The WorkOps Podcast

Summary What happens when AI changes not just the tools HR uses, but the way People teams operate? Trace Durning, Chief People & Culture Officer at Idox, joins Jeet Mukerji on The WorkOps Podcast to explain why successful transformation starts with people, process design, and shared ownership of change - not simply introducing a new technology. Trace shares her path from change management into...

Summary Anuradha Mayer, EVP & Chief People Officer at Infoblox, joins Jeet Mukerji on The WorkOps Podcast to explain why People teams need to stop thinking only in HR programs and start operating like product teams. For Anuradha, the shift means treating business leaders and employees as customers, building practical solutions to their problems, and getting feedback before anything feels finis...

Summary Claude Silver, Chief Heart Officer at VaynerX, joins Jeet Mukherjee on The WorkOps Podcast to explain how a role with no job description became the only Chief Heart Officer title in the business. Twelve years ago Gary Vaynerchuk gave her one remit, touch every single human being and deploy empathy, and she has scaled it from about 400 people to 2,200 by renaming HR "People and Experience,"...

Summary Katarina Berg, CHRO at On, joins Jeet Mukherjee on The WorkOps Podcast to explain what an HR leader carries from company to company after 30 years in the function, and what she leaves behind. She has run People at Spotify and now at On, the Swiss running brand that benchmarks itself against tech companies, and she has deliberately changed industry every time so she never does a "blue copy"...

Summary L. David Kingsley, Chief People Officer at Illumio, joins Jeet Mukherjee on The WorkOps Podcast to talk about what AI is doing to the People function from inside a zero trust cybersecurity company. David spent 13 years in management consulting at Accenture and Booz Allen before a single moment changed his path: he asked a disruptive HR business partner to leave his account planning meeting...

Summary Is AI a skill to list on a job description, or simply the way work gets done now? In this episode of The WorkOps Podcast, host Jeet Mukerji sits down with Amy Garefis, Chief People Officer at ZipRecruiter, who spent most of her career as a CPA before moving into HR four years ago. Amy explains why the hardest part of that move was accepting that people decisions rarely have a right answer,...

Heather Oxley, CHRO at Perficient, joins Jeet Mukherjee on The WorkOps Podcast to explain how a 7,000 person IT services company is rebuilding its People function around AI without pretending everything can move at the same pace. She opens with the work study she ran on arrival, which found that 60% of HR's workload was inquiry, and shows how that single number set her first priority. From there t...

Summary What happens when a CHRO treats AI like a brainstorming wall instead of a threat? In this episode of The WorkOps Podcast, host Jeet Mukherjee sits down with Jason Desentz, Chief Human Resource Officer at Toshiba America, to unpack why AI is an enhancement story, not a replacement story. Jason shares the history lesson behind his optimism, from direct deposit to factory robots to Ford's rev...

Summary Payroll problems were blowing up Slack channels at SurveyMonkey, and employees weren't taking them to finance. In this episode of The WorkOps Podcast, host Jeet Mukerji talks with Becky Cantieri, Chief People Officer at SurveyMonkey, about the decision to hit the blow-up button and move payroll out of finance and into HR, how a willing CFO and one simple question (who is willing to talk to...

Summary What happens when a CEO hands unlimited AI access to every employee, and adoption still stalls? In this episode of The WorkOps Podcast, host Jeet Mukerji sits down with Kimberly Nerpouni, Global VP of People & International Operations at Pearl, the parent company of JustAnswer. Kimberly shares why AI transformation is a human enablement problem rather than a technology problem, how her...

Summary What happens when your AI pilot works too well to stay a pilot? In this episode of The WorkOps Podcast, host Jeet Mukerji talks with Ivan Nosov, Head of HR Tech and Global Total Rewards Director at Campari Group, about taking AI in HR from proof of concept to production. Ivan shares why he started with Copilot Studio knowing it wouldn't last, where RAG breaks down at enterprise scale, and...

Summary What happens to careers when AI makes more than half of all roles look fundamentally different within two years? In this episode of The WorkOps Podcast, host Jeet Mukergi sits down with Lisa Sherwell, Chief People Officer at SUSE, to unpack her answer: strive for job security, not role security. Lisa shares how SUSE's Future Selves program transformed engagement for its over 50 workforce,...

