Hello, AI enthusiasts from around the world.

Welcome to this week's newsletter for the AI and the Future of Work podcast.

The present is a challenging time. Many employees fear for their jobs. There is constant talk of being replaced by artificial intelligence, and much of that pressure falls on leadership. 

Workers look to leaders for answers, even when leaders often have the same questions. 

That’s where restlessness pays off. If everything around you is changing, you must also learn how to change, grow, and improve your skills. 

But that’s not all.

You also have to learn how to help the world understand who you are and how you navigate these challenging times. 

Let’s dive into this week’s highlights 🚀

New Podcast Episode With Maryjo Charbonnier, Former CHRO & Executive Advisor at Kyndryl

The present is challenging. AI is destabilizing everyone, and work is becoming a place of perpetual fear as employees wonder if they are training their AI replacement. 

In these trying times, they turn to leadership for answers. It makes sense. After all, we invest so much of our lives in work that we want certainty. 

One place where many of those questions end up is Human Resources. So, how do you lead the people function in these trying times? 

According to Maryjo Charbonnier, there’s one thing you have to do: be restless. 

To cope with technology’s relentless pace of change, we must continuously learn and innovate. That restlessness pays off, but Maryjo warns that it’s not the only thing you have to do to thrive in the era of AI. 

Maryjo is the former Chief Human Resources Officer at Kyndryl and currently serves as an Executive Advisor. Kyndryl is the world’s largest provider of IT infrastructure services, with more than 70,000 employees worldwide. It was spun out of IBM in 2021 and was previously known as IBM Global Technology Services. Before Kyndryl, Maryjo was the CHRO for major companies such as Wolters Kluwer, Broadridge Financial Solutions, and PepsiCo. 

She sat down with PeopleReign CEO Dan Turchin to explain how, as the HR leader in one of the largest companies in the world, Maryjo has focused on more than helping employees learn and innovate. She has also instilled in Kyndryl’s workers the importance of telling the world about their skills.

After all, an inventory of skills does nothing if the world doesn’t know about it. 

In this conversation, we discuss:

• What Maryjo has learned from “seeking the heat” in messy transformations, having led HR through turnarounds, spin-offs, and large-scale change. 

• How, even though Kyndryl has more than 70,000 employees, it still uses the “Kyndryl Way” culture as an operating plan, effectively becoming the world’s largest startup. 

• Why HR must focus on which skills are rare and most valuable, and how Kyndryl’s Make Yourself Discoverable campaign turned skills into a strategic asset. 

• How AI-powered career profiles, skills-based redeployment, and role-specific AI curricula were intentionally designed to show Kyndryls that AI is an asset to their careers, not a threat to them. 

• Why Maryjo believes HR has three roles in AI, including reshaping commercial work and building an AI governance council that balances speed with risk. 

• How leadership “ORE” (organizational design, risk management, empathy) and human skills like change management and people leadership will define careers in an AI-enabled workplace.

Listen to the full conversation to learn more about how Maryjo believes HR can navigate even the most challenging evolutions and train employees to thrive through them, rather than shying away from the challenge. After all, as she explains, AI does not automate jobs on day one. Instead, it gradually takes over tasks, and that is where our opportunity lies. 

📖 AI Fun Fact Article

Could banks be systematically and illegally discriminating against qualified job applicants by using AI for screening? That’s what one major investigation wants to answer, as Technology.org explains. 

The investigation says major banks use AI screening tools that risk bias because of how they are trained. It’s one of AI’s core problems. When a company trains its AI platforms on historical hiring data, the system risks replicating and even amplifying existing human bias and discriminatory practices. 

But the controversy doesn’t involve only major banks. After all, they don’t create the software. That’s where HR tech vendors such as Workday and Eightfold are also at the center of the storm. 

One example is Wells Fargo, where investigators are focusing on the following:

• Is there systematic applicant rejection based on race, gender, or disability?

• How much are humans involved in automated screening decisions?

• Do the data sets used to train the AI contain historical biases?

• Does the application process provide reasonable accommodations for candidates with disabilities as required by law?

These questions don’t apply only to Wells Fargo or the banking industry, for that matter. That’s why PeopleReign CEO Dan Turchin reminds us to know our rights as a job applicant.

In the United States, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was established in 1965 to protect employees from discrimination, regardless of race, color, gender, or disability. Long-time listeners will remember the great conversation with Keith Sonderling, then an EEOC Commissioner and now the U.S. Deputy Secretary of Labor. 

That conversation was back in episode 307 in 2024. It explored the evolving role of AI in hiring and how it is forcing federal enforcement policies to evolve. Listen to this episode here. 

AI is biased because humans are biased. AI allows us to replicate human bias at scale. 

Question the process by which decisions were made that impact you based on algorithms. You have a right to know what inputs fed the algorithms and how the algorithm weighted those inputs. 

If you disagree with an automated decision, you have the right to involve a human. It’s our responsibility to hold AI vendors and AI algorithms accountable. 

Worth A Read

Until next time, stay curious! 🤔

That's a Wrap for This Week!

This week’s conversation doesn’t deny one topic: yes, employees are scared. But ignoring that fear will not solve anything for workers or for your company. 

Instead, it’s about navigating the current moment. The tech world is restless, so we must be restless too. Restlessness means continuous learning, constant upskilling, and, perhaps most importantly, telling the world about your skills. 

We hope this conversation inspires you to lead through change, turn fear into action, and guide your team into this new era with a focus on learning.