People Managing People

AI isn't the first technology to promise better decisions by removing messy human judgment. But generative AI brings something different: the ability to sound convincing, authoritative, and remarkably human. And that makes questioning its recommendations harder than organizations might want to admit. David Rice sits down with Claire Maiers to explore why context matters more than ever in AI-a...

We've all taken a workplace personality assessment that tells us something vaguely accurate about ourselves. We read the report, nod along, and promptly forget about it. So why do organizations keep investing in self-awareness tools that rarely change how people actually work? In this episode of People Managing People, host David Rice sits down with Dr. Jay Harrison, Co-Founder and Director o...

Most executives think they understand how work gets done. They've got the org charts, process documents, and dashboards to prove it. The problem? Those neat diagrams bear little resemblance to the work employees actually do. And when organizations start automating processes they don't fully understand, they're just making flawed systems run faster. In this episode, David Rice speaks...

For decades, career advice has been simple: specialize, build deep expertise, and become indispensable. But what happens when AI makes that expertise accessible to almost anyone? The value of knowing how to do something is shifting toward knowing what should be done, why it matters, and whether the result is actually any good. In this episode of People Managing People , host David Rice speaks with...

Most enterprise AI strategies start with the same question: What can we automate? It's a reasonable question if your ambition is to make the existing workplace run faster. It's a much less useful one if you're trying to build something better. In this episode, David Rice speaks with Paula Goldman, Chief Ethical and Humane Use Officer at Salesforce, about why human-AI collaboration d...

Most companies are still figuring out what an AI agent should actually do. JLL has moved well past that question. With agents operating across facilities management, brand communications, and corporate functions, the company is learning that the hardest problems aren’t necessarily technical—they’re about proving value, building trust, and making sure AI solves an actual business problem instead of...

Recorded live at the AI4 conference in Las Vegas, this conversation puts David Rice and Dr. Lilian Ajayi Ore—AI lead faculty and lecturer in strategic communication at Columbia University and co-author of The Power of the Learning Mindset —in the middle of one of the biggest questions surrounding workplace AI: Are companies gaining efficiency while quietly weakening their people’s ability to think...

AI may be changing the work, but the bigger risk is what happens when organizations optimize so aggressively for today’s efficiency that they stop building tomorrow’s capability. Recorded live at the AI4 conference in Las Vegas, host David Rice sits down with Dr. Jana Brown, Chief Human Resources Officer at eHealth, to unpack the long-term consequences of shrinking entry-level pipelines, why HR ne...

AI in HR has a credibility problem: the technology is getting better at spotting patterns, summarizing data, and automating work, but none of that guarantees a better employee experience. In this conversation, Motivosity Chief Product Officer Jesse Dowdle and VP of Engineering Dano Gillette make the case for “appreciation intelligence”—using AI to remove administrative friction without automating...

When people stay quiet at work, organizations lose more than participation. They lose ideas, warnings, customer insight, process improvements, and market intelligence that never make it into the room. Seema Bhansali calls this the silence tax—the hidden cost companies pay when their environments make self-censorship the safer option. In this episode, Seema joins David Rice to unpack why “speak up”...

AI transformation has a funny way of becoming an organizational X-ray. The companies getting real value from it aren’t necessarily the ones buying the most tools or burning the most tokens. They’re the ones that understand what they’re trying to accomplish, what excellence looks like, and which problems are actually worth solving. In this episode of People Managing People, David Rice speaks with Z...

HR has been told for years to “speak the language of the business,” usually as code for proving it deserves to be in the room. But Dr. Shindale Seale makes a stronger case: this isn’t about self-defense. It’s about leadership. If disengagement, poor management, weak culture, and badly handled transformation all carry measurable financial costs, HR needs to connect the human consequences to the num...

There are two ways the AI transformation of work can go. We can hand the keys to the efficiency obsessives and spend the next decade trying to engineer the humanity out of organizations. Or HR can recognize that understanding motivation, organizational design, and how people actually experience work is suddenly a strategic advantage—and start acting like it. Jessica Zwaan, VP of People Strategy an...

