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
Wisq is the AI platform for HR. We built Harper, the world's first AI HR teammate — designed to handle the judgment-heavy work that has historically consumed HR teams: job changes, performance concerns, leaves of absence, onboarding, and employee relations issues. Where HCM bolt-ons and chatbots deflect the easiest questions, Harper resolves full cases, end-to-end. The result is an HR function with the capacity and strategic bandwidth to focus on the work that moves the business.

Companies get Harper live in weeks, not quarters, with implementation support built on deep HR domain expertise. Wisq serves HR leaders at leading companies across industries, helping them raise the bar on employee experience and expand what their teams are capable of.

For more information, visit https://www.wisq.com

Summary

On The Human Element, Barb Bidan talks with Jennifer Erfurth, Global Head of HR at the cybersecurity company OPSWAT, about what it actually takes to run an AI-first people function rather than just talk about one. Jennifer canceled a planned Workday rollout, built AI agents on top of BambooHR, rewrote her employer value proposition to lead with AI, and kept her human HR team in place as the safety net. She breaks down the three bets behind the approach: what to build, who to hire, and how to drive adoption without forcing it. She is also candid about the parts that are still messy, including a chatbot that hallucinates an HR contact named "Aaron," and why 25 years of experience is the thing that keeps AI honest. The throughline: going AI-first is not about replacing the human function, it is about deciding what AI handles and what stays human. Built for CHROs, VPs of People, and anyone leading AI adoption in HR.

Chapters

00:00 Meet Jennifer Erfurth and OPSWAT
02:30 Building an AI-first people function from scratch
04:30 Change management and what's in it for me
07:30 Running HR like a product, launch at 80% and iterate
08:00 The AI-first EVP and screening for AI fluency
12:30 Why they scrapped Workday and built on BambooHR
15:30 Tier zero AI and tier one human HR
17:00 The skills-inventory app built in an hour
21:00 Bringing an existing team along, learn, organize, recognize
23:30 The future of the CHRO role
25:00 Lightning round
27:30 Barb's takeaways and the last word

Takeaways

• Build the knowledge base before the agents; OPSWAT spent six months on its before turning on a single agent.
• Build can beat buy. An engineer built a skills-inventory app in under an hour, replacing tools like Eightfold and Fuel50.
• An AI-first EVP attracts the talent you want and filters out the talent you don't.
• Drive adoption by teaching people to self-serve rather than forcing the tool on them.
• Keep a human in the loop; the AI can be right five times and wrong the sixth, and experience is what keeps it honest.

Connect with the Guest
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/globalhrexecutive/
Website: https://www.opswat.com/

Sponsor
Wisq is the AI platform for HR. We built Harper, the world's first AI HR teammate — designed to handle the judgment-heavy work that has historically consumed HR teams: job changes, performance concerns, leaves of absence, onboarding, and employee relations issues. Where HCM bolt-ons and chatbots deflect the easiest questions, Harper resolves full cases, end-to-end. The result is an HR function with the capacity and strategic bandwidth to focus on the work that moves the business.

Companies get Harper live in weeks, not quarters, with implementation support built on deep HR domain expertise. Wisq serves HR leaders at leading companies across industries, helping them raise the bar on employee experience and expand what their teams are capable of.

For more information, visit wisq.com.

Summary
On The Human Element, Barb Bidan sits down with Joshua Horenstein, who runs both the HR and legal functions at Innophos. Joshua argues that AI governance fails on the org chart, not in the policy document. He walks through his manufacturing-pilot mindset for rolling out AI, names the two reasonable worst cases most HR leaders aren't watching for, and explains why the friction between the CHRO and the GC is the engine of good policy, not a problem to fix. For HR leaders, CHROs, and the chief legal officers who work alongside them.

Chapters
00:00 Introduction
00:45 Joshua's dual hat: CHRO and chief legal officer at Innophos
03:15 The first governance question, what type of AI are you deploying
04:45 The pilot-to-policy mindset from manufacturing
05:45 AI governance as the rules of the road
07:30 Two reasonable worst cases: productivity backfire and dormant data leak
10:45 Sandboxing AI in an industrial company
13:45 The CHRO and CLO tension as the policy engine
16:45 Curiosity beats the playbook in HR leadership
23:15 AI as your shadow partner, the two-year forecast
26:15 The biggest flaw in current AI governance models

Takeaways

• AI governance is the rules of the road, not a 50-subpart document. Flexible top-level rules outlast rigid policies that age before they're signed.
• The internal AI data leak (a dormant folder permission surfaced by an AI tool) is almost as dangerous as the external one, and almost nobody is auditing for it.
• The friction between CHRO and CLO is the engine of good AI policy. Siloed functions produce one-sided answers.
• Sandbox the AI like a chemical pilot. Cordon off the data, open the spigots gradually, watch for leaks.
• Never let AI make a termination, promotion, or compensation decision. Humans own the outcome.

Connect with the Guest
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshhorenstein/
Website: https://innophos.com

Sponsor
Wisq is the AI platform for HR. We built Harper, the world's first AI HR teammate, designed to handle the judgment-heavy work that has historically consumed HR teams: job changes, performance concerns, leaves of absence, onboarding, and employee relations issues. Where HCM bolt-ons and chatbots deflect the easiest questions, Harper resolves full cases, end-to-end. The result is an HR function with the capacity and strategic bandwidth to focus on the work that moves the business.

Companies get Harper live in weeks, not quarters, with implementation support built on deep HR domain expertise. Wisq serves HR leaders at leading companies across industries, helping them raise the bar on employee experience and expand what their teams are capable of.

For more information, visit https://www.wisq.com

• (00:00) - Introduction
• (00:45) - Joshua's dual hat: CHRO and chief legal officer at Innophos
• (03:15) - The first governance question, what type of AI are you deploying
• (04:45) - The pilot-to-policy mindset from manufacturing
• (05:45) - AI governance as the rules of the road
• (07:30) - Two reasonable worst cases: productivity backfire and dormant data leak
• (10:45) - Sandboxing AI in an industrial company
• (13:45) - The CHRO and CLO tension as the policy engine
• (16:45) - Curiosity beats the playbook in HR leadership
• (23:15) - AI as your shadow partner, the two-year forecast
• (26:15) - The biggest flaw in current AI governance models