Name: Moving at the speed of AI without breaking your people
Uploaded: 2026-04-21T12:28:29.186Z
Duration: 45 min 30 s
Description: Moving at the speed of AI without breaking your people

Transcript for "Moving at the speed of AI without breaking your people": So as I mentioned, session one is all about trust. When you can't give people certainty, what can you give them? And how do you communicate about change when you're still figuring it out yourself? So with that, let's go. So before we jump in, let's start with the number. €274,000. That's what the average European organization has lost last year to preventable people problems. And this is according to Personio 2025 workforce goals report. Turnover that could have been avoided, mishires, skill gaps, workforce planning pay failures. And now on top of that, the same report saying that employees worried about AI are 39% more likely to be job hunting. Only 36% of them say they are getting adequate support to adapt the ever changing environment. So here's the question we're tackling today. How do you establish a baseline of employee trust when AI is changing work so quickly? I am delighted to be joined by Lenke Taylor and Jess Larsen for this conversation. Before we jump in to peppering you both with lots of questions, I'm going to hand over to you just to give us one line about who you are and what you do. And Lenke, maybe we start with you. Alright. Thanks, Susie. It's great to be here today. I'm Lenke Taylor. I'm the chief people officer here at Personio, and I lead the people, workplace in IT team. Fantastic. Welcome. Cool. I'll go next. Great to meet everybody here, and I'm delighted to be a part of this discussion. I'm Jess Larsen. I'm the founder of Fighting Humans. We are a consultancy that supports businesses in addressing the human dimensions of AI change transformation. So we bring the thinking of how do you actually design your future business model for the humans in the room. And I come to that, I should say, from a background of leading two businesses through their AI transformations over the past three years, learning a lot along the way along with a twenty year career leading HR and, doing some big heavy lifting on change programs. And there were things that were immediately obvious about how AI is quite a different change that felt really important to address. Excellent. So let's jump into it then. First of all, could we start with each of you briefly describing how you see the role of HR in AI transformed work? And I think a lot of people, professionals, are really grappling with this right now. So what falls within their remit and should they be responsible for it or not? And, Jess, maybe we start with you. Sure. Thank you. Okay. Great. I love this question because, I've had quite a bit of challenge with it, I guess, as we've worked with clients and prospects over it. I I have quite an an all encompassing view of how the people function, the HR function works in the sense that I see this function in businesses as accountable for the most human dimensions of how people work. And what I mean by that is, like, understanding people the best. So I see us as the people that have the most experience of the impact of how people work, of, like, what works, what doesn't work. We're the ones that have the skills to say, actually, we know from experience that this is gonna be more successful than that. And I think with AI, I saw quite quickly, as we started to take Thriving Humans to market, that as I was talking with people leaders that there were a lot of stakeholders that were telling me, I'm not heavily involved in the AI agenda. I'm actually trying to stay clear of it. I I'm either not comfortable with AI or I'm not being included in those conversations. Either I don't know how to get into that or I'm actively trying to stay out of it because I have so much on my plate I kinda can't really afford to. And that I found it quite disturbing because I thought AI is being this whole new tool skill set that was gonna be disruptive in a way that nothing else has been coming into our workplaces. So anyone who's lived through, like, cloud capability coming into business is like, that felt like a big change at the time. That's nothing compared to what AI is gonna do. And it I see it as remodeling so much of how people are gonna work. You know? I mean, I think many of us have seen that versus already. And so I see the people, HR stakeholders, as the ones that have the best skills to come in and design that work intentionally. And I think what HR leaders need to kind of refresh their thinking on is, hey. This change is happening ready or not. But if you don't get in front of that change, if you don't bring that knowledge and thinking that you have of how people work, there is very high risk, to your business model, but also the people in your business that, you perhaps don't design to make sure that change is gonna serve them well, but that the how work ends up in your business and future. We're all probably really familiar with, like, the threat to well-being that we've seen come through in the last five years. It's been a really hot topic since since COVID, and I see AI on the same dimensions of that. Like, if we let it run rampant through our business models and we don't really look at how is it affecting the ways that people work, how do we design this in ways that is healthy for them, that we can make mistakes, and we can end up doing things that actually makes work harder