important part of Parthasarathi’s role. “Ours is a complex story, and trying to simplify it for the investor audience is something that I spend significant time on,” he said.While the messages differ, the fundamental task remains the same: crystallizing the company’s technological story for a specific audience. “It’s ultimately about taking the technology and taking the story and crystallizing it for the audience. That’s marketing, right, whether it’s an investor audience or customer audience or a supplier.”Strategy, Storytelling, and the Limits of AIParthasarathi offered a grounded perspective as the conversation turned to artificial intelligence’s role in marketing. Coherent uses AI extensively for content generation and demand creation, but it’s clear about its limits. “AI is not going to tell me a story that has not been written yet,” he said. “Us as marketing folks, we’re writing the story. AI helps us refine the story.” For Coherent, AI remains a powerful tool in a highly technical B2B industry, where understanding customer pain points and translating complex technology into value is paramount, but it’s not a replacement for deep market knowledge.He emphasizes that successful marketing at Coherent is fundamentally a strategic function, sitting at “the intersection of markets, technology, and strategy.” This approach has underpinned the company’s ambitious growth, from a sub-billion-dollar revenue base a decade ago to a consensus estimate of around $7 billion for the current fiscal year. “Strategy is not done in a vacuum by two people from the executive team,” Parthasarathi said. “It’s done with multiple functions, and it’s a long-term plan.”Parthasarathi left the audience with a simple but powerful reminder as the session concluded. “Ultimately, it’s about the customers—what are the pain points that they’re having, what are the challenges that they’re trying to solve. And the realization of that is perhaps the most important thing that you can do as a marketing professional.” Ade Akin covers artificial intelligence, workplace wellness, HR trends, and digital health solutions.(Photos by Josh Larson for From Day One)
Workplace Wellness and Engagement When Employees Feel They’re at a Breaking Point
BY Grace Turney April 24, 2026Athar Siddiqee still remembers how thrilled he was when he got his first company-issued cell phone. “How cool is this?” he recalls thinking. But he had no idea he was stepping onto a treadmill that would never stop.That moment of innocent excitement captures something essential about the modern workplace: the tools meant to make life easier have steadily erased the boundary between work and rest. For HR leaders, that erosion has become a defining challenge—one that Covid forced into the open, and that no single app or assistance program has fully solved.The question of what genuinely supports employee well-being, and not just what looks good in a benefits brochure, was the focus of a panel at From Day One’s Silicon Valley conference, moderated by Rachael Myrow, senior editor of KQED’s Silicon Valley News Desk. One Size Fits No OneSiddiqee, head of total rewards at Micron Technology, was candid about the limits of standard benefits packages. During the pandemic, Micron rolled out an employee assistance fund, a home-office setup stipend, Headspace subscriptions, virtual fitness classes, and one “Innovate and Invigorate” Friday off per month. All of this was useful, yes—but not universal.In India, for instance, the employee assistance program went largely unused. Mental health struggles are handled within extended families, and the stigma of seeking outside help made formal EAP channels a non-starter. Micron responded by building flexible benefits programs in India, Singapore, and Malaysia that let employees allocate funds toward whatever they actually needed, such as childcare, gym memberships, or other priorities. “We realized that one size didn’t fit all,” Siddiqee said. Those localized programs have stayed in place.The Quiet Cracking ProblemMyrow introduced the phrase “quiet cracking,” or employees buckling under sustained pressure, and asked for a clinical perspective on what the early warning signs look like.“The term might be rather new, but this has been going on for a long time,” said Inderpreet Dhillon, MD, senior medical director at Grow Therapy. A board-certified adult psychiatrist with 20 years in practice, Dhillon says what has changed is the intensity. The commute that once served as a mental buffer between work and home has vanished for many people. “My living room is on the first floor and my office is on the second floor. I used to drive 20 or 30 minutes to get back home. That used to be my time to unwind.”Leaders spoke about "Workplace Wellness and Engagement When Employees Feel They’re at a Breaking Point"Without that buffer, personal stress and professional pressure have merged into a single, unrelenting weight. By the time people reach clinical care, the situation is often already serious. The challenge, Dhillon says, is reducing friction well before that point—making it easier to find a provider, understand insurance coverage, and sustain treatment rather than seeking help only in crisis and disappearing once the acute moment passes.Preventive Care Over Reactive FixesAt VIAVI Solutions, musculoskeletal claims have ranked among the top two cost drivers for years, a problem compounded by a workforce that skews older than the broader tech industry. “Once musculoskeletal issues become significant, it’s hard to reverse,” said Nancy Yang, VP of total rewards at VIAVI Solutions. Working with medical providers and benefits brokers, Yang’s team developed a virtual physical therapy program that employees can access from home, combining guided PT sessions with routine stretching, designed to interrupt that trajectory early rather than treat it after the fact.Dhillon reinforced the logic from a mental health angle. Patients who drop out of care after one or two sessions, then return months later in the next crisis, never complete a full episode of treatment. At Grow Therapy, the company has developed coaching tools to support patients between weekly sessions, helping them stay engaged across the full arc of recovery. “The ROI shows up,” Dhillon said, in reduced healthcare costs, lower absenteeism, and recovered productivity, but only if employees stick with care long enough to get there.Connection, Trust, and the Importance of Being SeenOlga Bobin, head of global talent mobility at EPAM Systems, relocated from Belarus to the United States 18 years ago, raised two daughters, and spent most of her career working remotely across time zones and cultures. When Myrow asked what actually carried her through the hardest moments, she didn’t mention a single program.“It was three things,” Bobin said. “Real human connection, people who genuinely cared, not because the system told them to check in. Real flexibility, when my company truly trusted me in how and when I work. And recognition, knowing that my work mattered.”She was blunt about what that trust costs when it’s absent: the energy employees spend proving their availability instead of doing their best thinking. “When organizations remove that tax through genuine trust, people become better, feel better, and perform better.”Bobin also issued a challenge to the audience: “When was the last time you told someone on your team specifically what they did and the real impact it made?”Building Systems That Surface the Human Moment“That small moment, which compounds across many people across an organization, those small moments are what lead to greater disengagement,” said Katie Cunningham, director of product at Augeo Workplace Engagement. She pointed to a pattern most people recognize: a moment of going above and beyond that passed without acknowledgment. The technology question her team is trying to answer is not how to automate recognition, but how to surface the right signals so that managers can act on them in a genuinely human way.“We’re not talking about removing humans from acknowledging that,” Cunningham said. “We’re talking about how do we surface those moments and make them very, very easy to act on.” She noted that managers are already stretched thin, responsible for both cultural cohesion and business outcomes, and that AI tools can help by handling the preparatory work, freeing managers to focus on the actual human interaction.AI as Accelerant, Not ReplacementThe panel closed with a question about AI and job security. Siddiqee pointed to a program Micron created that keeps the human element central: a licensed behavioral therapist stationed at each major location, available for 20-minute drop-in sessions. The slots book out a month in advance. For that kind of support, he says, AI needs to step aside.Yang described her team’s use of AI-generated video skits that turn compensation conversations into coaching moments, short scenarios drawn from real VIAVI situations that help managers explain pay structures, leveling decisions, and promotion criteria in plain language.Cunningham’s team built an AI-assisted coaching tool to help product staff communicate more effectively with executive stakeholders, raising the baseline before those conversations happened rather than replacing the mentorship that follows.Dhillon offered a caution. The human need to feel seen, heard, and connected is not a feature that organizations can automate away. If rising productivity expectations (enabled by AI) come at the cost of psychological safety and cultural connection, “we’ve got a little problem on our hands.”The through line in every answer was the same: technology can reduce friction, surface signals, and scale support. But the moment of recognition, the expression of trust, the sense that one’s work matters—those still require a real person to deliver them.Grace Turney is a St. Louis-based writer, artist, and former librarian. See more of her work at graceturney17.wixsite.com/mysite.(Photos by Josh Larson for From Day One)
Personalization Is the New Standard for Employee Well-Being
BY Katie Chambers April 23, 2026“We have people that are just starting out in their careers, parents, and people who are ready to retire. Some are salaried desk workers. Some are people out in the field and working hourly. There are people from across the world and many different nationalities,” said moderator Katie Johnston, reporter at the Boston Globe. All of these people come together at work.Thanks to data analytics technology, organizations have the opportunity to hone in on their specific needs to provide personalized benefits that leave them feeling engaged, supported, and seen. This was the topic of conversation during an executive panel discussion, moderated by Johnston at From Day One’s Boston benefits conference. Benefits That Reflect Cultural TrendsOrganizations are finding that more employees value meaningful work than ever before, especially post-pandemic. Aravind Menon, senior director of HR at Procter & Gamble, shares that his organization created a framework called the Employee Value Equation (EVE). “The primary focus of EVE is that employees at the core want to make an impact. They want to do meaningful work. They want to feel valued and rewarded,” he said. The organization uses surveys and data analytics to get feedback on what is working for employees, and what isn’t. With more than 100,000 employees, having a way to gather opinions en masse is crucial. Guided by feedback data, Procter & Gamble began offering a health plan with more transparent pricing and flex benefits, such as optional classes or services tailored to employees’ needs. Much of employee feedback, in one way or another, comes down to money. Offerings that support financial well-being have become integral to a well-rounded benefits package. “It is one of the only topics that touches every single person. Almost every single decision that you make on a daily basis,” said Rebecca Liebman, CEO and co-founder of LearnLux. Financial well-being now goes beyond traditional retirement planning, Liebman says, and also includes preparation for emergencies, childcare, elder care, and general financial resilience as the cost of living skyrockets. A well-rounded package should offer personalization for every life stage and be paired with an internal communications plan that educates employees on how best to maximize the offerings. Panelists spoke about "The Power of Personalization in Workplace Well-Being," at From Day One's Boston benefits conferenceSuch messaging can be particularly challenging for large organizations like Securitas, which has employees of all ages spread across the globe in a variety of roles. “I might have one guard sitting behind a desk at an office building, another one standing at a bank. I might have a group of them at a stadium. In most cases, they’re generally not co-located,” said Amy Noelle, senior director, benefits, North America at Securitas. But they must nonetheless receive clear, personalized information. Madhavi Vemireddy, CEO of Cleo, shares that in the U.S. alone, nearly 60 million people identify as caregivers and frequently hesitate to disclose this to their workplaces for fear of repercussions, such as being passed over for a promotion. “Family caregivers in the workforce, who are often women, deal with so many combinations of stressors: it could be pregnancy, parenting, menopause, elder care, [or] all of the above,” Johnston said. “How can employers identify who’s dealing with these issues and, before they get to the breaking point, what can they offer them?” Cleo works to help caregivers overcome the stigma and access the support they desperately need. “We’re supporting families across pregnancy, parenting journeys as well as adult caregiving, and we’re doing that holistically,” Vemireddy said. Early intervention can help workers stay healthy—and that depends on transparency and psychological safety to combat the stigma. “We need to start talking about it more, just like how we’ve been talking about mental health in the workplace, about menopause in the workplace, we need to start talking