Solving Marketing's New Challenge: How Does My Brand Show Up on AI Platforms?
BY Grace Turney October 21, 2026“About half the people who get a script don’t actually ever go to PT,” said Brett Groom, chief marketing officer at PT Solutions. Patients need a prescription for insurance to cover physical therapy, and many never use it. For Groom, those missing patients mark the spot where AI search could matter most.That gap framed a discussion at From Day One’s Chicago marketing conference. Four marketing leaders explored how answer engine optimization and generative engine optimization are changing the playbook built for traditional search, and which parts of the old playbook still work, in the session moderated by Jessica Wohl, managing editor at Ad Age. Old Rules, New SearchMuch of that playbook survives, said Matthew Dewoskin, VP of SEO and website marketing at Rate. “Honestly, a lot still applies,” he said. AI tools scrape websites to answer questions in seconds, so page speed and topic relevance still count. “If you’re in a good place with traditional organic search, you should be in a good place to start for generative search, AI search as well.”No marketer controls where a brand appears, he says, in AI-generated answers or traditional search results. Rate built visibility in home equity lending by creating a central hub of content on home equity lines of credit, then repurposing it as video and infographics across as many touchpoints as possible.Earning Citations From AIHope Trumbull, VP of brand partnerships at Social Native, boiled down what makes a brand citable. “AI is going to cite what it can find, what it can trust, and what it can share,” she said. Brands should make sure content isn’t hidden behind a login or JavaScript, and should answer the detailed questions buyers now type into AI tools.Trust, she added, comes mostly from outside sources. “AI is going to source and trust third party more than anything that we are going to do from a self-promotion perspective on your website.” Reviews on Yelp, social media posts, and Reddit threads all count.Panelists spoke about "Solving Marketing's New Challenge: How Does My Brand Show Up on AI Platforms?" at From Day One's Chicago marketing conference To keep brand voice intact as teams use AI to produce more content, Trumbull recommended a brand playbook that every AI tool must check its output against. Julia Goebel, chief marketing officer at Alight Solutions, says a trained tool can produce a solid first draft, but people must stay involved. “We really take care to make sure that what we write or publish sounds like an Alight advisor, because when you are off brand, it’s easy to lose trust.”Reviews Shape the BrandReviews matter most to Groom’s business. “Getting reviews is absolutely critical,” he said. Patients in active search mode read them, and they help Google rankings. PT Solutions, which runs about 550 clinics, recently expanded its Yelp presence because ChatGPT now draws on that site’s reviews, Dewoskin noted.Trumbull said marketers can’t control user-generated content but can influence it by briefing brand ambassadors and executives. Persistent complaints point to deeper problems, though. “That is not just something you can sprinkle frosting on and call it a day as a marketer,” she said. Pricing, service, or operations may need fixing first.Replies matter, too. Groom’s team uses a reputation management platform to answer comments, and healthcare privacy rules push treatment conversations offline. Goebel said a public response still matters. “If you don’t reply, it looks like you’re not paying attention.”Cautious Spending on New ChannelsNone of the panelists has gone all in on advertising in ChatGPT. Goebel says Alight isn’t advertising there yet, but she called herself a fan of pilots. “I never rule out any channel,” she said. Dewoskin plans to add it to Rate’s paid search mix. Groom sees weak tracking as the obstacle: AI firms “want to sell me impressions, not a performance base,” he said, and “if I had an incremental dollar, Bing would probably work better for me.”Dewoskin’s dollars currently go to affiliate partnerships, such as placement in rate tables on sites like NerdWallet and Bankrate. Goebel keeps funding public relations, bylined articles and executive interviews, because third-party credibility still carries weight.Measuring Impact, Not ActivityGoebel says she isn’t yet seeing a return from AI, and doesn’t worry about it. “The search volume that comes from AI is low. It remains single digits.”Dewoskin says most sites have lost organic traffic over the past year and a half, which forced discussions with his leadership team. He has had to rethink visibility, once a vanity metric to him, as a performance measure. Still, he says, leadership responds to business results, not rankings: pre-qualified borrowers, home equity loans, homes bought. “It matters how much you’re bringing into the business,” he said. “It doesn’t really matter how you’re ranking or how you’re positioned.”Groom’s team works from a mantra: “impact, not activity.” As a private equity-owned company, PT Solutions faces tough questions about what each dollar returns.Trumbull advised against tearing up current budgets. “Don’t blow everything up just because we’re now seeing this change," she said. Marketers should set a baseline, compare against it each month or quarter and move money as results shift. Goebel urged teams to reserve funds for experiments. “I actually think you need a bucket for testing,” she said, and to tell finance up front how results will be reported.Looking AheadTrumbull assigns one exercise: list the 25 questions buyers ask most, in search and in AI tools, then check how the brand and its competitors answer them. Timestamp the results so leadership can see progress six months later.Dewoskin expects Rate’s website to shift from a splashy homepage to an AI agent that greets visitors and answers questions, like a request for today’s mortgage rates. A library of content must remain, he says, to train the agent and keep the site relevant in search.Groom is focused on winning local searches. PT Solutions operates in 25 states, he said, but it really competes in about 20 markets, and patients typically travel only five to seven miles for therapy. “We don’t really care about a national presence,” he said. “I only care in the 20 markets I compete in.”Goebel offered a final caution about contracts. “We are deliberately not signing three-year contracts because we know how quickly AI is changing,” she said. Short commitments, she added, avoid sunk costs in technology that may look very different in three years.Half of Groom’s prescription holders never make it to a clinic, and AI search may be how marketers finally reach them. The panel’s advice for the search: keep what works, test what’s new, and keep every commitment short.Grace Turney is a St. Louis-based writer, editor, artist, and former journalist and librarian. She holds a Master of Library & Information Science (MLIS) and has nearly a decade of experience writing both full time and as a freelancer. See more of her work at graceturney17.wixsite.com/mysite.(Photos by Josh Larson for From Day One)
Brand Authenticity and Purpose: Aligning Values With Marketing Strategy
BY Grace Turney October 20, 2026Web traffic to seed brand Golden Harvest has dropped about 80 percent, but its marketing chief says that’s not a crisis. Younger farmers are increasingly turning to AI tools to diagnose struggling crops from photos rather than clicking through to company articles. And those who do visit the site are filling out “learn more” forms at higher rates than ever.“We’re still getting more output from the website,” said Eddie Kahle, head of marketing for Golden Harvest at Syngenta. “We’re just getting a lot less traffic to the website.”Kahle discussed this shift during a panel discussion at From Day One’s Chicago marketing conference. Mariah Rush, a staff reporter at the Chicago Sun-Times, moderated the conversation among four marketing leaders from very different industries on the topic of “Brand Authenticity and Purpose: Aligning Values With Marketing Strategy.”Trust Looks Different EverywhereFor Golden Harvest, which sells corn and soybean seeds to Midwest farmers, trust starts with weather no one can control. Kahle says the company’s seeds outperform competitors only about half the time, depending on when rain falls. So Golden Harvest focuses on helping farmers manage risk. “It’s about backing up your products when things go well or go poorly,” he said. The company uses AI models to track rainfall, sunlight, and wind, then alerts field sales teams when something happens in a farmer’s fields.Heidi Sullivan, VP of marketing at Equity LifeStyle Properties, manages more than 400 brands, one for each RV resort, marina and manufactured housing community. She divides the work into what stays fixed and what bends. The community feel and brand promise stay constant, while a campground near Yosemite can look nothing like a retirement community in Florida, she says. Panelists spoke about "Brand Authenticity and Purpose: Aligning Values With Marketing Strategy"At Aparium, an independent hotel company, authenticity is simpler and harder. Dina Fenili Niekamp, the company’s SVP of brand marketing, says the marketing has to match what a guest finds when they check in at 11 p.m. after a long day of travel.For Benjamin Svarczkopf, SVP of global marketing at Biocartis, a molecular diagnostics company focused on cancer, trust looks different. “We’re in a business where you can’t be wrong,” he said.Let Customers Do the TalkingAparium found a stronger approach by shifting its marketing strategy. Rather than relying on in-house campaigns built around road trips and family vacations, Niekamp’s team launched “As Told By,” a program that spotlights local makers, artists and contributors in each hotel’s city. “Nobody really wants to hear from a brand,” she said. “They want to hear from the partners, the customers, the people that made that brand.” The program has performed roughly 25 times better than the earlier campaigns, she says.Regulation pushes Svarczkopf toward the same approach. Pharmaceutical advertising to patients is illegal in the European Union, where most of his business sits, so Biocartis relies on pathologists and laboratory directors to carry its message. His budget goes mostly to case studies. “A really good day is finding a customer that is super excited, and they start putting out LinkedIn posts,” he said.The content that works also varies from industry to industry. Scientists don’t want polish. Svarczkopf says pathologists skip the slick slides and head straight to the footnotes and peer-reviewed evidence, so Biocartis leads with data and adds style afterward.Kahle faces a similar bar from a different direction. Golden Harvest’s products take decades to develop, and university studies often need five or more years to confirm that a product works. His team then boils the findings down into pieces a busy farmer will read.Though farms run on business-sized budgets, Kahle says the decisions often come down to one person in a family operation. That’s why consumer tactics tend to beat business-to-business ones. Golden Harvest borrowed the idea of a rewards program from the hotel industry.Community Is the ProductELS focuses on creating a community for guests, says Sullivan. “We don’t manufacture those relationships; we just facilitate the conditions that allow that to happen,” she said. Pickleball tournaments, campfire s’mores and golf cart parades give people reasons to return. The company’s annual “100 Days of Camping” campaign, which runs from Memorial Day to Labor Day and hands out collectible rally towels, now draws more than 100 million social media engagements, Sullivan says. The first year drew only a few million views.Niekamp described Aparium’s version: a hotel lobby built around a bar and restaurant rather than a check-in desk. She called it the “blue flame,” after the hottest part of a fire, because it draws locals and travelers to the same place. Her team teaches the idea to new hires alongside “the fifth meatball,” a story about staff who noticed a table of five has been served an appetizer of four and fixed it without asking permission.The panelists measure success by what customers say back to them. Sullivan tracks reviews, referrals and surveys. Niekamp watches direct bookings, since commissions from online travel agencies cut deeply into revenue, along with repeat guests. Svarczkopf’s favorite sign is a customer who “repeats your value message back better than you can.”All four said marketing can’t sit apart from finance and operations. “Marketing is not a cost center; it is a revenue driver and a growth driver,” Sullivan said. Listen Before You SpeakEach panelist shared a lesson that customers taught them this year, and each one changed how the company talks. Sullivan had always pictured RV guests as travelers. Then she met the annual guests who park for the season and build decks and tiki bars around their rigs, and she began marketing those sites as second homes.Kahle’s lesson came in his first year leading Golden Harvest. His bosses assumed the brand was fading, but surveys showed the opposite. The problem was reach, not reputation. Golden Harvest needs to get onto more farms so new customers can see for themselves.The four panelists, representing vastly different industries, all seemed to reach the same conclusion. Authentic marketing means talking less, listening more, and letting the people you serve tell the story.Grace Turney is a St. Louis-based writer, editor, artist, and former journalist and librarian. She holds a Master of Library & Information Science (MLIS) and has nearly a decade of experience writing both full time and as a freelancer. See more of her work at graceturney17.wixsite.com/mysite.(Photos by Josh Larson for From Day One)
AI-Powered Personalization: Scaling Relevance Without Losing the Human Element