for people, and we cause other problems down the road that everyone's gonna care about. Yeah. Absolutely. And the timing thing, actually, just to pick up on what you said or what you're hearing from people leaders, that resonates a lot because I think I'm hearing a lot of that from my own peer group as well is I just don't have the time to invest in experimenting and exploring more. And actually, the only way people are going to evolve is to carve out that time. So that feels like something that everyone should should really action straight away. Blanca, what about you? Yeah. I think I echo a lot of what Jess, said in terms of this is a new wave of work. Like, work is gonna change dramatically in the next couple years, and it's, in many ways, a very exciting time to be an HR person because part of what, we will be able to do is help figure out, how is how is work changing and how do we enable that across the businesses. And, that can be very strategic to the organization, but will also involve some of the core things behind, how we operate as an HR function, like, what are how our job's defined, and what are the skill sets, and what does a career progression look like, and how does that tie to compensation? Like, it is very interesting to, to think about the the early stage we are now of what I think is gonna be quite a significant, change, especially for those of us in, very computer centric, organizations or sort of desk based workers. I I would think of this you know, your question initially was, like, what is the role of HR? And I would encourage people to maybe think about three key things. The first thing is you gotta understand the what and the how of the change that's coming. And you you find your way in that journey. It may be, reading other HR leaders talking about it. It might be understanding, Anthropic just released a report overnight that was about, research that they've done about, like, how people are adapting to AI. Like, make this part of your regular routine to understand the changes that are coming. The second thing I would say, the role of an HR leader is to guide the organization and employees through the change journey. This is really something HR people have done for years. This is a different type of change. There's an opportunity here. And I think in particular, to engage in the development of the governance around how your organization is going to approach and engage AI in its work. And then the last thing I would say is, really aligned to what Jess was saying, which is, like, we're in a unique place because we are about the humans. And so I think HR leaders have the opportunity to try to anticipate the human impact of this very significant change. And that might be, some of the tangible things I mentioned earlier, like different skills that people will need or how is judgment gonna come into action. But I think it will also be the other side of humans, which is the emotional impact. And we all know from our role as people leaders that, how people go through work emotionally is just as important as how they perform, a specific analytical or whatever task. And so I think we as HR leaders are probably uniquely positioned, as Jess said, to support the the people in the organization through what is going to be quite a incredible transformation, and I think we'll have a lot of emotion. Right? There's gonna be loss and fear and excitement and, lots of, the up up opposing, emotions from people and how we help them navigate that with resilience is something that we can support for our employees. Absolutely. So I suppose what I'm hearing is we've had varying experiences navigating HR's role in an HR transformed workplace. But the common denominator seems to be here, like, the people centric element, but also bringing your people along on that transformation process. I referenced the Workhorse Pulse survey, which found that thirty six percent of employees get adequate AI training from their employer. And those worried, blanket to your point about losing their job to AI, are 39% more likely to be job hunting today. So what I'm interested to get in with both of you is where at all have you seen leaders underestimate the human load or growing at AI at speed, and have you seen rollouts expose or even accelerate? And then, obviously, a byproduct is creating trust problems. So, Lenke, maybe just staying with you for a second, you're managing Coursonia's own people function through AI transformation. How are you responding to situations which may cause employees to date strategy? With with every piece of our approaches of people function to the, integration AI, I think we really think about the communication that we're going to do, the governance that we have in place, and the guidance that we give our employees around how to use that, AI in a responsible way. And particularly as a people function, like, really having that as our framework upfront and being able to give our employees that context as we as we use it has been really important. One example that we did recently, as you know, Susie, because this is part of your team, but, we looked at how we could use AI to reduce the start to end time of our entire performance review process, and in particular, related to feedback and using AI to enable people to, form and, put, in place the feedback that they had for their colleagues. And, one of the things there, I think, was really helping people understand that the purpose of AI in this instance is to start with your