about caregiving in the workplace,” Vemireddy said. Sharpening Communications StrategiesDifferent workers may be receptive to different types of communication styles. But always, “there has to be an openness to the information before we decide on the delivery method,” said Kelle Colyer-Brown, head of office of accessibility programs at PSEG. Training internal stakeholders, in addition to engaging with outside vendors, is key. “We know that employees will go to the people that they talk to most often first, so ensuring that our managers have that information [is important],” she said.In terms of delivery, “our salaried office-based employees are most likely going to go to things like our blogs, newsletters, and email blasts. That is extremely unlikely for our field employees,” Colyer-Brown said. Field employees might be more reachable through all-hands meetings, daily stand-ups, fairs, or even apps. In difficult times, wellness offerings can help maintain engagement and retention. “This year, a lot of companies can’t give more money,” Liebman said. “So, they’re bringing in financial coaching as a benefit to help people understand what they can do with their paycheck. If we can’t give you more money, let’s empower you to make a plan for your life. And really, financial planning is just executing on the life that you want to live.” Looking ahead, Colyer-Brown recommends relying on survey data to understand what employees are seeking, then consistently reviewing and meeting with current and prospective vendors to ensure those trends are addressed. If your current vendors don’t offer adequate support, consider “what’s my buy, borrow, build, mix to fill in some of those gaps? Am I going to build internal services? Am I going to do outreach to government entities? Am I reaching out to nonprofits?” she said. “If I need to spend money, at least I can go to my leadership and say, ‘I looked at our internal resources first before I asked you for a check. I’ve done my due diligence.’”Katie Chambers is a freelance writer and award-winning communications executive with a lifelong commitment to supporting artists and advocating for inclusion. Her work has been seen in HuffPost, Top Think, and several printed essay collections, and she has appeared on Cheddar News, iWomanTV, On New Jersey, and CBS New York.(Photos by Josh Larson for From Day One)
Choosing the Right Problems to Solve: It’s Not AI for Something, It’s Something With AI
BY Ade Akin April 20, 2026In an era where many companies scramble to find uses for AI, Raman Achutharaman advocates for the opposite approach.“We always want to solve a business problem,” he said during a fireside chat at From Day One's Silicon Valley HR conference. “But you’ve got to find what value you’re going to generate, and then which tech comes along the way.” For Achutharaman, the SVP of operations, AI and productivity at Applied Materials, this problem‑first philosophy is the guiding principle behind a sweeping digital transformation at one of the world’s most vital technology companies.The Quiet Giant of the Semiconductor RevolutionApplied Materials doesn’t manufacture the tech gadgets that have become part of our daily lives, like smartphones and laptops; instead, it builds the multi‑million‑dollar equipment that manufacturers use to produce the semiconductors inside them. As Achutharaman said to Steve Koepp, co-founder and editor at From Day One, who moderated the conversation, a single advanced logic chip requires roughly 2,000 processing steps and three months to complete, despite being “a thousand times smaller than a human hair.” Founded in 1967, Applied Materials predates companies such as Apple and Intel in Silicon Valley and now employs more than 36,000 people globally. The company’s immense global footprint, supercharged by the accelerating AI revolution, makes digital transformation an urgent directive. To help meet this objective, Achutharaman’s role was created specifically to unify an organization that had grown “very global” and “very vertical.” He frames his team as an “internal consulting arm,” a nimble force that’s embedded in the middle to drive collective growth and navigate the friction of cross‑functional execution.Innovating the Way We InnovateWhen generative AI burst onto the scene, Achutharaman joined forces with the company's CIO and CTO to form a leadership trio that would charter the company's AI journey. Their guiding principle was to avoid using “AI for the sake of AI.” Instead, they focused on re‑engineering decades‑old workflows. They worked to “innovate the way we innovate,” Achutharaman said.Raman Achutharaman, SVP of operations, AI, and productivity at Applied Materials, spoke during the fireside chatThis mindset has led to a deliberate, problem‑centric rollout. The company established rigorous governance structures early on instead of unleashing every new tool on its workforce, addressing cybersecurity, intellectual property protection, and ethical concerns before any technology was deployed. “Almost the [entire] first year was really focused on making sure that anything we do doesn’t break,” Achutharaman said.The Cohort Program: From Office Hours to Change AgentsTraining 36,000 people on technology that evolves “every 15 minutes” requires more than a library of online courses. Achutharaman’s team launched a hands-on cohort program that pairs employees who have specific problems adopting artificial intelligence with mentors who are already advanced users. The program started small with weekly office hours where any employee could drop in with questions. It has since grown into a structured initiative. Last year, more than 1,000 employees applied to participate, and 250 were selected to work one‑on‑one with mentors.“When they solve their own problems using something, they start thinking about what else they can do with it,” Achutharaman said. “And they also act as the change agents going across the organization.” This peer‑driven model has proven to be far more effective than top‑down mandates, creating a self‑propagating network of AI champions throughout the organization.Data Quality and the Scientific RevolutionDespite all the excitement surrounding large language models, Achutharaman emphasizes that the real frontier lies in scientific and engineering data. The publicly available corpus of information, research papers, and technical articles is often biased toward positive results and lacks the calibration needed for rigorous scientific work. “You’ve got to generate your own data,” he added.To that end, Applied Materials is investing billions in a new research and development lab in Sunnyvale, California. The facility will help generate high‑quality data that will fuel the next generation of semiconductor innovation. “Having data at the right rate, using AI to be able to solve complex problems, needs not just AI. You actually need a whole bunch of other things: engineering, physical infrastructure, and actual experiments,” he said. Achutharaman also highlighted how Applied Materials' HR team is applying AI across the talent lifecycle. The technology is actively transforming every workflow, from analyzing Workday data to piloting AI‑powered manager coaching tools. Faster Insights, Better DecisionsAchutharaman remains firmly in the optimistic camp despite the accelerating pace of AI development. He sees the technology as a tool for gaining insights faster than a human ever could, enabling better decisions. He offered a personal example, using AI to digest decades of his aging parents’ complex health records, scattered across paper files and different doctors in India, to identify the right questions to ask their physicians. “Within five minutes, you’re able to at least find what questions to ask,” he said. “It’s not that you want the answers. The most important thing AI gives you is what questions to ask.” That perspective may be the most valuable takeaway for any leader navigating the AI revolution. The technology doesn’t replace human judgment; it equips people with faster insights, allowing for better decisions in an increasingly complex world. As Achutharaman put it, “It’s about faster insights and better quality decisions. It will give you insights that you would have missed.”Ade Akin covers artificial intelligence, workplace wellness, HR trends, and digital health solutions.(Photos by Josh Larson for From Day One)
Building Benefits That Balance Cost Efficiency With Employee Outcomes
BY Jessica Swenson April 15, 2026As healthcare and benefits costs continue to rise, organizations are under increasing pressure to cut spending while maintaining the employee experience. Jordan Dhillon, VP of sales for SmithRx, suggests that one way to drive cost efficiency is to explore alternative partners and start benefit evaluations early. “Don’t be afraid to have the conversation. Look for the long-term partner that’s aligned with your model and your values, and start the process early,” she said during an executive panel discussion at From Day One’s Boston benefits conference. Dhillon spoke on a panel with four other leaders, moderated by Harvard Business Review contributing columnist Rebecca Knight.Evaluating Benefits ProgramsTo balance utilization, cost, and vendors within your benefits programming, Elizabeth McClure, head of benefits for Lantheus, endorses a full audit approach focused on refining and streamlining your offerings. She recommends looking at utilization rates to determine high-value benefits, and maximizing impact by consolidating duplicative services provided by multiple vendors. “I think it was important to go through and get the full picture of what employees value, and how we can really focus on those [things].”Panelists spoke about "Building Benefits That Balance Cost Efficiency With Employee Outcomes," in BostonWhile ROI is of course a critical part of the decision-making process, Kathleen Harris, head of consultant relations & strategic programs at Forma, emphasized that overreliance on ROI can detract from benefits that are valuable for overall culture even with limited direct use. She told the story of the company’s on-site daycare; it can only serve 250 families out of Forma’s nearly 1,000 employees, but employees across the spectrum are proud to say that they have on-site daycare. She calls this a halo benefit.Harris also cautioned against fragmented evaluation of benefits. “Sometimes we talk about the ecosystem, but then we also look at things in a silo. So we’re not looking at it across, we’re looking at it vertically, in terms of what we’re offering our employees.” Between this siloed view and failing to incorporate employee feedback, companies can wind up with lower-value, fragmented benefit plans.The lack of fiduciary alignment in traditional pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) can be a hidden cause of overspending, says Dhillon. She advocates for partnering with independent PBMs that focus on lower drug costs, transparent pricing, and patient-first outcomes, aligning themselves with employer and employee needs. “I would say you need to find a partner that’s independent and that is operating in your best interest as a fiduciary,” said Dhillon.Inclusion in Benefits DesignMarjory Lake, head of total rewards & people operations at JCDecaux, suggests that companies consolidate vendors, continuously listen to employees to meet them where they are, and design benefits programming for real-life employee needs.JCDecaux recently combined healthcare savings accounts and 401(k) accounts into the same vendor, saving the company money while improving the employee experience, she says.Lake looks at employee benefits holistically to ensure the company is meeting the needs of most employees. “I want to look at something that’s more impactful and more meaningful. That way [you can get] that buy-in for the higher ups, but also you’re meeting people in the middle of where they are in their lives.”Aside from the simple shifting of costs, companies are finding innovative ways to provide value. Harris advocated for lifestyle spending accounts (LSAs) as a core requirement to address the diverse, evolving needs of today’s workforce. She discussed their ability to complement traditional benefit plans by bridging gaps for things like caregiving education, and counseling that are otherwise not covered.The advent of GLP-1 medications for weight loss has created a new benefit-cost challenge for companies, panelists agreed. “What we really focus on is that supportive ecosystem around all of these things. We want to partner with lifestyle vendors and offer these things like gym memberships and other pathways to meet people in the middle,” said Lake. “A healthier and happier workforce will, over time, pay it for itself.”Cindy de Bruin, senior director of benefits and global mobility for Boston Scientific Corp., highlighted the company’s Surgery Center of Excellence, which routes certain procedures through a curated provider network with the goal of lower costs, improved outcomes, and shortened recovery times.However, the workforce had a strong, unexpected reaction to the change, leading the company to realize that they needed better communication. “We had to explain that part of this is not just about cost—this is also about your benefit. This is also about all our employees across the U.S..”Communication as a StrategyNot surprisingly, the need for communication and employee listening around benefits programming emerged as a common theme. Employees need to understand why changes are happening, says Dhillon, or you can run into resistance and engagement issues. “The more you can communicate, the more you can educate your employees as to why we’re doing this—I think it’s powerful, and that’s where I see the most success, honestly.” Communication gaps can impact employees’ awareness of what is available to them. Vendors can help them navigate benefits, says de Bruin, but first there needs to be communication from the employer. “If we do listening sessions, for example, we sometimes hear of benefits that they would like to have offered that are already there. That means we are doing something wrong in the communication.” she said. To help neutralize lack of awareness or slow benefit uptake, Harris recommends multifaceted communications and repeated exposure to visual cues alongside traditional communication campaigns. Using an established color-coded system that categorizes company benefits, Forma draws attention to specific offerings or benefits by adapting its intranet site during seasonal awareness campaigns, but still sends a notification postcard to employees’ homes to notify them of actions like benefits enrollment.McClure achieved a 90% response rate on a recent employee survey by clearly communicating the purpose, “to make informed decisions moving forward,” ensuring anonymity, and allowing open-text responses. Employees are given the message that “this is your big chance to get out everything you want to get out,” she said, “because it’s so valuable [for the company] to hear this feedback.” In that survey, they “had 95% of people say that they rated benefits as the most important thing when determining whether they’re going to get a new job or stay at the one they’re at.” Armed with this employee data, she is able to keep leaders focused on the big picture and avoid quick fixes that could have negative long-term financial implications. Additionally, it’s crucial to balance vocal employee preferences with what is best for most employees, says Lake. “Our job is to always look at the equity—what the greater good is, what the need is,” she said. “The goal is to build a foundation that supports everyone. That’s not always easy, because everyone has different needs at different times, and they’re in different places in their lives.”Jessica Swenson is a freelance writer and proofreader based in the Midwest. Learn more about her at jmswensonllc.com.(Photos by Josh Larson for From Day One)