BY Carrie Snider October 16, 2026AI can personalize a message in seconds. Making that message meaningful is still a human job.At From Day One’s Chicago marketing conference, marketing leaders discussed how to use AI to scale personalization without overwhelming audiences with generic content. Moderated by Alex Maragos, anchor and reporter at NBC 5 Chicago, the panel explored how marketers can work smarter, preserve creativity and build stronger customer connections.Build a Shared Knowledge Base to Power AIEffective AI implementation starts with giving the technology the right information, according to panelist Connor Laughlin, VP of marketing and go-to-market at Transworld Systems Inc. (TSI).His team began exploring AI with TSI’s proposal-writing group, which handles a high volume of requests for proposals (RFPs). The company expects to respond to about one and a half RFPs daily, and the team generates 60% to 65% of new business. Laughlin saw an opportunity to use AI to make that workload more manageable.Early experiments with custom GPTs eventually led to a comprehensive audit of the content, information and data used across the company’s go-to-market operations. Today, employees can connect their AI tools to a shared knowledge base that helps them understand TSI’s business.As Laughlin said, the resource helps each tool become “a domain expert in all things TSI.” But better technology doesn’t automatically mean better marketing. Laughlin warned against flooding audiences with AI-generated emails and social posts simply because production is easier.“We are developing an eye for the vibe, for the feeling that it’s uncanny,” he said. Instead, he encouraged marketers to understand their customers, clarify their messaging and focus on the problems their products solve. Combining AI with thoughtful content creation can help companies scale their efforts without sacrificing authenticity.Keep Humans Responsible for CreativityPanelist Andrew Racine, VP of demand generation and growth at Writer, says marketers must remain accountable for the quality and relevance of AI-generated content.By connecting information from Slack conversations, Salesforce records and sales calls, marketers can better understand customer challenges and personalize their approach. However, Racine cautioned against crossing the line between relevant outreach and excessive, impersonal communication.“We approach it in our company as a human in the lead,” he said. Racine warned that marketers risk repeating past mistakes, such as overwhelming audiences with automated emails and excessive advertising. AI makes producing content easier, but more output doesn’t necessarily create more value.Panelists spoke about "AI in Marketing: Scaling Personalization Without Losing the Human Touch" in Chicago“Would you respond to this?” He added that marketers should evaluate messages from the customer’s perspective before sending them.AI can also help marketing teams become stronger partners to sales. Beyond generating leads, marketers can use it to understand what sales representatives need to advance deals, reach decision-makers and build customer relationships.Successful adoption also requires helping employees rethink their workflows. “It is 99% change management, not the technology.” Leaders must show employees how automation can free them to focus on higher-value work while maintaining human oversight and strong data governance.Prioritize Value Over VolumePanelist Amanda Rosso, head of global integrated marketing campaigns for money management at Stripe, says marketers must be intentional about the content they create as AI makes personalization easier to scale.At Stripe, craft and quality are central to the company’s operating principles. Yet consumers are increasingly overwhelmed by targeted messages that offer little substance.“I’m personally inundated with messages that are built for me, but also don’t say a lot,” Rosso said. She uses AI to refine her writing and explore creative options but prefers to develop her initial argument herself. Without a strong foundation, she warned, AI can gloss over gaps in reasoning and make weak ideas sound more convincing than they are.That discipline should extend to campaign planning. The ability to produce more content doesn’t mean audiences want more information. Marketers should simplify their messaging and focus on what customers need to know. “We still need to simplify and land the same messages in a way that our users understand,” she said.Rosso also stressed that marketing should offer genuine value to sales teams and their customers. Whether creating events, reports or emails, marketers should provide resources that salespeople feel confident sharing because they genuinely help the recipient.Personalization also requires responsible data use. Rosso sees opportunities to deliver timely, relevant messages directly within products, where customers can receive information tailored to their needs. But accuracy, privacy and security must remain priorities.AI may be changing how marketers work, but the fundamentals haven't changed: understand your audience, offer something valuable and earn their trust. The challenge is knowing when to let AI do the heavy lifting and when human judgment needs to take the lead. The marketers who get that balance right will be better positioned to create personalized experiences that feel less like automation and more like genuine connection.Carrie Snider is a Phoenix-based journalist and marketing copywriter.(Photos by Josh Larson for From Day One)
What’s Changing in the Way People Connect With Brands
BY Jessica Swenson October 15, 2026“I think it’s a generational opportunity. I think it’s the thing of our time,” said Peter Loftus, chief marketing officer of Publicis Creative US & Leo US at Publicis Groupe. He sees AI as a broad opportunity on par with the first iPhone—that was the last time he felt this kind of magic.“What I don’t buy into is that it’s going to eliminate the need for human creativity.” He believes that creativity is one of society’s most timeless, foundational vocations, and it is approaching a shift. The future of creative direction is bringing the “taste, sensibility, and craft to AI” that only a human can offer. “The work’s going to change a lot, and we’re going to have to do the work very differently.”This evolution and its impact on the brand-employee-consumer triad was the topic of a fireside chat between Loftus and moderator Christian Farr, a reporter for NBC5 News, at From Day One’s Chicago marketing conference.Citing Leo’s HumanKind study in partnership with Ipsos, Loftus revealed that despite a deep unease surrounding AI, 58% of Americans are using it. His team identifies a perceived lack of respect as the source of that paradox. “People across all demographics felt ‘people don’t genuinely respect or care about me,’ and because of that fact, they’re doubling down. They’re trying to create their own destiny, and they’re using AI to do it.” he said. “And they’re doing it in an environment where 6 out of 10 people feel that institutions don’t have their best interest at heart, so they’re not feeling respected.”Because they don’t see a future for themselves in today’s industry, younger workers’ goals have shifted from seeking the corner office to creating side hustles that become their main ambition, says Loftus. “We could enter maybe the greatest era of creativity ever in our business, but we have to bring that next generation along for the ride because they are incredibly complex and creative.”Peter Loftus, CMO at Publicis Creative US & Leo US, was interviewed by Christian Farr, General Assignment Reporter, NBC5 News, during the fireside chatCompanies could help slow this shift by simply listening to people and treating them fairly. The Leo HumanKind study showed that 61% of respondents will pay more for something—even in a down economy—when they feel respected by a brand. Loftus offered examples of brands addressing key customer pain points, like T-Mobile’s five-year price lock and Uber’s teen accounts.Encouraging brands to be transparent with consumers about AI content, he said, “If people want to be treated fairly, then transparency is table stakes, and we know from the data that we will be rewarded in kind as marketers if we are honest with people.”This applies most strongly to GenZ, known for their paradoxical nature as they seek meaning both in life and from the brands they interact with. “If more brands listen to them more, and recognize that multiple things can be true about them at the same time, it can't fit them in a box. I think they'd be more successful.”Focusing on AI solely as an efficiency play is another common mistake that Loftus sees companies make. “I think the argument that AI is an efficiency driver is the major issue I have. Absolutely, it can make you more efficient. There’s no question, and it should. But I actually think the most powerful thing in AI today is insight.” He suggests using it to pull information such as pain points and trend data from key social communities to inform your creative.Loftus offered three key takeaways for marketers: find your company’s consumer respect gap and address it, hold onto your humanness to amplify AI’s power, and use AI as a tool to find the insights you need to create meaning.And now is the time, he says, to shape the future of AI. “We’re all using it, so it’s on us to craft a future that we want with it. We have to be vocal, and we have to demand that AI fits into the worldview that we see. We need to stand up and say exactly what we think that should be to craft a better future.”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)
Recognizing Skills and Potential: Building a More Agile Workforce
BY Katie Chambers October 14, 2026The way HR analyzes resumes and positions candidates for growth is changing. “When I look at talent evaluation, I’m more looking at culture and what you’ve learned and what you’ve experienced, not necessarily the years of experience or the consistency [with] which you’ve been in a role,” said Bojan Balaban, VP of people operations at Verano.At From Day One’s Chicago HR conference, Balaban and a panel of other HR leaders spoke about “Recognizing Skills and Potential: Building a More Agile Workforce.” Michelle Relerford, weekday morning co-anchor at NBC 5 Chicago, moderated the session.Building a Skills-first WorkforceAs AI becomes integral to the workforce, employee skills are more important than ever for both organizational and personal growth. “You still need the skill set to tell the AI what the output is, and that’s the skill set that we’re trying to build in my organization,” Balaban said. “It’s not replacing the human capital; it’s just changing how we’re using it, and it’s going to make us more efficient as we grow and expand our business.” To build a skills-first workforce, Balaban says HR needs to meet with leadership to understand the nature of the work and what each role requires. “You need to start with partnering with the right leaders, figuring out what they’re trying to build out, and then you need to think about the workforce that we currently have in place. How do we identify which employees have what skill sets for these roles?” Creating a skills-based model takes time and requires leadership buy-in. “We need managers to be educated to pick up on certain skill sets to be able to identify who’s doing something well, or even more difficult, who has the potential to learn something and grow.” As the nature of work changes, so does who is qualified. “Are you seeing a meaningful shift away from the traditional qualifications like degrees or job titles or years of experience toward demonstrated skills and capabilities?” asked Relerford. The answer is complicated. “Particularly at the executive level, those things still matter. The difference now is not just what have you done, but what can you do next?” said Aram Lulla, managing partner, executive search at LHH. Hiring managers are paying even more attention to impact. “Did you lead through change? Did you face a lot of diverse situations? Did you have adverse situations you led through? How did you go about that? And ultimately, what was the net outcome? More and more, what we see now is that the people that are most successful in terms of candidates aren’t always the ones with the most linear resumes.”Adaptability will also be key for leadership roles, as the workplace, and technology’s role in it, changes rapidly. “You’re looking for them to be able to mobilize teams and work in different project groups, not just be linear in their thought in their line of business,” Lulla said. Panelists spoke about "Recognizing Skills and Potential: Building a More Agile Workforce" in Chicago To identify these skills, organizations need to invest in technology that tracks and measures them. “You want to look at what is going to be the best fit based on what we need and then find the technology for it. You don’t want to find the technology and then force your business to work on the technology for you,” Balaban said. That includes tailoring workplace communications to your employees' actual lives and workdays, such as providing breakroom signage for frontline workers who might not have constant access to email for updates. Some of that data might come out of recognition moments, says Omar Pradhan, employee engagement & HR technology strategist at Workhuman. “These are the observed skills that are organically captured in peer-to-peer moments. And so, when you accumulate those over many years, you’re able to then mine that for who might be a good fit for an open role,” he said, noting that agentic search can help comb through the records for a match. “There’s a tremendous opportunity for organizations to not just rely on those self-reported skills that are traditionally captured in those HRS systems, but what are the organic ways in which skills are being displayed in the recognition data.” Rethinking Learning and DevelopmentKatie Stangel, VP of learning and development at The Aspen Group, and her team have used a combination of AI and in-person conversations to analyze job descriptions and sort each role’s skills into four buckets: ownership, decision-making, hierarchy/timing, and business impact. She finds a skills-based approach has created clarity in conversations around promotions and internal growth. “I actually saw that lattice approach coming to life in the conversations because now people are talking about development and growth in their skills and what that could be in the future, and it might not be that ladder approach to career. It actually might mean moving into a totally different department,” she said. “Everything that we do from a learning and development perspective has some component of AI in it,” said Kristy Callahan, head of learning & development at GE HealthCare. “We are proud to say it’s about doing more with less.” It may take time to get employees to fully buy-in to AI, given the fears around it, so HR and leaders need to work hard to help workers understand how it can make their jobs better, not take them away. “You need psychological safety; that tends to get people to lean in more and experiment” with AI, Pradhan said, which ties back to recognition. “They’re not going to do that if they haven’t been seen and appreciated.” Monthly recognition is tied directly to higher reported psychological safety, he says. Change management stories tied to AI adoption, demonstrating and celebrating those who integrated AI into their workflow, can “create a sense of community and shared purpose that becomes this reinforcing mechanism.” In the face of all this technology, Callahan said, “What we need more than ever is humans. What truly makes us human? Our soft skills, the things that people brushed aside before. Those will become the differentiators.” Discernment and judgment, she says, will matter, especially among young workers who may rely too heavily on AI without thinking critically about its results. And leadership skills will always be a priority. “It’s distinctly human to actually lead. AI is not going to help set your culture for the organization. AI is not going to help inspire confidence in your teams or get everyone aligned on one mission, vision, or value system proposition,” Lulla said. “And that’s where the future will show in five years that we’re really putting that same premium on those types of skill sets.” 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)
The New Talent Equation: Hiring Leaders and Building Cultures That Keep Them
