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The Illusion of Choice: The Steps CHROs Must Take Before AI Decides for Them

BY Christopher O'Keeffe March 11, 2026

Cliff Jurkiewicz opened his session with a simple image: two doors at an airport gate. One reads “Pilot On Board.” The other reads “AI Pilot.” “I want to know what door you’re walking through,” he said during a thought leadership spotlight at From Day One’s Washington, D.C. conference. For Jurkiewicz, the VP of global strategy and executive evangelist at Phenom, the scenario is more than a metaphor. He’s a longtime pilot himself, and aviation analogies come naturally. But the thought experiment illustrates a deeper point: many organizations still believe they have time to decide whether artificial intelligence belongs in their HR strategy. In reality, he said, that decision is already being made.“We think we have unlimited choice. We have time,” Jurkiewicz said. “We really don’t right now.”Flying With Outdated InstrumentsThroughout his talk, Jurkiewicz returned to the parallels between aviation and enterprise technology. Modern aircrafts are heavily automated, he says. Pilots today spend less time manually operating controls and more time monitoring systems and making high-level decisions. Enterprise organizations, however, often operate with far less modern infrastructure.Many HR technology environments have grown through years of mergers, acquisitions, and incremental upgrades. The result is a stack of disconnected tools layered on top of aging systems. Jurkiewicz described one hiring workflow where a candidate’s journey—from job search to onboarding—moves through multiple separate platforms, each requiring its own integrations. “So that was one, two, three, four, five, six, seven different systems and twenty different integrations,” he said. “And you haven’t even added your third-party software yet.”Cliff Jurkiewicz, the VP of global strategy & executive evangelist at Phenom, led the thought leadership spotlight The problem, he says, is not that any individual tool is flawed. It’s that organizations are trying to modernize old infrastructures instead of redesigning them. “What we’re talking about now is really slapping iPads on old cockpits and calling it a modern infrastructure,” he said. “And it’s not.”Amplifying the Human Value of WorkDespite the anxiety surrounding AI, Jurkiewicz emphasized that its role in HR is not about eliminating human work. Instead, AI should remove repetitive tasks so people can focus on more meaningful responsibilities.“How do we amplify the human value of work?” he asked. “How do we get rid of the busy work, the things that we shouldn’t be doing?”Tasks like interview scheduling, applicant ranking, and document processing can increasingly be handled by AI-driven systems. But removing administrative work does not eliminate the need for people. Instead, Jurkiewicz sees a shift in how HR functions are structured.“What is happening is a realignment of work,” he said.In that realignment, areas such as talent strategy, learning and development, and compensation planning will likely grow. These functions rely heavily on human judgment, insight, and relationship-building—areas where technology can assist but not replace people.Technology alone will not determine whether AI adoption succeeds. According to Jurkiewicz, the most important factor is culture. “The first thing we start with is culture,” he said. “Culture is the one driver of AI fluency that guarantees its success.”Organizations that successfully build AI capability typically start small, experimenting with tools across teams and measuring the outcomes. Often, high-performing teams are paired with struggling teams so both groups can test and learn from new workflows. These bottom-up experiments frequently reveal a surprising pattern. “Leadership happens to be the biggest blocker to building AI fluency,” he said. Managers and individual contributors often adopt AI tools more quickly because they see immediate benefits in their daily work.Another shift Jurkiewicz believes will accelerate is closer collaboration between HR and IT. As AI becomes embedded across enterprise workflows, workforce strategy and technology infrastructure can no longer operate independently. “People plus technology is going to be what drives outcomes in your organization,” he said.Some companies have already begun restructuring around this idea. Moderna recently combined HR and IT under a single leadership role focused on productivity and transformation. Even when formal restructuring isn’t possible, Jurkiewicz encourages organizations to align the two departments around shared success metrics.Looking Beyond EfficiencyWhen discussing AI adoption, many companies still frame the business case around efficiency. Automating administrative tasks can certainly reduce workload, but Jurkiewicz says that efficiency is only part of the story. “Efficiency is finite,” he said. “Revenue is infinite.”When organizations free employees from routine work, new opportunities often emerge—new markets to explore, new products to develop, and new ways to deliver value. Those opportunities, he said, often represent the real return on investment.Jurkiewicz closed his session by revisiting the language commonly used to describe human involvement in AI systems. Many technology leaders talk about keeping a “human in the loop,” meaning that people remain responsible for reviewing automated outputs. “You’re going to hear this term ‘human in the loop’ a lot,” he said. “It is wrong.”Instead, he prefers a different phrase.“The term they should be using is human in the lead,” Jurkiewicz said. “When you say human in the lead, it means I’m putting you in charge of the outcomes.”In aviation, pilots follow a simple rule: aviate, navigate, communicate—fly the plane first. For Jurkiewicz, the same principle applies to organizations navigating the AI era. Technology may provide powerful new instruments, but it is still people who determine where the journey goes.Editor’s note: From Day One thanks our partner, Phenom, for sponsoring this thought leadership spotlight. Chris O’Keeffe is a freelance writer with experience across industries. As the founder and creative director of OK Creative: The Language Agency, he has led strategy and storytelling for organizations like MIT, Amazon, and Cirque du Soleil, bringing their stories to life through established and emerging media.(Photos by Josh Larson for From Day One)

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Thriving Through Change: Mindsets for the Future of Work

BY Jessica Swenson March 10, 2026

“Regardless of what kind of change processes you have in place, an organization’s culture needs the right mindset for change in order for any of them to be effective,” said Carissa Romero, PhD, the co-founder of Paradigm. “Specifically, an organization needs a mindset focused on learning, innovation and growth, known in research as a growth mindset.”In a thought leadership spotlight at From Day One’s February virtual conference, Romero discussed how companies can embrace a growth mindset to improve their ability to adapt, perform, and thrive during rapid change.The “change muscle” of an organization, as Romero calls it, represents how people feel about change and how that influences employee engagement and productivity. This can be a broader reflection of the company’s readiness to learn, adapt, and thrive through uncertainty.In today’s business environment, with ongoing economic shifts, multigenerational workforces, and rapid AI adoption reshaping how work is done, the pace and volume of change is not likely to slow down. Romero says that this reality “forces [talent and culture leaders] to reexamine two things: the type of talent and the type of culture that is going to enable high performance.”Referencing a World Economic Forum report on key workforce skills, Romero says the abilities to adapt and to leverage interpersonal and leadership skills are increasingly critical as companies globalize and become more diverse. Capabilities like resilience, flexibility, agility, empathy, social influence, and active listening ensure that people can adapt and collaborate during ongoing shifts in the workplace.Carissa Romero, co-founder of Paradigm, led the session (company photo)Even more important than individual skills, says Romero, is organizational culture. This is where a growth mindset comes in—embedding this mindset into an organization helps employees learn and embody “the belief that change is possible, the idea that people, teams, and organizations can adapt and get better.” She cited research from the 1980s and 1990s showing that “when people approach work with a growth mindset, they perform better.” This happens because rather than focusing on proving themselves, she says, people with this mindset tend to focus on continuous learning. They see challenge and change as “essential parts of the learning process” rather than signs of failure or inability.Early mindset research assumed that a person’s mindset was an internal trait that they carried with them; it influenced their approach to work across environments and organizations. More recent research challenges that assumption by showing that workplace culture can influence the individual’s mindset. “I think the fact that cultures bring out these mindsets is really good news for organizations,” said Romero, “Because that means the goal is not to identify every single individual’s mindset and try to shift them to be more growth or to try to hire a bunch of growth mindset folks. The goal is to really then create an environment that helps people show up and lead with that growth mindset.”When employees know that their leaders believe people can improve and grow, it gives them a sense of psychological safety that promotes innovation, collaboration, and experimentation, driving learning and long-term performance. “Companies that are able to successfully shift their culture to be a bit more growth-oriented, you are going to see more of these benefits unlocked.”Romero offers four key strategies for leaders looking to make this shift in their organizations. First, embrace humility. Leadership behavior sets the tone, and leaders who exhibit humility about their challenges or mistakes can help employees be more open to risk-taking and experimentation.Next, reinforce growth behaviors like new decision strategies, learning processes, research, or experimentation through feedback and recognition. She shared the story of an oil rig experiencing significant financial loss and safety incidents. Leaders sought a shift from a culture of machismo to one where employees could admit and learn from their mistakes.“What they did is start giving out rewards and celebrating really big failures.” she said. This change in culture led to an 84% decline in accident rates while increasing productivity, efficiency, and reliability. “Adapting to failure is not something that happens despite high performance. It is actually a critical driver of being able to innovate and achieve high performance.”Effective mentorship is another key approach. “What do the best mentors do differently than everyone else? They do two things simultaneously. They set very high standards because they believe it is possible for people to meet those standards, but they give people the support to actually meet those standards.”By setting high expectations, even in times of rapid change, and then offering coaching and resources that help people meet those expectations, you provide tangible support that “can help teams see challenges not as risks to avoid, but really as opportunities to grow.”Lastly, to create a culture of continuous learning, shift beyond training programs and skill-building to system-level change. This type of change “happens when organizations pair growth-oriented leadership behaviors with the right infrastructure.”By building environments where culture, leadership, and systems work together to reinforce growth mindset behaviors, companies can boost their organizational resiliency and give employees the freedom to grow through innovation and collaboration.Editor’s note: From Day One thanks our partner, Paradigm, for sponsoring this thought leadership spotlight.Jessica Swenson is a freelance writer and proofreader based in the Midwest. Learn more about her at jmswensonllc.com.(Photo by Pakorn Supajitsoontorn/iStock)

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Finally, Leadership Development at Scale: Equipping Every Manager With an AI Personal Trainer

BY Kristen Kwiatkowski March 06, 2026

Fostering team engagement and a positive work culture starts with empowering managers. Standard training often falls short, which is why personalized AI-driven programs for each manager are key to driving real impact in employee engagement and team development.Jennifer Dulski, CEO and founder of Rising Team, highlighted how personalized AI training can help managers and their teams during a thought leadership spotlight at From Day One’s Washington, D.C. conference.  “The great news is that with AI, we now can finally do this,” said Dulski. “We can give every single manager a personalized plan that’s targeted to their own needs and context. We can give them consistent practice over time.”This is what Rising Team’s training accomplishes with its AI personal leadership trainer, aRTi. “It essentially takes every manager, gives them a personal leadership trainer, creates a plan based on intake of what they need, which is also customizable,” Dulski said. The training features a wide array of activities, such as one-on-one practice and skill learning as well as team building that’s personalized to fit the needs of each manager.aRTi starts the training by asking a variety of intake questions involving topics such as number of direct reports, years as a manager, managing duty that is easiest to perform, and overall goal of employee training, says Dulski. The manager is then asked how much training time is requested and the AI trainer creates a growth plan that the manager can follow exactly or alter if they choose to do so.Jennifer Dulski, CEO and founder of Rising Team, led the session in D.C.Over time, the AI gets to know the manager and the training preferences. The training sessions can be added to the manager’s calendar, and aRTi will even practice training scenarios with the manager. “So the scenario I picked is I need to tell Ted that I’m giving him a lower rating on his performance review than he gave in his self-rating, involving all kinds of hard situations, like I need to tell him he’s not getting promoted when he expected a promotion, or if I’m managing up and I want to ask my manager how do I get on track for a promotion,” said Dulski. “All of these conversations can be practiced here.”Dulski practiced the scenario with the AI system for the audience and showed how the role play session can help managers practice their conversation before putting it into motion. aRTi will prompt the user to improve their conversation, if needed, and provide a score and tips on how to improve in future conversations. The score is based on effectiveness of achieving the objective, clarity in doing so, and empathy used along the way. aRTi then recommends phrasing to use and a plan for future conversations.The next step is putting aRTi to work with your team via live practice sessions. “That’s another part of this process, and it gets all kinds of insights about the team that managers just wouldn’t get on their own because they don’t know what questions to ask,” Dulski said. “We get everyone’s strengths and we know what makes people want to jump out of bed in the morning,” she said. “I know how to put people on projects, and we know exactly how each person likes to receive feedback.”With the help of aRTi, going through these training sessions provides managers with insights as to how employees want to receive feedback, encouragement, and appreciation.“All of this comes together into giving every single manager a personalized leadership trainer, coach, role play partner, and team building facilitator and the amazing thing is it works,” stated Dulski. “The data is super clear on this and within six months, you’re getting massive, statistically significant lifts on manager effectiveness.”And when a manager is effective their team members feel valued and heard, which can lead to improved productivity and retention within an organization.Editor’s note: From Day One thanks our partner, Rising Team, for sponsoring this thought leadership spotlight. Kristen Kwiatkowski is a professional freelance writer covering a wide array of industries, with a focus on food and beverage and business. Her work has been featured in the Bucks County Herald, Eater Philly, Edible Lehigh Valley, Cider Culture, and The Town Dish. (Photos by Josh Larson for From Day One)