Delivering Personalized Benefits for a Multigenerational Workforce
BY Ade Akin April 13, 2026Verlinda DiMarino didn’t spend hours researching her options when her 86-year-old mother asked for a getaway to New York to watch Broadway shows for her birthday. Instead, she called her company’s travel concierge, the same service she had previously used to plan a Harry Potter World excursion in London. “They take that work off the shoulders of our employees,” DiMarino, the Head of Benefits at Liberty Mutual Insurance, said. “So they can basically function and be more productive in their work as well as in their life.”DiMarino sat down with Wall Street Journal columnist Callum Borchers at From Day One’s Boston benefits half-day conference to lay out a vision for employee benefits that treats workers as whole people across a multigenerational workforce.Wraparound Benefits for a Multidimensional WorkforceThe old model for benefits packages, health, a 401(k), and dental, no longer cuts it. “Employees today, no matter where they are in their life journey, are looking for programs and benefits that support them holistically,” she said. “It’s really a part of the value proposition today.”Borchers, who also teaches at Bentley University near Boston, drew a parallel to the shift in higher education toward “wraparound services.” Just as students need more than classroom instruction to succeed at higher learning institutions, employees need other things besides a paycheck to thrive. Verlinda DiMarino, head of benefits at Liberty Mutual, spoke with Callum Borchers, columnist at the Wall Street JournalThe challenge becomes deciding what to offer a workforce that includes everyone from recent college graduates to employees in their 80s. DiMarino says the answer starts with data. Liberty Mutual uses employee surveys, focus groups, and employee resource groups (ERGs) to determine what workers really want. “We partner with them regularly in terms of understanding the needs of their community and the allies in their communities,” she said.Listening to employees led Liberty Mutual to expand its fertility program to include perimenopause and menopause support. “When women get to the top of their license, and they’re going full throttle and hitting all cylinders, their hormones start to kick in, and they’re starting to have some brain fog,” DiMarino said. “We don’t want to lose those women from the workforce.” The fertility program now covers more needs, such as family-forming fertility benefits, menopause support, and testosterone replacement therapy for men. One Program, Multiple Life StagesDiMarino highlighted Liberty Mutual’s retirement program as a prime example of benefits designed for everyone. It’s a standard 401(k) on its surface, but it also provides financial counseling, which includes unlimited, one-on-one sessions on budgeting, retirement strategy, and draw-down planning. The company also launched a student loan match package. “Some of our employees coming right out of school are challenged with some student loan debt,” DiMarino said. The program matches student loan payments with matching contributions, helping early-career employees to pay down their debt and build retirement savings. The same program offers mid-career employees an emergency savings benefit and support for home buying. “Within that one program, we are meeting the needs of early career employees dealing with student loan debt,” she added. “We’re helping our mid-career employees as they plan to buy homes, as well as providing support for retirement planning.”Where Artificial Intelligence Helps and Where Humans StayBorcher asked DiMarino about how Liberty Mutual navigates around AI in HR as an increasing number of workplace interactions become automated. “We don’t think of AI as a replacement. We understand that it’s generative, it’s not creative,” she replied. “That’s what our talent is. We’re creative.”Liberty Mutual uses AI for tasks like consolidating dense vendor decks or pulling salient points from documents. “That’s a great use case for AI,” she said. As for employee appetite for AI? That depends on the generation. “My daughter would rather never talk to a person if she could,” DiMarino said. “And then there are employees that want paper, they want to read something and see that it resonates and it makes sense, and then they want to call and clarify.”Covering GLP-1s as a Strategic InvestmentBorchers asked about one of the hottest topics regarding benefits today: GLP-1 coverage. He recalled that DiMarino had recently told a room of her peers that, “AI and GLP-1s were like the two big things on the bingo card.”Liberty Mutual covers GLP-1s for both diabetes and weight loss. “It really aligns with our philosophy that we want a healthy workforce,” DiMarino said. “If you’re at a healthy weight, you’re likely going to have fewer comorbidities. You’re going to be able to sleep better, you’re going to be more productive.”DiMarino acknowledges the high cost of GLP-1s, but frames it as a long-term investment in lower cardiac risk, reduced diabetes spending, and improved cholesterol management. Liberty Mutual built in wraparound lifestyle support when it moved to a new pharmacy benefits manager in 2026. “We wanted to give them the tools and the support around lifestyle management, being able to eat appropriately,” she said, especially for employees who want to titrate down or come off the medications.That coverage has now become a recruiting tool. “We do occasionally have employees. When they’re considering employment with Liberty, they’ll say, ‘Do you offer these medications?’” DiMarino added. “We’re happy to say that we do.”Benchmarking for Top TalentBorchers asked how much employers should keep an eye on competitors when designing benefits. “That’s important, because you want to be the employer of choice,” DiMarino said. Liberty Mutual benchmarks against a peer set that includes other insurance companies as well as “the most admired companies and the top 100.”Regarding hybrid work, which is another popular benefit, Liberty Mutual requires employees within 50 miles of an office to come in two days a week, allowing them to work from home on the remaining days. “That is extremely popular with our employees,” DiMarino said. The company also offers “virtual weeks” around holidays like winter break and back-to-school time, when everyone works from home.DiMarino’s message, delivered through stories of fertility benefits, travel concierges, and Broadway trips, suggests that the companies that invest in true wraparound support will be the ones employees remember.Ade Akin covers artificial intelligence, workplace wellness, HR trends, and digital health solutions.(Photos by Josh Larson for From Day One)
Modernizing Talent Acquisition for a Better Applicant Experience
BY Jessica Swenson April 03, 2026“How do we spend less time in front of our computers doing those manual tasks, and instead get in front of candidates and clients, which is where people really like to spend their time?” asked Catie Brand, SVP of HR global RPO & recruitment solutions at LHH. It’s a question Brand is working to answer at her organization, amid rising application volumes in recent years that have forced recruiting teams to do more with the same or fewer resources.Between increased volume, fake applicants, and the manual demands of the end-to-end recruiting process, teams are looking for ways to improve their efficiency without sacrificing the human aspects of recruiting. This was the topic of an executive panel at From Day One’s NYC half-day talent acquisition conference, moderated by HR Brew senior reporter Courtney Vinopal.The introduction of AI is helping to reshape recruiting workflows, improving efficiency and productivity while reducing the manual task load. There are an overwhelming number of AI solutions on the market—how can leaders choose the best option for their company?Smaller organizations with smaller budgets need to carefully assess their needs, says Jean-Luc Charles, VP of people & culture for EILEEN FISHER. They can also start with free tools and incremental upgrades rather than large enterprise projects. Eileen Fisher’s approach is “really thinking about the use, and how we’re going to connect that to a return on investment.”Brand encourages a focus on the business problem to avoid piloting incompatible platforms. She also suggests prioritizing tools that elevate the candidate experience. “We really try to focus on how we can leverage AI to provide an excellent candidate experience—surface the real human beings, and then really care for them throughout the process whether they’re hired or not.”Panelists spoke about "Modernizing Talent Acquisition for a Better Applicant Experience"Noting that ROI in this space can be hard to quantify, Brand says that with the use of AI tools, her team’s client interaction and market trend tracking KPIs “have all gone up because they’re spending less time on things that are really manual.” IBM reduced the scope of repetitive HR tasks by implementing an internal AI assistant. Carl Bernadotte, global head of executive search and talent acquisition leader for IBM, shared that while there was initially dissatisfaction from employees and recruiters, “over time as adoption [increased] and the models got smarter, those employee engagement scores started to go back up. It drastically allowed us to reduce our footprint, but increased our efficiency.” AI tools can bring unintended bias into the hiring process. Charles suggests working with vendor partners to understand details like source training data, known algorithmic bias, and model behavior. “I think that in our capacity with talent, we have a real responsibility, you know, to kick the tires, to lift up the hood, to ask the hard questions,” he said.This potential bias can also impact early talent candidates, making it crucial for them to find ways to differentiate themselves. Fathima Jaffer, VP & head of early talent at TD, advises these individuals to show intentionality as they pursue new roles. Rather than using the “spray and pray” resume approach, attending information sessions, networking with recruiters, and following up after career fairs can help offset some of the common obstacles in today’s market.Charles also suggests that candidates differentiate themselves through self-awareness, authenticity, and genuine connection. “We want to encourage people to think about what's particular to you. How can you offer your story? And that’s a lot about getting to know yourself.”While AI can accelerate processes and create efficiency for hiring teams, especially when faced with massive application volumes, some industries have strict regulations, and it’s important not to sacrifice the candidate experience. TD treats AI as augmentation rather than automation, says Jaffer, by starting with low-risk efficiency implementations at a safe pace. The company still relies on resume reviews conducted by humans, especially for early talent. “We are finding, what is that right balance between human and technology and the efficiency that that technology will bring?” she said. “We need that efficiency, but [need to do] it in a way that does not erode that candidate experience.”Bernadotte also advocates for a balance between AI experimentation and human interaction. “At the very core of every experience, we have to focus on the things that are uniquely human that we can do, and where do we add value?”Companies should focus on places where person-to-person contact is required, such as talent pipeline development, candidate conversations, and consultation with hiring managers, he says, saving AI tools for tasks that support productivity and scale.It’s clear that there is a place for AI in the TA process, but trends among panelist companies show that human involvement continues to be an integral part of the recruiting and hiring process.Charles tells his team that, with their capabilities for self-awareness, insight, and authentic human connection, they themselves are the tool. “As talent professionals, we need to continually upskill, not just in the technical aspects, but in the strategic—in our own connection with ourselves.”Jessica Swenson is a freelance writer and proofreader based in the Midwest. Learn more about her at jmswensonllc.com.
