Embracing AI is about more than just adopting AI-powered tools, according to top HR leaders

• Business Insider gathered chief people officers and senior leaders for an on-the-record dinner in New York City.
• The event, Futureproofing Your Workforce in the Age of AI, highlighted the relentless change HR executives are navigating.
• Below are excerpts from the discussion, edited for clarity.

"Are we working for AI at this point or is AI working for us?" Maxine Carrington, the Chief People Officer of Northwell Health asked a group of HR and people executives who were gathered for dinner on a rainy night in New York City recently.

"How we can use those tools as enablers to help us achieve our goals, that's the mindset I need us to have, not chasing the tools."

Heads around the table nodded in agreement. The group, convened by Business Insider, spent ninety minutes in a conversation titled "Futureproofing Your Workforce in the Age of AI," presented by Indeed.

"I do think it's an organizational, transformational challenge and not a technological one," Gareth Lewis of Lewis People & Culture Advisory said at one point. "But right now the conversation's all around tools, efficiencies, headcount reductions, and not so much about how we actually are going to redesign our roles."

Redesigning roles is exactly what Agnes Garaba, Chief People Officer at UiPath, is striving to do, but it's not easy.

"So we basically asked every single one of the functional leaders to think about what the future would look like," she said. "If I could go out today and blow up my entire HR team and reimagine it from scratch, what would that look like? And it's a hard exercise. Often I find our imagination is the biggest barrier, so to say, to get there."

The tension between AI driving total transformation versus a focus on integrating AI tools was top-of-mind for the executives gathered together. But in the wide-ranging conversation, plenty of other topics were discussed too. Below are some highlights.

How to help employees become AI "power users"

Katie Burke, COO, Harvey: Part of what you have to start asking yourself is, is your organization experimenting and dipping your toe in the water or are you driving actual impact and transformation? And not surprisingly, there are patterns across every industry on what makes the difference between those.

Number one is senior leaders actually being in on the work. So not saying, "Here's the example that I can share." It's actually building the agents themselves, for example, or attending those hackathons.

And you cannot drive transformation, in my opinion, just with a stick. There has to be some level of carrot and reward and excitement, and I think people operate at their best when they are not operating out of fear.

Make partners prove the value of AI tools they're providing

Roz Harris, VP, Talent, Zillow: Put the pressure on your product partners, the vendors that you're using, to justify their roadmaps and why they're getting your dollar. Because your shareholders, your leaders are (asking), 'What's the big revolutionary bang that's going to unlock our teams? That's going to unlock the business, going to move things forward?'

I can promise you many of us aren't companies that are going to build that thing ourselves. But we do have product partners who should be enabling us to do those things. But are we articulating our needs to them? Are we articulating those well?

Company-wide hackathons allow employees to shine

Maggie Hulce, Chief Revenue Officer, Indeed: So we have a monthly contest that any employee can be a part of and they submit their ideas of agents or use cases. The sales teams are absolutely running away with it. And people don't think of the sales teams as the ones who are going to build the agents first. So this particular person who we thought of as a salesperson, maybe thought of as one-dimensional, now I see them as having five functional hats.

HR leaders play a key role in pushing companies to adopt AI

Dickie Steele, Partner, McKinsey & Company: How do we build a culture where we go after dramatic productivity improvement on the numerator? Somebody doing a thousand clinical trials, not one clinical trial? I feel as an HR community, we should be a lighthouse in terms of the deployment of (AI) agents. We should be pushing the business to start with a much more compelling value creation thesis than "Can we cook something up that makes our employees marginally more productive?"

Beware the hype around AI dramatically improving your bottom line

Liz Dente, Chief People Officer, Priceline: Dickie, just to push back a little bit is, you know, you're looking for this amazing thousand-times return. The notion of incremental, relentless forward progress every day is just fine with us. You know, it'd be great to be selling a thousand times more plane tickets, but I just don't think that's realistic. And I think there's a lot of hype in the marketplace that you're going to get these massive returns. I just don't think it's true.