Summary On this episode of The WorkOps Podcast, host Jeet Mukergi sits down with Natasha Valani, Chief People Officer at Tubi, the number one free ad-supported streaming service in the US. Natasha shares how her people team built a live calibration tool in Replit in just two days, connecting it back to Workday and saving roughly two weeks during year end review season. The conversation goes well b...

Summary Carmel Smith, Director of People Operations and Programs at Tenstorrent, joins host Jeet Mukerji on The WorkOps Podcast to make the case that the AI moment is really a human one. Fresh off building people operations inside a company that grew headcount 43% past 1,300 employees, Carmel explains why she's rebranding her team from "people operations" to system architects and experience creato...

Summary On this episode of the WorkOps Podcast, host Jeet Mukergi talks with Kate Stewart, Staff People Operations, AI and Automations Lead at Horizon3.ai, about what really happens when you put an AI agent into a live people-operations workflow. Kate shares the story of the offer-validation agent she built in Slack to check every job offer against approved comp bands and job architecture, how a S...

Summary   In this episode of The WorkOps Podcast, host Jeet sits down with Colleen McCreary, Chief People Officer and Head of Internal Systems at Confluent, for a candid conversation about people, productivity, and what AI is really doing to the workforce. Colleen makes the contrarian case that early-career talent is a company's edge in the AI era, while the "murky middle" faces the hardest reinve...

Summary What happens when the push to automate HR collides with the humans inside the process? In this episode of The WorkOps Podcast, host Jeet Mukherjee sits down with Nancy Luschkowski, Director of HR Infrastructure & Operations at PagerDuty, to unpack a live onboarding redesign happening amid restructuring, attrition, and the AI wave. Nancy explains why a perfect automation can still ruin...

Summary In this episode of The WorkOps Podcast, Jeet sits down with Ann Watson, Chief People Officer at Cover Genius, to unpack why pay-for-performance creates a structural integrity problem that no amount of manager training can fix. Ann argues that the annual raise has always been a budget decision dressed in performance language, and that pay transparency didn't create the breakdown — it just m...

Summary On The WorkOps Podcast, Jean Parchewsky, VP of People Operations at Vendasta, makes a case most AI conversations miss: whether AI takes hold in your company is decided at the hiring table, not in the tooling budget. She traces it back to a training binder that optimized for terminations over hiring, the "hire slow, fire fast" principle she built in response, and the behavior-first "ideal e...

Summary On this episode of The WorkOps Podcast, Jeet sits down with William West, VP People at Wrapbook, to dig into what happens when HR leaders stop trying to do everything in one place. William shares how a 20-plus-hour calibration process became six hours by separating ratings conversations from development conversations entirely. He also makes the case that HR's distinct job in an AI transfor...

Summary A top performer walks out the door at Qualtrics holding an outside offer for double their salary. Michael MacArthur, then Head of People, has a choice: pretend the market is wrong, or admit the comp process was. His read, years later from the COO seat at Recharge: the 2x counter-offer isn't a market signal. It's an audit finding. This is one of the cleanest diagnostics we've heard for whet...

Summary In this episode of The WorkOps Podcast, Jeet sits down with Weston Fillman, Director of People Operations and Employee Relations at 1Password, to unpack what it actually takes to get an HR transformation funded, and what changes when AI enters the room. Wes describes the months of pre-work that won him more executive budget than he asked for at a 10,000-person enterprise tech company, the...

Summary What looks like a warm, boutique onboarding experience on the outside is often powered by something much less glamorous on the inside: a person copy-pasting LinkedIn headshots into slides at midnight.  In this episode of the WorkOps Podcast, host Jeet sits down with Amie Taylor, Senior Director of People Operations, Rewards and Technology, for a refreshingly honest conversation about the h...

Summary What if the most honest feedback about why people leave your company isn't in the exit survey at all—it's in the Slack threads, Zoom transcripts, and emails already happening every day?  In this episode of the WorkOps Podcast, host Jeet sits down with David Hanrahan, SVP of People Success at SolarWinds, for a candid conversation about one of the most broken processes in HR: the exit survey...

Summary A CEO signs off on a new compensation philosophy. Two months later, when HR starts rolling it out, that same CEO tells the executive team it was never approved—and blames the HR leader for pushing it.  Sound impossible? It happened.  In this episode of the WorkOps Podcast, host Jeet sits down with Kelsey Browning, VP of People Operations, for a candid and detailed story about what happens...