Beyond Generational Labels: Designing Benefits That Support the Whole Person
BY Ade Akin April 02, 2026“Don’t make assumptions about what a particular generation looks like,” said Susan Bridges Gilder, director of total rewards at Beiersdorf. “We need to get beyond labels and really need to get into what individual people need.”Gilder spoke on an executive panel discussion about this topic at From Day One’s NYC half-day benefits conference. Panelists discussed how they are supporting a workforce that spans five generations. The session, titled “Inclusive Well-Being Strategies for a Multigenerational Workforce,” quickly landed on a consensus to stop trying to put employees in a box.From Demographics to 'Moments That Matter'Tania Rahman, moderator and social director at Fast Company, opened the discussion by noting the breadth of needs in today's workforce. A Gen Z employee might be focused on student debt, while a Baby Boomer is more concerned about their pensions.“For me, it’s not even generations, it’s really about the moments that matter,” Maria Julieta Casanova, the global head of strategic HR business partners and talent acquisition COE at Corteva Agriscience, said. She notes that potential hires now ask more questions regarding their benefits, like fertility support or parental leave for dads, than about their salaries.“Those are the moments that we need to focus on,” she added. “It’s our job to make sure that people stay while they navigate through the complexities of life.”Sometimes the moments that matter exist within the workplace. Lesley Alderman, a Brooklyn-based psychotherapist, has a client who was miserable working in their company's open-plan office. Alderman offered a simple solution that was immediately rejected: wear headphones.“No one does that. I’m going to be stigmatized,” the client thought. This fear of standing out is one of the silent killers of employee well-being. It’s a problem no single benefit package can fit, but a culture of inclusive leadership just might, she says. Panelists spoke about "Inclusive Well-Being Strategies for a Multigenerational Workforce"Sarah Royal, the senior director of marketing at the family care platform Cleo, challenged the audience to consider the commonality all employees share beneath the surface.“We often get caught up in that generational conversation of saying they’re so different,” she said. “But I would venture to say that, for the most part, if we asked what are the top three most important things in your life, probably most of you would say somebody that you're caring for.”The Preventive Approach to Mental HealthAlderman says feelings of uncertainty are the primary reason many people seek therapy. Any benefits that make it easier for employees to navigate their world provide a sense of control, whether it’s financial planning, onsite services, or caregiving support.Casanova echoed this, sharing a story of a senior executive candidate who negotiated for more vacation time, a move she calls a “breath of fresh air” that signaled a cultural shift. “The more we can bring leaders and really encourage them to make good use of the benefits available, the more this will cascade and become part of the culture,” she said. Gilder highlighted the importance of preventive mental health. Companies shouldn't wait until employees are broken to offer support, she says. Beiersdorf has been working on a resilience series with the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) and joined an employers' collaborative in New York City to foster ongoing conversations.Gilder also championed the idea of a dedicated caregiving benefit, pointing to Cleo as an example of a service that acts as a guide for employees navigating life events, from raising children to caring for aging parents. “It’s not like the EAP where you just get a random person,” Gilder pointed out. “You have someone assigned to you, and you build that connection.”Building Trust Through Utilization and CommunicationYou can design the most generous benefits package in the world, but if your employees don’t use it, you’ve wasted your time and money. Michelle Randazzo, the total rewards retirement benefits lead at AlixPartners, says that the work doesn’t end with rolling out a great program. “Employees need to be educated on their benefits so that they can make educated decisions, and that still remains an issue," she said.To combat this, AlixPartners focuses on building trust through personal connection. To bridge the gap between benefits and utilization, Randazzo leads a neurodiverse employee resources group (ERG), and she’s candid about her experience with ADHD. She maintains a 25-page 401(k) FAQ that ends with a simple but powerful prompt to send her an email if they still have unanswered questions.“The magic actually happens when you meet your people in person,” she added. “They feel valued, and that builds trust, and when you build trust, they will then be part of the process.”Royal added that the most effective marketing for a benefit often comes from peers. “Have the people leaders, the managers, be human, use the benefits themselves,” she said.Ultimately, it was unanimously agreed that the most successful strategies treat employees as whole human beings who are navigating their complex lives. As Randazzo put it, “If all you care about is cost containment, then we are not dealing with humans. We are dealing with data, and people are not robots.”Ade Akin covers artificial intelligence, workplace wellness, HR trends, and digital health solutions.(Photos by Josh Larson for From Day One)
Listening to the Employee Voice to Shape Smarter Benefits
BY Grace Turney March 25, 2026When employees at Pernod Ricard needed to find mental health care for their children after the pandemic, the company heard about it quickly. Parents stressed over long waits for therapy appointments and limited options for younger dependents—and this stress followed them into the workplace.Within months, the company rolled out a digital solution that allowed families to access therapy from home, says Diana Estrada, director of compensation and benefits for Pernod Ricard, North America. The move illustrates a growing challenge for employers: gathering employee feedback is easy, but turning that information into meaningful workplace benefits requires a much more deliberate process.Discussing how organizations can translate employee input into real benefits decisions was the theme of a panel discussion at From Day One’s NYC half-day benefits conference. Moderated by Tania Rahman of Fast Company, panelists explored how HR leaders and benefits experts gather feedback, analyze data, and communicate decisions back to employees.Listening Beyond SurveysEmployee feedback often begins with surveys, but many workplace needs go unspoken. “Some people have trouble being direct about their needs because they feel ashamed or like they’re being needy,” said Jenny MacKay, partner, SVP, employee benefits consulting at Alera Group. Leaders therefore need to look beyond formal responses and pay attention to subtle signals from employees.“You have your extroverts who will tell you exactly how they’re feeling,” MacKay said. “But you’ve also got a quieter population. Unless you’re visible and present with employees, you may not know what they need.”Building trust across the workforce makes those conversations easier. When employees know HR leaders personally, they are more likely to share concerns, whether about healthcare, finances, or work-life balance.Panelists spoke about "Listening to the Employee Voice to Shape Smarter Benefits"For organizations with highly vocal workforces, the challenge can be less about encouraging feedback and more about managing the volume of it. “At my company, employees are very vocal,” said Estrada of Pernod Ricard. “They use all the channels available, surveys, business partners, leadership conversations, to share their feedback.”Estrada’s team analyzes multiple data streams, including HR case-management systems and employee surveys, before evaluating potential benefits changes with outside advisors. “We take all that data and determine what’s going to have the biggest impact and what’s feasible financially,” she said.Understanding What Employees Actually WantThe phrase “better benefits” can mean very different things depending on the workforce. For global organizations, the diversity of employee roles and life stages makes benefit design especially complex.“It depends on the population you’re talking about,” said Eduardo Mennocchi, director of compensation, benefits & HR operations, at LVMH Fashion Group. Retail staff working in stores, he says, often have different priorities than corporate employees. Life stage matters just as much as job type. “For some people it’s all about medical coverage,” Mennocchi noted. “For others, it’s flexibility.” In many cases, employees aren’t asking for higher pay or more expensive benefits. Instead, they want policies that allow greater control over their time, such as more flexible scheduling for paid time off. “That flexibility sometimes doesn’t cost the company anything,” he said.Searching Beyond Surveys for InsightEmployee feedback is just one piece of the puzzle when designing benefits. Organizations must also analyze behavioral data to understand how workers are actually using the benefits available to them.“We don’t just look at employee surveys,” said Noora Garnett, VP of global benefits at Hasbro. “We also look at claims information and employee behavior.”For example, an increase in hardship withdrawals from retirement accounts can signal financial stress among employees. A spike in maternity-related claims could highlight the need for stronger family support. “If we see those patterns,” Garnett said, “we know we need to adjust our programs.”Financial data can also reveal insights employees might not openly discuss. “Money is incredibly private,” said Jeff Miller, VP at the financial well-being platform nudge, whose work focuses on employee financial health. Because of that privacy, organizations often need to analyze trends rather than rely on direct disclosures.“If you look at the data deeply, like 401(k) loans or financial-health scores, you can start to understand what employees are dealing with,” Miller said. Those insights can help employers tailor communications and benefits to the groups that need them most.Balancing Employee Needs and Budget RealityEven when companies understand what employees want, cost constraints can complicate the decision.MacKay encourages employers to look at the existing data before sending out new surveys. Workforce demographics and healthcare claims information can reveal issues that even employees themselves may not recognize yet.“You can see the demographics of your workforce and what’s happening in your claims data,” she said. “That helps you build a budget before you go to employees and ask what they want.”This approach helps organizations avoid a common mistake: asking for feedback on benefits that the company ultimately cannot afford to provide.Follow-through, MacKay emphasizes, is crucial for building and maintaining trust. “If you run a survey, you need to be prepared to implement what you said you would,” she said.Economic downturns or changing priorities can sometimes force companies to reduce or delay benefits. In those moments, transparency is critical. Mennocchi says organizations must identify which benefits are essential before making cuts. “There are some benefits that are non-negotiable,” he said. “And if you’re in a tough situation, your priority should be keeping your staff.” If trade-offs are unavoidable, honest communication helps employees understand the reasoning behind the decision.Garnett echoed that view, noting that openness can sustain trust even during difficult changes. “You have to be transparent and vulnerable with your people,” she said. “Explain the due diligence that was done and why this is the only way forward.”Well-Being as a Performance DriverBeyond cost and logistics, panelists emphasized that benefits play a crucial role in employee performance.Garnett described well-being programs as the engine that supports pay-for-performance strategies. “If you don’t support employee well-being, how can you expect them to perform well?” she said.Well-being programs have come to extend beyond physical health to include financial, mental, and social support. At Hasbro, employees participate in community volunteering and charitable initiatives that strengthen social connections within the company. Garnett noted that those programs help employees stay motivated, even during challenging periods.Closing the Feedback LoopThe panelists agreed that the most important step in the feedback process happens after data is collected. Employees want to know what became of their input.Estrada says HR leaders work closely with employee resource groups to communicate decisions—whether a suggestion results in a new benefit or not. “It’s not about making sure everyone agrees,” she said. “It’s about making sure they understand the why.”When organizations clearly connect benefits decisions to employee feedback, workers are more likely to participate in future conversations. “Make a big deal about it,” MacKay advised. “Tell employees: we heard you, and we acted.”Without that closing step, even the most detailed surveys risk becoming just another form employees fill out, without expecting anything to change.Grace Turney is a St. Louis-based writer, artist, and former librarian. See more of her work at graceturney17.wixsite.com/mysite.(Photos by Josh Larson for From Day One)
Rewiring Hiring for a Company That Never Stops Casting
BY Katie Chambers March 24, 2026It has been an exciting time for NBCUniversal: February saw the Winter Olympics in Italy, the Super Bowl, basketball, and several blockbuster film promos released, all in a matter of weeks. “It was a moment of a lot of pride for employees at NBC,” said Suzan Vulaj, SVP of global talent acquisition at NBCUniversal. Employees at the 30 Rock headquarters in NYC enjoyed big-screen watch parties in lounge chairs, Italian delicacies, gifting suites, and more, she said during a fireside chat at From Day One’s NYC TA conference. Vulaj spoke about how the company is modernizing their hiring processes. “Our business was changing. It was getting more complex. We were consolidating and just hiring and recruiting wasn’t keeping pace with what was going on in the business,” she said. “There was just no way we could grow and excel as an agile TA workforce, if we were still using a 10-year-old ATS system.” The organization didn’t want to throw AI on top of its old system; instead, it chose to build a new one from the ground up.