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Building Trust in Hiring: Creating an Exceptional Candidate Experience

BY Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza March 05, 2026

“Ninety-one percent of recruiters and hiring managers have spotted or suspected candidate deception at some point,” said Will Leahy, VP of customer success at applicant tracking platform Greenhouse, citing the company’s 2026 AI in Hiring Report. That deception can be as little as fudging skill proficiency to falsifying references to adopting a deepfake likeness or false persona.This presents a challenge to today’s good-faith job seekers, who aren’t only competing against other qualified applicants, they’re now going head to head against bad actors willing to game the system and lie. The challenge for recruiters is remaining vigilant without treating sincere candidates with undue suspicion.This problem—and new solutions—was the topic of conversation during a From Day One webinar on how employers are building trust in hiring while also improving the candidate experience.The ‘AI Doom Loop’Candidates are using AI to apply for more roles, while at the same time employers are using AI to manage the swell of applications. “It’s not uncommon for a recruiter to post a role and, within 48 hours, have over 900 applications,” said Leahy’s co-panelist Erin Walsh-Beguin, senior director of global recruiting operations at GoDaddy. Employers are struggling to sort through the slop without losing great candidates along the way.Will Leahy, VP of people success at Greenhouse, spoke during the session (company photo)The result is an “AI doom loop.” “Candidates are leveraging AI to get themselves out there at an exponentially higher rate, which is causing an extraordinary amount of application influx, and quite a bit of it is spam,” Leahy said. “On the other side of the house are recruiters trying to navigate that and leveraging AI to the best of their ability to try and cut through that noise.”With each side trying to stay several steps ahead of the other, “it creates a doom loop, and no one’s happy, no one’s having a good time, and no one’s satisfied,” he said.To find the best candidates—who are actually real people—recruiters are trying things like identity verification. “Eighteen percent of recruiters that we talk to have had an experience where there was a deep fake in the room,” Leahy said. Greenhouse’s new partnership with CLEAR lets employers verify a candidate’s identity at whatever point they choose. Once that’s out of the way, “you can bypass suspicion and have a real human conversation,” he said.Real human conversations and sincere interactions are invaluable in this moment, when employers and candidates are becoming increasingly distrustful of one another. Walsh-Beguin likes to hold onto those moments by “sending notes, emails, and touching base,” she said. And a lot of that can be aided with automation. But avoid the temptation to over-automate and send blast-emails or status updates that are impersonal or uninformative. “It doesn’t take that long to send out a check-in and say, ‘Hey, thank you for hanging in there. We’re doing our best,’” she said. Transparency matters: Telling candidates upfront what they can expect in the hiring process, how AI will or won’t be used, and when they might hear from you again—these things don’t take much time or technical know-how. Behind the scenes, new applicant tracking tech is helping employers surface the best, most qualified, and most-likely-to-be-real candidates. Greenhouse’s new Talent Mapping feature works like an email inbox’s spam filter, sorting through suspicious applications to find strong matches and those most likely to be irrelevant or fraudulent. And like a spam filter, red-flagged candidates aren’t thrown out, but set aside for human review.The recruiter sets the parameters and reviews the results. “You are going to continuously teach the AI that the parameters that you used did yield the correct match, and you can override it again,” Walsh-Beguin said. That human intervention is key. “Ethical utilization of AI is something everybody has to ensure they’re following through on.”“Any amount of automation that allows more humanness to enter the conversation” is worthwhile, said Leahy. This goes for sophisticated talent mapping as well as simple transcription and summarization features, which lets him focus on the candidate rather than note-taking. “That’s automation making my life easier but also making it more human.”Editor’s note: From Day One thanks our partner, Greenhouse, for sponsoring this webinar. Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is an independent journalist and From Day One contributing editor who writes about business and the world of work. Her work has appeared in the Economist, the BBC, The Washington Post, Inc., and Business Insider, among others. She is the recipient of a Virginia Press Association award for business and financial journalism. She is the host of How to Be Anything, the podcast about people with unusual jobs.(Photo by Ridofranz/iStock)

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From Claims to Connections: Driving Value Through Proactive Member Engagement

BY Grace Turney February 26, 2026

When Marissa Bloomer talks about a Spanish-speaking client receiving a $78,000-a-month cancer injection administered in a hospital, she pauses for effect. That same medication could be administered by a culturally appropriate oncologist at a nearby office—for just $5,000 a month. “We said, let’s hold the phone here,” recalled Bloomer, VP of population health at Curative. “We’re not paying $78,000 a month for a shot. Where can we find the same drug at a different provider?”That story captures everything wrong, and everything fixable, about the way most American employers design health benefits. At From Day One’s Washington, D.C. conference, Bloomer led a thought leadership spotlight on a deceptively simple idea: coverage is not the same thing as care, and the gap between the two is costing employers billions of dollars and costing workers their health.The Trap of the High-Deductible PlanMarissa Bloomer, VP of population health at Curative, led the sessionThe numbers Bloomer opened with were familiar to most HR leaders in the room, but their implications were stark. Some 27% of covered workers are now enrolled in a high-deductible health plan, and the average deductible for single coverage on an employer-sponsored plan has increased by 47% over the last decade. “These really are not benefits,” Bloomer said. “These are barriers.”The downstream effects compound fast. Preventable conditions now represent a $1.34 trillion burden in untreated illness, with $55 billion lost annually from missed preventive screenings alone, she says. Workers on high-deductible plans face a 25% higher risk of diabetes complications, not because their plan doesn’t technically cover screenings, but because they can’t afford the initial out-of-pocket cost to find out they need one. “I’ve seen it,” said Bloomer, a registered nurse with 25 years in the health insurance industry. “Missed preventive screenings are the number one cause of people crashing into diabetes.”The cycle is self-reinforcing: confusion and unaffordability lead to deferred care, deferred care leads to worsened health, worsened health leads to lower productivity and higher costs. And employers respond by raising deductibles again. “We set ourselves up to fail,” Bloomer said. “High-deductible health plans were designed to manage expenses. But we ended up creating the most expensive outcomes, and we’re not treating employees as a whole.”The $0 Model as a Clinical StrategyCurative’s answer is structural. Its plan eliminates copays and deductibles entirely for in-network services, and Bloomer emphasized that this isn’t a generous perk; it’s a clinical tool. “A $0 copay and $0 deductible is a clinical strategy intended to keep employees healthy,” she said. Remove the financial hurdle, and utilization rises. Utilization rises, and conditions get caught earlier. Conditions caught earlier cost a fraction of what they cost when they reach the crisis stage.But Curative’s model adds a layer that most zero-cost plans skip: health literacy. “I truly believe if you teach people how to use their plan in plain language, they get it,” Bloomer said. Her team operationalizes this through what the company calls the baseline visit: a one-hour onboarding appointment every new member completes at the start of their plan year.The baseline visit unfolds in two back-to-back 30-minute sessions. The first, with a care navigator, is essentially Benefits 101: how to use the member portal, how to find a doctor, how to order a colorectal cancer screening directly through the app. The second is with a clinician (a physician, nurse practitioner, or physician’s assistant) who reviews the member’s health history, flags overdue screenings, and makes personalized recommendations. A member turning 45 with a family history of colon cancer, for instance, gets steered toward a colonoscopy rather than a Cologuard test.“We’re able to actually physically show and put in the member portal: this is what we want you to do this year,” Bloomer said. That roadmap then drives ongoing outreach, such as calls during Breast Cancer Awareness Month to members who haven’t completed mammograms, or emails during Colorectal Cancer Awareness Month to those who haven’t been screened.The outcomes are striking. Curative reports a 98% completion rate for the baseline visit. It identifies 94% of chronic conditions during that initial appointment. And in a controlled study, members who engaged with a registered nurse after the baseline visit saw their medical cost spend reduced by 62.5%. “I’ve never seen that in my 25 years in the healthcare industry,” Bloomer said.Connections, Not ClaimsBloomer was pointedly critical of traditional case management, which she called “dialing for dollars.” Predictive analytics flags a high-risk member; a call center employee asks if they want to enroll in a disease management program. “Those things don’t work,” she said. What works is intervening at the moment of need, with a real clinician who already knows the member’s history.That philosophy shapes how Curative deploys AI as well. As of November, its care navigation team uses an AI tool to handle first-response emails—currently resolving about 60% of inbound messages, sometimes within minutes. The system is trained to recognize frustration signals (all-caps text, profanity, etc.) and hold those for human review. Thanks to this use of technology, care navigators spend less time on routine queries and more time on the outbound, proactive outreach that actually changes health outcomes.Bloomer closed with a framework she calls the five principles of a person-first health plan: data-driven decision making, proactive and predictive (rather than reactive) support, scalable innovation and personalization, a human-centric experience, and integrated healthcare ecosystems. The throughline is that benefits should be built around the full human being: financially, clinically, and emotionally.For HR leaders evaluating their own plans, she offered questions worth sitting with. Does your plan design create financial stress for the employees who need care most? How are people actually engaging with their primary care physicians and chronic care programs? And is your vendor teaching health literacy, or just providing a card?“Coverage doesn’t equal access,” Bloomer said, returning to where she started. “Connection is really the best ROI.”Editor’s note: From Day One thanks our partner, Curative, for sponsoring this thought leadership spotlight.Grace Turney is a St. Louis-based writer, artist, and former librarian. See more of her work at graceturney17.wixsite.com/mysite.