BY Carrie Snider October 14, 2026Employees want to know what a company stands for and whether its actions reflect its values. Courtni Hughes-Bochenek, SVP, head of people & culture at Zeller, says workers increasingly research companies before deciding where to work and whether to stay. “People really dig into the research,” she said. “They want to know: Are you talking about things, and are you also living it?”Hiring and retaining great employees takes more than competitive pay and the latest technology. During a panel discussion at From Day One’s Chicago HR conference, Hughes-Bochenek and four other panelists took the stage to discuss building trusting workplace cultures, adopting AI thoughtfully, and keeping people at the center of business decisions. Build a Culture Employees Can TrustCulture must go beyond a mission statement, says Hughes-Bochenek. Employees notice whether leaders follow through on promises, recognize contributions and demonstrate genuine care.That consistency matters even more as organizations introduce AI and employees worry about job security. Workers also expect work-life balance, she added, and recognize when company messaging doesn't match reality. Leaders build trust through honest communication, meaningful engagement and everyday actions that show employees they are valued.Let AI Adoption Grow OrganicallyAt Ideal Industries Inc., AI adoption has grown through employee curiosity rather than a company-wide mandate. Panelist Michele Miller, SVP and CHRO, says that the company started with about 30 Microsoft Copilot users. Adoption has since grown to 20% of the workforce as employees shared successful use cases with colleagues.“It was done in a more organic way,” Miller said. “Individuals that were interested in using the tool and creating the adoption, they went and told their friends, ‘Here’s how I’m using this, and we let it grow.’”Patricia Garland, author, journalist, and adjunct instructor at Loyola University Chicago, moderated the session among leadersAI helps employees reduce repetitive tasks and focus on higher-value work. Miller cited writing job descriptions as one example of a task the technology can speed up. The company also uses AI to help develop The Forge, its gamified leadership training program.Adoption works best when employees see AI as a way to improve their jobs, she added, not replace them. That human purpose remains central to the company's approach.Prioritize Human ConnectionPanelist Nicole Rogers, COO of whiskerDocs, emphasized that retaining talent means recognizing employees as humans with responsibilities beyond work, including caring for family members and pets.“The key to that really is building trust, and you do that by looking at them as a whole person,” Rogers said.Small gestures, such as acknowledging an employee’s pets or children, can strengthen workplace relationships. Rogers cautioned that rapid technological change can undermine those connections if leaders lose sight of the people behind the work.“We run the risk in a time when things are moving so fast, and we’re deploying so much technology, of forgetting the person on the other end,” she said.At whiskerDocs, AI supports data analytics and clinical guidelines, but people still handle customer concerns. Genuine care and flexibility can go a long way in helping employees manage life’s challenges and do their best work.Use AI to Free Employees for Higher-value WorkAt United Airlines, AI is a tool for improving work, not eliminating jobs. Panelist Krista Fischer, managing director of HR, says the company is exploring how automation can free employees from repetitive tasks so they can focus on strategic work.Workers at United don’t worry about AI replacing their often specialized roles. “For us, AI hasn’t been scary,” Fischer said. Instead, the focus is on “how is AI going to make my life easier, and how is it going to free up time for me to think in a different way?”She experienced those benefits firsthand when she used AI to teach herself Python coding and conduct an employee attrition analysis. A task that might have taken eight hours took about 15 minutes, though she still had to review and validate the results.As AI makes technical tasks more accessible, United is placing greater emphasis on curiosity, judgment, care and the ability to evaluate AI-generated work responsibly.Prioritize Education and People-centered LeadershipPanelist Kase Konkright, founder of Signal & Strand, said many organizations need practical AI education before investing in expensive tools or making staffing decisions. His firm helps clients identify useful, ethical, and affordable ways to adopt the technology.“The best people right now are really just asking the questions of how do we use it to enhance the experience? How do we use it to enhance their jobs and not replace the people in the process?” Konkright asked.He cautioned that AI-generated information isn’t always accurate and cannot replace human judgment. HR teams can help organizations navigate adoption by educating employees, communicating expectations and keeping workplace culture in mind. “It’s really just people that can lead their people through the journey,” Konkright said.Konkright also noted that AI can help managers remember important dates and employee needs, strengthening personal connections rather than weakening them.The new talent equation combines technology with trust, curiosity and human connection, the panelists agreed. Through intentionally focusing on good company culture, organizations can better retain employees. AI can improve efficiency, but leaders determine whether it strengthens workplace culture and helps employees grow.Carrie Snider is a Phoenix-based journalist and marketing copywriter.(Photo by Josh Larson for From Day One)
Building Resilience Amid Workplace Change
BY Ade Akin October 13, 2026Norah Larke sees an opportunity for Wintrust Financial Corporation to prepare thoughtfully for AI before its effects reach the broader workforce. Larke, the company’s EVP and chief HR officer, began by building a risk framework and governance structure to guide the technology’s adoption.With a workforce that has already navigated years of change and growth through mergers and acquisitions, Larke has focused on getting the organization ready for what comes next. “We know it’s coming and it’s coming like a freight train,” she said. “So we’re just trying to get ready,” she said during an executive panel discussion about navigating change fatigue at From Day One’s Chicago HR conference. The four panelists, in a conversation moderated by Kim Quillen, business editor at the Chicago Tribune, explored how people leaders can keep teams grounded as AI adoption adds another layer of change to the workplace.Living Inside Constant ChangeWhat sets this moment apart is the missing finish line, says Laura Cheesewright, global principal consultant at Unmind. Organizations once managed people from point A to point B. Now there is no point B, and employees are asked to keep working through change without knowing where it leads. “There’s a tremendous amount of ambiguity around what the future of work is going to look like,” Cheesewright said.The psychological impact is outpacing the operational impact across Unmind’s client base. Anxiety and burnout are up, and people are struggling to stay connected to purpose and meaning, says Cheesewright. Cheesewright describes burnout as “a chronic imbalance between job demand and job support.” Demand keeps climbing, and much of that pressure can’t be removed, so she encourages organizations to raise the support side of the equation.Leading Without All the AnswersEmployees often look to their leaders for answers, and this time leaders won’t have them all. “This is truly a leadership moment, and leadership capability is going to become crucial,” she said. The skills she expects leaders to need most are “clarity, transparency, communication, and the ability to just build confidence in people.”Candor is part of that confidence. Cheesewright says the most trustworthy thing a leader can do is sometimes say they don’t know. Leaders can still offer certainty about processes when they can’t guarantee outcomes. Resilience is “the ability to stay connected to your capabilities when you’re under pressure,” she said.Executive panelists shared insights during the session, "Change Fatigue Is Real: How Leaders Can Keep Teams Adapting"David Loiselle, managing partner at the Leadership Pipeline Institute, encourages organizations to change the question they ask leaders about AI. “The question should start with how are you enabling your team to do their work with these tools and changes,” he said. Faster tools make an old trap more tempting, he says: leaders stepping down to do their team’s work.Austin Mace, VP, and change catalyst at Dentsu, works within teams like a player-coach. “There’s a big difference between mandating and educating folks on how to use these tools,” Mace said. His group shadows employees on the job and shows them where AI can lift tasks off their plates. “I really don’t think it’s an efficiency conversation,” he said. “It’s a new capability.”Hiring for Human SkillsQuillen then turned to talent acquisition and what employers should look for now. Wintrust is working toward a skills-based hiring framework, a multi-year effort that Larke wants to accelerate as AI reshapes jobs. Culture fit will stay in the equation, she says, because the community-based organization needs people who live its values.Which skills matter is the harder question. “I think it’s human skills,” Loiselle said. The question is personal for him, with a 5-year-old son and an 8-year-old daughter growing up alongside AI. He lists learning agility, judgment, decision-making, and curiosity, and rejects the idea that AI allows companies to hire only generalists. “The specialist is more important today than ever because they’re the ones that hold judgment,” he said.Mace tested that thinking this summer when he hired four interns. Some applicants knew programming languages and how to build agentic systems, he says, but what really impressed him was how candidates carried themselves in interviews and where curiosity had taken them outside the classroom.AI is also reshaping both candidate selection and the hiring process. With applicants using AI to strengthen their applications and employers using it to evaluate candidates, one-on-one conversations are becoming increasingly important for getting to know candidates beyond what their applications reveal.Larke also sees an opening for current employees. “This is probably a huge opportunity for internal mobility,” she said. Employers know far more about their own people than about outside applicants, yet often second-guess insiders and gamble on outsiders. “Look at the data you have internally and make the decision there,” said Loiselle. “Your predictability is much better.”Spending on Tools, Not PeopleAt a time when budgets are tight and companies are investing more in technology, investing in the people expected to use it is just as important. Without the right support and training, even the most advanced tools may fall short of their potential.“I almost think we’re over-investing in the tools at the moment and under-investing in the people that need to use those tools,” said Cheesewright. Returns are lagging as well. Only 37% of respondents say AI has contributed to their organization's Earnings Before Interest and Taxes (EBIT), according to McKinsey's 2026 survey on the state of AI. Loiselle sees the gap as a sign that executives need to explain why the organization is using AI, whether for better customer service or faster turnaround.Asked who owns the return on AI, Loiselle separates responsibility from accountability. Accountability for a business decision probably rolls to the top, he says. Responsibility differs at each level, and the people using the tools probably drive the value in the end.Make Change Less ScaryAsked how well-being strategies can keep people engaged and away from burnout, Mace says his team deliberately gives employees room to step away from daily work and learn the tools, often at in-person “makeathons” built on fun and community.Quillen closed by asking each panelist for one practice that protects productivity during rapid change. Mace recommends a workplace that’s safe for failure and experimentation. Cheesewright advises leaders to “create certainty where you can” by spelling out the process and exactly what they're asking people to do. “It’ll ground people,” she said.Larke’s answer was to simplify. “One of the things that’s really important when it comes to change is to make it less scary,” she said. “Don’t try to teach everything at once.”Loiselle translated simplicity into a single action: “put the right work with the right people.” When work lands with whoever grabs it first, he says, everyone else is left wondering what their role is. “Don’t let the work get absorbed by people just for the sake of speed,” he said.Ade Akin covers artificial intelligence, workplace wellness, HR trends, and digital health solutions.(Photos by Josh Larson for From Day One)
Keeping Care at the Center of the Future of Work
BY Katie Chambers October 13, 2026“A core part of Hyatt’s mission is caring for people,” said moderator Kim Quillen, business editor at the Chicago Tribune. This can become more difficult in an AI-driven world, where efficiency sometimes seems to take precedence over human connection. How can organizations care for people and help them do their best as technology reshapes work? During a fireside chat at From Day One’s Chicago HR conference, Kristin Oliver, the CHRO of Hyatt, discussed a people-first approach to an AI world, including how leaders can build agility and comfort with new technology, and prepare for a workforce that increasingly works alongside machines.Helping People Be Their Best“We care for people so they can be their best” is Hyatt’s mission, guiding both colleague and customer relations through the same equation: empathy + action = care, says Oliver. “How do you understand what people want, what they need, and then how do you act upon it? In doing those two things together, that’s how you show care for someone,” Oliver said.Care for people is, in some ways, intrinsic to the hospitality industry. But, “we’re in this era of rapid change and AI and technological advancements. How do you bring that human touch?” Quillen asked. This is where AI’s hyper-efficiency can become a benefit. “We’ve got to find a way to use AI to free up time so that we can spend more time on genuine human connection,” Oliver said. This is especially important in an industry responsible for customers’ comfort and building meaningful experiences.This culture of care is embedded into Hyatt’s enterprise leadership program, Elevate 2030. “It has three pillars: Elevate Our Brands, Elevate Our People, Elevate Our Technology. And so, the enterprise leadership is also a statement of what we need to do from a human perspective to make that happen, to bring that strategy to life,” Oliver said.Kristin Oliver, Chief HR Officer at Hyatt, was interviewed by Kim Quillen, Business Editor at the Chicago Tribune, during the fireside chat The program encourages experimentation, nurtures growing talent, and fosters cross-department collaboration. Employees complete self-evaluations tied to specific mindsets and behaviors, which they then discuss during mid-year conversations with managers. The organization also launched a speaker series wherein leaders discuss their own experiences and talk about the behaviors, she says. The first session had more than 1,000 online attendees. “I think people are hungry for it. Eventually we’ll work it into our hiring practices, our performance