“You are unveiling a whole new blueprint for intelligent, connected hiring in the company,” said moderator Stephen Koepp, editor in chief at From Day One. The advent of AI as a major driving force behind that blueprint has meant that Vulaj and her team must help recruiters become comfortable with implementing emerging technology. Some employees are already building out their own AI agents, while some of the 30-year TA veterans are still getting used to it. It comes down to education, she says. “How do we approach that from every angle to make everyone feel comfortable in using the tool that suits them? It’s got to bring value to their job.”Speeding Up TA With AIVulaj envisions AI impacting every level of the recruiting process. At the very least, it can help in crafting the many emails written every day to candidates and hiring managers. Also, “our recruiters are using it to create Boolean searches to find people. We have some recruiters and leaders on my team who are using it for market insight and then putting that together in a PowerPoint and presenting it to our hiring managers. We have people who are using it to consolidate feedback and pitch candidates in a very concise manner.” All of these are time-savers. “The productivity is sped up a lot, which, we tell our recruiters, gives you a lot of time to focus on the value add.”Suzan Vulaj, the SVP of global talent acquisition at NBCUniversal, spoke about "Rewiring Hiring for a Company That Never Stops Casting"Leaders are surveying the TA team about how they spend their time, what they enjoy most, and what tasks are the most time-consuming to better understand where AI can add the most value. “[Although] our recruiters don’t want to do those tedious things like scrolling through 1000 resumes or drafting up emails or sourcing, they feel very comfortable with it. And so, we’ve got to change people’s way of working and thinking and get them comfortable with letting go of the things that have made them successful as a recruiter. There’s a lot of psychology behind adopting AI,” she said. One major challenge of AI has been an increase in spam. Her team partnered with the cybersecurity department to install a bot blocker on the recruiting website; once it was installed, the number of resumes the organization received was slashed in half, demonstrating the pervasiveness of spam. “It’s OK,” Vulaj said. “We don’t need more people applying. We need real, quality people applying.”Even though initial interviews may be by video, all final interviews are done onsite in part to ensure the candidate is real. “We will never hire someone unless we meet them in person.” The organization is also implementing more thorough background checks, and recruiters are checking all links on LinkedIn profiles and verifying email addresses to ensure candidates are real. Creating a Great Candidate Experience Organizations also need to be mindful of the impact of AI on the candidate’s experience. “Right now, it’s famous for so many headlines: People are frustrated. They’re getting ghosted, sending in a zillion resumes, etc. How can you improve that interaction?” Koepp asked. Vulaj says her surveys indicate candidates want radical transparency. “They want to know, are you using AI when I apply for a job? What are you looking for? Where am I in the process? What’s taking so long?” she said. She thinks more frequent communication with candidates will help them feel more comfortable, noting that, in an ideal scenario, even a rejected candidate will still be excited about and interested in working for the company in the future. “You want to leave every interaction with the candidate in a positive way. Being able to use AI just helps you get there faster.” NBCUniversal, well-known for its page program for recent graduates, has a TA team dedicated exclusively to early career hiring. “We receive over 50,000 applications just for our summer [internship] program,” Vulaj said. AI can help narrow down selections and make the process less overwhelming. Having a single central ATS system has helped get leaders across the organization invested in the hiring process, Vulaj says, not just HR. “They’re putting [in] feedback. They’re looking at candidates.” If she could do anything differently in implementing the new system, she says she would have hired a few more ops team members to help manage recruiting and hiring while the system was being built and tested, since talent acquisition never stopped during the transition. “And I think we underestimated change management a little bit,” she said.Her advice to others hoping to implement a new system? “Don’t rush. I see so many people rushing to buy some new and expensive AI tool. I would rather you be very thorough and ensure that it’s got a lot of value long-term and [is] not a Band-aid for one piece of your vertical.” Katie Chambers is a freelance writer and award-winning communications executive with a lifelong commitment to supporting artists and advocating for inclusion. Her work has been seen in HuffPost, Top Think, and several printed essay collections, and she has appeared on Cheddar News, iWomanTV, On New Jersey, and CBS New York.(Photos by Josh Larson for From Day One)
What Makes a Company Totally Rewarding to Work For
BY Kristen Kwiatkowski March 23, 2026The role of chief heart officer may not be a job title you come across in business every day. While rare in name, it’s powerful in impact, keeping employees connected and turning a company into a place worth showing up for.Claude Silver, chief heart officer at VaynerX and author of Be Yourself at Work, spoke about her book and how she’s helping employees show up as themselves at work during a fireside chat at From Day One’s NYC benefits conference.When the CEO of VaynerMedia asked Silver to be the chief heart officer at VaynerX, she had three questions about the job position, including what her role would be in an HR department setting, what they are building there, and how to know if she’s successful. As for what they’re building at VaynerX, “He said, we’re building the single greatest human organization in the history of time,” said Silver. And when it comes to knowing when she’s successful, CEO Gary Vaynerchuk told her that she would impact every single human being while deploying empathy throughout the offices.“Deploying empathy is pretty ambiguous, and it’s pretty massive,” said Silver. “It depends on what empathy means in every given moment, because it’s going to mean something different to you and to you, and so being able to discern that without a lot of subjectivity or bias, is really the job,” she told session moderator Steve Koepp, From Day One’s editor in chief. “It’s also creating and holding space for people, no matter where they are on their journey, with the hopes that we’ll get everyone from here to high performing to here to thriving, whether or not that’s in our four walls,” said Silver.When it was time to draft a job description, Silver included the usual important components such as empathy, elaboration, imagination, and creativity, but also added in other key components including trust, psychological safety, and belonging but concentrating on factors such as talent, talent retention, and performance.“Everything in this job description is still housed in empathy, psychological safety, all of those things that are just natural to me and natural to many of us, but it’s really geared on finding the needle in the haystack and making sure that we are retaining those needles in haystacks,” she said. Silver shared insights from her book, Be Yourself at Work: The Groundbreaking Power of Showing Up, Standing Out, and Leading from the Heart, during the fireside chat in NYC When asked about the philosophy of her book, Silver shared that it’s a call to individuals to know who they are and what they offer. “What I’m saying is find yourself. You are in charge of yourself. You’re the CEO of yourself, and so through your own self-awareness journey, whether or not that starts today, yesterday, or on your last day on earth, begin that journey so that you can get to know yourself and know what your triggers are and where your limits are,” said Silver.“The premise of the book is you deserve to be comfortable with yourself and to share yourself in any environment that you’re in,” said Silver. “I think we’ve been conditioned to think that others can change our behavior, but no one can change your behavior other than you, and so that’s really what it's all about.”“I don’t subscribe to bringing your whole self to work, I really don't,” said Silver. “You figure out what part you want to bring, and hopefully it’s a part that you enjoy and that others might get a kick out of.”How Leaders Can HelpWhen asked about how team leaders can meet the employees’ needs, Silver discussed Maslow’s hierarchy of needs in connection with what HR professionals should keep in mind with their teams. It’s important to individuals that they have their needs met, including the physiological needs, psychological needs, and eventually self-actualization. When putting this into effect in the workplace, it’s important to look at how team leaders can help their employees and how employees can respond to this assistance. Also, how can people in a work environment be their whole selves yet have boundaries and how can the team leaders best work with these individuals?“I think the key there is the culture and the leaders and managers—how can they become more human? How can they be more empathetic, caring, and compassionate?” When managers and leaders show their human qualities, they can reach their team and show them they’re supported, she says. Supporting GrowthMost employees want to grow and evolve in their job roles and with the overall company they work for. So, how can team leaders make this possible?Silver highlighted that at her company they often use a simple phrase, “Yes and…” This could mean ‘yes, that’s a possibility’ or ‘yes, we’ve looked at something and know we can provide certain things for our employees.’ A growth mindset really means being open to possibility. One solution won’t work for all employees, but you also can’t do something specific for each individual employee. It has to be something in the middle that works. “We’re not going to be able to retain our folks, our great people, and especially this younger generation, [if we’re leading with a] ‘no.’ So, let’s see what's possible. We can’t promise, but let’s see what’s possible.”Kristen Kwiatkowski is a professional freelance writer covering a wide array of industries, with a focus on food and beverage and business. Her work has been featured in the Bucks County Herald, Eater Philly, Edible Lehigh Valley, Cider Culture, and The Town Dish. (Photos by Josh Larson for From Day One)
Smart Tools, Smarter Hiring: Using AI to Elevate Hiring Decisions
BY Ade Akin March 19, 2026Employees at BNY are not just learning to work with AI, they’re building with it. Johanna Bazos, the company’s head of executive recruitment, corporate and talent research engine, recently became “Eliza certified,” meaning she can now create autonomous agents on the firm’s proprietary AI platform.Since then, Bazos has built agents that assist with interview briefings, competency development, and feedback collection, all without writing a single line of code. “I am not, by any extent of the imagination, a techie or a coder at all,” Bazos said during an executive panel discussion at From Day One's NYC half-day talent acquisition conference. “But the tools that the company has provided all employees—and 98% of all employees have taken advantage of this—are really showing how leadership has democratized AI.”This grassroots adoption of generative AI was a recurring theme among the talent acquisition leaders gathered for the panel discussion titled “Smart Tools, Smarter Hiring: Using AI to Elevate Hiring Decisions,” moderated by Corinne Lestch, journalist and founder of the Off-Site Writing Workshop.Redefining the Recruitment Process as a Human-Centric JourneyFor many organizations, the shift to AI-powered recruiting has prompted a fundamental rethinking of how talent acquisition teams operate. At BNY, this has meant moving away from viewing recruiting as a series of transactional steps and toward seeing it as a continuous candidate journey that prioritizes human connection.“The most important transformation at BNY has been around mindset,” Bazos said. “It’s thinking about talent acquisition as a journey, rather than specifically as a process where you’re filling roles.”Using a journey-based approach allows recruiters at BNY to identify the “moments that matter” in the candidate experience, such as the first conversation, the offer presentation, and the onboarding process, and deliberately inject human emotion into these touchpoints.“Many of us have the same available tools through AI like Copilot, ChatGPT,” Bazos added. “It’s going to be about that differentiating factor of how human-centric you can be.”Panelists shared insights on the topic "Smart Tools, Smarter Hiring: Using AI to Elevate Hiring Decisions" at the NYC talent-acquisition conference At Macquarie Group, that human-centric focus means using technology to free recruiters to focus on what matters most: conversations with potential candidates. “The most important thing that they can be doing is talking to candidates and having an advisory conversation with hiring managers,” Marjie Howie, the head of talent acquisition for the Americas at the financial services firm, elaborated. “The more time that they can spend on the phones with candidates, the better.”To help achieve that goal, Macquarie has developed internal chatbots that answer basic recruiting questions for hiring managers, such as how to open a job or obtain headcount approval, so recruiters don’t have to. The company also created a prompt library with dozens of detailed prompts that help to reduce the administrative load on recruiters, such as drafting call notes or synthesizing market intelligence.AI Adoption Starts With Leadership AlignmentLeigh Miller, senior customer talent advisor at Gem, says a sense of ownership is vital for the successful adoption of AI. She has seen what happens when such ownership is missing in her work as she helps companies implement new technology. It turns change management into an uphill battle.“When implementing Gem with customers, we’ve actually slowed down the implementation because recruiters weren’t bought in,” Miller said. “If they’re not excited, they don’t know why they’re getting it, they don’t see a problem in the first place; they are absolutely not going to adopt it.”At Macquarie, Howie’s team has avoided pitfalls by creating working groups that give recruiters a stake in the hiring process, ensuring leadership alignment extends beyond members of senior management to the people doing the work required daily. “The team feels like they own the process. It’s not happening to them. They’re part of it,” she said. “And I feel like that’s exciting for them. It’s not scary.”Navigating Compliance and Regulatory Risks in a Global TA FunctionOrganizations in heavily regulated industries require a more measured approach for AI adoption. Cassandre Joseph, the global head of TA and R&D at Novartis, oversees a team of over 200 people across multiple countries, each with its own compliance requirements. “There are just so many different regulatory risks in every one of the countries,” Joseph said. “Data privacy, particularly in Europe, is huge.”This reality has forced Novartis to take what Joseph calls a more thoughtful approach to AI adoption, slowing things down as others speed up, asking thorough questions about what each tool achieves, and bringing leaders from legal, compliance, and global data privacy into every decision."We want to understand: What are the algorithms that went into it? How were the algorithms built?" Joseph added. "We're really [focused] on layering and ensuring that we can peel back the layers to truly understand: Will this tool, yes, it might make us move a little bit faster, but will it create further regulatory risks for the organization from a legal standpoint?"The cautious approach to AI integration at Novartis hasn't prevented innovation. The company has deployed an AI coach that is available to the entire HR team, helping members to become better advisors by practicing different scenarios and asking better questions. The AI coach allows recruiters to work through challenging situations, without inputting identifying candidate information, to refine their approach.Bridging the Candidate Experience Gap Through Technology IntegrationOne of the most pressing challenges facing talent acquisition teams today is the perception gap between what employees think they’re providing and what candidates actually experience. Social media is filled with candidate complaints about being “ghosted” by employers or sending applications into what feels like a black hole. These are clear indicators of poor candidate engagement.Contrary to popular belief, AI isn’t automatically screening out most candidates. “We screen every application,” Joseph said. “There are a lot of legal reasons why we don’t adopt that technology just yet.” For now, every resume is reviewed by a human at Novartis.The real challenge is the volume of applications coming in. “Last year, we saw a 20% increase in applications, and I know it’s probably going to continue to rise,” Joseph said. “So what do you actually do?” She says her team is now exploring how AI tools can help create more human-centric messages and deploy them at the right time in hopes of avoiding situations where candidates receive rejection letters a few hours after applying.At Macquarie, the applicant tracking system (ATS) doesn’t auto-disqualify any candidates. “There is a human in the loop for the entire process,” Howie said. The organization works closely with its employer brand team to craft thoughtful rejection messages and invites candidates to join its customer relationship management (CRM) system, where they receive content about upcoming events and other company news. “We’re hoping that we’re using AI to bridge this communication gap, not strengthen it,” she added, demonstrating intentional technology integration that's aimed at enhancing the candidate experience.Workflow Optimization Through a Human-Centric LensAll four panelists agreed that the fundamentals of talent acquisition remain intact despite the rapid technological changes unfolding. Joseph warns against simply layering tech stacks upon each other without closely examining whether the underlying processes are sound.“We really need to get back to the basics,” she said. “At the end of the day, as folks within talent acquisition, it is: How do we help leaders make the right decisions to bring the right people into the organization? How do we help candidates find the right opportunities that work for them?”Miller framed it as the interplay of people, processes, and technology. “AI in recruiting is having a moment, rightly so,” she said. Miller says effective workflow optimization requires balancing all three elements.For Bazos, it comes down to remembering that behind every application is a person. “These are individuals with careers, families, trying to pay for mortgages and schools,” she said. “Carry that [idea] through the entire talent acquisition journey, keeping it human-centric at every step.”Ade Akin covers artificial intelligence, workplace wellness, HR trends, and digital health solutions.
