Earlier this week, Charter participated in Transform, a conference where roughly 4,000 HR leaders, technology executives, and investors gathered in Las Vegas for the three-day program. Charter executive-in-residence Brian Elliott emceed the main stage, and Charter managing editor Jena McGregor moderated a plenary session about the future of work.
Last year, AI was a strong undercurrent at Transform. This year, it permeated everything, with discussions that ran from excitement about what’s possible to worry about job losses and the stress of moving too fast and too slowly at the same time. That energy—and anxiety—was palpable on stage, at lunch, and at cocktail hours and after-parties throughout the conference (it is Vegas).
Here are our key takeaways from three days on the ground.
AI transformation is a team sport. Too much of the conversation about AI is focused on the enterprise or individual level, rather than the team. The importance of the team unit came up repeatedly—including in Brian’s opening remarks. Teams that train and experiment together adopt AI faster than teams that don’t. One embedded champion who cares about the team’s goals more than her own is worth more than 100 top-down mandates.
Focus is essential for AI transformation. Widespread experimentation is great for culture-building and psychological safety, Writer chief people officer Jevan Lenox said. But “what we’re finding from our customers and what we brought inside is that it’s really insufficient for massive ROI,” he said. Leaders need to have visibility across the organization of which experiments are doing well, shifting from a mode of “let a thousand flowers bloom” to “what do you want to propagate?” Lenox said.
He wasn’t the only one to make this point. Procore chief people officer Inna Landman described the construction software firm’s shift from trying to adopt AI across the entire organization to narrowing it down to two domains, software engineering and customer relations. That was a better way to go deep and deliver results, she said, such as cutting the time to create customer presentations from days to hours.
Treat AI adoption like a product launch, starting with the outcome, not the tool. People teams risk building solutions with AI before they deeply understand what they’re trying to achieve. “Requests from the business sometimes are for the vehicle versus the thing you really want to achieve,” said Lenox. “There’s just sometimes a temptation to run too fast.” As AI tools become increasingly accessible, resist the pull to move fast. Do the design work first.
Leaders need to step up—and listen more. Michael Walters, CHRO at Samsung Semiconductor, said he runs a monthly listening tour through different parts of his organization focused specifically on how people are experiencing both the company and AI, and pairs himself with a younger HR team member for reverse mentorship.
Meanwhile, former CHROs Tracy Layney (Levi Strauss) and Eric Severson (Neiman Marcus) made a case against HR’s addiction to preserving historical programs regardless of their current value, encouraging the audience to stop guessing what employees want and start asking them. Severson suggested asking employees to rate how important something is on a one to 10 scale, and then how effectively the company delivers it. The gap between those two scores should be your talent agenda, he said. “Build the [talent] agenda based on the voice of the employees.”
Trust is a challenge, and an impediment to change. Trends in the broader macro environment—and their impact on trust—came up again and again in conversations. Author Jon Levy and Van Jones, the CNN commentator and co-founder of pulse survey software Rapport, said decreased connection between people compounds issues of trust at work.
Levy, who hosts dinners where strangers cook together, talked about how shared experience builds connection and trust, and how teams need the same opportunities at work. ServiceNow chief people and AI enablement officer Jacqui Canney said “we can mitigate but not displace fears,” advocating for transparency while not making promises that can’t be kept.
Push decision-making lower—with the help of AI and the right frameworks. On a panel about frontline managers, John Ferguson, former chief human resources officer at NASCAR, said one way to help push decision-making lower in the organization is to use Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ famous distinction between one-way and two-way door decisions—those that are permanent versus easily redone. Frontline managers, often concerned about asking leaders for permission, can use AI to test scenarios and role-play challenging conversations.
Use AI to stress-test your succession plan. Most succession plans look solid on paper but fall apart under scrutiny: One person might be tapped for eight different roles, or there’s no one ready to backfill if a key candidate moves up. Caroline Stockdale, chief people and communications officer for First Solar, described using AI to build what she calls a “succession planning resiliency scorecard”—pulling together performance data, retention risk, candidates’ ability to grow into a larger role, and their decision-making skills. “It helps us understand—do we truly have a decent, robust succession plan or [do we have gaps] in various places? It also stops you from boiling the ocean,” Stockdale said.
Clean your data before building anything else. In the rush to deploy AI tools, most HR teams skip the unglamorous first step: a reliable, consistent data foundation. As Kit Krugman, senior vice president for people and culture at Foursquare, put it: “If you’re not building from a great, consistent knowledge base—a data layer you can access and build on—then everything else is going to break.” Audit your people data for accuracy, accessibility, and completeness before the next tool goes live.
The leadership skills of the future won’t look like those of today. Danny Guillory, chief people officer of Gametime, said leaders increasingly need to be three things: a builder, an evaluator, and a tastemaker. He said leaders need to “do whatever we can to be as fluent and as comfortable with the tools that are available now,” while also understanding what people like and want. Guillory is putting that into practice, vibe-coding a wine app in his spare time.
Reserve people manager roles exclusively for top-notch leaders. As agentic AI takes over more coordination and execution work, HR leaders should raise the bar for who actually manages humans, said HubSpot chief people officer Helen Russell. As leaders orchestrate more work through agents, “at a human level, it has to be world-class managers, only world-class people managers—because that’s what people deserve.”
Read more on AI transformation:
- Charter’s playbook from our Leading with AI Summit
- Why your AI adoption strategy is stalling—and what to do instead
- Charter’s coverage of Transform’s 2025 event