management, our succession planning, and training.”The Changing Role of HRCollaboration between IT and HR will become more important than ever as technology continues to change how we work, says Oliver. “We have to deeply familiarize ourselves with [AI] as leaders. We have to experience it ourselves so that we really know how it’s going to shape things, because we’re going to be responsible for determining what are the impacts on skills, on jobs, on org design, [and] on culture.” Oliver did this herself by experimenting with an AI executive coach to help with decision-making. She cautions that AI doesn’t always get things right, but it can do many basic tasks quite well, allowing humans to step in and refine the work. “Modern workplaces increasingly blend human talent with artificial intelligence, and that means that in the workplace, humans and smart systems are both sharing responsibilities,” Quillen said. The challenge is honing a strategy that allows workplaces to take advantage of the best of both. Oliver says AI’s strength is its speed and efficiency for simple but time-consuming tasks like writing reports. Human workers “are the people that exercise judgment. We are the people that bring creativity. We are the ones that show empathy and are perceptive, and those are all very important skills.” At Hyatt, encouraging AI adoption has meant moving beyond counting licenses and tracking usage to helping employees understand how the technology can make their work easier. Oliver emphasized the importance of starting with employees’ actual challenges: “If somebody has a problem and you can show them how AI will solve this problem, they’ll be much more interested in learning it.” Hyatt’s approach includes sharing real-world examples of AI use during leadership meetings and introducing structured OpenAI training to help employees build their skills. The goal is to give people the tools and confidence to see how AI can make a difference in their day-to-day work, without fear of it replacing roles. One of the most obvious ways AI can support HR is through the recruiting process, as its high-speed and high-volume nature pairs well with the tech’s automation capabilities. But its ability to let candidates tailor and submit applications quickly can also challenge HR. “The volume of what we’re dealing with and how we have to sort through it to get to people that are the right fit for our job and our company—it has muddied the waters,” Oliver said. “We can outsource some of the process, but not the responsibility.” She still looks to internships and apprenticeships to really get to know and test candidates to see if they are a fit for growth within the organization. Oliver identifies a few major human skills as integral to succeeding in the workplace of the future: “The world is changing fast and it just keeps speeding up. So the ability to adapt and change, learn, be open-minded, experiment with things, [and] have a growth mindset” will be crucial, as will be the ability to judge and think critically, including and especially about AI-created solutions. The innate human ability to care should remain front and center in HR and leadership, as it does in Hyatt’s mission, says Oliver. “Talk to people. See what they really value about the company. See where there are problems or areas of friction that you could make [better]. And then try to turn that into decisions. Try to make it true. You’ve got to act consistently with it. You don’t want it to just be something on the wall. It’s about how you bring that to life.” 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 HR Can Prepare for the Next Era of Work
BY Jessica Swenson October 12, 2026To ease common anxieties about AI in the workplace, Kathi Moore, SVP of HR at Motorola Solutions, recommends experimenting with the technology personally to build confidence in using it.She also used AI to help navigate conversations with physicians while a family member was dealing with an illness. “Since then I’ve seen how [AI] can help me, and that’s always been my attitude. [AI] is not always right, but it’s this iterative tool that I can bounce ideas off of and utilize,” she said during a fireside chat at From Day One’s Chicago HR conference. Moore discussed this and other best practices for integrating AI into HR capabilities in the session moderated by NBC5 News anchor Stefan Holt.Motorola Solutions is an offshoot of Motorola’s consumer phone business focused on mission-critical radio, software dispatch, and video security supporting the safety of first responders and communities. The organization uses an AI governance board to oversee AI use across the company, especially with the growth of internal adoption in 2025.Moore avoided the fear often associated with AI, instead assessing it as an option to support her HR team. “I looked at it from a lens of ‘this is going to help us because we’re asked to do a lot every day, and we’re so lean, and you hear about burnout and anxiety all the time.’ So I took the approach of, ‘let’s learn about this, and how it can help us.’”To assuage employee fears, she encourages minimizing exposure to the constant flow of news and social media dialogue around AI, and focusing on what aligns with the company’s needs and values. “You’re getting all this information all the time,” she said, “and it’s just increasing anxiety. Every week we hear something new. It’s all over the map, and you have to turn down the noise.”Kathi Moore, SVP of HR at Motorola Solutions, spoke with moderator Stefan Holt, Anchor at NBC5 NewsWhen determining where AI might fit into an organization, says Moore, leaders must look at whether it aligns with the company’s culture. “You should be questioning, ‘Can AI do this? But then again, even though AI could do it, you have to think about your culture and what makes sense for your company, and that’s going to really drive the decision. Just because everyone else is doing it doesn’t mean you should. It’s not always good to be first.”Preserving human judgment as a key part of the process is also critical, acknowledging that AI is not always right. “Everyone has a responsibility to not just take it at face value, and still use judgment.”The company’s external AI products are branded as “AI Assist” because they are designed to assist first responders, not be the first responder. “We still have the person as the first responder because of our culture, and because we have a responsibility out there to our communities,” she said. Her team uses AI as an internal first responder to answer routine self-service questions for employees. This helps reduce repetitive questions and saves the team’s time and energy for higher-impact critical moments. However, Moore still contends that it is important to know when to prioritize human connection. “We don’t want AI for everything,” she said. Sharing an example of a Friday after-hours episode involving a new executive order on H-1B visas and employee travel, her team initially considered using an automated platform to communicate the changes but ultimately realized the situation called for a human touch. “People were very emotional and scared, and we weren’t going to point them towards this site. We were on the phone with these folks. I was personally on the phone with them, talking to individuals, calming them down, putting them at ease,” Moore said.As the influence of AI continues to grow, the next generation’s core professional skills will need to evolve, says Moore. “Emotional intelligence, definitely communication, judgment skills. Being able to question—not look at something and just take it at face value, but be able to challenge it.”Acknowledging that people are becoming increasingly isolated, Moore emphasized the need for empathy and human connection. “We forget that we are social beings, and that we still need to come together and use these great tools to help us solve the problems,” she said. “If we continue to go out in the workforce, in our communities, in our societies, and we have the attitude of wanting good for the other, I think we’re going to get through this just fine.”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)
Power Moves: The People Side of Transformation
BY Ade Akin October 12, 2026A drone equipped with AI-powered facial recognition technology flies over a utility pole to detect rot. If the pole is sound, the crew stays on the ground, the truck stays parked, nobody loses power, and the pole gets another look in six months. At Exelon, some of the people writing business cases for that kind of technology are interns.Jaclyn Trovato, the head of employee experience and analytics at Exelon, shared the example to make a point about AI adoption: it depends on people. “If people don’t adopt AI, the technology is useless,” she said.Trovato spoke during a fireside chat at From Day One’s Chicago HR conference, in a session titled, “Power Moves: The People Side of Transformation,” moderated by Patricia Garland, adjunct instructor at Loyola University Chicago. Trovato shared insights from her role that combines traditional data sets, AI and analytics, and change management for the energy company’s 20,000 employees, who range from timekeepers and overhead electricians to executives and lawyers. “Putting the human in human resources is something that we try to prioritize at Exelon,” she said.Use Cases From the Office to the FieldExelon’s AI use cases include the familiar ones, such as an employee chatbot that answers questions about vacation days and lifts administrative work off HR. “But some of the most exciting use cases are for our employees in the field and for our customers,” Trovato said. Skipping an unnecessary pole replacement pays off three ways. “We’ve been more efficient in the use of our employees. We’ve made people safer, and we’ve reduced the costs that we have to pass along to our customers,” she said.Jaclyn Trovato, Head of Employee Experience and Analytics at Exelon, right, spoke with moderator Patricia Garland, Adjunct Instructor, Loyola University ChicagoSmall gains in operational efficiency add up at a regulated utility. Exelon distributes power but doesn’t control its price, Trovato says. Saving a minute or two of an outage, or a few dollars on a repair, multiplies across the millions of customers Exelon serves in Illinois and the millions more served by its five East Coast utilities.A Chatbot Built on Bad DataTrovato’s biggest early lesson regarding AI is that bad data turns a time-saver into a liability. When a model pulls from a policy library cluttered with outdated versions, an employee can act on a rule that changed years ago, and a tool meant to speed things up ends up producing an investigation instead. “And that was not the point. The point was to get the information to someone more quickly,” she said.“One of the biggest mistakes we had in HR was that we launched a chatbot, but we launched it without ensuring that it was guardrailed within the most recent policies and procedures, the most accurate information, and then also that all of the user personas were correct,” Trovato added.Exelon’s answer was to pause and launch another data governance initiative. “We’re not building anything more until we can tell you the source of all the data, what systems every piece of data feeds in or out of, and what exactly this model is going to pull,” she said. The audit is complicated because Exelon grew through mergers and acquisitions, leaving legacy systems and benefit rules that vary by hire date.The relaunched chatbot will also route information according to who is logged in, and employees must ask questions for themselves, which Trovato says can take the burden off HR and managers. “Everyone’s information can be personalized based on their persona, and so everyone has to become a user,” she said.Training for Skills That StickExelon’s AI training borrows from its apprenticeship programs, which qualify construction workers for overhead or underground electrician work. Those programs pushed the company to study adult learning. “If an adult doesn’t use a skill very quickly after learning it, they will not have the ability to retain that information nearly as well as a child will,” Trovato said.Training is therefore timed to real work. During a current organizational optimization initiative, HR staff were trained on the tools they would be using to support their clients just ahead of the meetings. For dangerous field work, virtual reality offers a rehearsal. “We’ve used a lot of virtual reality training in order to put people in a position where before they do something dangerous, they are in a sandbox where they can do that thing a lot more safely,” Trovato said.For workers who worry the technology will take their jobs, the simulations make the opposite case. “This is going to make you better at your job and safer at your job. And then you show them that, and that’s how you gain trust,” she said.Peer learning does its own trust-building. For a couple of hours a week, employees can drop into a virtual room to trade methods for stubborn tasks. Trovato likes the community practice model because attendance is voluntary. “It’s your peers. You’ve all chosen to come together. No one’s made you come to this room,” she said.Safety as Step ZeroExelon’s safety priority shapes how employees respond to AI guidance. “We come from a place of safety is step zero. Nothing happens unless we feel we can execute on it safely,” Trovato said.Exelon once ran the largest fleet of nuclear power plants in the U.S., she says, and crews there learned a three-part communication protocol: one person gives an instruction, the other repeats it back, and the first confirms before anyone acts. That habit now applies to AI output. “When a system gives you a piece of information, you have to gut check it. You have to make sure it’s right,” she said.The same rigor makes field employees slower to trust a new tool, while corporate employees are more willing to take risks. Trovato values the tension, with field-based workers reminding office-based colleagues that “job one is still always safety.”Trust Your Own CultureAsked what she would tell HR leaders who are just starting out, Trovato cautions against buying tools out of fear of falling behind. “Take a minute to decide what works for your organization,” she said. “As HR practitioners, we know our culture. We know what works for our employees.”A sound foundation, Trovato says, comes down to “good data governance, employees who understand why you’re investing in this technology, and then responsible guardrails.” Garland added a fourth element: existing trust with employees. Trovato agreed, noting that people won’t embrace a technology pitched as a way to halve the staff. Employees need to understand that “this is an investment in them, not so that you need fewer of them, but so that they can be doing the more interesting work,” she said.Ade Akin covers artificial intelligence, workplace wellness, HR trends, and digital health solutions.(Photos by Josh Larson for From Day One)
Betting on Existing Talent: Internal Mobility as the Answer to AI Disruption