From Organizational Values to Employee Experience: Making Culture Tangible
BY Jessica Swenson March 18, 2026Creating an experience that your customers want begins with your employees, says Marc Paulenich, CEO at Hart, and it’s necessary to build a strategy that connects the two. Misaligned company values and broken policy promises can erode employee trust—a rising issue in today’s workplace, he says.“If you’re going to move an employee along this continuum from apathy to advocacy, you have to demonstrate with real proof, real evidence, those values being lived and ultimately shown, rather than told.” Paulenich said during a panel discussion at From Day One’s Washington D.C. conference moderated by Morning Brew HR reporter Kristen Parisi.Flexibility and Care for EmployeesSome may have the impression that organizational empathy and flexibility so popular during the pandemic has declined in recent years, but panelists agree that those values aren’t gone, they’ve just shifted in response to evolving business needs.Dr. LaTricia Frederick, global head of executive talent management at Cisco, says that earlier-career employees might not have inherent connection with their peers. Because of this, empathy for these employees needs shows up as intentional connection that rebuilds in-person relationships. “We actually want people to be connected to each other, to know each other, to be able to rely on one another.” When economic changes force adjustments in business models and financial realities, it can impact established programs and options. So, “what may look like a decrease in empathy is a change in business models,” said Cari Bohley, VP of talent management at Peraton.This introduces a new question. “Given that’s what is driving organizational behavior, how do we maintain the empathy? How do we meet our employees where they are?” One way that Peraton executed on this value was changing its EAP provider; utilization skyrocketed after the change.Leaders spoke about "From Organizational Values to Employee Experience: Making Culture Tangible" during the executive panel discussion Another key way to demonstrate company values is through flexibility for employees’ unique needs. Carlee Wolfe, AVP of leader development and organizational effectiveness for Hyatt, acknowledged that flexibility options vary based on role and emphasized localized care policies. “How are you understanding your employees differently and meeting them where their needs are? Maybe you have things already at the system level, but also—where can people lean in at the local level?”Paulenich recommends stewarding your employer brand as you would your external brand. Continued care and consistency during times of employee adversity is one way to do that. “Employees oftentimes aren’t looking for an ideology, they’re just looking for some coherence and consistency between what you say you’re going to do and what you actually did,” he said. “So ground yourself in what those values are going to be, hold true to them, and then reinforce that consistently across the organization.”Workforce Enablement With AIAI-generated job insecurity can add a new anxiety for employees, but Hyatt frames AI as a human-centered skill development experience rather than a play for workforce reduction. “AI is a piece of our commitment to care around developing skills, leveraging and inserting it where your role is,” said Wolfe.Cisco seeks to build AI fluency across the organization so everyone can understand its relevance and build skills. “We wanted to create a curriculum that allowed people to become fluent in AI, to understand what it is and what it offers,” Frederick said. To that end, the company has rolled out a multi-module companywide e-learning that includes baseline AI education along with a prompt library, low-stakes challenges, and function-specific prompt practice opportunities.Peraton also runs AI literacy academies, one for baseline knowledge and one for advanced technical team members, says Bohley. “We needed to give them access to training so they can understand how AI can enable the work that they do, how it can make their lives easier, and what some of the ethical AI guardrails are.”Paulenich sees AI training as a values test. To demonstrate investment in AI and commitment to innovation, companies need to make time for employees to learn. “This is a moment to say, are we going to stand behind that? Are we going to carve out the time for people to learn it? Are we going to take away some of the barriers to learning?”While many companies have structured standalone programs for broader experimentation, like Cisco’s sandbox days and quarterly planned learning time, others integrate AI through short, accessible learning moments that impact daily interactions. Wolfe suggests inserting AI into real workflows, providing ready-to-use prompts, and modeling AI use in live settings. Resistance to ChangeBohley reframes AI resistance as helpful data. “Resistance is the signal, not the problem. The problem is that we haven’t effectively communicated what the change is, what the value is associated with the change, how the change can improve, what you do.”Conducting listening sessions and asking real questions can reduce change fatigue by giving employees a sense of co-creating the process, says Paulenich. “By having that dialogue early on, people take ownership; it feels less like something that’s being put on them, and more like something they’re part of.”Grassroots structures like AI committees and champions can also help neutralize resistance. Cisco leverages early adopters and champions to generate excitement and engagement among team members. Peraton’s Community of Practice provides a place for interested employees to learn via speakers and other programming, and bring that information back to their teams.Looking forward, Frederick sees AI as a tool to create capacity for greater investment in relationships. “Trust and connection are going to be that much more important, and we have to use AI to help us build capacity so that we have more opportunity to build on the trust and connection that we have.”Jessica Swenson is a freelance writer and proofreader based in the Midwest. Learn more about her at jmswensonllc.com.(Photos by Josh Larson for From Day One)
Rethinking Recognition and Rewards: New Strategies for Across-the-Board Encouragement
BY Katie Chambers March 11, 2026“We all know the data on the benefits of recognition: when you feel recognized, you feel great, your engagement goes up,” said Naomi Dishington, director of consulting at Workhuman. But did you know: “The giver also experiences that same lift in engagement, that same bump in productivity, that same likelihood to become a brand ambassador.” By ingraining recognition into organizational culture, leaders can help all employees feel a boost in morale, says Dishington, who spoke on an executive panel at From Day One’s Washington, D.C. conference. Panelists spoke about “Rethinking Recognition and Rewards: New Strategies for Across-the-Board Encouragement.”Why Recognition Matters“The stakes are really high, because if you get it right or wrong, recognition is deeply personal,” said Sheila Muhl, SVP of HR talent & total rewards at Viatris, noting that it touches on both employee and corporate values. “It’s incredibly important to have a far-reaching strategy around recognition, so that you can touch people in multiple different ways, so that people are feeling a sense of accomplishment and achievement and a deep connection to your purpose.” At her organization, achievements are tied not only to standard business objectives but also to cultural values such as fostering well-being and inclusion. “In big organizations, you have so many people making outstanding contributions all the time,” moderator Taylor Telford said. “How can employers ensure folks’ contributions aren’t going under the radar?” Muhl advises making recognition not just about end results, but about the entire employee journey, so that it is always top of mind. “Maybe someone learned something. Maybe something got messed up and we had to pivot—those are also important moments,” she said. Kimberly Young, SVP of total rewards at Amentum, agrees that employees “want to be recognized in real time,” even with a simple “thank you.”Panelists shared strategies on the topic of "Rethinking Recognition and Rewards" in D.C.“Recognition is one of the most strategic, powerful tools a leader has, because it’s how you signal what you value,” said Wendy Jolly, VP of total rewards and team member experience at Inova. Every recognition reinforces what you are looking for. She sees recognition as “a counter to feedback,” a quick positive repetitive reinforcement, leaving “rounding out the picture” for a deeper performance discussion. A good recognition and rewards program is “well-designed, well-communicated, and well-funded,” Dishington said, “as well as specific, timely, and meaningful. That doesn’t mean giant amounts, it means little bits dispersed throughout the year with that pop of spontaneity.” Panelists recommend surveying and employee listening to get a sense of what types of rewards and recognitions mean the most to your constituents as you build out your strategy. “Recognition is where the human shows up at work,” Jolly said. “They have to actually feel seen.” Creative methods of rewards include community-building activities like group volunteer opportunities, as well as “redemption store experiences” that can allow for uniquely personal prize selections. In terms of engagement, Muhl notes that recognition is a way to continue courting employees both immediately after and long after they are hired. “Woo your people as if you’re onboarding them continuously to keep that excitement and energy alive. Your strong employer brand and your strong employer proposition need to continue throughout recognition. It has to be nourished over time.” Making an Impact The most meaningful recognition programs, says Dishington, encourage involvement from the entire organization, not just leaders. “When you can empower everyone to use their voice to call out what’s going well in a colleague late at night, on the tarmac or in the hospital on the floor after a 14-hour shift, in the moment on [their] mobile [phone] in two minutes, you’ve done something to energize your culture that managers alone just can’t carry, even with the best intentions,” she said. Dishington notes that AI tools can help identify business benchmarks, flag language from employee skills profiles, and identify opportunities for real-time positive reinforcement. But it’s imperative to not take AI too far, and ensure the human voice is still there. “The challenge with AI is that it can be so impersonal for a lot of people,” said moderator Telford.The implementation of AI across other areas of the workplace means leaders will begin valuing employees’ human innovation and risk-taking as they adopt the technology. “I’m more likely to lean into that risk and that innovative state of mind, if I feel safe psychologically,” Young said. And that’s where recognition comes back in. “You can really do a lot with psychological safety in your environments, when you have a culture built on recognition and appreciation of each other.” AI is not the only way technology is impacting rewards. “Another great thing about technology or platform is the opportunity to put a bigger spotlight on a great moment,” Jolly said, not only to give the celebrated employee added positive attention, but also to educate others about corporate values. “You take it just a step further and say why that was a good moment for our company or our culture that we’re trying to create.” Recognition should come from the top-down. “Helping leaders incorporate a recognition focus as part of their day-to-day leadership is really important,” Muhl said. This includes not just executives but also front-line team leaders and managers. HR can help provide language, strategies, and reminders to help them incorporate it into their management style. Securing buy-in from organizational leaders means aligning your rewards program with their values. “It has to be authentic to your culture and to your leaders. What are the words they use, what are the things they naturally say in a town hall or in leadership messages?” Jolly said. “If you weave those in your recognition program, it will really land in a very genuine way in your workforce.” Katie Chambers is a freelance writer and award-winning communications executive with a lifelong commitment to supporting artists and advocating for inclusion. Her work has been seen in HuffPost, Top Think, and several printed essay collections, and she has appeared on Cheddar News, iWomanTV, On New Jersey, and CBS New York.(Photos by Josh Larson for From Day One)
How AI Is Reshaping Talent Acquisition Without Replacing Human Judgment