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Marketing Strategy is MIA: Why Leaders Feel out of Control & How AI Could Bury Your Plans in 2026

BY Paul Kersey February 26, 2026

George Huff says that it was a simple question from an executive at Nike in 2012 that made him understand one of the biggest problems in marketing: “What’s going on with the São Paulo Marathon?”Huff, CEO of Opal, outlined the challenge of keeping marketing output aligned during a thought leadership spotlight at From Day One’s Atlanta marketing conference. He shared some of the many reasons executives struggle to keep their marketing efforts on track.Huff, then a consultant in Portland, noticed that the sheer volume of corporate marketing content makes it hard for companies to track what is being published in their name or how it impacts their brands and relationships with customers. Nike, for example, had 650 social media accounts producing content daily but struggled to monitor just one tied to a road race in Brazil. Even then, tracking all accounts in detail and understanding how they aligned with the company’s broader identity and strategy was nearly impossible. Nike is not alone and the challenge is only set to grow.Part of the challenge is the culture. Creative people who produce content are independent and self-directed and do not automatically follow instructions. They are often organized into small teams, each focused on its own projects. Nike’s 650 social media accounts may be an extreme case, but large companies often have multiple teams working on different aspects of marketing, including product lines, advertising, events, and brand identity. It is easy for these activities to fall into siloes, says Huff. George Huff, CEO of Opal, led the session (company photo)Even if your various teams are communicating with each other, plans still tend to get muddier as they filter through a large organization. Strategic directives come from top executives and filter down through middle management, but content comes from individual workers who may not understand the assumptions and nuances behind the overall strategy—assuming they were fully briefed on it or bought into it in the first place. “Your strategy dilutes as it goes through your organization. Control disappears with it. And then what’s played back to you often doesn’t look like what you set it out to be,” said Huff.The control problem appears to be common among marketing executives. When Huff asked his audience whether they would prefer more content or better control, almost everyone raised their hands for better control. “Well, the bad news is, you’re probably all going to get more content, whether you like it or not,” Huff said.AI can produce a flood of text, images, and audio in minutes with a well-crafted prompt. It makes creating material for all types of media easier, and smart marketing executives will not want to suppress that output, he says. More content gives more opportunities for customers to hear about a company and its products. The challenge is ensuring every message aligns with the company’s identity and supports its overall marketing strategy.Using traditional tools, tracking all the content is a high-friction activity, involving meetings, emails, and presentations. The right toolset can turn this into a low-friction activity, collecting and organizing content as it is created and quickly producing summaries for managers to review. And even better, it can put the strategic plan front and center while content creators work, rather than being a slideshow sitting on a server that employees may or may not review periodically.Opal creates tools that will tame that creative torrent and foster connected planning between executives and the many content-creating teams, says Huff. These tools can make it easy for them to coordinate with each other and work within the overall strategic plans. The applications are designed to track and generate valuable reports: strategic plans, week-by-week calendars, content approvals, workflows, and general project management and process reports. “We have to build really, really good, world-class experiences that people want to use for this whole thing to work,” he said. Ultimately, marketing is about the customer experience, but creating compelling experiences requires marketing executives to guide their creative teams efficiently. Time spent monitoring and managing countless teams—like figuring out what is happening with the São Paulo Marathon—is time that executives cannot devote to focusing on customers.Editor’s note: From Day One thanks our partner, Opal, for sponsoring this thought leadership spotlight. Paul Kersey is a former attorney and freelance writer who has covered events for Bloomberg News and other outlets.  Paul is based in Chicago, IL.(Photo by andresr/iStock)

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Powering the Future of Work: A New Perspective on Designing Connection That Scales

BY Christopher O'Keeffe February 19, 2026

“How do we scale connection? How do you support growth, recognizing and realizing that growth is redefined and defined by every individual on a one-on-one basis?” asked Matt Garrett, COO and CMO of Augeo Workplace Engagement. The answer, says Sarita Parikh, SVP of product at Augeo Workplace Engagement, starts with understanding what engagement actually looks like in daily work. It’s not the large, scheduled events that define culture, but the small, repeated interactions that signal whether someone is seen, supported, and developing.Garrett and Parikh spoke during a thought leadership spotlight about “Powering the Future of Work: A New Perspective on Designing Connection That Scales,” at From Day One’s Atlanta conference. The session focused on a central tension in modern organizations: culture is expected to be deeply human and highly individualized, yet it must operate across increasingly complex, hybrid, and time-pressured environments. AI, in their view, becomes useful not when it replaces human judgment but when it makes meaningful moments more visible and easier to act onTo illustrate, Parikh shared the story of “Sammy,” a high-performing data analyst eager to grow into a more client-facing role. Her manager Max was genuinely invested in her success, and their initial conversation was energizing. But a week later, overwhelmed by competing priorities, Max lost the thread. The breakdown wasn’t about intent or capability, says Garrett. “It’s not on Max for failing to do his job, it’s really just about the system that broke down,” he said. Those missed follow-ups, the lost context between conversations, are precisely where AI can help, by surfacing what matters at the moment it’s needed.A Flywheel for BelongingTo make culture more repeatable, the speakers introduced what they called a “cultural connection flywheel,” built on four reinforcing elements: recognition, connection, participation, and growth.Matt Garrett, COO & CMO and Sarita Parikh, SVP of product at Augeo Workplace Engagement, spoke during the session in Atlanta Each fuels the next. Recognition strengthens connection; connection encourages participation; participation creates growth; and together they generate the momentum that produces a shared sense of belonging.“Culture doesn’t scale through programs,” Garrett said. “It actually scales when we’re using systems that ultimately support this idea of human behavior.” That shift, from one-time initiatives to continuous, behavior-based systems, reflects a broader change in HR’s role. Instead of managing tools, leaders are increasingly designing experiences.What Actually Drives EngagementThe second framework focused on individual motivation. Drawing on decades of loyalty and consumer-experience research, the team identified five core drivers that influence how employees engage: purpose, belonging, growth, connection, and well-being.These drivers don’t appear all at once or remain constant. They shift from day to day and person to person, requiring managers to respond in ways that are both consistent and highly contextual, a task that becomes nearly impossible at scale without technological support.AI’s value, Garrett said, is that “the best AI doesn’t necessarily make decisions for people. It makes these moments more visible.” For a manager with double-digit direct reports, or, in one client example, a ratio of one to 127, that visibility is the difference between treating management as a math problem and practicing it as a human one.But the speakers emphasized that AI must be used carefully. Poorly designed systems can create a sense of surveillance, reinforce bias, or over-rely on quantitative signals that miss emotional reality.“AI can tell you all kinds of numbers,” Parikh said, “but it can’t tell you the context of what people are feeling.” That limitation reinforces the central principle of their approach: AI should reduce friction and surface insight, while people make the decisions and build the relationships.Scaling the Human Side of WorkUltimately, the session framed HR’s future as a design discipline. The goal is to ensure that employees and managers encounter the right prompts, opportunities, and recognition at the right time—not through more programs, but through systems that support human connection continuously.For someone like Sammy, that might mean being alerted to a new mentorship opportunity aligned with her goals. For her manager, it might mean walking into a one-on-one with the relevant context already in hand. Those small interventions, repeated across an organization, are what turn engagement from an aspiration into an operational reality.The real objective is not just scaling work, “but more importantly, scaling the human parts—scaling the belonging at work,” said Parikh.Editor’s note: From Day One thanks our partner, Augeo Workplace Engagement, for sponsoring this thought leadership spotlight. Chris O’Keeffe is a freelance writer with experience across industries. As the founder and creative director of OK Creative: The Language Agency, he has led strategy and storytelling for organizations like MIT, Amazon, and Cirque du Soleil, bringing their stories to life through established and emerging media.(Photos by Josh Larson for From Day One)

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Don’t Sleep on Your Presentation Discipline: The Underdog Medium CMOs Should Be Leveraging

BY Grace Turney February 16, 2026

Allie Wilson once had a job designing movie posters in Los Angeles, and remembers the task as deceptively simple: take a two-hour story arc and distill it into a single image. Years later, as CEO of GhostRanch Communications, she’s doing something remarkably similar for marketing leaders, except now the canvas is a PowerPoint deck and the stakes are significantly higher.“What I learned along the way is this work can look beautiful and still completely fall flat if the idea is not set up to land,” Wilson said during a thought leadership spotlight at From Day One’s Atlanta marketing conference. That realization, she says, pulled her from product design into the world of presentation design, where strategy and storytelling collide.Her message to chief marketing officers is straightforward but often overlooked: presentations aren’t just a box to check. They’re where strategy either holds together or completely falls apart.The Hidden Cost of Bad DecksThe numbers tell a grim story. Humans create 30 million presentations daily, yet sales and marketing misalignment costs the global economy a trillion dollars annually. That’s roughly 10% less revenue per company that simply evaporates, according to Wilson, who has spent over a decade partnering directly with CMOs across industries.Allie Wilson, CEO of GhostRanch Communications, led the session in AtlantaIn a recent survey of 50 marketing leaders, GhostRanch Communications found that for every presentation delivered externally, five are given internally. “That means there are five times more presentations happening inside your org than outside,” she said. “That’s shaping understanding, alignment and execution long before anything ever hits the market.”The ripple effect matters. When marketing creates a deck and hands it off to sales, product teams, and customer success, that original story multiplies outward to customers, analysts, and investors. If the foundation is weak, the distortion compounds at every handoff.Wilson frames effective presentations around three essential components: story, screen, and stage. “Presentations rarely fail for just one reason,” she said. “Usually it’s not that the story is bad, or that the slides are ugly, or that the presenter isn’t confident. It’s that one leg is weak and the whole thing starts to wobble.”Story: The Power of DistillationDespite CMOs’ deep understanding of narrative, most presentations fail to truly tell one. Instead, they offer what Wilson calls “a real estate tour”—click, feature, click, another feature, another screen. This approach is informative, but it misses the opportunity to show the transformation: what life looks like before your solution exists versus after.The problem is density. Research from the American Press Institute shows that sentences around eight words are remembered nearly 100% of the time. Once you reach 43 words, retention drops essentially to zero. Yet the average PowerPoint slide contains far more text than that. “We see slides that are closer to 100 or 150 words,” Wilson said. “Which means we’re designing slides that are almost impossible to remember and then wondering why our message doesn’t travel.”She points to Steve Jobs as an exemplary distillation master. At Macworld 2003, Jobs used just 20 words across his first 20 slides. His headlines, like “1000 songs in your pocket” and “Apple reinvents the phone,” were short, crisp, and easy to repeat. “He put those headlines on a silver platter for his audience,” Wilson said.Screen: Visual Storytelling That SticksThe second component addresses how strategy shows up visually. When slides are cluttered or inconsistent, focus drifts and trust erodes. But when visuals do their job, they dramatically increase retention. Research cited by John Medina in Brain Rules found that people remembered about 10% of a purely verbal message after a short period. When paired with relevant visuals, retention jumped to 65%.Wilson emphasizes that design isn’t about beauty; it’s about bridging the gap between what you mean and what people understand. “You should be able to feel the contrast between a problem and a solution,” she said. “The before and after shouldn’t be subtle.”She warns CMOs about brand erosion, particularly with the rise of AI-generated imagery. While these tools can save time, they can also lead to inconsistency if not guided carefully. “Throwing imagery creation entirely to the bots can be a really big shortcoming,” Wilson cautioned, sharing examples of AI-generated images that botched specific brand assets.Stage: The Personalization GapThe final component is delivery, which breaks down when messages aren’t tailored to audiences. While B2B marketers excel at personalization in emails, ads, and landing pages, that discipline often disappears in presentations and enablement assets. Over half of B2B buyers say they will switch brands if communication doesn’t feel personalized.Wilson shared the cautionary tale of Nike allegedly losing basketball star Steph Curry to Under Armour due to a presentation that wasn’t personalized and reportedly left someone else’s name in it. “That’s a $14 billion mistake,” she said, “because the story didn’t feel like it was for the person in the room.”Treating Presentations as a DisciplineWilson’s core argument is that presentations deserve the same strategic rigor as any other marketing function. When story, screen, and stage work together across the entire ecosystem, strategy holds together longer, teams align faster, and sellers show up with confidence.“This isn’t about better templates,” Wilson emphasized. “It’s not about prettier slides, and it’s definitely not about being the font police. This is about treating presentations as a discipline, one that helps you differentiate, create alignment and build momentum across your org.”For CMOs navigating constant complexity (setting strategy only to watch it dilute as it moves through the organization, fighting inconsistent messaging, dealing with sellers who go rogue, etc.), presentations are both the problem and the solution. They’re where all that complexity shows up, but they’re also the lever for fixing it.The challenge isn’t perfection. It’s reducing distortion as strategy moves from leadership to execution to customer. When the message is clear, intentional, and well-built, what ripples outward actually holds together.Editor’s note: From Day One thanks our partner, GhostRanch, for sponsoring this thought leadership spotlight. Grace Turney is a St. Louis-based writer, artist, and former librarian. See more of her work at graceturney17.wixsite.com/mysite.(Photos by Josh Larson for From Day One)