BY Katie Chambers October 09, 2026“A lot of companies see AI as something that comes in from the outside, takes over, and takes away jobs,” said moderator Maiken Scott, host and executive producer of WHYY, The Pulse. But TIAA “has made a very conscious effort to approach this topic differently,” Scott said during a fireside chat at From Day One’s Philadelphia conference. During the fireside chat, Claire Borelli, chief people officer at TIAA, was interviewed by Scott, sharing how the century-old institution is rethinking career development for the AI era and moving away from default external hiring toward a deliberate, internal-first strategy. The Partnership of HR and TechnologyOne rule has been the driving force behind TIAA’s strategy: “We knew we didn’t want AI to happen to our associates; we wanted to bring them along,” Borelli said. This meant developing a partnership between the organization’s HR and technology functions. “There was no way we could relegate all the AI transformation work that had to happen to IT. When you think about the impact that it’s going to have on human capital, how jobs are going to be formed, how jobs are going to change, and what jobs might even go away—with that comes the notion of how important internal mobility is,” Borelli said. “Because if we’re going to bring people along, then we need to make sure [that] as we reshape jobs, we’re preparing them how to fit into those new reshaped jobs.” Borelli and her team were transparent with workers: because of AI, certain roles would change. But with internal mobility as a top priority, they would help employees find new pathways within the company. TIAA launched a program called Elevate, which educated workers on the skills and understanding needed to use AI and made internal mobility part of the company’s core infrastructure. “We pulled recruiters offline and said, ‘You’re going to be completely focused on internal mobility. You’re going to find jobs for those people in our organization as opposed to external [candidates].” Elevate includes a proprietary AI tool called MYGAIT, which all employees are encouraged to use and learn from. “We made sure that every associate had the ability to touch AI,” Borelli said.One of the biggest learning moments for employees has been seeing how they can grow their careers outside their own function. “They don’t necessarily realize that people in a contact center may end up getting a job in internal audit. People in technology may end up getting a job in the people team. Those types of things become uncovered as we use this tool.”How HR Is Approaching AIInitially, most organizations saw AI as a tool to make individuals more efficient: writing better emails, creating cleaner slide decks, and more. “Now, what we’re doing is we're realizing AI needs to be leveraged differently in TIAA and all companies. We need operational leverage,” Borelli said. “How are we going to change processes? How are we going to have better revenue opportunities?” Each group within TIAA has AI use cases. For HR, that means “understanding what does that mean to the people in [each department]? What jobs are going to go away? What capabilities are going to be different? And then how do we prepare them?”While AI might eliminate some job functions, it also creates opportunities for workers to focus on and develop the uniquely human skills AI may never replace. “It’s enabling associates to focus on things like judgment, problem-solving, complexity, and relationship-building,” she said. Claire Borelli, Chief People Officer at TIAA, left, spoke with Maiken Scott, Host and Executive Producer, WHYY, The Pulse, during the fireside chat in PhiladelphiaIn terms of how the job market might change going forward, “I do believe that to some degree corporate structures are not going to look exactly the way they look today,” Borelli said. For one thing, she feels job titles will matter less than they do now, as workers move from one role to another to focus on individual projects rather than staying stuck in certain silos. This is a good thing, she says. “I can now get exposure in things I never would have gotten before, and I can help the organization solve problems that we weren’t able to solve.” This leaves employees feeling empowered and helps to form partnerships between departments rather than friction. TIAA’s new strategy is working, she says. This year alone, 17% of associations have had an internal mobility opportunity. Overall, the company’s internal mobility rate is 45%, compared to the industry average of 27%. She says this is partly because it’s no longer just an HR initiative. “We put in quarterly mobility targets for our [department] leaders. Now everybody’s paying attention,” she said. They’ve also launched an internal communications strategy around the initiative. “We have a thing called Faces of TIAA, where we focus on the individual that got the job, and then we also focus on the leader that helped them get it.”This is a very exciting time to be in HR, “I feel as though we’re the leader. At the end of the day, this is not a technology play. It’s a human capital play,” Borelli said. 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)
The AI-Enabled Workforce: Redefining How People and Technology Work Together
BY Jessica Swenson October 08, 2026There’s no doubt that some elements of business will always need a human touch, regardless of how efficient AI can make us. “In a world where all the popular media is saying, ‘What are we going to automate? What are we going to streamline? What are we going to change?’ I have really had a lot of success flipping that question and saying, what needs to remain radically human and why?” said Christopher Rosett, head of global workforce design at Vanguard. He encourages companies to reflect on their competitive advantage and their risk tolerance when considering how to integrate AI into their operations. The delicate balance between human and machine was the topic of a panel moderated by Philadelphia Inquirer reporter Ximena Conde at From Day One’s Philadelphia conference.By embracing a strategy of elevating human potential at the “intersection of human capital and digital capital,” Jonelle Coletta Parker, SVP of the HR, research, development, & commercialization people organization at Bristol Myers Squibb (BMS), said her organization is seeing faster, higher-quality outcomes, including improved patient outcomes. Parker shared that BMS has “recently launched the equivalent of an augmented GPT, which means that some of the members of that team are in fact digitized.” This method has magnified the teams’ workforce intelligence, she says, “because instead of having one person who represents the medical or the clinical development team, you have this agent who's able to pull from many, many places.”Ximena Conde, reporter at the Philadelphia Inquirer, moderated the sessionPanelists widely agreed that AI is appropriate for repetitive, continuous work that doesn’t require human nuance and judgment. Catherine DaGrossa, corporate VP of HR for New York Life sees value in using AI to identify, synthesize, and analyze data patterns and create simulations. But since her company is accountable to policy owners over the long term, it is careful about where it fits AI into its processes.“We have to really think about where we’re willing to put a machine in between us and our customers,” she said, “and the moments that matter most to families, we’re not willing.” That’s why humans are still connected at touchpoints that can create or lose trust, like claim decisions and performance reviews. That said, New York Life’s most-used AI agent, with 7,000 employee and 9,000 leader hits, was built for performance review season; it helps both employees and leaders prepare for review conversations. Getting data into the hands of customer-facing operations, increased expertise in actuarial and underwriting, and improved sales data are some key areas Matt Geis, SVP of HR at Lincoln Financial Group cited as ripe for AI integration. “I think about product manufacturing and being able to more quickly do pricing analysis or product redesign so that we can be faster or nimbler in the marketplace,” said Geis. “Being able to make your sales force that much better with where they're going, and what data they're bringing once they get there—it's invaluable.”Acknowledging employee fears and the potentially divisive nature of AI, empathy and effective change management emerged as common themes among panelists. Samantha Davis, CIO, Americas, at Arkema, reflected on a Microsoft CoWork pilot that shortened a monthly FP&A report timeline from 5–7 days to 30–45 seconds. This caused fear among the team historically responsible for this report.“That’s a really real fear. It’s something they’re feeling. It’s not right or wrong, and it’s real for them at that moment.” Davis said. “So I think when we show things like that, preparing for who the audience is and the possible outcomes of sharing that, so you can anticipate from a point of possible empathy or information, is really important.”DaGrossa described the challenge as a “change management problem disguised in a technology costume.” She suggests easing up on ambition and speed to ensure adequate training and authentic engagement.Geis emphasizes that AI use is a journey, comparing it to the advent of the internet and asserting that humans are resilient and adaptable. “Once you start using the tool and realizing what it can do and how it can make your job easier,” he said, “When employees start to see that, that gives time for people to develop, to learn, and to see how it can make their jobs better.”As workflows change and AI becomes more ubiquitous, roles and performance evaluation will also shift. Parker says that real-time data is helping provide more clarity on what people are actually measured against. As the volume of curricula production has increased for BMS’s commercial learning group, the team was initially fearful that an AI agent would create all content and eliminate their roles. But it turned out that their human ability to distill science-dense content into user-friendly learning materials is invaluable.As organizations and employees adjust to these new ways of working, Rosett encourages people to remember that many of the tasks teams are used to doing still need to be done—the focus on how to do them is just changing. “If you’re feeling a little bit intimidated by all this tech stuff, and the terms,” he said, “know that a lot of the really core foundational strategic work that HR has been good at for a really long time is critical to how AI is going to get enabled in your organization. That’s a really important place where we’re focusing energy in upskilling how HR can show up and help.”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)
Supporting and Retaining the Frontline Workers Who Keep the Business Moving
BY Carrie Snider October 08, 2026Frontline workers keep businesses moving, yet they can be among the hardest employees to engage and retain. At the From Day One’s Philadelphia conference, a panel of HR and workforce leaders explored practical ways employers can better recognize, support and retain these essential employees.Their advice pointed to a common theme: Retention starts with creating a workplace where frontline workers feel heard, supported, connected and genuinely valued.Listen, Then ActFor Burlington Stores VP of HR Cora Claus, retaining frontline employees starts with a simple but often overlooked step: listening to what they need.Having supported both store associates and corporate employees, Claus understands the divide between frontline and office environments. She encourages leaders to ask employees what would make a difference in their work lives, then take action where possible. “It’s asking the question, listening, and then being able to actually take action where you can and explaining why you can’t when you can't,” Claus said.That might mean adjusting schedules to give employees more hours or making it easier for them to pick up additional shifts. The key is identifying practical solutions rather than assuming every concern requires a major policy change.Ariella Cohen, deputy managing editor, news, at the Philadelphia Inquirer, moderated the session titled, "Frontline Focus: Recognizing and Retaining the Workers Who Keep Business Running"Recognition also needs to become part of the daily routine, even when managers are juggling competing priorities. With up to 100,000 associates across its stores, Burlington faces the challenge of making meaningful connections at scale.Claus says that successful locations often have leaders who take time to know their employees personally. Instead of immediately listing the day's tasks, a manager might ask about an employee's daughter's birthday party. “It’s those simple steps of actually acknowledging the people who are doing the hard work for you,” Claus said. Those small moments of connection can help employees feel valued, strengthening engagement and giving them more reasons to stay.Support Financial Well-BeingFor frontline workers, financial stress can have a direct impact on their experience at work. Catherine Whitelaw, VP of strategic sales and partnerships at DailyPay, says employers can help by offering benefits that give workers greater control over money they have already earned. “It’s their money, let them access it when they need it, not just on payday,” Whitelaw said.That flexibility can be particularly valuable for workers living paycheck to paycheck or juggling multiple jobs. Rather than turning to overdrafts or high-cost loans when an unexpected expense arises, workers can access earned wages when they need them.But Whitelaw says financial well-being goes beyond simply providing access to pay. Digital tools can give employees greater transparency into their earnings and help them build healthier financial habits through features such as savings tools and credit monitoring. “They have complete transparency on what they just earned,” she said.Workers who can see what they’ve earned may be more likely to pick up additional shifts because they can see their progress toward a financial goal, she says. For frontline employees balancing work and everyday financial pressures, giving them practical tools rather than simply telling them to “budget better” can make a meaningful difference. The result can be employees who feel more supported, more connected and more engaged with their workplace.Show Up and Communicate PurposeChristopher Rosett, head of global workforce design at Vanguard, says that connecting with frontline employees starts with leaders being willing to meet them where they work. Leaders should get out on the floor, visit call centers and spend time alongside the people doing the work, rather than sending an email.“There’s no reason you can’t put on some safety shoes and a vest or walk the floor,” Rosett said. “Go see them, go be with them, and be able to communicate that purpose.” That visibility helps leaders connect employees’ everyday responsibilities to the organization’s larger goals. It also creates opportunities to listen, answer questions and acknowledge that change won’t always go perfectly.Leaders should be transparent about that reality rather than pretending they have every answer, he says. “When organizations have trouble with change management, it’s not usually because people don’t like change. It’s because we didn’t communicate it well,” he said.That communication needs to continue throughout the organization, not rely solely on senior executives. Frontline leaders play an important role in helping employees understand what's changing, why it matters and what happens next.Use AI to Enhance RecognitionWorkhuman’s Employee Engagement & HR Technology Strategist, Omar Pradhan, said AI can make employee recognition more meaningful, but it shouldn’t replace the human connection behind it.He prefers AI to help employees add specificity and explain the impact of a colleague’s contribution. Over time, those individual moments can reveal larger patterns around skills, collaboration, company values and leadership potential.“AI shouldn’t be writing the message for the person,” Pradhan said. The recognition should come from the person who witnessed the work, while technology helps make the message more detailed and useful.That human element is especially important for frontline workers, whose managers may not see everything they accomplish. Pradhan recommends peer-to-peer recognition because coworkers are often present for the moments that managers miss. Managers can then add context about why the contribution mattered to the organization's larger purpose. “It’s the pure moment of appreciation with the detail and specificity that’s important to make them feel valued,” he said.The goal isn’t to automate appreciation, but to make it easier, more specific and more consistent, while using the resulting data to help leaders understand how employees are contributing and growing across the company.Across the panel session, the message was clear: Frontline retention is built through everyday experiences. Employees are more likely to stay when they understand why their work matters, have practical support, receive meaningful recognition and know their leaders are listening. Carrie Snider is a Phoenix-based journalist and marketing copywriter.(Photo by Josh Larson for From Day One)