BY Ade Akin March 09, 2026Meghan Rhatigan and her team at Marriott International discovered that candidates didn’t mind getting a text message to book their interviews after automating interview scheduling. In fact, many candidates barely noticed.“We’ve scheduled over 300,000 interviews through an automated process and saved thousands and countless hours,” Rhatigan, VP of global talent acquisition experience at Marriott International, said during a panel discussion at From Day One’s Washington D.C.conference. The impact of that decision has been substantial: the interview process that once took ten days from start to finish now takes only three. Rhatigan’s findings challenged a common assumption in HR spaces, such as the belief that high-touch hospitality recruiting required human coordination at every step. Instead, automation freed Marriott International’s recruiters to focus on building relationships with candidates and hiring managers.Rhatigan shared her insights during a panel discussion with three other HR leaders titled “Modernizing Talent Acquisition: Enhancing Efficiency, Outreach, and the Applicant Experience,” as part of a wider discussion on how artificial intelligence is redefining the recruitment process. Adam DeRose, a senior reporter at Morning Brew’s HR Brew, moderated the conversation.The Case for Keeping Humans in ChargeThe panelists agreed there is a firm line between automation and decision-making. Rhatigan says Marriott made an early philosophical decision early on as it started to integrate AI into its system: AI would never get to select which candidates move forward or get hired. “We’re a hospitality company. We have a business around human connection and travel and experiences, and the last thing that we want is for candidates to go through a hiring process where they never actually talk to a human,” Rhatigan said. “There are companies that are moving in that direction, and that’s fine, but we’re not that company.”Panelists spoke about "Modernizing Talent Acquisition: Enhancing Efficiency, Outreach, and the Applicant Experience"Shabrina Davis, head of manager enablement and inclusive hiring learning at Amazon, offered a counterpoint. She says AI can help identify and reduce bias. It can intervene when recruiters develop unconscious preferences, such as favoring graduates from their alma mater. “From a learning and development perspective, we can have a pop-up that says, ‘Hey recruiter, we see you have a preference for Arizona State, but have you looked at Utah, or Florida State, or Howard University?’” Davis said. “Instead of 30 days later looking at a report and saying, ‘Oh, these recruiters are only looking here,’ we can do it immediately and have an intervention that rewires the thinking.”Data-Driven RecruitingFor Bert Hensley, chairman and CEO of Morgan Samuels, AI’s most valuable contribution has been transparency. His firm conducts executive searches with unusual intensity, typically speaking with more than 250 candidates per engagement, and up to 500 for sales roles. The research required to identify the right people once took 20 minutes per company. Now, AI accomplishes the same task in about 25 seconds.Using AI tools to aggregate data gives recruiters an honest view of their own performances. Hensley cited his wife, a therapist, who observes that “everyone is just hardwired to believe better about themselves than they really are. We live in that myth until you have the data that you’re getting every single day that tells you, no, you’re not quite doing what you thought you were doing.”Hensley says that reality check has improved performance across the organization while reducing anxiety. “They’re living in reality, and they don’t have to worry about what’s happening. They know what’s happening every single morning,” Hensley said.Jason Long, senior HRIS analyst at G-P, framed the broader challenge as one of trust. His company encourages employees to experiment with AI tools, and some of those innovations have made their way into G-P’s employer-of-record platform, helping connect professionals with international opportunities.Long drew a parallel to the early internet. “Pets.com didn’t fail because they didn’t have a good idea. They failed because nobody wanted to put their credit card on the internet in 2000,” he said. “Now we have HTTPS and PayPal and a million ways to do that. So what is that key that will unlock trust and help people actually believe that what they're getting from AI is useful?”Doing More With LessExternal pressures are also reshaping how companies approach the hiring process. Layoffs remain in the headlines, and candidates are asking harder questions. Davis acknowledged that Amazon’s recent workforce reductions come up in conversations.“We’re transparent,” she said. “Candidates ask about it, and it’s the reality of the industry that we’re in.” For new hires, a mindset of adaptability is essential. “The role that you’re hired for today may not be the role that you’re doing in 30 days. With that mindset, when you walk in the door, that hopefully will allow you to weather the storms.”Hensley has observed the same trend, noting that search firms now evaluate candidates on agility quotient (AQ), alongside intelligence quotient (IQ) and emotional quotient (EQ). “If they’re afraid of AI, I can’t present them to a client,” he said. “They don’t have to be the master of it, but they need to be embracing it.”For Rhatigan, the pressure is more immediate. Talent acquisition teams are being asked to do more with less. Marriott recently brought its frontline hiring in-house after two decades of relying on a recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) model. The company hired 50,000 U.S. frontline associates last year, despite having a team of only 20 people. “We would have never been able to do that without AI, ever,” Rhatigan said. “No one is going to be given a pot of money to add people anymore. But we’re all being asked to hire more. So the answer is technology.”Perhaps the most unexpected win came from Amazon’s learning and development team. Davis says AI has eliminated language barriers in training. A year ago, her team could only produce materials in seven languages due to translation costs. Now there’s effectively no limit. “If you’re in a small country on the continent of Africa, and your language is definitely not in the top seven, you’ll have the same experience as someone who’s in Italy,” she said. “It levels the playing field and makes it fair.”The lesson, panelists agreed, isn’t to chase grand transformations, but to find the small, repetitive tasks where automation can deliver meaningful impact while allowing humans to do what they do best.Ade Akin covers artificial intelligence, workplace wellness, HR trends, and digital health solutions.(Photos by Josh Larson for From Day One)
Change Fatigue Is Real: How Leaders Can Keep Teams Adapting
BY Ade Akin March 04, 2026Jennifer Vardeman kicked off the panel discussion at From Day One’s Houston conference by asking the audience about their sentiments when asked to adopt something new, like a tool, system, or policy, and to rate their feelings by raising one, two, or three fingers. One finger signified excitement, two meant exhaustion, and three represented pretending to be excited while feeling exhausted.“I see a few ones, that’s good, but mostly threes and twos,” Vardeman, Ph.D., professor and director at the Jack J. Valenti School of Communication, University of Houston, said. “So we’re in the right place at the right time.” The panel discussion moderated by Vardeman brought together HR leaders from four major organizations to diagnose the symptoms of change fatigue and discuss remedies. The Many Faces of FatigueFor Anand Mudunuru, global head of HR for software engineering at Stellantis, change fatigue looks less like resistance and more like weariness born of perpetual motion. Stellantis, the world’s third-largest automaker with over 250,000 employees, has undergone decades of acquisitions, leadership changes, and headquarters relocations.“What I see is that people are used to change,” Mudunuru said. “What happens is that people are exhausted. There is a never-ending story.” He says his teams are open to new things but crave “clarity of thought, focus, and clear timelines.”Clelia Cayama, the senior HR director at Vytl Controls Group, described a similar dynamic in her organization, which is built on continuous improvement and operational excellence. “Everybody over coffee is talking about what we can do better,” she said. “But then it comes, always a joke about, ‘Oh, new implementation, a new project. Who’s going to volunteer for that? Who’s going to lead it?”Panelists spoke on the topic, "Change Fatigue Is Real: How Leaders Can Keep Teams Adapting"Mindy Fitzgerald, the head of HR operational excellence at Air Products, offered a more visceral description. “I see a quiet depletion,” she said. “Discretionary energy into things. A sense of languishing, maybe the joy they got in a job, a task, or an activity. It just seems to be missing.”Brea May, head of HR for the Americas at Mahindra, painted a picture of organizational chaos. With three new product launches, two ERP systems to reconcile, and a host of strategic projects, the same “best and brightest” employees are tapped for every initiative. “It causes a lot of anxiety,” May said. “It causes a lot of burnout.”Communication Across Cultures and Time ZonesCommunication often breaks down first when employees are overwhelmed. Language barriers, cultural differences, and asynchronous work compound the challenge global organizations face.Mahindra, headquartered in Mumbai with over 200,000 employees across 100 countries, is familiar with this problem. Misunderstandings in written communication were once frequent, as only 10% of its employees speak English as a first language.“Somebody is taking in information, they’re translating it into English, and they’re putting it into a written form or speaking it out loud,” May said. “It caused a lot of tension for years.” Employees often interpreted direct, bullet-point emails as aggressive, while softer messages were seen as indecisive.The solution to that problem emerged organically. Employees began using a proprietary AI tool, Mahindra AI, to draft and refine cross-cultural communications. “Since everybody started doing it, it’s become this sort of adoption,” May said. “Hey, I’m not going to take offense to the email. I know that Mahindra AI wrote it.” Some employees even tag messages with disclaimers like “AI drafted this.”Stellantis took a different approach. Mudunuru, who built a 7,000-person software team across 30 countries during the pandemic, instituted monthly town halls as the single source of truth for major announcements. To ensure psychological safety, he introduced Mentimeter, an anonymous question-and-answer tool. “They’re able to bring out their concerns without being judged,” he said. “And most importantly, they’re being heard.”For Cayama, the key is intentional, empathetic leadership. “Our leaders are not afraid to say when they don’t have the answer,” she said. “To be there with people, to be empathetic, to relate themselves to what we’re going through.”The Leadership Behaviors That MatterAs the panel shifted from identifying the problem to addressing it, a clear picture emerged of the leadership habits that matter most: transparency, empowerment, and humanity.Cayama highlighted two of Vytl Controls Group's values: “trust to act” and “make it fun.” Trust to act means empowering people to make decisions and execute their work with the confidence that the organization has their back. Making it fun, she says, is about knowing when to pause. “Sometimes in the middle of a business review, to take the time to have some time to decompress, to make fun, not to talk about the work and the topic of the meeting, but to spend time together, connecting,” she added.Mudunuru emphasized customer centricity, passion, and a global mindset with regional execution. He also offered a more tactical tip that has been adopted at Stellantis: no meeting may exceed seven people, and every employee has the right to decline an invitation. “If you are invited, there’s a tendency just to add people,” he said. “Every employee has a right to reject the meeting.”Fitzgerald introduced the concept of “narrowing the field of focus.” She says leaders can create stability by establishing predictable rhythms when everything feels urgent. She stresses the little things, such as no-meeting Fridays, standing check-ins, or simply focusing on one thing during one-on-ones. “You’re creating a level of stabilization amongst all the churn,” she said.She also offered a mantra for leaders: “Our job as leaders is to prioritize the work for our people and our organization ruthlessly. It’s not to prioritize. It is to prioritize ruthlessly. Remember, all that work that you are unable to prioritize creates change fatigue and unsettledness for your employees.”AI as a PartnerThe panelists all agree that how artificial intelligence tools are introduced matters tremendously as they become ubiquitous. When used correctly, AI reduces overload instead of adding to it.Artificial intelligence is already reshaping the workforce at Stellantis. Mudunuru notes that the company has stopped hiring entry-level software engineers because AI systems now write much of the code needed. Experienced engineers are needed to validate and enhance the code, but the shift has forced a rethink of the talent strategy.Mudunuru created a chatbot trained on two years of town hall recordings for HR purposes. Employees in Poland can request vacation days using the system, while those in Brazil can contact their HR representative. “You don’t need to ask these questions,” he said. “Seventy to eighty percent of the questions are just for HR. They are not strategic questions.”Cayama’s organization uses AI to automate non-value-added tasks, freeing employees to focus on more meaningful work. Inside sales teams, for example, use AI to pull prior quotes, accelerating pricing and freeing up more time with clients. “It’s leveraging technology to do the non-value-added task so we can have more people-to-people interaction,” she said.At Mahindra, AI adoption is supported by monthly lunch-and-learn sessions. “It’s about getting them comfortable with using AI and showing how it could reduce the workload,” May said. “This is your partner. This is your assistant.”Learning From Failure to Keep Moving ForwardNo change initiative unfolds perfectly, and the panelists were candid about their missteps. May introduced a more unusual response to failure, the “smart failure award.” When a project fails despite meeting all deliverables, due to factors beyond the team’s control, the team presents lessons learned and receives recognition for the effort. “At first, people were saying, ‘I failed. This is hard,’” May said. But the award reframes failure as a learning opportunity and acknowledges the work that went into the attempt.As the panel concluded, Vardeman recapped the many strategies shared: clarity of thought, careful planning, listening, standing meetings, cultural onboarding, anonymous Q&A tools, values-based leadership, and ruthless prioritization. She highlighted the importance of seeing employees' lived reality, positioning AI as a partner, and creating space for fun.“Everything cannot be planned,” said Mudunuru. “Everything cannot be super structured. The best part is being on top of the list, prioritizing the list, and just keep executing.”Ade Akin covers artificial intelligence, workplace wellness, HR trends, and digital health solutions.(Photos by Josh Larson for From Day One)