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How the Georgia Aquarium Cares for Its People

BY Grace Turney February 10, 2026

When a beluga trainer at Georgia Aquarium took on the challenge of managing recognition programs, she gained project management skills far beyond her role of caring for marine mammals. That sort of cross-functional development opportunity is the perfect example of how the popular Atlanta attraction is breaking down silos among its 700-person workforce; a team that ranges from life support operators who maintain precise water conditions to hospitality staff welcoming millions of guests every year.During a thought leadership spotlight at From Day One’s Atlanta, Angela Bryant, manager of employee engagement at the Georgia Aquarium, shared how the organization is leveraging its core values to improve retention and build connections across vastly different roles. Speaking with Alexandra Powell, director of client cultural insights at Reward Gateway, Bryant shared a strategic approach that turns abstract corporate values into tangible daily experiences.Quarterly Values in ActionRather than treating values as static wall art, the Georgia Aquarium selects one value each quarter and brings it to life through targeted initiatives. The first quarter focused on inclusion and Bryant’s team found creative ways to enhance it. “We chose inclusion, which is a strength for us,” Bryant said. “Our engagement surveys have said across the years that we’re scoring high on this; we’re very welcoming.”The second quarter tackles the value of excellence by reimagining existing events. Georgia Aquarium’s annual barbecue will become a platform for teams to showcase work they’re proud of, even when it lacks the glamour of headline achievements, says Bryant.“There are teams that might have been working on something that is not as glorious, but really the team is proud about,” Bryant said. “We want to make sure that we’re communicating what is excellent from their perspective.”The approach extends to World Oceans Day in June. While the aquarium typically focuses external messaging toward guests, this year will include internal celebrations recognizing staff commitment to ocean conservation and animal care.The Engagement Committee as a Development EngineA 30-person employee engagement committee drives much of this work, but Bryant has structured it as a leadership development program rather than just a volunteer group. The team requires both creative thinking and execution skills, with tenure averaging one to five years.Alexandra Powell, director of client cultural insights at Reward Gateway, the event's title sponsor, spoke with Angela Bryant, manager of employee engagement at the Georgia AquariumThe beluga trainer who now independently manages the organization’s highest-tier recognition luncheon represents the committee’s developmental impact. “She took on the role of our recognition tiers,” Bryant said. “It’s growing her project management skills. It’s helping her think of the organization as a whole, not just her role within her department.”Since 2017, the committee has operated through an application process requiring manager approval. This shift from departmental representation to selecting individuals with the right personality mix has improved retention and engagement on the committee itself.Technology and Tools Supporting RecognitionReward Gateway’s platform, internally branded as “the reef,” provides infrastructure for the aquarium’s recognition efforts. With 85% of employees accessing the platform and 46% actively sending recognition, the system has generated more than 10,000 recognitions and 1,400 rewards in 12 months, says Bryant. The platform solved practical challenges, including replacing a manual scratch-off “sand dollar” program that didn’t have tracking capabilities. “We couldn’t really track how many were being given out, and just the metrics behind the recognition we didn’t have,” Bryant said. Custom e-cards let staff participate in initiatives like Valentine’s week or appreciation days for specific roles. An open submission process invites employees to design cards, with committee advisors reviewing selections. The personalization even extends to artwork from staff children, making recognition feel distinctly and genuinely connected to the organization’s culture.Beyond improved engagement scores and net promoter scores from guests, from the partnership, Bryant observes noticeable changes in the workplace atmosphere. “People are a lot more chatty. They’re more willing to have conversations, or even just smile and say hi as you’re passing by,” she said.Guest reviews increasingly name individual employees, even during challenging busy weekends; evidence that the internal culture does translate into external experiences.The Georgia Aquarium’s approach demonstrates that values become meaningful when organizations translate them into specific behaviors, create structured opportunities for cross-functional connection, and measure both quantitative metrics and qualitative cultural shifts. For workplaces navigating diverse teams with different priorities, the aquarium’s quarterly focus model offers a blueprint for making abstract principles real and tangible.Editor’s note: From Day One thanks our partner, Reward Gateway, for sponsoring this thought leadership spotlight. Grace Turney is a St. Louis-based writer, artist, and former librarian. See more of her work at graceturney17.wixsite.com/mysite.(Photos by Josh Larson for From Day One)

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The Hidden Costs of GLP-1s and How HR Can Rethink Employee Health

BY Kristen Kwiatkowski January 15, 2026

Obesity affects nearly half of U.S. adults, making it one of the most urgent and widespread health challenges facing the country today. To address this concern, some individuals have turned to glucagon-like peptide-1 medications, otherwise known as GLP-1s. Access to GLP-1s and other weight loss treatments is quickly becoming a sought-after employee benefit. But with the costs of GLP-1 medications and other health aspects surrounding these weight loss aids, are there other ways that employers may rethink this health treatment route? The answer is a resounding yes.During a From Day One webinar titled, “The Hidden Cost of GLP-1s and How HR Can Rethink Employee Health,” Yasmine Meneses, manager of consultant relations and dietitian, and Manuela Abreu, head of nutrition and community and dietitian, at Nutrium explored this topic in detail and discussed ways that HR teams can rethink employee health as they uncover GLP-1 hidden costs. In their roles at Nutrium, an employer-focused nutrition benefit and health and wellness platform, Meneses and Abreu draw on their expertise to discuss GLP-1 medications and alternative approaches to weight management.The current state of metabolic health in the U.S. helps explain why GLP-1 medications have emerged as a treatment for obesity. Obesity rates are now three times higher than they were in the 1960s, rising from 13% to 40% today, Meneses says, underscoring how obesity and weight management increasingly affect the workplace. “It’s no longer just a public health concern but truly a major employer issue and an issue that we’re dealing with every day. For employers, this impact isn’t abstract.”Some of the results of this HR concern include medical claims, chronic condition management, leaves and disability, absences from work, productivity, rising pharmacy spend, and complexity managing these. “It’s not just a population trend, it’s an operational reality.” It was that pressure that set the stage for GLP-1s. “Employers have been searching for solutions that can truly drive meaningful change at scale,” said Meneses.Understanding What GLP-1’s Can DoManuela Abreu, the head of nutrition and community at Nutrium, spoke during the session (company photo)Abreu delved into what GLP-1s are, as some may not be too familiar with this type of medication. GLP medications were initially designed for Type 2 diabetes, not weight loss, she says. Ozempic and Wegovy are some medication names and all belong to the class of GLP-1 receptor agonists. In other words, they don’t replace the naturally produced GLP-1 hormone, but instead they amplify its action so it activates the same biological effect, but do so in a stronger, more long-lasting way. Every time we eat, GLP-1 is released from our gut and completes the job by telling our body food is coming in, energy is available, and we can start regulating our intake. It’s a constant conversation between gut and brain. “This shows that eating behavior is not driven entirely by willpower,” said Abreu. When the GLP-1 receptors are activated, it helps the body release insulin and improve glucose control, slows how quickly food leaves the stomach, and helps people feel fuller longer. The effects of GLP-1 were clinically compelling with amazing clinical results. For the first time, a medication delivered truly dramatic results for people living with obesity. The speakers noted that weight loss was both rapid and significant, with study outcomes surpassing those of any previous weight loss drug. Individuals and employers alike saw tremendous promise. Still, medication alone does not address the root causes of obesity.Hidden Health Costs of GLP-1sThere can also be hidden health costs associated with GLP-1s. In controlled studies, for example, participants aren’t relying on medication alone; they are also receiving nutrition support, medical supervision, and ongoing coaching.In real life, individuals might not have this type of support. Further, some people experience side effects, such as nausea, fatigue, and GI discomfort, and still have to deal with life’s daily tasks. “So this reality check makes long-term consistency much harder than it looks on the papers,” said Abreu. Another difference between the controlled environment and real life is the willingness to stay on the medication. When the medications cease, so do the physiological aspects. “So this is what we started seeing in real-world situations: about 70% of patients discontinue within the first year, and when they stop, up to two-thirds of the weight that was lost is regained.” Employers are learning the type of weight loss also matters. The employee taking GLP-1 medication may not get the right protein intake and they don’t just lose fat, they lose muscle mass, too. Less muscle means a lower metabolic rate and when the metabolic rate drops, weight maintenance becomes more difficult. Therefore, regaining weight becomes easier and employers are paying for a type of weight loss that makes long-term outcomes harder. “The bottom line is that medication without the right support is extremely fragile,” said Abreu. Aspects such as how to build protein intake, deal with unexpected events, and address stress or emotional eating aren’t covered. The root cause of obesity isn’t treated. How GLP-1 Hidden Health Costs Increase Overall Cost Meneses took over the cost segment portion of the chat and showed how hidden costs of GLP-1s can really increase the overall cost of using this medication. “The instability in health outcomes also creates instability in the entire system,” said Meneses. The GLP-1 landscape is changing constantly. New medications and new pricing make it difficult for the benefits team to deal with the complexity. When GLP-1 was originally used just for Type 2 diabetes, this was easier for employers to gauge costs. However, with weight loss usage and GLP-1s, the picture is less clear. Access pathways expanded and employees often perceived GLP-1s as being more affordable for employers to provide than is the case. Three new pricing models for GLP-1 use include the following: direct-to-consumer, where the member purchases the medication straight from the manufacturer and they receive a discounted price; compounded GLP-1s, such as semaglutide and tirzepatide, which may be offered at a fraction of the cost but aren’t regulated or consistent; and, discount programs, such as GoodRX and TrumpRX (starting January 2026), which connects consumers to lower cost medications via discount. As pathways multiply, expectations of employees are increasing. They wonder why employers don’t cover GLP-1s or only cover them for certain employees. Hidden economic costs often enter the discussion at this point.  Hidden economic costs can include organizational volatility, discontinuation waste, unequal employee experience, and productivity impacts. Volatility arises when employees start, stop, or adjust GLP-1 use, making it hard for HR to manage a consistent program and often triggering repeated costs. Discontinuation waste occurs when employees stop due to side effects or cost, then later restart, creating added administrative burden. Unequal experiences can emerge if eligibility is limited, raising fairness concerns. And productivity may suffer if nutritional gaps lead to low energy, irritability, or reduced focus.GLP-1 use isn’t linear. Some employees have it covered by their employers, some get it straight from the manufacturer, and some are stopping the medications altogether. This is why there’s movement toward a two-path operating model. Understanding the Two-Path Operating ModelAbreu details the two-path operating model by highlighting Nutrium’s framework. The program works whether the employer offers GLP-1s freely or in a more restricted form. “Regardless if your employer is covering GLP-1s, restricting them, or does not offer them at all, we keep hearing the same question, “How can we support everyone safely, consistently, and in a way that actually leads to sustainable results?” The Nutrium team works directly with employers and thousands of members as they pursue their individual health journeys. There are scalable, one-on-one personalized appointments with a registered dietitian and evidence-based guidance, says Abreu. It’s tailored to fit the individual’s health needs. By using patient data and behavior signals from Nutrium technology, the dietitians can detect health issues or warnings and step in before small issues become larger. The approach is prevention first for early intervention and protecting long-term metabolic health. “Our philosophy is simple,” said Abreu. “Medication can help, but long-term health comes from nutrition habits and consistent support.” In practice, this comes down to a unified system that turns into two clear pathways, one for employees already using GLP-1 and one for employees who don’t. HR teams can make more confident decisions about GLP-1s by first defining their philosophy and clarifying their organization’s stance. From there, building a dual-path system ensures all employees are considered and that the benefits strategy remains fair, predictable, and scalable.However, GLP-1s should not stand alone. They are most effective when paired with nutrition and behavior support, alongside a strong non-medication option for employees who choose a different path. Employers should also track outcomes, including long-term weight maintenance, and partner with providers grounded in evidence and shared value.Ultimately, the speakers agreed, GLP-1s can be powerful tools and highly attractive benefits, but lasting metabolic health depends on building a comprehensive approach that goes beyond medication alone.Editor’s note: From Day One thanks our partner, Nutrium, for sponsoring this webinar. Kristen Kwiatkowski is a professional freelance writer covering a wide array of industries, with a focus on food and beverage and business. Her work has been featured in Eater Philly, Edible Lehigh Valley, Cider Culture, and The Town Dish.(Photo by Varlay/iStock)