Creating an Employee Experience That Works Across Generations
BY Grace Turney October 07, 2026Tara Karver was pitching a project her team had built to her CHRO when the conversation took a more candid turn. Karver, the head of HR for enterprise learning and skills at Pearson answered questions candidly, telling her CHRO that the questions were making her feel stressed. The call moved on.Days later, her CHRO told her that Pearson’s AI-powered Communication Coach had flagged the exchange as a missed opportunity: Karver’s honesty was a natural cue to pause and ask what was going on. Karver’s own copy of the coach had a suggestion for her, too: Be more direct and assertive when presenting material.“That’s where AI is so powerful, where it really connects humans and makes us better communicators,” Karver said, during an executive panel discussion at From Day One’s Philadelphia conference. Panelists shared how companies can create positive experiences for workers across generations, from benefits and recognition, to learning opportunities, and more. “People want to do a good job, and they want to be recognized for it,” Karver said. Preferences differ by career stage, though. Early-career employees want skill building, mid-career workers want leadership opportunities, and veterans want to mentor.Josette Jean-Francois, VP of talent management at B. Braun, sees younger employees reshaping how feedback flows. “They’re not waiting for feedback. They’re asking for feedback,” she said. They also want short, on-demand learning in place of eight-hour classes, and career moves that go sideways as well as up.Benefits for Every Life StageAllison Russell, VP of total rewards at Lincoln Financial Group, says generational labels do little for benefits design. Two Gen X employees can live very different lives: One cares for young children, another for aging parents, one is healthy and another is managing chronic illness. Employees now expect support well beyond the workplace, she says, at every life stage and event. The answer is a flexible ecosystem of programs, even though personalizing everything is administratively daunting.Panelists spoke about "Creating an Employee Experience That Works Across Generations" in PhiladelphiaAI could make that personalization practical. “We expect everything to be instantaneously at our fingertips,” Russell said, describing the shift from yesterday’s “Amazon experience” to today’s ChatGPT standard. The ideal, in her view, is a benefit that surfaces itself at the moment someone needs it, rather than a flyer that arrives after surgery.Transparency as a Focal PointMatt Sandler, global head of executive and equity compensation at Kenvue, focused on the importance of transparency. “If you’re removing a benefit or adding a benefit, just be transparent about why you’re making that change,” he said. He urged plain language over corporate lingo.He speaks from experience. Kenvue cut long-term incentives when it spun off from Johnson & Johnson, and it is now being acquired by Kimberly-Clark, a deal expected to close within months. Some employees’ pay will rise and some will fall. Sandler said the first cuts barely dented retention because the company explained them. “Amazingly, our attrition really didn’t go up,” he said.Sandler also offered a pay philosophy. If a company can exceed the market median on one component of compensation, he says, make it base salary, because cash matters in anxious times and base pay feeds into 401(k) and other benefits. He prefers giving larger long-term incentives to fewer people, noting that Kenvue’s all-employee equity award produced grants as small as $600 for some of its 22,000 recipients.Moderator Earl Hopkins, features reporter at the Philadelphia Inquirer, asked the panel about “the tension between what employees say they want and what the organizations themselves believe they need.” When employee preferences and business needs diverge, leaders have to make the case for what the organization needs while helping workers understand what’s at stake. That means spelling out the risks of standing still alongside the opportunities that change can create.Skills as a Business MetricCaitlin Collins, director of program strategy and outcomes at Betterworks, rejected the idea that development competes with performance. “They’re not really competing priorities,” said Collins, an organizational psychologist. She called evidence of skills a leading indicator of business outcomes. Companies that decouple the two see development fade, she said, because nobody tracks it.Karver urged leaders to name the skills they want, whether AI fluency or agility, and decide how to measure them. Sandler’s advice was to pick one or two tools to prioritize instead of eight.Measuring What AI DeliversMost employers can’t yet tell good AI use from busy AI use, says Russell. Lincoln Financial allocates tokens to employees and tracks consumption. “I don’t think most companies are doing that well yet,” she said. A worker who burns through every token may add less value than one who nails a few high-impact uses. Leading organizations are moving past utilization toward measuring value, and toward rewarding employees who share what they learn, says Collins. AI brings its own stress, panelists agreed. Karver finds that tasks that once took days now take minutes, yet she has no spare time, because everyone produces work faster. Her leadership team now puts well-being first, helping staff prioritize tasks. What Comes NextAsked what leaders will need to rethink in three to five years, panelists shared different priorities. Collins predicted higher talent density as AI lets teams do more, which makes people matter more. “Managers are going to be the most important,” she said.Karver and Jean-Francois both chose learning agility. “We’re all going to need to fall in love with learning,” Karver said. Jean-Francois added that leaders must learn to guide others through ambiguity, since waiting for answers means nothing gets done.Russell pointed to a harder constraint, the rising cost of healthcare, including GLP-1 drugs, which is pushing employers toward painful cuts. She urged companies to reinvest savings in other benefits so employees don’t feel their overall value has shrunk.For all their differences on pay, benefits, and the pace of change, the panelists emphasized the same point: The tools will keep changing, and the human habits around them matter more. Karver’s missed pause is a small example. Software spotted the moment, but only a person could act on it, by stopping to ask what was going on.Collins put the stakes plainly. “I don’t think we ever lose sight of the value that our people drive,” she said, “because the competition is just going to get harder and harder.”Grace Turney is a St. Louis-based writer, artist, and former librarian. See more of her work at graceturney17.wixsite.com/mysite.(Photos by Josh Larson for From Day One)
How AI Is Changing the Work Behind the Work
BY Ade Akin October 06, 2026When nominations for EPAM Systems’ special pay program reach Larry Solomon’s desk, the case for each name tends to sound the same: this person holds the certifications, that one finished the training.Solomon, the SVP and chief people officer at EPAM Systems, answers with a question of his own. “Okay, how many hours have they billed to a client?” His question captures how AI is changing EPAM, a company many know for IT outsourcing. EPAM, a software engineering and IT services firm, employs more than 60,000 people, and its clients now ask for more than code. They want process redesign, with AI embedded in how their people work and learn.“AI is not only about technology,” Solomon said. “You can’t just open up an AI box, and everything works.” Solomon discussed how those changes are affecting everything from recruiting and pricing to the future of HR itself during a fireside chat at From Day One’s Philadelphia conference, in conversation with Joseph DiStefano, a staff writer covering business news at the Philadelphia Inquirer.The Forward-Deployed Engineer BoomFew job titles in technology are growing faster than the forward-deployed engineer. Postings for the role rose by more than 1,000% between January and August 2026 compared with the same period a year earlier, according to data from Lightcast, as reported by Fortune.Solomon describes the position as, in most cases, a senior engineer embedded in the customer’s processes, someone who understands technology, knows the client’s industry in depth, has solid change management and strong relationship skills, and “understands how to accelerate transformational solutions for their client to deliver transformational outcomes.” “It’s a hybrid role,” he said.“You’re really describing people who are pretty close to managers,” DiStefano added. Solomon agreed. EPAM competes with Microsoft, Anthropic, and Google for them, he says, and candidates generally want pay packages well above the norm. The company pairs recruiting with upskilling because “there’s no better source of talent than taking your own raw material and trying to upskill the people that we have.”Titles inflate easily, however. The real test, he says, is time spent working with clients. “If they’re not actively working with a client, delivering value on a day-to-day basis, then to me that’s not a real forward-deployed engineer. That could be a forward-deployed engineer in the making.”The standard flows from a principle EPAM calls client centricity. “When you wake up in the morning, you need to focus on your client,” he said. The client may be a paying customer or, for a recruiter, the hiring manager. Solomon wants HR built the same way, with forward-deployed HR leaders who understand technology and the industry they serve.From Hourly Billing to Shared OutcomesAI is changing how EPAM charges its clients, and whom it hires. Solomon pointed to “tokenomics,” a term he says is spreading quickly. “What it refers to is keeping track of and accounting for the cost of the tokens that run the LLMs and the AI technology, and those costs are starting to become a big, big issue with companies,” he said.Larry Solomon, SVP & Chief People Officer at EPAM Systems, spoke during the fireside chat in PhiladelphiaEPAM built much of its business on staff augmentation, billing on a time-and-materials basis. It is now moving toward different pricing models: fixed price, fixed price with an incentive, or a shared return.In a hypothetical Solomon offered, the client pays a third to cover EPAM’s fixed costs, a third on milestones, and a final third tied to results that may take one to three years to materialize. “That’s a type of gain sharing, which is the proverbial win-win because we’re able to cover our fixed costs, and then we’re delivering based on outcomes,” he said.The same arithmetic applies inside the company. “AI allows an organization to scale without increasing the expenses at the same rate of growth,” Solomon added. As EPAM begins budgeting for next year, he’s challenging its leaders to support the company’s growth while keeping costs flat or near flat.No Opting Out for HRSolomon, who is responsible for about 3,000 people, put his global people team through an AI boot camp that he has also completed. Using these AI tools is “not optional,” he said. “AI is not an add-on. It doesn’t mean doing your normal work the way you were doing it years ago, and then doing an hour or two at the end of the day of training or experimentation or something like that.”Solomon says he is not a technical person, yet he prepared for his fireside chat with DiStefano with EPAM’s Copilot and Claude, which produced outlines and topics “in 10 minutes instead of 10 hours.”When he asked who was losing sleep over AI replacing HR jobs, a few hands in the audience went up. “I do not think AI will replace HR roles,” he asserted. However, he sees the risk for those who refuse to experiment with artificial intelligence. AI is a threat only “if you’re not willing to embrace it and you’re not willing to work some extra hours and learn it, and play with it in a little sandbox and experiment and fail and force yourself to get out of your comfort zone.”The reward is time. For decades, HR teams have asked to do less operational work and more business partnering. Solomon says AI tools finally make it possible, taking over routine tasks to “allow HR professionals to spend more time with their people doing those more value-added, personalized experiences” in recruiting, compensation, performance management, and succession planning.Training as a Permanent FunctionWhen asked by DiStefano whether the surge in training is temporary, Solomon says he expects the function to keep growing. He defines the company by that habit more than by its services.“I refer to it as a learning organization because that’s what it’s all about. It’s about learning. It’s about sponging up everything you possibly can,” Solomon said. “And at the end of the day, if you can take away one thing that you’ve learned, or at the end of the week, then you’ve been successful in your role.”Ade Akin covers artificial intelligence, workplace wellness, HR trends, and digital health solutions.(Photos by Josh Larson for From Day One)
Keeping Talent Engaged and Growth Opportunities Within Reach