With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility: Scaling Marketing With AI
BY Ade Akin March 03, 2026Carrie Teegardin kicked off an executive panel discussion at From Day One's Atlanta marketing conference with an iconic line from the original Spider-Man movie: “With great power comes great responsibility.” It was the perfect metaphor to kick off the panel about artificial intelligence and its impact across industries, particularly the marketing world. “There’s a lot of stuff you can do, but really, should we be doing that now at this time?” Teegardin, a reporter at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution who moderated the conversation, asked, setting the tone for the discussion. The panel, titled “AI in Marketing: Scaling Personalization Without Losing the Human Touch,” brought together marketing leaders who are actively trying to find a balance between innovation and ethics. Allison Conrad, the managing director of technology at Accenture, immediately seized on Teegardin's Spider-Man analogy. “It really hits on one of the key things around leveraging AI,” Conrad said. She cited the results of a recent Accenture collaboration with Amazon Web Services that surveyed 1,000 C-suite leaders. About 72% reported they had halted an AI pilot or program because of responsible AI concerns.Conrad encouraged marketers to engage in the governance conversation early on. “Marketers need to be at the table,” she added. “Responsible AI gets real when you turn it to customers. And who knows the customers better than the people in this room? If you’re invited to that, I encourage you to go. If you’re not invited, I encourage you to invite yourself.”When Trust Requires Moving Slow to Go FastChristopher Merrill, the chief marketing officer for the digital platform at Synchrony Financial, shared how his company built a fence around the metaphorical AI playground before opening up access.“In financial services, just like any bank, [we] have your social security number and your bank accounts, and so you would probably not like that information to go out outside of my walls," Merrill said. “The beauty and also the danger of AI is once you submit things to ChatGPT, you ask things, you upload documents, it’s gone forever.”Synchrony initially blocked access to public artificial intelligence tools entirely. Instead, the tech team at Synchrony Financial built its own private ecosystem using open-source AI and dubbed it "SYF-GPT" after the company’s stock ticker. “So, yes, did it take longer? Obviously, you know, it took time,” Merrill said, “We were a little bit behind versus some of the folks that didn’t have that same kind of data constraints. But now it’s allowing us to go faster,” he said. The secure environment Merrill's team built now allows employees to upload sensitive documents and draft copies without fear of data leaks. Keeping the Human in the LoopThe panel unanimously agreed that human judgment remains more valuable than ever despite the rush toward automation. Aniket Maindarkar, the chief marketing officer at business process services company Firstsource, shared a cautionary tale about chasing AI hype.After receiving a provocative email from leadership about a competitor producing an ad video for a fraction of the cost, Maindarkar's team raced to produce its own AI-generated video. The quality wasn’t up to par, he admitted. The team eventually partnered with an agency to refine the story and ensure it resonated emotionally with viewers. “For marketers, the only moat that you have is authenticity. That’s it. That’s the only moat that we are left with,” Maindarkar said. “So tech does stuff, but in today’s environment, I think for marketers, the people aspect becomes so important, because without that, you’re probably lost.”Panelists spoke about "AI in Marketing: Scaling Personalization Without Losing the Human Touch" Conrad built on this, distinguishing between AI’s ability to drive efficiency versus its inability to create true distinctiveness. “The LLMs [large language models] that are out there, unless you’re very sophisticated in doing a lot of native work, they’re learning. They’re learning off of everyone else’s data and your data,” she said. “It’s going to be really hard to be distinctive if you rely too heavily on that. What is the human doing? The humans are the people in this room, making sure that you don’t lose your distinctiveness. AI is not really good at that. That emotional connection that you have been investing in your brand, that’s another thing that AI is not going to give you.”From A/B to Multivariate TestingThe panelists agreed that one of AI’s most impressive capabilities is the ability to optimize performance. “We all do some sort of A/B testing,” Merrill said. “Digital, for a long time, has made that so much easier with tools like AI. You can test not just three, four, or five multivariate models, but literally hundreds at the same time. It is an extremely powerful tool, if done correctly.”Maindarkar says AI is now helping dismantle internal silos, bringing together teams that previously worked in isolation and unifying the content-creation process. Now, teams collaborate on a single platform using shared briefs and templates, giving marketing leaders a direct line of sight into what really drives pipeline and brand perception.The Evolving Skill Set: What Happens to the Grunt Work?Teegardin posed a provocative question to the group: If AI eliminates menial tasks, how will junior employees learn the fundamentals?“How, as young employees, did we learn menial tasks?” she noted, reflecting on her days as a young reporter covering local government meetings. “If our people aren’t doing menial tasks, is that a problem?”Merrill suggested the skill set is simply shifting. “The real skill becomes, well, how do you take full advantage of these capabilities? Do I ask it just one very simple question, or am I asking 100 questions to get deeper at the source to figure it out?” He elaborated. “You can’t just take it and say, okay, this is what the answer is. I’m going to run with it.”Conrad acknowledged this is one of the biggest challenges she’s facing. “That apprenticeship, that mentorship, how do we cultivate that sixth sense? If you don’t have that experience, how do you get it?” All three panelists emphasized that AI adoption is as much about culture as it is about technology. Merrill’s team runs internal campaigns asking employees how they’re using AI, from writing code to creating bedtime stories for their kids. Maindarkar recently held an offsite event where 80 employees formed pods and were challenged to create a campaign ad in 20 minutes using only free tools. “It creates magic within the enterprise,” he added. “In an organization, you often have certain people whom AI is forced upon, but certain people who are experimenting and who are trying and are just waiting for the opportunity to showcase that.”As the session concluded, Teegardin circled back to the villains in the Spider-Man universe. What should marketers watch out forMaindarkar warned that CMOs must now think like a Chief Information Security Officer for their brand. “There is nobody else in the company who’s looking at that in terms of what parts of your brand are being leaked out,” he said. Merrill kept it simple. “I’'ll say just trust but verify,” he added. “AI is an awesome set of tools. But you can’t just take it at whatever it says. You’ve got to have the human in the loop.”Conrad’s final word was a call for robust infrastructure. “You can’t do point solutions,” she elaborated. “Laws are changing. You’re going to need an integrated platform that is constantly monitoring these programs. If you’re going to fight the bad guys, you need to be armed with a lot of automation and a lot of data.”Ade Akin covers artificial intelligence, workplace wellness, HR trends, and digital health solutions.
Rebuilding a Brand From the Inside Out: How Tech and Team Engagement Drive a New Strategy
BY Carrie Snider March 02, 2026As a 116-year-old company, ABM Industries looks very different today than it did in over a century ago. Recently, the company set out to redefine itself—but how it approached that reinvention was critical.Founded in 1909 as a window-washing business, ABM Industries has grown far beyond commercial cleaning into integrated facilities management, serving airports, universities, and complex infrastructures across 14,000 client sites with 100,000 frontline employees.Three years ago, leadership realized the company’s story hadn’t kept pace with its transformation. Cary Bainbridge, chief marketing officer at ABM Industries, spoke during a fireside chat at From Day One’s Atlanta marketing event about how technology and internal alignment drove ABM’s brand evolution.“When you think about our evolution, and what I’ve been fortunate to be part of over the last 20 years, it’s continuing to see that evolution and tell a new story,” Bainbridge told session moderator Stephen Koepp, From Day One’s editor in chief and co-founder. In recent years, ABM has expanded its capabilities, integrating soft and hard services under single contracts and modernizing its operating model. The shift wasn’t cosmetic. It was strategic, says Bainbridge. The company invested heavily in upskilling its workforce and embedding technology into daily operations. Today, frontline employees use mobile devices that direct workflows in real time, while managers and clients gain visibility into building operations through centralized digital platforms.Reflecting the Inside ChangeThe brand refresh, anchored in the theme “Driving Possibility, Together,” needed to reflect those internal changes.“It all started with alignment to our business strategy,” Bainbridge said. “We were going through a system transformation internally. The brand needed to match who we’ve become.” That transformation included modernizing enterprise systems and introducing new tools across the workforce. Leadership was intentional about pacing the change.“How much change can our teams consume at any given time?” Bainbridge recalled asking. “We wanted people to feel the change and see that it was happening—so when we empowered them with a new story, it was something they could believe in.”Cary Bainbridge, CMO at ABM Industries, spoke during the fireside chat Rather than leading with marketing, ABM focused first on operational credibility. Employees needed to see proof before they could authentically champion the new brand.The transformation began internally. ABM pressure-tested messaging with employees, launched the brand inside the organization first, and positioned team members as its primary storytellers before rolling out targeted external campaigns. “We knew we had to start on the inside,” Bainbridge said.Smart Growth, Not Just More GrowthAs ABM expanded into electrical infrastructure, microgrids, and mission-critical environments like data centers, its ambitions began to outpace public perception.“We had an alignment problem,” Bainbridge said. “Customers would say, ‘I didn’t know you did that.’ And internally, our team members would say, ‘I don’t know all that we do.’”Closing that gap required discipline. Rather than chasing volume, ABM intentionally targeted higher-value integrated solutions in sectors such as airports, higher education, semiconductors, and data centers.To support that strategy, the marketing team deployed AI-powered lead scoring and machine learning tools to prioritize quality over quantity—resulting in a 4% improvement in lead conversion rates in the first year.AI also expanded access to performance insights. By layering generative AI into marketing dashboards, ABM enabled more employees to query data directly, freeing analysts to focus on advanced modeling and strategic insights.Bainbridge emphasized that marketing’s credibility depends on measurable contribution to growth. At ABM, sales and marketing operate under shared leadership, with aligned KPIs tied directly to revenue in priority segments. “When I stand in front of our leadership team or our board, it’s about our contribution to new sales growth,” she said.Brand as a Cultural StrategyFor Bainbridge, the evolution of the CMO role requires both culture and ROI. ABM’s CEO is invested in internal culture, reinforcing the idea that the brand begins with employees.Employees represent the company to customers, recruits, and their communities. Internal alignment, therefore, becomes a business driver—not just a communications effort. By modernizing systems, upskilling employees, aligning leadership, and embedding technology into operations, ABM ensured its brand transformation reflected real change.Marketing’s role, Bainbridge said, is to connect those dots—so growth strategy, culture, and customer experience move in the same direction.Carrie Snider is a Phoenix-based journalist and marketing copywriter.(Photos by Josh Larson for From Day One)