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Solving the Healthcare Cost Crisis: Reducing Spend Without Cutting Benefits

BY Grace Turney January 13, 2026

When Liz Hill joined Advance Auto Parts as director of benefits two and a half years ago, she faced a challenge many HR leaders are familiar with: healthcare costs were increasing faster than wages, and employees were questioning the value of their medical plans. For a workforce of 60,000, around 70% male, with an average age of 46, and spread across 4,300 locations, the situation was especially dire. “I’ll never forget the first conversation I had with a frontline manager,” Hill said during a From Day One webinar. “I asked what he wanted me to know about the medical plan. He said, ‘Oh, the medical plan, that’s for our older, more mature workforce.’” Hill saw that perception as a red flag. Younger employees were opting out entirely, viewing the high deductibles as too risky when they felt healthy. In 2025, Advance Auto Parts faced healthcare trend increases of 13%, which was well above the industry average of 9%. Hill knew she needed a new approach, and one that wouldn’t shift costs to employees or disrupt their existing coverage. The Provider Quality Problem The solution came from an overlooked option: helping employees choose better doctors. Research shows that the single biggest factor in a patient’s health outcomes and total cost of care is the individual provider they see. Yet most employees choose doctors by word of mouth or checking online reviews, and neither method necessarily correlates with cost efficiency or high-quality care. Lauren Chucko, the SVP of account management at Garner Health, spoke during the session (company photo)Lauren Chucko, senior vice president of account management at Garner Health, illustrated this with a striking example. Two spine surgeons, who were both quite popular among employees, had dramatically different outcomes. The first had patients who frequently experienced complications and needed revision surgeries. The second surgeon used minimally invasive techniques, had lower complication rates, and his patients spent significantly less—$69,000 in total claims versus $172,000, with zero out-of-pocket costs for members. Traditional provider evaluation methods, which merely average the previous year’s costs, had ranked the first doctor higher. But Garner’s database of 300 million patients, applying 550 different clinical metrics, revealed that the second doctor was actually superior across multiple measures: fewer unnecessary surgeries, lower complication rates, and more appropriate use of outpatient procedures.A Multi-Pronged Strategy Hill approached this challenge systematically, using what she called a “multi-pronged strategy.” This included operational improvements like carving out subrogation, pharmacy changes, and tightening leave of absence processes. But the largest opportunity was in value-based care. Rather than switching to a narrow network or committing to a specific carrier, Hill chose Garner’s plan-agnostic approach. The company maintained its full Anthem Blue Cross network but added a powerful incentive: employees who used Garner’s top-rated providers would have their out-of-pocket costs reimbursed up to $2,000 for individuals and $4,000 for families. “For a highly price-sensitive population like mine, that’s substantial,” Hill said. The plan was intentionally placed on Advance Auto Parts’ middle-tier option, which increased the deductible from $1,500 to $2,500 but offered the Garner reimbursement. The message was clear: use better doctors, save money. These innovative, outside-the-box solutions are exactly what’s needed to reduce spending while cutting costs in healthcare, without compromising the quality of care. The Importance of CommunicationHill’s team knew the success of these policy adjustments hinged on communication. They didn’t just announce the change; they orchestrated what one colleague called a “communication wheel” that kept turning through multiple phases. Before open enrollment, they trained the entire HR team, not just benefits specialists. During enrollment, they made creating a Garner account part of the required enrollment process in their benefits administration system. This was a crucial step that Hill credits with high adoption. They mailed customized materials to all 4,300 store locations, and ran content on TVs in stores and distribution centers. They also made a crucial naming decision: the plan became the “Anthem Silver Plus Garner Money Plan.” As Hill noted, “When you ask employees what medical plan they’re in, they often don’t know. So let’s call the plan what it is.” The approach worked. Despite having a passive enrollment system where employees could simply stay in their existing plan, 44% of the workforce enrolled in the Garner plan. More impressively, 53% of those enrolled created Garner accounts, well above the 30% benchmark. Hill’s advice for other benefits leaders is straightforward: dig into the data to build confidence in the methodology, communicate relentlessly through every available channel, and don’t be afraid to push vendors to customize solutions for your unique workforce. Most importantly, she emphasized, “When you make this decision, you’ve got to be all in from a communications perspective.” Editor's note: From Day One thanks our partner, Garner Health, for sponsoring this webinar. Grace Turney is a St. Louis-based writer, artist, and former librarian. See more of her work at graceturney17.wixsite.com/mysite.(Photo by MonthiraYodtiwong/iStock)

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Evolving HR Systems into Engines of Action: How to Build a More Connected User Experience

BY Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza January 08, 2026

HR teams are under immense pressure to deliver a great employee experience, often with tools and processes that haven’t meaningfully evolved in years. The challenge of improving the employee experiences is not a lack of data on their employees. In fact, HR has access to more information than ever before, from engagement surveys and performance reviews to benefits uptake and attendance records. The problem is that this information is scattered across incompatible systems. When connections can’t be made, HR leaders miss the patterns forming right in front of them, like the early signs of burnout and disengagement or escalating turnover that could be stopped.During a From Day One webinar, HR leaders explored how employers are finally beginning to turn their HR systems into engines of action–tools that don’t just store information, but actively connect workers and improve the employee experience in real time.“We’ve inflicted an awful lot of digital friction on ourselves,” said Miriam Connaughton, chief people and experience officer at Simpplr. Employees must wade through disparate platforms, multiple log-ins, and poorly designed interfaces to find the information and tools they need to carry out basic tasks. “How do you make that user experience more seamless–more simplified–so you’re not forcing them to search through the tech morass to find what they need?” At the same time, some HR teams try to layer antiquated processes into outdated software, said Julie Develin, a senior partner at UKG. Too often, organizations digitize outdated workflows instead of rethinking how work should actually be done.If HR were to do one thing in 2026, Connaughton suggested that it should be a radical simplification of the employee tech experience. That means fewer clicks, clearer pathways, and systems that anticipate needs instead of requiring employees to hunt for answers.Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza, journalist and From Day One contributing editor, moderated the discussion (photo by From Day One)Talent acquisition and onboarding have been the most obvious places for HR to focus on process improvement, followed by basic employee fact-finding (like FAQ chatbots), but AI-powered HR tech is now mature enough for the complex task of what Connaughton and Develin call “performance enablement.” This means helping managers become better coaches and employees set goals that align with the company’s. “It’s the whole performance cycle and everything that goes with it.”This matters because HR technology has long lagged behind consumer technology. Employees aren’t using the same smartphone they had 10 years ago, yet many HR systems feel frozen in time. HR has grown accustomed to stability and wary of experimentation, so instead of trying a new process or new tech, they do nothing at all. “The cost of doing nothing has weighed on a lot of organizations,” Develin said. When HR tech systems don’t work, low adoption is often blamed on employee aptitude or even obstinance, but low usage is seldom a skills problem–it’s usually a design problem. “You know your tech is not good when your HR team is using the gum-and-duct-tape method to make it work,” Connaughton said.But artificial intelligence is changing HR’s habits. Today, AI has already proved it can automate routine tasks and reduce administrative burden, and leaders are quickly warming to its use. But, the panelists said, we should be thinking bigger: Its greater promise is employee personalization. Great consumer brands learn their customers and tailor the experience accordingly, so why can’t HR tech do the same? For a frontline worker, that might mean opening an app to instantly see their schedule, request a change, or receive a notification that PTO has been approved. For a manager, it could mean timely nudges about performance management or insights into team workload before burnout sets in. As Develin put it, when the experience works and employees feel cared for, they don’t just do the work–they engage.Done well, modern HR systems become the engine of the employee experience. Employees don’t have to think about where to go or whom to ask, like the best consumer tech, the experience just works.Editor’s note: From Day One thanks our partner, Simpplr, for sponsoring this webinar. Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is an independent journalist and From Day One contributing editor who writes about business and the world of work. Her work has appeared in the Economist, the BBC, The Washington Post, Inc., and Business Insider, among others. She is the recipient of a Virginia Press Association award for business and financial journalism. She is the host of How to Be Anything, the podcast about people with unusual jobs.(Photo by A9 STUDIO/Shutterstock)

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Rethinking Pharmacy Benefits: Cutting Costs, Improving Care