idea. Right? What is the feedback that I want to give somebody? Not the AI is gonna generate ideas on the feedback I need to give, but how do I actually start with my own voice and my own ideas and use the AI to help me clarify or develop that idea further? The other thing we did was make really sure that along the way, we helped people understand, hey. AI, you know, can make mistakes or it can extrapolate something that maybe isn't what you want to say. And so not only are you responsible for that input of this was original my original idea and the AI is helping you to build it out, but you're also responsible for the output. So when it comes back and gives you a suggestion about what the feedback should be, you need to make sure that it's still true to the things that you, wanted to say or that you believed are appropriate for that person. And, making sure that it has that, ownership of your voice or whatever in it. And I think this will change as AI gets more access contextual information, and you'll more likely come into places where the AI is suggesting to you what the feedback should be to somebody. And so it's even more important that we ground people in this starting point of the responsibility of you as the person to make sure that that output is in fact consistent with what you wanted to say or what is appropriate in in that, specific context. It can be AI can be a very helpful thought partner. And, one of the things I think we found was that it enabled people much more easily, for example, to take their feedback about somebody and compare it to a framework. Right? So if we have a consistent set of job expectations for a role, the likelihood that somebody using AI was tying the feedback back to the framework was much greater than before we had AI to do it. People would just write write feedback and more likely than not, would have forgotten, in some cases, that there's a job framework that, like, how am I really assessing this person? So I think it helped people be a bit more objective and, rigorous in, how they put feedback together. And, ultimately, one of the things that I think is the best outcome is that we had people receive more feedback than they did in the past. The number of times I had somebody say to me, hey. I was, able to do all of the peer review request that came to me, whereas in the past, I just picked four and I only did the four. And as we talk about a lot in relation to employee development, we talk about the importance of any time and sort of real time ongoing feedback. And so I'm really excited about the opportunity that these tools will have to continue to enable people to give that real time feedback to, the individuals that they work with in a meaningful way. And I know that even the people who then could do 15 peer reviews instead of, four were really grateful because they knew all 15 of those coworkers were really important and deserved, the feedback rather than just the four they would have prioritized in the in the in the past. So, overall, I think, it's a exciting starting point for, for where we are and an opportunity to really support employee development and continuous feedback. Yeah. Absolutely. And just to play back, I think one thing you said that's a very salient point is that everyone is still responsible responsible for their work output. What you have now is potentially an agent or something to help support as an editor, but should never be the author of that work as well. And I think underscoring that, particularly for people that are looking for quick fixes is is really important. Jess, coming to you, what do leaders do during this process that accidentally maybe shuts down adoption, or even honest feedback? Yeah. Thank you, Susie. I I actually just wanna highlight something Lenka said in her answer because it's such a cool example of some of the insights we're helping our clients with is understanding not just how we're using the tools, but also how the tools are changing us. So the example you gave, Lenka, of not allowing people to use AI for all of the generation in the first instance, but forcing the users to think first and do that do that active thinking. It's one of the risks that we see in in very high adoption cases is helping companies think really carefully of if we kind of outsource that thinking to AI, do we run the risk of losing that capability? So we know that, repetitive usage of AI and and specific use cases runs the rest that we start losing those abilities ourselves, and really thinking about that in the application. So if you're designing tools, if you're designing processes, we're often helping clients think about how do we put hurdles in here that force people to do that thinking that we really need them to hold on to, as well as, as you said, the governance at the end of they have to also maintain that relationship mental relationship of owning the output that they don't lose sight of they're still accountable for whatever they're they're delivering an output. But to do what you're asking in helping people getting stuck, some of the, the places people go wrong, it's, I think, the first one that I've seen for HR leaders is this, nervousness or apprehension of needing to be a subject matter expert in AI. Like, you don't. And and, actually, nobody is. And increasingly such, I think that's really important to say, and I I'm really mindful you've got a big audience here today, and it's likely to be a huge spectrum of experiences that people listening might