Nobody sets out to build a workforce surveillance system. It usually arrives dressed up as optimization, productivity, wellness, or efficiency. But as AI makes it possible to monitor everything from keystrokes and mouse movements to emotions and physical behavior, the line between legitimate measurement and invasive surveillance gets harder to ignore. In this episode, I speak with Lynn Parramore,...

The EU Pay Transparency Directive isn’t just another reporting requirement. As pay reporting expert Tom Heys puts it, it’s closer to the UK gender pay gap regime “on steroids”—combining organization-wide reporting with individual employee rights, restrictions on recruitment practices, and requirements to group jobs of equal value and explain the pay differences within them. The bigger issue is wha...

AI spending continues to hit record highs, yet most organizations are still struggling to translate that investment into better work. In this conversation, David Rice sits down with Ofir Bloch of WalkMe to unpack the findings from the State of Digital Adoption 2026 report and explore why the problem isn't model capability—it's everything surrounding it. From the massive disconnect betwee...

AI is quickly becoming the new test of executive credibility—but there's a growing gap between leaders who use AI and leaders who've fundamentally rebuilt how they work around it. In this episode, David Rice sits down with JC Christian, President of executive search firm Christian & Timbers, to explore why "AI-enabled" is no longer enough and what it actually means to be AI...

AI adoption isn't slowing down—and neither are the risks. The challenge isn't that organizations don't know AI can create problems. It's that employees are already using it in ways leaders can't fully anticipate, while governance models built for yesterday's technology struggle to keep pace. In this episode, David Rice sits down with AI ethics expert and The Ethical N...

AI isn't creating high-performing teams—it’s exposing the difference between teams that already know how to work well together and those that don’t. In this episode, David Rice sits down with social psychologist and Superteams author Ron Friedman to unpack new research on what separates the top 8% of teams from everyone else. The conversation challenges the assumption that AI is a universal p...

AI transformation doesn't fail because the technology isn't good enough. It fails because organizations try to layer it on top of cultures that were already struggling with trust, learning, experimentation, and leadership. In this conversation, David Rice sits down with Meagan Bond, Founder and CEO of The Human Method, to unpack why psychological readiness—not technical readiness—is the...

Resumes still matter—but not for the reasons we think. In a world where AI can polish anyone’s experience into a compelling narrative, the traditional hiring signals many organizations have relied on are losing their value. Heather Krueger, Chief People Officer at Engine, joins David Rice to explore what comes next when a polished resume becomes proof of tool usage rather than proof of talent. The...

AI isn’t arriving as a gradual workplace evolution—it’s arriving as a societal shift that many leaders are still struggling to describe honestly. In this conversation, David Rice sits down with Leap Academy founder and CEO Ilana Golan to explore what happens when skills expire in one to two years, organizations expect dramatically higher productivity, and career stability becomes the exception rat...

David Kolbe argues that most organizations are only measuring two-thirds of what drives performance. We assess what people know (skills) and how they tend to behave (personality), but often ignore how they instinctively take action. That missing piece—what Kolbe calls conation —shapes how people gather information, solve problems, make decisions, and navigate uncertainty. In this conversation, Dav...

Most reward systems were built for a world where speed, volume, and visible output were reliable signals of performance. But AI now produces all three at scale. That leaves organizations facing an uncomfortable question: if AI can generate more output than ever, what exactly are you rewarding? In this episode, David Rice sits down with Anju Choudhary, Chief People Officer at Xoxoday, to explore wh...

What if the leadership skills we've spent decades rewarding are no longer the ones that matter most? In this conversation, mediator, peacemaker, and author Douglas Noll argues that AI is making critical thinking, emotional intelligence, and human connection more valuable—not less. As technology takes over more analytical work, leaders who can regulate trust, create psychological safety, and k...