BY Christopher O'Keeffe January 06, 2026

Rising prescription drug costs have become one of the most persistent pressure points in employer-sponsored health care. For many organizations, pharmacy spending now accounts for as much as a quarter—or more—of total health care costs, with limited visibility into what’s actually driving those increases. As new drug categories emerge and traditional pricing models grow more complex, employers are increasingly questioning whether higher costs are inevitable—or structural.That challenge was the focus of a recent From Day One webinar about “Rethinking Pharmacy Benefits: Cutting Costs, Improving Care.” The session explored how pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) shape prescription costs, where traditional models fall short, and how more transparent approaches may help employers rein in spending while improving access to care.Session moderator, Abigail Abrams, the director of content operations at Atria, set the stage with a reality many employers already recognize: pharmacy benefits have grown rapidly, often faster than other components of health care spend.Alissa Johnson, senior director of clinical strategy at SmithRx, pointed to several forces behind that trend. One is innovation. “One of the greatest things that have happened is tremendous innovation,” she said, noting that the United States develops “around 80% of the world’s new drugs.” New treatments have expanded what’s clinically possible, but often at a higher price.Another factor is where care is delivered. Many treatments that once required hospital or outpatient infusions are now available as self-administered injections or oral medications taken at home, says Johnson. While that shift can improve convenience and outcomes, it also moves more spending into the pharmacy benefit, increasing employers’ exposure to drug costs.The Transparency Problem in Traditional PBM ModelsAlissa Johnson, PharmD, MBA, BCPS, the senior director of clinical strategy at SmithRx, led the session (company photo)Traditional PBM pricing structures can obscure true costs. Johnson described the industry as one in which a single drug can have multiple price points, from list prices to discounted rates and negotiated rebates.“There’s just a lot of different mechanisms to not have the PBMs be transparent, or offer visibility into what the actual drug costs are,” she said. Vertical integration, where PBMs may also own pharmacies, specialty distributors, or have financial ties to manufacturers, can further complicate incentives.Johnson likened discount-based pricing to a misleading retail analogy. A drug might appear inexpensive because it’s offered at a steep percentage discount off a high list price, even if a lower net-cost alternative exists elsewhere. “What you really want to know is how much you’re paying at the end of the day,” she said.A recurring theme throughout the session was the importance of shifting from discount-based metrics to cost-based ones. Johnson encouraged employers to start by insisting on access to their own claims-level data. “Your data is yours,” she said.One simple but powerful metric, she says, is per-member-per-month (PMPM) pharmacy spend. By dividing total drug costs by the number of covered members, employers can track real spending trends without getting lost in rebate guarantees and contractual fine print.Johnson shared examples of employers that switched from legacy PBMs to more transparent models and saw significant reductions in both plan costs and employee out-of-pocket expenses. In one case, she said, PMPM costs dropped from $65.57 to $48, while average out-of-pocket spending fell from $12.90 to $6.Cost transparency isn’t just a financial issue—it also affects whether employees can access and adhere to their prescribed treatments. Johnson emphasized that when medications are unaffordable, people simply don’t take them, which can lead to worse health outcomes and higher medical costs over time. “If patients can’t afford their drugs, they won’t fill them and they won’t take them,” she said.She also addressed the role of utilization management tools like prior authorization. While such measures can be important safeguards, Johnson says that they can become unnecessary barriers when approval rates are effectively universal. In those cases, she says, removing prior authorization can reduce friction for both patients and providers without increasing risk.High-Cost Categories: GLP-1s, Biosimilars, and What’s NextJohnson also shared insights on drug categories drawing heightened employer attention, including GLP-1 medications for diabetes and weight loss. Johnson described them as “a drug class of interest for a long time,” given their effectiveness and growing list of potential indications. At the same time, she cautioned that broad utilization makes guardrails and data visibility essential.Another area of focus was biosimilars, lower-cost alternatives to biologic drugs used to treat conditions such as autoimmune diseases. Johnson urged employers to ask not just whether their PBM offers a biosimilar-first strategy, but how effectively it’s implemented.“Not all biosimilars are created equal,” she said, noting that some still cost thousands of dollars per month while others are available for a fraction of that price. Conversion rates, she added, can be a more meaningful measure than policy statements alone.Throughout the session, Johnson returned to a consistent message: employers don’t have to wait for regulatory reform or litigation outcomes to demand more clarity. Asking the right questions now, about data access, net costs, sourcing options, and reporting cadence, can reveal whether a PBM’s incentives are truly aligned with controlling spend and supporting employee health.As the webinar concluded, the message was less about any single solution and more about a shift in mindset. Transparency, Johnson suggested, isn’t an abstract ideal—it’s a practical tool for understanding where pharmacy dollars go and how benefits strategies can evolve to meet both financial and human needs.Editor's note: From Day One thanks our partner, SmithRx, for sponsoring this webinar. Chris O’Keeffe is a freelance writer with experience across industries. As the founder and creative director of OK Creative: The Language Agency, he has led strategy and storytelling for organizations like MIT, Amazon, and Cirque du Soleil, bringing their stories to life through established and emerging media.(Photo by nortonrsx/iStock)

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Building Resilience: Staying Agile Through Workforce Disruptions

BY Stephanie Reed January 05, 2026

Agility in business is no longer optional. Organizations that adopt agile ways of working see measurable gains in operational performance, including speed, predictability, and target achievement, while also improving employee engagement through clearer missions, greater empowerment, and stronger customer focus. But agility comes with constant change, requiring organizations to build real responsiveness and resilience.“How do I survive in this world where change is coming hard and fast, creating a real sense of loss on a number of levels, and my response to it may not always be productive and constructive?” asked Kenneth Matos Ph.D, director of market insights at HiBob. Matos spoke during a From Day One webinar about “Building Resilience: Staying Agile Through Workforce Disruptions.” Matos brings psychological expertise to the design of agile organizations, offering HR leaders, managers, and teams practical tools to adapt and thrive amid constant change. Drawing on organizational psychology and his experience at HiBob, he helps managers and employees drive sustainable growth and productivity.Creating Structural SupportBuilding an agile culture and organizational resilience requires structural support, says Matos. This includes company policy and managerial practices. You want your organization to remove friction so employees can adapt easily, he says. Matos suggests starting with clear guiding principles rather than rigid policies. Policies should provide context by explaining their purpose, not just prescribing what to do and what not to do. He also emphasizes the value of scalable platforms for cross-team collaboration, which are often more cost-effective and impactful than investing in single-purpose technologies. Scalable tools can expand or contract as needs change, making it easier to evolve processes and communication without being constrained by the technology itself.Kenneth Matos, Ph.D., the director of market insights, HCM at HiBob, led the session (company photo)Another way to boost structural support is through HR incorporating flexibility into workflows and employee journeys. “It might make a lot of sense to have a meeting at the end of the day to close out what you’ve been doing, but it also might get in the way of having a really diverse workforce of people who might have caregiving responsibilities,” he said. Creating internal marketplaces for projects and learning can reduce the need to hire externally by making it easier to redeploy existing talent. Matos also points to job architecture as a critical area for structural support, emphasizing that it should be treated as an ongoing, evolving process rather than a fixed framework. “Are these roles still making sense as we launch a new product? Are these roles still making sense if we go into a new area or we’re shrinking as an organization?”Learning and development should also become demand-driven. Matos suggests finding people who want to complete specific tasks and giving them the learning resources to fulfill those tasks. This makes new skills more likely to stick. Additionally, performance systems should be reviewed more frequently. An effective system has the rewards and structures that check against what employees want to accomplish.  Lastly, says Matos, organizations must adopt agile budgeting. “I think one of the mistakes that HR often makes is that we don’t realize how much of what we do is defined by things like the financial process,” Matos said. “So the fact that budgets get reviewed once a year sets the limits for the reward process that we do and how we think about learning.”The Importance of Personal DevelopmentPersonal development helps employees shift from change resistance as an instinctual response, says Matos. For example, when asked how teams can decompress during uncertainty, Matos emphasizes that the key aspect is allowing people to be heard using feedback.Inviting teams to reflect on their current challenges, successes, and what could be done differently helps replace doubt with clarity and confidence. Managers play a critical role by supporting personal development and normalizing role evolution, celebrating past accomplishments while reinforcing that employees are resilient, adaptable, and capable of change.“Asking people, say on a weekly basis, ‘what did you learn this week? What did you learn this month?’ Can just help them stop and go, ‘Right, I’m supposed to still be learning things, not just executing this job over and over again like a cog in a machine.’”Establishing a shared narrative can ease transitions by encouraging open conversations between employees, leaders, and peers about stepping into new roles. Previews, pilots, and trials also help employees gradually acclimate to organizational change. Most importantly, supporting employees’ livelihoods requires honest discussions about their role in the organization, future growth opportunities, and where they envision their careers heading.These discussions should reinforce resilience and adaptability as positive growth indicators. “Markers of an agile workforce is that they have fluid professional narratives,” Matos said. “They don’t see themselves as bound to a particular title or job track, but as having a collection of skills that they can apply to a variety of different purposes and goals that change with the context around them.”Editor’s note: From Day One thanks our partner, HiBob, for sponsoring this webinar. Stephanie Reed is a freelance news, marketing, and content writer. Much of her work features small business owners throughout diverse industries. She is passionate about promoting small, ethical, and eco-conscious businesses. (Photo by NanoStockk/iStock)

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The Agentic HR Operating Model: Moving Beyond Chatbots to AI-First HR

BY Ade Akin January 02, 2026

AI is generating both excitement and concern in the workplace, and especially in HR. Tools like Wisq’s AI HR generalist, Harper, promise to automate tasks and slash workloads by more than 80%, yet many organizations find their AI experiments deliver only incremental results instead of the transformative change they hoped for, says Clayton Holz, the head of product at the agentic HR platform Wisq.AI can transform HR departments if deployed pragmatically, Holz shared during a From Day One webinar about “The Agentic HR Operating Model: Moving Beyond Chatbots to AI-First HR.” Success requires proactively navigating around fundamental limitations, redesigning processes, and rethinking organizational structure, he says. “You are going to have to do work,” Holz said. “But I can clearly see a world in which, in the HR domain, AI is doing a lot of the tier zero, tier one, maybe some of the tier two work, and then augmenting your work further up the pyramid.”The Reality Check on AI AgentsTransforming HR departments with AI starts with a clear understanding of the technology’s current capabilities and limitations. Holz outlines several fundamental constraints HR leaders must work around. First, AI models are probabilistic, not deterministic. “A model with no supporting safety algorithm is going to be consistent anywhere from 60 to 90% of the time,” he said, adding that out-of-the-box AI tools like Copilot often perform worse on HR-specific tasks. Clayton Holz, the head of product at Wisq, led the webinar (company photo)Second, artificial intelligence struggles with complex, multi-turn instructions, sometimes leading to “hallucinations.” Models are trained to be sycophantic, which conflicts with HR’s need to be consistently fair and empathetic. “AI is more than willing to go ahead and make a decision on behalf of your organization that might not be present in the source material,” Holz said. Third, AI doesn’t magically drive behavior change. For example, AI can’t do much if employees aren’t motivated to create individual development plans. “AI is not suddenly going to change that motivational gap and change people's behavior,” Holz said. “It might make the experience of doing it different and better, but it's not necessarily going to change their behavior.”Holz advises that the best use cases for artificial intelligence are scenarios where “people just keep doing what they were doing before, and AI is there so they don’t have to change any behavior at all.”Building the Bridge With ITA major hurdle many HR teams face is getting their IT departments on board with the decision to give AI a larger role. Holz says HR teams should be proactive and data-driven when communicating with IT departments. “Vague asks are going to be difficult for them to prioritize,” he said. Holz advises HR leaders to articulate their needs to IT teams using three key dimensions: care (employee experience), compliance (risk reduction), and cost (time savings).He recommends building bridges by helping IT teams to understand the unique nuances of HR work, such as the rules governing a leave of absence. “The best examples that I’ve seen, honestly, are when someone in IT has recently gone on a leave of absence, because then they have empathy for some of the things that you’re dealing with,” Holz said.Redesigning HR Processes for AIThe core of Holz’s advice for HR leaders centers on the methodologies used to redesign processes for the implementation of AI. He suggests a hands-on workshop approach, starting with a subject-matter expert interview to map out multi-step processes like handling a request for promotion in detail, including the back-and-forth and waiting periods. Once that’s out of the way, the next step is to codify each step of the process. This systematic breakdown makes the workflow shape visible. “This is a great opportunity for redesign,” Holz said. “We’re looking for places where we can remove, combine, reorder, and standardize steps.”Finally, each step of each process should be evaluated and placed on a two-by-two grid. One axis measures the level of risk involved if the step is incorrectly done, while the other measures the amount of human judgement required. Doing so creates a clear opportunity map for applying AI to processes:Low-risk, low-judgment tasks: Examples include tasks like sending a reminder email or retrieving a standard policy document. These are prime candidates for full automation.High-risk, high-judgment tasks: These are important tasks like granting final approval on a sensitive employee relations case. Such tasks should be primarily handled by human experts, while AI serves as an assistant that helps to curate information or generate drafts. Tasks in the middle: These include tasks such as the initial assessment of a promotion request against set criteria. Most of these tasks can be handled by AI, but a human review step should be built in for quality assurance. For example, in the case of a promotion request, the approval routine might be automated, while a human communicates the final decision to the employee after evaluating the AI’s recommendation. Preparing Policies for an AI TeammateHolz says company policies must be AI-ready to operate the technology effectively. Ambiguous policies that are confusing to humans will be even more problematic for artificial intelligence. He highlights some of the most common issues organizations face, including outdated handbooks, over-reliance on jargon, and vast amounts of unwritten “tribal knowledge” governing discretionary decisions. Holz recommends archiving old policy documents, using plain language, and running policies by focus groups consisting of new employees to test for clarity. “If they don’t get it, it’s likely that AI is also not going to get it consistently,” he said. He also recommends codifying the unwritten rules that govern discretionary decisions, like what counts as a “close family member” for bereavement leave. This codification is essential to offload repetitive work to an AI agent. One of the most profound shifts in attitudes Holz proposed regarding AI is to view it as a team member, instead of a tool. “They’re going to need a manager, they’re going to need onboarding, they’re going to need supervision, they’re going to need performance feedback,” he said.Holz predicts the slow, consensus-driven policy management model will hinder the effectiveness of AI systems adopted and sees forward-thinking companies shifting toward a hub-and-spoke model with clear, centralized policy owners. “This is going to be a big [shift], allowing you to move much more quickly and get more out of AI going forward,” he added.The Future of HR Service DeliveryHolz envisions a not-too-distant future where AI handles the majority of HR service delivery, freeing humans up for tasks that require more human skills. “I think all of [those transactional requests] could be done in part or entirely by AI,” he said. The shift toward AI-driven HR may also encourage organizations to standardize policies that were once open to broad interpretation. “I could see policies becoming more black and white, candidly, or black and white for large shares of the population, so that decisions can be made in a more programmatic and consistent way,” he said.Holz’s message to HR leaders is that AI has the potential to transform processes, but that requires a proactive, process-oriented, and collaborative approach. The teammate of the future is waiting to be onboarded. Editor’s note: From Day One thanks our partner, Wisq, for sponsoring this webinar. Ade Akin covers artificial intelligence, workplace wellness, HR trends, and digital health solutions.(Photo by CL Stock/Shutterstock)