might be coming from. So you might be in a company where you're in hyperadoption, and this is just business as normal for you. And, you know, some of the pieces we're talking about in entry level may not feel as relevant, but, or you might be right down the other end where, you know, you you're not seeing any instances of AI application or you're being held back from putting tools into place. And I'd say, we talked a little bit in the prep that, people often sometimes get stuck in the bubbles, the echo chamber of of your own experience, so that kinda feels like the whole reality. And I I just wanna put that back that, that we definitely see people across a huge spectrum of experience. So wherever you're at today listening is okay. But the the first piece to say is helping yourself as a leader. If this feels intimidating or it feels, uncomfortable of, you know, this is something I really don't know anything about or, you know, there's so much noise out there. Like, where do I start? I definitely get those questions. There there are some incredibly powerful resources, like all of the big vendors and topic, you know, Gemini, etcetera, have put out very easy short, training videos of, like, five minutes long as entry points. So, you know, anywhere you're looking at using an LLM, you can go into their tooling. And the quality of that training, just to help you understand what are we even talking about, gives you a great starting point. The other thing to do is use an LLM. So, you know, whatever you're using, there's umpteen models out there. My personal preference is Claude. I'm always gonna be an advocate of, but I use probably five regularly, in terms of different use cases. And I might put the same query into multiple, elements that I'm playing with and see what comes back. But even ask the question, where can I start? This is how I'm feeling. These are my concerns. I don't know what to do. This is what I'm seeing in our business. What might be a good use case? Like, they are at a level of sophistication that you'll get a base game plan to get you started. And, so that that nervousness of, I don't know what I'm talking about. You know, I'm not technical enough. There's too much noise out there. Like, easy entry points for that. And I would say, I was at a conference in November, which, was a community of CTO just across The UK. So going into a room of CTO, CIO, so the people at the top end of businesses, you know, 2,000 to a 100,000 type size employee basis. And I was nervous of how do I come in that room, you know, from this people HR background and speak credibly to this problem space. By the time my panel came on stage at midday, everybody all morning long who had all been technical speakers, the ending of their conversation was, really, what this is is a people problem. So where they're having technical issues, there is very loud recognition that the technical leaders are challenged by the human adoption issues along the way. They're they're recognizing they need our help, basically. And so if you're not in those conversations, this is you know, my call to action for you would be go and ask those stakeholders in your business. What are you seeing? What are you finding? Don't be afraid of being curious. Don't be afraid of looking stupid. Nobody is fully up to speed on this stuff. It's a great time to start wherever you are. Great. Fantastic. Yes. I think, Lenke, you already set the the scene there just in terms of a very practical example of what we've done at at Personio, and Jess has evolved it into some other practical things that people can be doing. Lenka, maybe just staying on that same example, when you think about rolling out that to, Personio, was there ever any issues with people trusting in kind of the the box that were built to give more effective feedback, and how did you ever combat and trust during the AI adoption? Yeah. I think, so much of that comes down to the communication and, also the the prompts that we put into the tool itself to remind people to, make sure it was their original ideas and that these were aligned to what, the, feedback that they were trying to give, and then ultimately listening to employee feedback along the way. So there was both the pre rollout, experimentation and testing with trusted users on how do we feel, what's the feedback that we're hearing from people about how it's working, but also when it went into production, to be available response, responsive as people identified, things that we could do differently or how it could be improved and really incorporating that into the process, I think, is part of the the trust. And then as I said earlier, I think as these tools become much more connected with information and, if there's a future where it's the AI that's suggesting what somebody's development needs are and not the manager, those that's a different stage, I think, for companies to navigate in terms of trust. Because if the manager's responsibility is to manage the person, as Jess was saying earlier, like, we gotta make sure that the managers, have those skills and are actually doing that accountability, so that they can carry forward in that role. And we we didn't use our AI bots for our performance process in that way this year. But, certainly, as this technology advances, that's gonna become more and more common that this context will come into play. And then I think HR teams will further have that responsibility to ensure that the outcomes are actually fair and reasonable