BY Grace Turney October 05, 2026When Central Health went looking for medical assistants, it didn’t post a job and wait. It built its own pipeline, hiring community members as apprentices and paying them while they trained, then retaining 95% of participants within the organization, says Jeannie Virden, EVP and chief people officer at Central Health.That story anchored a wide-ranging conversation on talent, growth, and burnout. At From Day One’s Austin conference, Kelsey Bradshaw, editor at City Cast and the panel’s moderator, guided HR and workforce leaders through questions about career development, financial pressure, brand identity, and the growing role of artificial intelligence at work. She noted that “one of the most important things for many employees is seeing opportunities for growth,” a theme that ran throughout the discussion.Growth Means Movement, Not Just TitlesAparna Samuel Balasundaram, PhD, global head of well-being, resilience, and inclusion and belonging at Wipro, says her company has changed the way it talks about advancement. “Instead of saying there’s a career ladder, we’re kind of talking about a career journey,” she said, describing a shift toward expanding employee capability rather than climbing a fixed hierarchy.Emlyn De Leon, who leads tasks and skills redesign, strategic workforce planning at USAA, agreed that growth only works when business strategy and employee understanding move together. Mary Wicks, talent acquisition partner, HR, North America at Tiffany & Co., says her team listens directly to employees through quarterly surveys, then builds new roles around what they hear. “We would rather keep who we have than bring in external,” she said.Benefits Only Work If People Can Use ThemPanelists shared the importance of effective and innovative benefits as a means of keeping talent engaged. Virden of Central Health, pushed the panel past the question of what benefits exist and toward whether employees can actually access them. Tuition reimbursement is meaningless, she says, if workers can’t front the money or find time outside their shifts. “We have to make the time and the effort to make it accessible for them to go and use it,” Virden said.Tricia Erickson, national sales director, financial wellness, at Norton LifeLock Benefit Solutions, connected that accessibility gap to the financial pressures workers face when weighing a job change. She described employers losing workers to jobs offering a dollar more an hour, only for some to return after discovering that the new employer offered weaker benefits, such as higher health costs or no 401(k) match.That experience points to a broader challenge for employers: Benefits can have significant value, but workers may not always understand that value when making decisions about their jobs or finances. Financial wellness programs can help bridge that gap by giving workers a clearer picture of how their benefits contribute to their overall financial well-being. When workers better understand and use the resources available to them, employers can see gains in both benefit utilization and retention, she says. Communication Builds Trust From the TopSeveral panelists pointed to visibility from leadership as the connective tissue between benefits, growth, and belonging. Wicks described Tiffany & Co.’s new president touring every North American store within his first few months to introduce himself and explain the company’s direction. She said the effort helped reassure workers during a period of organizational change, giving them more context and confidence in their roles.Central Health takes a similar approach internally, Virden says, using an education calendar that includes benefits fairs, on-site tabling, and recorded sessions for workers who can’t attend live.Executive panelists took the stage to discuss "Keeping Talent Engaged and Growth Opportunities Within Reach" in AustinClear communication can also help address burnout. Asked how employers can protect frontline workers from burnout, Virden pointed to three levers: reminding staff of the impact of their daily work, removing friction from their work environment, and encouraging them to make real use of benefits such as paid time off and employee assistance programs.Balasundaram added that Wipro built a manager’s toolkit focused on empathetic listening, recognizing that a worker’s sense of well-being is often shaped more by their direct manager than by company-wide policy.AI Is Changing the Job, Not Ending ItThe panel’s final stretch turned to artificial intelligence. Balasundaram said Wipro has framed AI deliberately as “human plus AI,” emphasizing how employees can reinvest the time AI saves into upskilling and higher-value work rather than simply treating AI as a productivity shift.Wicks says AI has freed her up as a recruiter to spend more time evaluating candidates who might not look right on paper but fit the brand in person. De Leon described AI’s role as “the maker” and the human as “the checker,” meaning judgment and validation remain squarely human responsibilities even as tools handle more of the output.Take Initiative, Don’t Wait for TenureClosing out audience questions, Wicks addressed employees who expect promotion for years served or a certification earned. The best approach, she says, is to encourage employees to take initiative by raising their hands and having direct conversations with their leaders about growth. They should ask questions such as, “What does growth look like in this role?” and “What can I do to get there?” Erickson offered a parallel focus: “What are the things you can do right now that’ll make an impact. What’s something you need now in your organization that’s going to help build towards the future and the next steps?”Grace Turney is a St. Louis-based writer, artist, and former librarian. See more of her work at graceturney17.wixsite.com/mysite.(Photos by Josh Larson for From Day One)
Using AI to Make HR Work More Effective and Human
BY Jessica Swenson October 05, 2026While AI can streamline processes and increase productivity, many HR leaders agree that the human aspect of the HR process remains invaluable. At From Day One’s Austin conference, an executive panel explored how AI can support HR teams without replacing the human interactions at the heart of the function. Jeet Mukerji, co-founder and CEO of Kinfolk, says that when used well, AI can actually strengthen those interactions by handling routine questions and giving HR professionals more time to focus on people. “AI would make it better because it means you can focus on human work. When you can equip folks to find information and self-serve much quicker, when they come to you, you have a much richer and more helpful conversation,” said Mukerji.Choosing the Right Tasks for AIRepeatable, scalable tasks are a key area where AI can have noticeable impact, says William Soares, VP of global HR operations for Circana, especially since AI and automation complement each other. “It gives us time back, which I think every HR professional is always looking for,” said Soares. “We want to make sure that we’re able to do what we need to deliver, but we also want time for innovation.”Mukerji agreed, citing a study that showed a greater HR benefit in automating transactional tasks than from generative AI use. “Anything that you can do more than once is something potentially quite ripe for AI agents,” he said. He proposes low-consequence, high-frequency activities as an AI entry point for organizations.Advocating for a broader, yet customized approach, Emily Lewis-Pinnell, head of global workplace GenAI at Experian, suggests building general company-wide AI fluency while exploring a deliberate organization-level strategy. “To get the bigger, more transformational things, that becomes more of like a deep strategy where it’s going beyond what one person can do,” she said, “because it has to look at how the group works across the organization as a whole and how work is flowing through the team.”Keeping Up With the Pace of ChangeJason Miller, head of people intelligence and AI at Natera, sees the delay of AI discovery as a bigger risk than moving quickly, in part because moving too slowly can cause organizational imposter syndrome.Anywhere that work directly touches a human, says William Ferro, president, founder, and CEO for Betr Health, is a space worth slowing down and being intentional. “Once you say this is going to maybe affect the member journey and the coaching aspect of it. That’s when you have to pump the brakes and go a little bit slower.”Steve Koepp, From Day One co-founder and editor in chief, moderated the session about "How HR Leaders Can Leverage AI to Make Their Work More Effective and Fulfilling"It’s important for leaders to exercise that intentionality as they determine appropriate uses for AI and lead teams into this new era. “You have to think about what good looks like within our organization and be really clear in communicating,” said Lewis-Pinnell. “We want to be fast and innovative, but still be trusted and responsible, and build everything around that.”Choosing the Right AI Tools and Use CasesHowever, not every task has a valid use case for AI; organizations must look at AI integration from a process lens rather than just a technical workflow lens. Miller shared a story about AI exploration at Natera, where 22 meetings surfaced 90 potential use cases. Upon further analysis, only a small fraction of those needed AI intervention. “Not every answer should be or has to be AI,” he said.Protecting sensitive data is also imperative across all organizations. Mukerji recommends a multi-faceted checklist that identifies which tools and models are being used, their access level, what information may/may not be put into generative AI tools, and whether data leaves the environment. He also advocates for audit logs that show whether changes were made by agentic AI or a human user. “That kind of auditability and governance and structure is going to be really important.”Lewis-Pinnell asserts that many of today’s leading AI tools are roughly comparable, and encourages leaders to focus more on which model of their chosen tool to use, based on use case, user value creation, and cost.“Teams are able to decide whether this is someone who is really cranking the usage and driving a ton of value, and we want a really big limit for them, versus the average business user. It’s probably reasonable for them to stay within a certain range, and then you have to spend the time thinking through how you manage what those costs are.”Soares suggests looking at your existing systems and services for examples to find bolt-on AI tools to test. “There are some AI capabilities that you can leverage in those systems and tools. So, what’s already part of your portfolio that you might be able to expand some value, and it might facilitate some of the work that is a bit painful in today’s world.”Getting Workers Comfortable With AITo boost adoption, Lewis-Pinnell believes AI needs to be tied to tangible use cases that make sense to employees, rather than just open-ended experimentation. Mukerji recommends the use of internal AI champions and hackathons to encourage teams to explore use cases and enable quick a-ha moments that will promote further engagement. Miller agreed, saying that even just a 5% increase in speed can help adoption click into place.Soares advocates using cross-functional collaboration to create shared scenarios and map real pain points, helping teams collectively identify an AI structure that can support entire processes. “It builds the quick wins, but it also kind of gives that controlled environment of ‘we're going to focus on this’ versus it being too open-ended. That’s where some people just get a little bit stuck.”Regardless of what AI can do, there will always be human elements that it cannot replicate. “You can have an AI build a manual, but unless somebody cares if that person shows up or not, it’s never going to get there,” said Ferro. “I think that that’s what’s great about AI—it allows you to spend more time being human and more time building community.”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)
Frontline Focus: Recognizing and Retaining the Workers Who Keep Business Running
BY Katie Chambers October 02, 2026For frontline workers, meaningful support can sometimes mean opening a door that once seemed out of reach. At Confluent Health, Alyson Cadman, senior director of organizational effectiveness, helped launch a program that pays student loans over five years for frontline employees who return to school to become physical or occupational therapists. The impact, she says, extends well beyond those enrolled in the program: “They’re first-generation college students, and they would not have gone back. They don’t have access, but now they [do].” As Cadman has seen firsthand, investing in frontline workers can create a ripple effect that strengthens their connection to their employer and their communities.Frontline workers keep businesses running, yet they face some of the highest turnover rates and lowest engagement levels. Supporting them isn’t just important; it’s essential. How can leaders better connect with and retain frontline staff? What benefits, training, and recognition matter most to them, and how can employers uncover those needs? What tools or approaches can improve their workplace experience, especially in environments where technology isn’t always accessible? Leaders shared their expertise on these questions and more during an executive panel at From Day One’s Austin conference.Understanding the Perspective of Frontline Workers It can be challenging to fully understand the needs of a frontline workforce, especially in fields like healthcare, where roles vary, and work may be spread across several locations. Having a comprehensive employee listening strategy is key. “Engagement surveys give us really good data on where we think the team members are feeling, what they’re thinking, what their engagement is, and how long they’re going to stay. But then we have to reconcile it with what they’re actually telling us” through targeted listening sessions, said Jeannie Virden, EVP and chief people officer at Central Health. “The biggest thing that helps for everyone is really when our leaders listen, when they get to know their team members. That’s where the retention sits.” Cultivating a strong understanding of employees’ needs and experiences can also help develop training and skill-building programs. “It’s important that any type of design that goes into a learning program is actually something that is relatable and highly relevant,” said Emlyn De Leon, tasks and skills redesign, strategic workforce planning lead at USAA. For example, employees who frequently handle difficult customer service conversations could benefit from an AI tool that lets them practice those talks. The panelists shared ideas on recognizing and retaining frontline workers “Some of these employees have those skills, they utilize them well, but they also want to be recognized for utilizing them well,” said moderator Cory Mose, journalist and anchor on KVUE TV. It’s crucial to have recognition programs that are attractive to frontline workers, keeping in mind that their values might not be the same as those on a corporate level. “They may not be doing their everyday jobs focused on your company’s core business values. They may be more interested in safety or quality work,” said Hari Date, principal consultant at Workhuman. His organization offers a variety of intake and output systems for recognition that meet employees where they are, whether it’s calling in recognition by phone, sending a paper form, walking up to a kiosk, integrating into Slack or Teams, or using a mobile app. He shares that for one client, a mining company where some frontline workers have difficulty with reading and writing, they circle pictures to give feedback.Date emphasizes focusing on ROI when deploying a recognition strategy. “The impact of a 1% drop in