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Measurably Improving Culture: It Takes a Shared Language, Culture Skills and Analytics

BY Paul Kersey December 31, 2025

As a former HR attorney, Janine Yancey says that she hasn’t actually run into that many truly bad people. There are a handful of “bad eggs,” as she puts it, but most of the cases she handled involved decent folks who were struggling to manage workplace demands and the many different personality types they have on their teams.“It’s just people being people. They have different perspectives on situations. They’re optimizing for different outcomes. They’re thinking about different things. They have different communication styles, which leads to conflict,” she said. “It’s just hard sometimes to interact.”Her background led her to think of corporate culture a little differently; it's not just the history and values and mission, it’s the shared language and people skills that a company promotes. A healthy corporate culture can head off many workplace issues, and companies can instill that healthy culture intentionally. Now, the founder and CEO of Emtrain, an online compliance and culture training company, Yancey shared insights on measurably improving culture during a thought leadership spotlight at From Day One’s LA conference.Focusing on Actions, Not PeopleLeaders often assume good intent, Yancey says. But they also need to recognize how employees’ moods and pressures shape performance and interactions. Even strong managers are affected by stress and tight deadlines, and conflicts can arise between coworkers who are simply trying to do their best.Janine Yancey, the founder & CEO of Emtrain, led the thought leadership spotlight With that in mind, Yancey says HR professionals should avoid categorizing people as bad actors. It’s more constructive to focus on specific actions or habits that cause problems. When you do that, you can be more clinical and less judgmental. Interventions can take the form of teaching skills rather than correcting character faults. “You’re not judging somebody and calling them a toxic person or toxic manager, you’re saying, hey, you’ve got an area of opportunity, and we can help develop this skill a little bit.” Yancey describes a color scale for workplace interactions: green for those handled well, yellow for moments shaped by stress or bad habits. As an attorney and compliance specialist, she distinguishes yellow from orange, which involves legally protected groups and potential litigation. Red marks situations that are clearly illegal.New Issues Create Workplace StressEmtrain has been gathering employee feedback through its training program, and Yancey notes trends HR should watch for. One key trend is generational differences: younger workers prioritize work-life balance more than older employees.For example, Yancey describes a hypothetical law firm meeting where a senior attorney scolds a younger associate for being unavailable after hours on a time-sensitive project. Younger workers are more likely to view this as out of line, valuing work-life balance, which can heighten conflicts over after-hours availability and task flexibility.Another potential conflict arises with AI implementation. While AI can save time, such as generating programs previously done by junior tech staff, it can also disrupt job roles and interdepartmental relations. IT workers may find themselves verifying AI-generated code rather than creating it.With AI, departments will work together in different ways, says Yancey. And some workers will inevitably begin to question their value to the company—what is the computer coder’s role now when AI can write programs itself based on specifications it gets from executives? This confusion and insecurity will place new stress on employees, and HR professionals will need to be ready to deal with the fallout, she says. Building a Culture With Soft SkillsProactive leadership can help a company build a culture with a shared language, a common set of values, and soft skills, all of which minimize conflicts and make it easier for workers to resolve them on their own.  As a litigator, Yancey’s own experience was that much of the time she was coaching employees about people skills. She suggests that companies start by creating their own matrix of social habits that best serve their employees. Emtrain’s own skills matrix is based on four central values: ethics, respect, inclusion, and belonging. “If you have a really strong culture of soft skills, compliance becomes a non-issue,” she said.Yancey suggests embedding these skills in regular compliance training. Additionally, tailored programs, especially online, can both reinforce culture and gather anonymous employee feedback, giving leaders insights to prevent conflicts and spot potential issues.“We’re all works in progress, trying to do better,” Yancey said. “As we practice with intentionality, then our actions start developing into skills.” A well-designed training program can help employees develop the skills they need to excel, and help your company develop the positive culture it needs to adapt and grow.Editor’s note: From Day One thanks our partner, Emtrain, for sponsoring this thought leadership spotlight. Paul Kersey is a former attorney and freelance writer based in Chicago, IL.(Photos by Josh Larson for From Day One)

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The Rules Are Being Rewritten: How Bold Leaders Win in the AI Era

BY Ade Akin December 22, 2025

The time between technological revolutions has shrunk from 50 years to a couple of decades, and AI is now rewriting what work looks like faster than organizations can adapt. The rapid pace of new technologies that significantly impact how companies operate is creating massive skill gaps that traditional hiring and training methods are ineffective at addressing. Recruiting and learning divisions within organizations are now coming together to improve talent acquisition and address skill gaps from within. Tigran Sloyan, the CEO and co-founder of CodeSignal, urges companies to move beyond passive learning and resume screening, and embrace AI-powered, hands-on learning programs and scalable assessments. “You want to answer the question, ‘What can we do? How can we leverage this, and how can it be good for humanity?’” Sloyan said during a thought leadership spotlight at From Day One’s LA conference. The Historical Pace of Change And Why This Time Is DifferentSloyan started his presentation by comparing the speed of technological breakthroughs since the development of the internet to the pace of tech advancement several centuries ago, when the printing press was invented. “It used to take us 50 years to experience a new, dramatic technological shift,” he said. “Forty years ago, we didn’t have web developers. Thirty years ago, we didn’t have cloud engineers. Twenty years ago, we didn’t have mobile engineers.” Each shift created new jobs and skills, but organizations had more time to adapt.Today, generative AI tools like ChatGPT, which has only been around for a few years, are transforming workplaces, garnering over 700 million active weekly users. Sloyan says the challenge is leveraging new technologies like AI to “transform how we find, discover, and develop skills that will shape this future.”Closing Skills Gaps With Hands-On, AI-Powered LearningTigran Sloyan, CEO & co-founder of CodeSignal, led the thought leadership spotlight Sloyan introduced CodeSignal as an “AI-native skills intelligence platform” built on the principle that people learn best when performing tasks. “Think about when you learn how to ride a bike, how you learn to drive a car. You get behind the wheel, and you actually try and practice,” he said. The same applies to job skills, but scaling hands-on learning programs has historically been challenging.Sloyan shared the example of Dropbox, which faced considerable AI skill gaps across its workforce. Dropbox’s executives recognized it couldn’t hire its way out of its problem because the skills required were too new to be widely available. The solution was to partner with CodeSignal to build a Gen AI Skills Academy. The academy offers employees three options: AI use lessons for non-technical roles like marketing, AI integration classes for building products using existing tools, and AI creation courses that teach how to build new AI systems. Sloyan says the key to the success of Dropbox’s Gen AI Skills Academy is its practice-based nature. He demonstrated a model where learners first practice prompting an AI model, then are tasked with teaching a simulated coworker named “Nova” how to do it. “Another way you learn well is by teaching other people,” he said.CodeSignal’s AI doesn’t only simulate conversations, it also provides personalized feedback through its “Cosmo” system. “Practice without feedback is not very helpful,” Sloyan said, comparing it to learning to drive a vehicle without an instructor. “With generative AI, we’re making it possible to actually scale this to an entire organization.” Dropbox applied this to thousands of employees, enabling them to learn, practice, and get feedback at scale.How AI Interviewers Are Opening Up the Hiring FunnelSloyan also shared how Coinbase created a more efficient hiring process thanks to CodeSignal’s AI interviewers that scale top-of-funnel recruiter screens to nearly 100% of its candidate pool. Coinbase had previously struggled sorting through a flood of applicants with its limited recruiting team, leading to as many as 95% of job applicants never hearing back from a human.“Almost every candidate that applies actually hears back and actually gets to have a conversation to talk about their skills,” Sloyan said. He showed a demo of “Milo,” an AI interviewer CodeSignal uses in its hiring process, interviewing a candidate.A common concern is that AI interviews might feel impersonal, but Sloyan says candidate feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. “Candidates are saying, ‘This is one of the best interviews that I’ve actually done,’” he said. The AI can be customized for tone to align with an organization’s legal and brand guidelines. Sloyan says the next step is moving toward AI avatars to create an even more immersive experience. He playfully demonstrated the concept with a candidate interview conducted by an AI avatar of Santa for an “elf” position.A Future Built on Skills, Not Just CredentialsSloyan kept returning to a central theme during his presentation: The future belongs to organizations that can discover and develop new skills proactively. AI is the accelerant, but the solution is timeless; learning by performing tasks reinforced by feedback. It’s the necessary response to a world where new jobs are created by new technologies every decade. “Technology keeps on moving faster and faster. Humans do not,” Sloyan said. “We’re still the same humans, and it’s this technology that needs to help us go through this process faster and be on the winning side of history.” Editor’s note: From Day One thanks our partner, CodeSignal, for sponsoring this thought leadership spotlight.Ade Akin covers artificial intelligence, workplace wellness, HR trends, and digital health solutions.(Photos by Josh Larson for From Day One)

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AI Disrupts Staffing: The Inevitable Transformation