for, the people that are receiving the the on the receiving end of those decisions. Sure. Sure. And, Jess, Lenke has given us a few kind of trust building interventions for people leaders to be thinking about. How do they then measure whether those interventions are actually working? Yeah. I think where we have, overseen implementation journeys, I think going back to some of the core principles of change management on how are you communicating, how can you align your leadership around the clear communication objective and schedule and have repetitive communication things that reiterate the same points and then interject those with listening exercises. I think we've got better tools than we've ever had in terms of listening to what people are experiencing in the workforce today. And never underestimate, like, the value of doing physical check ins and actually getting listening pilot sessions around your organization to invest the time and effort if you can afford to do that of what people are actually seeing and experiencing. But then feeding that back in through your communication channel to say, hey. These are the things that we heard. These are the themes and therefore and recycling those back through. This is what we're then now doing to address those. So in in a lot of cases, what we've seen with the changes play I is that because partly, certainly about, you know, eighteen months ago, twelve months ago, the development of the tech is moving so quickly, and the develop and the landscape of, what's happening in terms of the tech stack and the evolution of products that are coming to market, then things are changing very quickly. And so it's really hard for businesses to declare this is the road map and these are you know, you don't you can't afford that traditional approach of we've got everything sorted out and this is what you can expect. It's much more a case of this is the direction we're going in. These are the principles by which we're gonna work, and this is how we're gonna learn as we go. If we're passing milestones that we're celebrating those that we're starting to see, hey. We've applied these pilots. We can we can roll these out wider into the organization. These are the wins. This is how we're measuring, but also feeding back, hey. We learned these other things. These are the the failures that we've had. Like, we definitely see businesses where they have used this change journey as a louder exercise to celebrate failure, which, like, we absolutely advocate with clients because the way the tech operates is changing so quickly, and what we're desperately needing is innovation and use cases. Like, it's so flexible. I mean, we we talk about AI capability being like Play Doh. Like, you know, we think about five coding and what that potential really means. It's like people have, if you can enable that little tool again to your business model, people suddenly have the potential to build, like, really powerful stuff quite quickly, you know, depending on your governance landscape. So when that's happening, I think cycling that back into your communication plan and helping people be informed of what's going on as you go, but encouraging a culture where it's okay to be challenging. It's okay to not be alright with what's going on. It's okay to have negative messaging, you know, coming through as well. It's it's really important. And so having leaders, you know, add to the communication that they're giving out whether that's, you know, on your message boards on Slack or whether it's in your town halls or whether it's just face to face with your changes. Like, hey. I'm not a 100% comfortable with this either. Like, these are things I'm struggling with. I feel finding hard. Or, like, I tried that. It didn't work. Or, actually, we we made a mistake here, and we're gonna roll it back. Like, I think bringing in that kind of muscle of this doesn't need to be perfect. That's not the goal. The goal is actually learning, can do wonders for shifting your culture because that, you know, from an HR people dimension, that gives you loads of additional value in the business anyway, like adopting a culture that is more comfortable to learn and grow and, celebrate learning sometimes over results. You know, I think one of the things we're just saying earlier about having the time to learn is never been more important with the rate that this tech is coming in and how powerful it promises to be. But we're definitely seeing clients who've invested that time in learning and kind of allowed for space to slow down and test and fail. That initial investment has radically paid off, you know, because then suddenly, they they get this capability that things start to move faster. Absolutely. If I can if I can just, dive in off of what Jess was saying, like, I what I really love about what she was saying is, like, it's such a reminder to us as HR people that although this topic is new, being an HR person is not new to you. And so all of these things that how you would manage change or how you help build trust with people or how you communicate in an honest way even when you made mistakes, Those principles we've learned and been practicing throughout our journey as HR people across lots of different topics. And so while you might come to the conversation with, nervousness about what you don't understand about AI, it's actually okay because you're able to bring your expertise. How do you support the people in the business of the people of the business