turnover, which is a small movement in the right direction, is millions of dollars in savings. You take a fraction of that and invest that back into your employees to say, ‘We see you. You matter. Your voice matters. We care that you’re here,’” he said. “That little gift turns into a huge moment of building culture and that sense of belonging and purpose.” Comprehensive benefits and professional development offerings that speak directly to frontline employees’ needs can contribute to that sense of community. “Frontline workers must feel like they belong, and in the future, they can see themselves continuing to belong, which means there is a clear growth path, and the financial pieces of it, the systems pieces of it, support that growth,” Cadman said.Guiding Workers Through Their Unique Set of Challenges Frontline work can be stressful enough on its own, but it can also add compounding personal pressures. One of the biggest concerns for today’s frontline workers is economics. “The harsh reality of today’s economy is that more than half of frontline workers are living paycheck to paycheck,” said Carly Brush, SVP, strategy, planning, and growth at DailyPay. Financial wellness offerings can therefore be a major benefit to help alleviate stress. “It’s easier to get to work when you can afford to figure out emergency transportation [or] emergency childcare, and that leads to higher productivity and lower turnover,” Brush said. Education on mortgages, flexible payroll offerings, retirement savings options, and student loan repayment plans are all avenues of support. Artificial intelligence is another major stressor in the modern workplace, as workers fear being replaced. Cadman offers important advice when integrating AI into your workforce, especially in light of recent daunting headlines: never forget the humans at the heart of your organization. “AI is so scary in so many ways. The thing that I have the most control over is how I relate to it and how I take care of myself, and how I connect to other people, and that’s the humanity component,” Cadman said. “As we serve people and as we lead people, it’s so wildly important to equip them to be able to do that, because of the amount of change with AI and the amount of holes that it reveals, and how much people crave true belonging and connection and the ability to sustain within themselves. We can’t do that unless we also consider the human at the center of all of it,” said Cadman. When frontline workers feel supported both personally and professionally, they are more likely to stay. “How can we help them with childcare? How can we help them with flexible scheduling? We need to listen to them and get creative in the ways that we help support them and meet them where they are,” Virden said. “When we’re talking about benefits, we need to talk about holistic total rewards. So, it’s compensation, but it’s also your health, your mental, your physical, your financial—all of that is wrapped into one, and that’s where we need to focus.”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)
When AI Becomes Part of Everyone’s Job: How HR Can Help Workers Use It
BY Ade Akin October 02, 2026Before talking about artificial intelligence, Melissa Garza asked an audience full of HR executives to relax their shoulders.“If you are wearing your shoulders as earrings, let’s go ahead and bring those down,” she said. Then she turned to another familiar source of tension: the smartphone. “If you’ve got your chin down on your chest as a necklace, let’s bring that up so we can start stress-free today.”The exercise was more than an icebreaker. As AI becomes increasingly embedded in everyday work, HR leaders are being asked to manage a new source of workplace tension while helping their organizations adopt the technology. For Garza, chief HR officer at Powerfleet, those two jobs are inseparable: HR can’t help organizations embrace AI without also addressing what it asks of the people using it. Garza explored this topic during a fireside chat at From Day One’s Austin’s conference; the session was moderated by Courtney Sebesta, the editor-in-chief of the Austin American-Statesman.Start by Naming the FearGarza says AI adoption differs from most workplace changes because it can threaten how people see themselves. “AI can absolutely trigger identity-level resistance,” she said. That makes psychological safety the first consideration in any rollout. She recommends asking employees a direct question: “What are you worried about that you haven’t said out loud yet?”Her second principle is fluency before scale. Powerfleet is rolling out a companywide AI 101 course that covers large language models, hallucinations, and the company’s guardrails. After that, she advises piloting on a small scale and making the results visible, because in change management, “co-creation with people is always better than a decree.”Executives have homework to do as well. “Leaders who are asking their employees to use AI kind of need to use it themselves,” Garza added. She urges companies to build feedback loops, even anonymous ones.Melissa Garza, Chief HR Officer at PowerFleet, was interiewed by Courtney Sebesta, Editor-in-Chief of the Austin American-Statesman, during the fireside chat in AustinSebesta pointed out that public anxiety about AI has grown from fears about job loss to fears about humanity itself, and Garza takes those worries seriously. “I’d be super skeptical of any leader or, quite frankly, any person who tells me that there’s nothing to worry about with AI because that simply just isn’t true,” she said.She recommends watching The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist, a 2026 documentary featuring interviews with experts regarding both the potential hazards and benefits of artificial intelligence. No single company can settle the existential debate, but every organization controls its own practices. Her first rule is to keep a human in the loop. Her second is to give employees clear guidelines and a way to ensure they follow them. That kind of risk mitigation doesn’t have to wait for governments or industry groups to agree on a unified framework.HR as Co-ArchitectWho should decide how AI changes work? That depends on the ambition, Garza says. An AI-first strategy changes hiring, the org chart, and career paths. In that case, “HR needs to be a co-architect at the beginning of that initiative, not just the department that finds out last and implements it,” she said. “We know the employees, we know the career paths, right? We know where the problems are.”A narrower tool rollout calls for a different role. “Procurement and IT are going to take care of which tool to buy. Our job then is: how does it impact the people?” she added.Garza’s career traces HR’s digital transformation, starting in a compliance department full of paper files. At USAA, long before anyone called it AI, a team of statisticians practiced early predictive analytics. “We didn’t have AI, but what we did have was a group of statisticians that could tell me if someone left in one department where I could expect a vacancy in another,” she said. Subsequent work at Freescale (now part of NXP) involved using data analytics and metrics frameworks to assess employee engagement and inform strategic organizational decisions.AI adds new responsibilities, but it can’t replace judgment about values and organizational culture. “AI can tell you what’s happened in the past. AI can tell you what could potentially happen in the future, but it can’t tell you what you want to do,” she said.Skills to PrioritizeWhen it comes to recruitment and expanding skill sets, Garza advocates for a T-shaped candidate model: combining specialized knowledge to meet immediate requirements with the versatile breadth needed to adapt as organizational roles evolve. At the top of her list is a growth mindset, the idea, developed by Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck, PhD, that people can improve their abilities through effort. Recruiters can test for it by asking, “Has this person ever started over in a completely different way?”Comfort with uncertainty comes next: “Can I say I don’t know without perceiving it as a weakness?” Sebesta called that a lesson for all leaders, urging them to “be vulnerable, show them [employees] that you don’t have all those answers.” Garza agreed and suggested leaders tell their teams, “We’re building this capability. We’re on this journey together, and we don’t have an end state for you guys.”Why Humans Still Check the WorkJudgment matters because employees are increasingly reviewing what machines produce. “So we’re now quality checking what’s coming out of AI,” Garza elaborated. She has seen AI mangle formulas, names, and dates. “It just makes things up sometimes, and that’s why you always need a human in the loop to make sure that you’re getting what you bargained for,” she said.Better prompts help, and Garza compares prompting to giving feedback. “If I tell you to be nicer, what does that even mean?” she asked. Instead, she suggests providing a role, context, and details: “I’m a senior recruiter,” followed by specifics such as “three paragraphs, 150 words, warm but professional.”Watching for SmokeWhat worries Garza most are “effectively irreversible decisions,” such as hiring or firing the wrong person. “Did our AI software inadvertently discriminate against some group of employees?” she asked.What excites her is prevention. HR used to rush in after the fire started. Now, “we can see a little bit of smoke,” she said, because AI can flag which employees are likely to leave and which managers need training. “It’s proactive HR versus reactive HR.” Automation also pulls practitioners out of “administrivia” and frees them for the human work, “which is coaching, which is building relationships with your leaders, which is having conversations with employees.”Her parting advice to HR leadership amid workforce changes came full circle. “Never take the human out of the loop,” she said, and make sure your teams check everything AI produces. HR professionals, she reminded the audience, “are the stewards of the entire company,” so AI adoption should never come at the cost of care: “Don’t forget about empathy and psychological safety because everybody is at different levels and a different pace.”Ade Akin covers artificial intelligence, workplace wellness, HR trends, and digital health solutions.(Photos by Josh Larson for From Day One)
Building an AI-First Culture Is a People Strategy
BY Grace Turney October 02, 2026A physician can tell in an instant when a patient is scared, even if the patient never says so. No algorithm can do that. For Brittany Podolak, chief people officer at athenahealth, that gap between what technology can compute and what a human can perceive is the starting point for everything the healthcare technology company is building around artificial intelligence.During a fireside chat at From Day One’s Austin conference, moderated by Dan Solomon, contributor at Texas Monthly, Podolak shared how athenahealth has approached AI adoption not as a technology rollout, but as a cultural shift. The conversation covered leadership development, skill erosion, bias auditing, and what she calls the “non-negotiable professional skill” every worker now needs.A People Initiative, Not a Tech OneWhen athenahealth began shaping its approach to AI, leadership made a deliberate choice to frame the effort around people, not tools. “AI isn’t about replacing human capability; it’s about amplifying it,” said Podolak. In healthcare, that amplification applies directly to empathy, judgment, and trust, the qualities she considers core to the company’s mission.That framing influenced how the message landed internally. Rather than pitching AI as a mandate, Podolak’s team asked employees to consider which problems they were already trying to solve, and how AI might extend their reach in solving them. Curiosity followed, she said, but buy-in remained an ongoing effort rather than a one-time achievement.Podolak’s team also used AI to change how it develops leaders. Traditional coaching programs, she noted, tended toward a one-size-fits-all approach. By partnering with a strategic consulting firm and giving leaders access to a large language model for on-demand coaching, athenahealth introduced a level of personalization that hadn’t existed before. The shift also redefined what leadership now requires: supervising AI-generated output, not just people, and building the skill to coach the prompts behind it.Brittany Podolak, Chief People Officer at athenahealth, spoke with Dan Solomon, Senior Writer at Texas Monthly, during the fireside chat Asked whether AI adoption threatens core professional skills, Podolak described three categories: skills that erode quickly without daily use, skills that stay dormant but return with practice, and skills that fade harmlessly, like handwriting. She pointed to a decades-old case in aviation, where pilots who relied heavily on crew resource management lost some hand-flying ability, as a caution for high-stakes skills like critical thinking. Those, she says, cannot be delegated to AI without deliberate practice.Making AI Literacy Everyone’s JobPodolak compared AI fluency to earlier shifts in workplace technology, like the move to PowerPoint and Excel. Holding out, she said, isn’t a viable strategy, since someone who does use AI will eventually outperform someone who doesn’t. Rather than issuing static prompting guides, athenahealth built a curriculum meant to develop what Podolak called “prompting muscle,” paired with lessons on responsible use, including matching the tool to the task rather than defaulting to the most powerful model available.She also spoke to the importance of understanding bias in the technology. Inclusivity, Podolak said, has to be designed in rather than assumed. She urged leaders not to take vendor claims about algorithm auditing at face value, and to instead maintain direct oversight of how systems are evaluated. She also pointed to representation among the people training AI models as a factor shaping how equitable the resulting output becomes. athenahealth's employee resource groups, she added, play an active role in product development and customer research, feeding directly into how the company designs for accessibility.Moving Past the Experimental PhaseTraining also became a tool for managing anxiety. By pairing structured learning with hackathons, ambassador programs, and an internal event called Growth Week, athenahealth found that quarterly sentiment around AI improved as employee knowledge did. Confidence, Podolak said, tracked directly with competence.Solomon pressed on whether companies have moved past the trial-and-error stage of adopting AI. “Have we moved past that?” Solomon asked. Podolak said athenahealth has, pointing to how the company’s own measurement of success has shifted from an early fixation on token usage to a focus on the quality of output produced.One correction has emerged along the way, she noted: reminding employees that being AI-first doesn’t mean using AI for everything. Output that skipped human thinking and creativity was noticeably weaker. Keeping that distinction alive, Podolak says, remains a continuing effort as the technology evolves.Grace Turney is a St. Louis-based writer, artist, and former librarian. See more of her work at graceturney17.wixsite.com/mysite.(Photos by Josh Larson for From Day One)