BY Stephanie Reed December 19, 2025

AI may have entered HR through efficiency, but it’s staying for something bigger. As tools grow more sophisticated, their role is expanding from automating tasks to shaping how organizations understand people and make hiring decisions. According to John H. Chuang, CEO of Skill, recruiting is where that shift is becoming most visible.During a live thought leadership spotlight at From Day One’s Miami conference, Chuang spoke about the advanced capabilities of the latest AI technology and how it will eventually be integrated into every department in an organization. One way recruiting is being revolutionized is by AI processing voluminous data, he says. A recruiter alone is less efficient at digesting information from thousands of potential recruits. “I would argue that human beings are actually sort of not qualified to do the initial stage of sourcing because they cannot absorb data,” Chuang said. “What can absorb data? Computers. What can now understand computers? AI.” Beyond processing information at scale, AI also enables better matches by identifying specialized skills and technical nuances of roles that recruiters themselves may not be deeply familiar with, he says. For example, some clients are seeking very specific roles, such as cardiologists, medical coders, and construction supervisors. “Are you telling me that the average recruiter is going to know all the lingo and all the technical details in all these areas that are completely dispersed? No, they won’t. But AI can. And AI does know these things.”Another way AI is reshaping recruiting is through language. While recruiters may only speak one language, AI can process resumes across many, removing a common barrier to global hiring. Once the technology is properly trained, it also allows recruiting to scale efficiently, helping talent teams identify the best candidates faster. The return on investment is clear: the cost of an additional AI-led search is significantly lower than a human-led one, making large-scale recruiting far more cost-effective, says Chuang. John H. Chuang, CEO of Skill, led the thought leadership spotlight At Skill, Chuang described how the company is moving toward a recruiter-less model, driven by advances in AI. Agentic AI, an evolved form of the technology, acts as an intelligent assistant for processes that require flexibility, context, and real-time decision-making. “Recruiting will be absolutely unrecognizable in three years,” he said. A 2025 Deloitte report highlights how agentic AI is reshaping workplace processes, from understanding context and user intent to supporting scenario planning, forecasting, and risk assessment. It can even make autonomous decisions in areas like economic forecasting and competitive analysis. Chuang recalled that during beta testing ahead of a January release, the team tasked agentic AI with finding a customer solution engineer, and the system took action on its own.The team set a goal to find a customer solution engineer. Agentic AI took action on its own.“We didn’t tell it what to do at all.” The technology created a strategy: create two job ads. One defined the technical aspects of the position, while the other highlighted the customer service aspect more. The system ran the job ads, continuously optimizing underperforming postings through four iterations as more matches came in. Once it reached a sufficient pool of candidates, the results were sent to a recruiter. “Guess how much time all the strategy development, the posting of jobs on five job boards, one’s internal database, and four iterations, how long this took? This took eight minutes.”While agentic AI may “supercharge” talent acquisition, Chuang emphasized that people remain essential to the process. Recruiters won’t have to read through too many documents. Instead, they can focus on interviews and negotiation.HR’s new role will be to help transform the organization, emphasizing the partnership between people and technology. Put simply, computers will accomplish what computers are best at, and people will accomplish what people are best at. “AI can do amazing things. And you haven’t even seen anything yet. It’s coming, and it’s going to be more amazing than you’ve ever seen.”Editor’s note: From Day One thanks our partner, Skill, for sponsoring this thought leadership spotlight. Stephanie Reed is a freelance news, marketing, and content writer. Much of her work features small business owners throughout diverse industries. She is passionate about promoting small, ethical, and eco-conscious businesses(Photos by Josh Larson for From Day One)

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Global Hiring and Emerging HR Tech: A New Path to Solving the Talent Shortage

BY Grace Turney December 17, 2025

Noelle Pittock, senior director of onboarding and business operations at Remote, remembers the first time her team completed what was previously a six-to-eight-week performance review cycle in just 48 hours. The drastic change wasn’t only about speed; it ultimately saved 7,000 hours of work and achieved 95% completion rates. This breakthrough came from rethinking how technology could actually make work processes smoother instead of more complex.The talent crisis has reached a tipping point. According to research from Remote surveying nearly 4,000 business and HR leaders worldwide, 72% of companies missed a key business goal or deadline in the past year due to talent shortages. These weren’t product failures, they were people problems. Teams simply couldn’t find and onboard the right talent fast enough to meet critical deadlines.“The bottleneck isn’t that great candidates don’t exist. It’s that we’re looking in too narrow a place,” Pittock said during a thought leadership spotlight at From Day One’s December virtual conference. Opening Borders, Not Just Job PostingsThe data reveals an intriguing paradox: 74% of HR leaders say finding qualified local talent is more difficult than a year ago, yet 79% would hire more international candidates if it were as easy as hiring domestically. The willingness exists, but the infrastructure just isn’t there.Many companies are currently expanding their geographic reach, says Pittock. Some business leaders expect more than half of their 2026 new hires to come from outside their primary country. This isn’t a fringe strategy anymore; it’s becoming standard practice for businesses struggling with shallow local talent pools.Noelle, a senior director of onboarding & business operations at Remote, led the virtual session (company photo)Remote itself operates as proof of concept. The fully distributed company receives 30,000 to 35,000 applications per month across 90-plus countries, employing nearly 2,000 people without a physical office. “We haven’t faced a talent shortage by taking this globalized strategy,” Pittock said.What’s held companies back isn’t desire, but clarity. Nebulous local regulations and compliance concerns make the risks seemingly outweigh the rewards. Modern HR technology is trying to change that perception through global-first sourcing tools, AI-assisted screening, location-based compensation planning, and legal hiring mechanisms like employer of record services that handle compliance complexity.But finding talent is only half the challenge. HR teams also face an operational crisis managing the sheer volume of work across disconnected platforms. The average HR leader juggles 3.6 tools, with some using four to seven systems just for basic processes. These tools rarely communicate with each other, ultimately multiplying workload instead of reducing it. “When HR teams say they don’t have enough time, that’s not an exaggeration,” Pittock said. “That’s reality.”Automation That Actually Reduces WorkThe most effective teams aren’t just adopting new tools; they’re completely rethinking workflows. Remote’s approach offers a framework: simplify processes before automating them, consolidate platforms to eliminate data silos, and create automated workflows that don’t rely on institutional memory.In hiring, AI screening now helps teams navigate increased application volume. Candidates can use AI to tailor resumes quickly, flooding recruiters with applications. One in five talent acquisition professionals report seeing AI-generated applications with misleading information, says Pittock. Remote’s pilot program used AI to extract skills, summarize resumes, and generate consistent screening questions, allowing recruiters to focus on qualified candidates rather than sorting through virtual piles of paperwork.Onboarding presents another opportunity for automation. Remote onboards talent in over 100 countries by breaking the process into clear workflows with integrated systems, she says. Personal data automatically generates employment agreements in seconds and compliance checks verify identity remotely. By integrating AI directly into workflow platforms, Remote compressed reviews from six weeks to just two days. Managers complete reviews on day one using preliminary information and structured data. Leaders calibrate and finalize decisions on day two. The system achieved 85% employee satisfaction while completing reviews 15 times faster. “AI isn’t replacing judgment,” Pittock said. “It’s supporting it by handling drafting, summarizing, and formatting so managers can focus on substance.”Starting Small and Scaling StrategicallyFor HR teams ready to simplify their workload while increasing productivity, Pittock recommends four immediate steps: remove one manual task you touch often, consolidate data into fewer platforms, pilot global hiring for a single role where widening the search meaningfully improves your candidate pool, and add one lightweight automation ritual like weekly check-in reminders.The key is identifying what matters most to your team. “Take a pulse check with your HR leaders,” Pittock said.  “What’s the one most annoying thing they do every day that, if it disappeared overnight, would change how they work? Start there.”These changes require minimal investment but create foundations for sustainable, high-performing organizations that remain people-centric even as they automate. The goal isn’t replacing any of the human elements in HR’s, it’s about freeing professionals to focus on what actually requires their judgment, creativity, and care.Editor’s note: From Day One thanks our partner, Remote, for sponsoring this thought leadership spotlight. Grace Turney is a St. Louis-based writer, artist, and former librarian. See more of her work at graceturney17.wixsite.com/mysite.(Photo by dem10/iStock)

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The Power of Purpose-Driven HR Technology Decisions

BY Christopher O'Keeffe December 16, 2025

The HR technology landscape didn’t arrive at its current complexity overnight. While many of today’s leaders may not have lived through three decades of platform evolution firsthand, the industry has—from the dot-com era’s monolithic systems to Web 2.0’s “all-in-one” platforms, through the SaaS boom that fueled a massive unbundling of tools, and now into an AI-powered cycle of rebundling and automation.During a thought leadership spotlight at From Day One’s November virtual conference, Alex Uhre, enterprise sales manager at Rippling, walked through this history to share how HR leaders can make smarter, purpose-driven technology decisions. “Companies above 1,000 employees on average have 177 SaaS technologies within their organization,” he said. Employees feel that burden acutely: “It creates this position that not only are employees a little bit frustrated about trying to figure out where to go, but we’re also finding that even when you do have these all in one systems for our administrators, they’re finding themselves hamstrung.”Against that backdrop, Uhre outlined a clear, three-pillar framework: buy for the employee experience, choose unification over integration, and adopt new systems with a methodical mindset.How We Got Here: The Four Cycles of HR Technology Uhre opened with a rapid but revealing history lesson.In the dot-com boom, he said, “desktop technology and desktop information and personnel records transitioned into this idea of the HR information systems that we know today.” These early monoliths centralized employee data and automated payroll, replacing paper systems with digital infrastructure.The rise of Web 2.0 expanded this further. “We saw this rise of ‘integrated technologies’ where it wasn’t just about the employee records. We wanted to see technology expand to more of the practical day to day things that HR was taking care of.” Recruitment, onboarding, and performance tools all moved under the umbrella of the “all in one.”Then came SaaS—and a structural shift. “We saw this unbundling of technology,” Uhre said, where organizations adopted “individual point solutions that provided exactly what they needed.” The gain in specialization created an explosion in total platform count.Now the pendulum is swinging again. “AI is here, massive automation is here,” Uhre said. “We can unify systems again. We can rebundle systems to give HR and business professionals holistic systems that provide exactly what they need.”The Three Pillar FrameworkToo often, Uhre said, HR tech is marketed around “what saves HR time.” But he encouraged leaders to rethink the goal altogether: “I’d love to shift this mindset from saving HR time to reducing friction for your employees.”An employee tech journey audit offers a practical starting point. “Talk to all of your individuals within your organization,” he said. “From the first day that they join your company, throughout the life cycle of their employment, where is it that they’re finding inefficiencies, and where can things be better?” And utilization is what determines value. “Utilization is the true test,” he said. Alex Uhre, an enterprise sales manager at Rippling, led the session (company photo)The proliferation of disconnected systems has created what Uhre called the modern “Frankenstack.” “APIs are great. Integrations are fantastic,” he said, “but they’re a bandage for what could be structural redesign.”The cost of this patchwork approach is significant: dual maintenance, data discrepancies, compliance risk, manual work, and fragmented reporting. “Efficiency comes from data talking to itself,” he said, “not having administrators check on APIs or check on integration.”Uhre shared the diagnostic question he urges leaders to ask vendors. First, “If you make a change to an employee, how many systems does that need to touch?” And, “Am I able to report on everything entirely in one single report?”Even at Rippling, the impact of unification is visible. “It should start and stop with as few systems as possible.”The third pillar, he says, rather than roll out new platforms in one sweeping change, Uhre advises leaders to identify a minimum viable rollout. “When you have a unified system, you are actually able to roll out individual pieces over time,” he said. He urged teams to start with high-impact, low-friction improvements: “Maybe it’s expense reporting, maybe it’s PTO requests, things like that.” He also emphasized the importance of measuring everything. “I would really ensure that you are measuring adoption and gathering feedback,” he said. “If it works, promote it. If it doesn’t, let’s fix it before we launch the next module.”Across every stage of the framework, Uhre returned to one theme: clarity.The Way Forward: Purpose-Driven Decisions in an Era of AI and ComplexityAs the industry enters another major inflection point—this time shaped by AI and automation—the lesson from Uhre’s session is clear: companies cannot afford accidental tech stacks.Unification, intentional design, and employee-first thinking are no longer differentiators; they are survival strategies.And while the tools have changed dramatically since the dot-com era, the goal has stayed the same: making work easier, clearer, and more connected for the people at the center of it.Editor’s note: From Day One thanks our partner, Rippling, for sponsoring this thought leadership spotlight. Chris O’Keeffe is a freelance writer with experience across industries. As the founder and creative director of OK Creative: The Language Agency, he has led strategy and storytelling for organizations like MIT, Amazon, and Cirque du Soleil, bringing their stories to life through established and emerging media.(Photo by Thawatchai Chawong/iStock)