Summary

RJ Jadhav, Vice President of Human Resources at Lumen Technologies, joins host Barb Bidan to reframe how HR leaders should think about AI, transformation, and the role of their function. RJ has spent his career inside the most transformative companies in tech — fifteen years at Microsoft, the hypergrowth years at Google Cloud, and now at Lumen, where he's helping rewire a legacy network company into a digital services company built for the AI economy. In this conversation he unpacks why AI is 70% culture and 30% tools, why business impact has to be the goal long before AI, and why HR has earned the right to lead the AI charter inside the enterprise.

Takeaways

• Transformation needs three things at once — leadership behaviors, designed systems instead of interventions, and a real business anchor. Pull one lever in isolation and the other two drift.
• AI is not the destination. Business impact is. Start with where the business is going, then let AI accelerate moonshots you'd otherwise rule out as too slow or too expensive.
• AI is 70% culture and 30% tools. AI amplifies whatever culture already exists — good or bad. Treat it as a tool rollout and it will surface every cultural weakness you have.
• The most underestimated AI metric in the C-suite is protected leadership capacity — the space to think, reflect, and produce ideas muscle memory cannot.
• Stop using AI as a productivity hack. Start using it as a leadership system that coaches your judgment in real time.

Chapters

00:00 Cold open and welcome

00:55 Meet RJ Jadhav, VP of HR at Lumen Technologies

02:00 The through-line across Microsoft, Google Cloud, and Lumen

04:30 Microsoft's established engine vs Lumen's existential rewire

05:50 One year in — moments that prove the transformation is real

08:30 AI as accelerant, not destination

09:10 Lumen's three-year people strategy and the business-first sequence

11:00 The most underestimated AI unlock — protecting leadership capacity

13:00 From productivity hack to leadership system

15:30 AI as a 24/7 coach

16:30 AI fluency as the only new HR skill

18:00 Why HR should lead the AI charter

20:30 The Chief AI Enablement Officer role

21:30 Three focus areas — redesign, talent, culture

22:30 The work-design framework — automate, agentify, human

24:00 Skills for the next generation of HR leaders

26:00 AI is 70% culture and 30% tools

27:00 Goal Pro — 70,000 goals aligned to the North Star

31:00 Barb's recap of the conversation

32:00 Lightning round

34:00 Top takeaways

36:00 RJ's parting words — the judgment test

Connect with the Guest

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rj-jadhav/

Website: https://www.lumen.com/en-us/home.html

Sponsor
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