through this, change and transformation, which is something we've done in other, context as well. Yep. Such a great point. And I think if I'm to catch everything that both of you just said is that it's progress over perfection. Right? And that's the most important thing is that, again, giving people time and space to experiment while maintaining the principles of being an HR person, it's just going to take time. And it's ever changing and evolving, so we need to to lean into that and get comfortable. Now before we go further, I want to get a quick benchmark from around the room. We have a lot of people on the call here. We've been talking about trust, pace, and really the people side of AI adoption, but I'm guessing you're not all starting from the same place. So this will help us keep the discussion really relevant. If you're exploring and you need different answers and if you're scaling or tightening governance. So we've popped the poll up there, and I will give you about thirty seconds or so to to take it. Thanks. This is really, really helpful. We've somewhat even matched across where people are at in the room From exploring, so no rollout yet to rolling out across the organization. Interestingly enough, we're not seeing many that have rolled out and are now optimizing. So it looks like there's some room for improvement there. Okay. Excellent. And there's also a good proportion of you who have selected not sure, and not involved closely yet as well. So, hopefully, some of the takeaways from this will, will make this a bit more practical for you. So just in terms of Lenke and Jess coming back to you, for those who voted still exploring, what's the first thing that they should do? And think about it maybe in small steps rather than trying to tackle the the big problem. And, Jess, maybe I'll I'll start with you. Yeah. I would say pick something small. I think it's really important. Like, we have definitely worked, with clients who have kind of reached a bit of an impasse where they've been trying to eat the elephant and tackle everything all at once or they've, reached overwhelm. And I think overwhelm's really real. Like, one of the things we use in our workshops is, exploring the landscape that we're currently living in and the fact that overwhelm is a really real problem and threat to businesses at the moment, and AI is amplifying that. And so what can we do about it? So we try and help people, both learn more about humans and how, what that means for us and what it's doing for us and how do we help people come back from the edge, you know, with that. But the, the course to action is, like, start smaller and start learning. So the the learning conversation, you know, we're just having is pick something you know, if you think about, delegation and you'll pick something small enough that, is gonna be okay if that person fails. And you've got you know, you're giving them a bit less oversight than usual because there's, like, a sandbox they're playing in, and you put clear governance rails around that. I'd say those will be your first perfect use cases to, apply AI. So if you can see, you know, you've got a piece of your technology you're using today that might have a capability and you wanna see, well, what will happen if we roll this through a certain process? So we put it into an application that's like, let's trial the small pieces, maybe get a smaller team of people around it who are particularly interested or curious or have started experimenting and put that together and say, right. These are the goals, the objectives. This is how long we're gonna give it. Give it a couple of weeks, see what happens there, and then recycle that learning through. But enough governance around it that you're assessing what those risks are. We I've been surprised, I think, across our client base, at the speed of adoption sometimes, has been faster than I thought in really high governance environments, because often the reaction we hear is, oh, you know, well, the types of work we do or the sensitivity of our data landscape, you know, we we have to be very cautious in how we play out. One of the, industries that I've worked with that that was really surprising was in the health care space, and someone who is an AI leader there was sharing with me that the lessons they've learned through COVID and how to force innovation. Like, if you imagine the problem that they were addressing in COVID and trying to, you know, basically solve the world's problems really, really quickly, they had to force themselves with how they unlock their governance structures and create enough of a sandbox that they were okay with doing that and obviously succeeded, you know, radically with with, you know, delivering the vaccines at the speed they did. So they've recycled those business principles into AI adoption. So actually, they in some cases, their adoption cycle's gone really, really fast because they've kind of upskilled their business on how to do that well, which I thought was fascinating. I was like, well, there's a great answer for any other highly governance based business to say it's not it's not a matter of needing to go through all these layers of governance. Some of it's about mindset shift and addressing the real pain points in ways that we get the right capability in right places. Mhmm. Jess, I wanna comment on that because just earlier today, we were talking about, employee development in relation to AI. So and I think the reason I bring this up is