Summary
Yessica Perez, Chief People Officer at Ojos Locos Sports Cantina, has spent more than 20 years in HR leading people work in fast-moving frontline businesses. Ojos Locos has nearly doubled its footprint since 2022, growing from 18 to 35 restaurants, so her work sits where growth, labor pressure, customer experience and frontline execution meet.

Yessica tells host Barb Bidan why HR's seat at the table now has to be earned again and again: by knowing the P&L, framing risk as a business decision instead of a "no", and staying ahead of AI rather than waiting to be told to learn it. She shares how a California opening was moved by a week without HR becoming the barrier, how 15 minutes and a Chick-fil-A taught her finance, the commercial she built with ElevenLabs, and the three-step method she used to pressure test a third party's sales analysis with AI. For CHROs, CPOs and HR business partners in frontline and multi-unit businesses.

Chapters
00:00 Meet Yessica Perez, Chief People Officer at Ojos Locos Sports Cantina
01:24 Getting the seat at the table vs. continuing to earn it
03:08 The credibility cost of leading with policy
05:02 The California opening: be the solution, not the barrier
07:50 Why AI raises the cost of not knowing the business
09:30 Building business fluency: 15 minutes with the experts
13:53 Making a commercial with ElevenLabs
16:33 How AI levels the playing field for mid-market companies
18:26 Pressure testing a third party's sales analysis with AI
21:53 Leaders own the outcome, not the AI
24:30 Teaching judgment through exposure
25:50 Lightning round: labor cost, retiring attendance metrics, the seat at the table
29:32 Takeaways and Yessica's final word

Takeaways
- Getting a seat at the table is not the finish line; HR keeps it by understanding the people, the numbers and the operations.
- Lead with the business outcome and the risk, then offer a path: a one-week delay beat a "we're not ready".
- Ask the experts for 10 to 15 minutes every period; HR business partners should know their regions, stores, P&L and turnover.
- Pressure test outside advice with AI in three steps: scrubbed data plus public benchmarks, a data-integrity check, then a fresh chat that acts as your adversary.
- AI saves time but never owns the outcome; leaders reskill people in judgment and measure training by application, not attendance.

Connect with the Guest
Yessica Perez LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yessicaperezsphr
Company Website: https://www.ojoslocos.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.