because what you just said to me is is, like, this perfect example of a transferable skill or transferable organizational capability in this case. The organization with your crisis actually developed this, like, we can innovate faster capability and now can apply it to something else. I think we actually have an opportunity here to see the same thing for employees, which is if you automate or simplify or make something go away in your job because AI tools help you to do that, rather than that being, like, I don't have a job anymore, the question becomes, what is now the transferable capability that this person has that they could figure that out that they can do something else? And so even that is a mindset shift of, like, I thought my knowledge that was that, you know, I did this and then I did this and then I did this in the workflow. And now the knowledge shift is gonna switch to, like, I figured out how to make it so we don't need this workflow or so that it can be faster or similar or whatever. And that will be a shift, I think, for HR people, for employees, and and certainly for management as well. Like, I just wanna tell something on that. So one of the first things we help our clients, the first principles is people have related to AI. Like, the noise we hear is that people are becoming more dispensable, and we have challenged that radically and said, if you implement AI through your business model, you're kind of super powering. You're supercharging up your capability. So whether that means you take people out of that and you keep the same growth rate or whether you grow in other areas of your business and then the same workforce is delivering much bigger output, like, that's kind of up to you with your business model. But, ultimately, the ratio of productivity that you get per person is going up. So, actually, every person in your business gets more valuable as you implement AI. And when you see people kinda get that and you see this pay drop, and they're like, oh, actually and for me, that's so critical for people leaders to appreciate. It's like, the people in your business model with this shift are going to be more important. The success of each person, the productivity of each person, the ability for those people to thrive and succeed in your business is gonna be more important than this future state, not less. Mhmm. Yep. And I think there's a tension there, right, on balance. And I hear this often is that leadership wants velocity, whereas employees want security, and culture needs time to adapt. And, again, I referenced that workforce pulse report, and it's showing that 36% of employees feel adequately supported with AI. And, like, you talked earlier a little bit about the discussion we're having internally around developments. But businesses can't afford to wait while kind of competitors sprint ahead. So where where's the line? How do you balance speed that the organization wants to move at with trust of the employees? Or is that even the right question? I said, Lenke, maybe just starting with you on that point, like, how how do you navigate that tension internally? And do you feel pressure to move faster than your people can handle? Yeah. I think for me, when I think of this from a business lens, it really comes down to you and your management team making a very honest assessment about what is the business case for this for your team. And this goes back to, like, a very baseline change management principle. Like, what's the burning platform? What's the vision of, like, why people should adapt into this change? And so I think that's sort of the starting point is, like, helping people understand in the context of your organization why what what is imperative and why that really matters, is maybe the first thing. I think, I've been in now growth stage tech industry for a long time, and I have the benefit, therefore, of being in a place where, like, I don't know. Change is just, like, always happening, and speed is always faster than employees can tolerate. And, I think there's a truth then that it attracts people who are a bit more, tolerant and resilient or excited by that. But we still I think as HR people have the responsibility to navigate, the in between of that, which is how do you, understand what your business is trying to achieve, but navigate for the reality of the employees in their journey through that change. And managing that, together will be very important for us. I think your question you said something about, like, this our speed and trust in opposition to each other. I think they're probably not. I think that, it really then comes back to the question of where are you today in are you coming from a high trust or low trust space? And that ultimately will determine whether your seed and trust are in opposition, rather than that by nature, they're in opposition to each other. Yep. No. Super fair. And, Jess, I suppose as a consultant and you working with many different organizations at the moment, have you seen any that have genuinely cracked this, or is everyone just choosing which problem they're willing to to live with? Yeah. I think what Lenke has said, I a 100% agree with. It depends on your starting point. And what I mean by that is I've worked across a whole range of different industries, which is super interesting because the psychological contract is quite different than some of those. So from financial services, professional services, through the manufacturing, back to SAS, like and the the culture, like, what work is has felt quite differently. Like, the power dynamic and the and blue collar working and manufacturing is really different from when you go into a knowledge based economy and where employees have a lot more power, you know, with that. So I would argue that your access to trust is very, very different across those cultures. But I think the yeah. I think it's important to kind of pause and reflect on what what do I think the trust is in our business, and how does that show up. And what I mean by that is I would look at the behaviors. I would look at when leaders speak and say things, do people, believe that automatically? You know, is there a genuine, agreement and confidence in those? Or is there, is there, you know, kind of a a a conversation out in the hall that's different? Or is there a reaction that challenge that comes through an engagement data we get? Are there different conversations that happen at team level? Like, how consistent is the conversation through the business? Do we see, you know, people acting a certain way and then they're talked about in a different way? In official communications, that will be an indicator of trust. You know, have we declared things in the past and then, reverse them without explanation? That would be a real trust breaker. So I'd look for, like, are there trust breakers happening? Or the trust positive things would be, you know, acknowledging stuff. Like, is there is there a tone to our internal conversation that when we see stuff that, you know, maybe isn't aligned with our values, do we call that out? Do we address it? Do we go back and correct it? Do we acknowledge it? You know, do we have the the confidence to, and the humility sometimes of leadership to be more real about, hey. This is the truth of what's going on here, or we made a mistake. Or, you know, I think redundancies and and restructures are always a really telling time for businesses to reveal, like, what is that trust really. And, of course, when you go through that kind of change, it's incredibly high risk because we all know as people leaders, like, that you you are gonna damage that trust, but I've also worked with businesses where I've seen those types of changes be managed so well that sometimes they improve the quality of the trust. So there are absolutely good ways to do this stuff. More often than not, unfortunately, we see things not go well. So definitely finding out, like, how can we do this stuff better? What are best practices? Why? Either how do we protect that? How do we tie the things together between what we say and what we do? And I would also say an indicator of trust is how much challenges there in the room. Like, how comfortable are people to openly challenge and and head out those, you know, those conversations that are really real, and be back and forth and people to challenge upwards, I think is a really good indicator on do people feel comfortable? Do they feel safe? And if you have an environment that has that type of culture and then you lay through a change, you're gonna expect to get a reaction, and that's a positive thing. You know? Not getting a reaction is actually often a very, negative indicator of either people don't feel comfortable to say stuff, they don't think it's gonna be listened to, or they've checked out completely, or they're hiding in a hole somewhere, which is really bad. So so I do see our you know, I do see this HR people function as, the definitely the owners of that climate, like, you know, kind of the litmus takers of, what's actually going on here. You know, what data can I pull toward that? What, you know, qualitative, indicators and pulling that together regularly back to the leadership of this is the picture that we see. And, you know, really valuable information toward that is always gonna be your stay into your excellent view where you get your your richest insights. If you invest in those conversations as people have the freedom that they need their business, usually, am I telling, you know, in conversations is they're no longer worried about what gets said. Great piece of advice. Okay. We are just bumping up against time. So I have a last question for each of you, which is what's the one thing an HR leader in the audience today should do next to turn AI anxiety into trust? So we'll do quick fire answers from both of you, and, like, maybe I'll start with you this time. I would say help people see the opportunity to get inspired versus be afraid of it. So, break that AI, pro anxiety, trust, or help people gain the trust by helping them be curious about, what AI can do for them. Right. Jess? Yeah. I love that, Lenke. I I would add to that, go and listen. You know, make sure that you are listening actively, and some of that listening might be passive where you're just receiving information. I definitely would say show up as listening and tell people that you want to hear, that you want to find out. Go and join team meetings around the organization. Send your team around. Actually get involved to what's going on. Ask the difficult questions. Show that curiosity. Allows you the opportunity to hear. People feel free to do that, but also the chance to respond and catch people wherever they are and just get a richer data landscape of what's actually going on, and then feed that data into your leadership community to build a plan of action of how you tackle it. Excellent. Jess, Lenke, thank you so much for a really, really important conversation.