20 influential voices in AI for business & people transformation 

‍Some people observe the AI trend. While others are using their knowledge on AI to transform talent and business capabilities. 

Leadership teams are optimizing Artificial Intelligence to create new avenues for market growth.

While AI is still in its early stages, the potential benefits generative AI and ChatGPT’s capability overhang could bring to businesses and people remain unexplored. 

As a result, there’s a Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) building up. Everyone is competing to implement AI. Everyone wants to generate value in their recruitment, learning strategies and customer service with new innovations. 

Here’s the challenge. With so much hype around its potential, business teams need to know how to solve their specific challenges with AI and create sustainable growth. 

Lepaya selected the 20 top voices in AI for talent and business transformation. Because while AI has many capabilities, only human intelligence should influence how we adapt it to our work. 

These 20 influencial AI experts aren’t randomly selected. We split their thought leadership into 6 categories to build a story around the value of AI for your people and your business.

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AI’s influence on talent recruitment, succession planning & future job roles

Leading companies recruit the best talent from the market. Through AI, businesses can streamline recruitment processes and systems with automatized data to select skilled talent. 

However, it’s not just the systems that technology is changing, but also the talent and skill sets recruitment teams need to prioritize for emerging job roles in the AI field.

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1. Will Dempsey, Global Talent Acquisition Lead, AstraZeneca ‍
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AstraZeneca recruits top talent to support their company mission and improve patients’ quality of life. 

Will has shifted their talent acquisition from a traditional to a digital-first strategy. Their tech-driven strategy not only optimizes the experience of candidates and hiring managers but also ensures the company fills critical roles that support healthcare solutions for patients. 

Through a mixture of tech platforms, automation, and data, Will is building a robust talent succession plan across all business areas and creating opportunities to integrate more tech into AstraZeneca’s recruitment process.

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2. Shubham Saboo, Director of AI Product Management, Tenstorrent

Shubham not only analyzes current AI trends, but also predicts future job roles it will create. His daily AI newsletter discusses emerging job roles in different business areas that company executives and recruitment teams should prioritize for future growth needs.  

Here are the future AI roles and their responsibilities Shubham predicts:

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3. Brijesh Singh, Global AI Lead, Wipro

Brijesh has helped embed two values in Wipro’s company culture to optimize AI - responsible use and creating the right working environment for AI-skilled talent. 

Brijesh’s work focuses on enriching Wipro’s AI skill pool as well as leading a team of data scientists that ensure the responsible use of AI in clients’ Large Language models (LLMs).

As a result, Wipro earned the award “50 best firms for data scientists to work for in 2023”. And this is down to the company culture Wipro offers their data scientists, leading to low attrition rates and high engagement. The reward is based on: 

• Growth in data science and analytics 
• Attrition rates 
• Average tenure of a data scientist 
• 90 day failure rate post-hiring

4. Markus Graf, Global Head of Talent, Novartis 

Creating a skills-based organization with AI solutions is crucial to attract top talent and drive innovation in the life sciences industry. Markus assisted an AI transformation at Novartis with a $5 million ROI. 

AI optimized talent allocation for project assignments and helped create targeted reskilling for industry-specific innovation, such as research and omnichannel customer communication.

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Redefining skills, company culture & closing the talent gap for AI adoption 

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Attracting new talent and aligning job roles isn’t enough to capitalize on AI’s potential. Businesses also need to invest in their workforce’s skills to optimize new technologies. 

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5. Danielle El Khoury, Head of Training & Certification France, Amazon Web Services 

Danielle is an expert in aligning upskilling strategies and AI adoption for organizational transformation.  

At Amazon Web Services, she has helped implement 7 courses for business executives and developers to work with Amazon’s generative AI services and improve their applications. 

Talent from any company can access machine learning, AI coding and data analysis training - helping to democratize the adoption of AI and key skills across all businesses.

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6. Shilpa Rao, Principal Partner & Transformation Lead, Tata Consulting 

Shilpa approaches AI from a wider lens and analyzes the readiness of the Indian workforce for AI. 

With new roles such as prompt engineers, data detectives and AI business strategists, Shilpa believes that cultures of innovation will be essential for Indian companies to create value from new technology and grow the national economy. 

Shilpa encourages companies to build cultures and upskilling solutions that support talent to progress into AI-related roles and give them the freedom to experiment with the latest innovation. 

7. Amitkumar Shrivastava, Head of AI, Fujitsu 

Amit analyzes the AI ecosystem in the Indian workforce from a different perspective - skill gaps and talent resources. He has identified a 51% gap between the current 416k AI and data scientists and the total demand for 629k experts. 

Therefore, Amit encourages government and private-led initiatives to support start-ups and corporate companies to adopt AI in every sector: 

• Leverage public-private partnerships 
• Develop AI infrastructure 
• Bridge the talent gap with upskilling and recruitment 

With his work, Amit is helping India’s talent and economy secure its position as an AI global leader.

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8. Marlene de Koning, HR Tech & Digital Director, PWC Nederland

Marlene, an AI consultant, addresses a key concern in the Dutch labor market - the exposure of more than 44% of jobs to generative AI. 

Marlene bridges the gap between strategy and AI technology to transform people’s skills and business areas such as:

• Company culture and performance 
• Employee experience and wellbeing
• Workforce productivity 

Marlene believes that with the right intersection between generative AI, Environmental Social Governance principles and people wellbeing, HR teams can design solutions that solve labor shortage in key Dutch industries, including finance, tech and education. 

AI’s potential to transform HR services and capabilities 

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HR teams can leverage AI to improve their services, decision-making and workforce productivity. And with the right HR candidates and skills, they can also provide the link between people’s capabilities and client success.  

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9. James Purvis, Head of HR, CERN

With a career in IT and engineering, James understands the core value of tech. He encourages HR teams to integrate AI into their operations and improve workforce productivity at scale.  

At Cern, James has been leading the HR team since 2016 for the companies’ 18.000 employees and previously developed innovative and data-driven solutions to meet Cern’s hiring needs. 

But the role of HR talent has to change with AI. 

Therefore, James believes that HR leaders should look to integrate candidates into their teams with experience and knowledge of technology to effectively support their organization’s performance. 

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10. Alex Rylance, Head of Human Resources UK, Netcompany  

Alex Rylance looks at the future impact of AI from a dual perspective - linking internal business integration and external client use. 

But how can both areas be connected? 

Netcompany’s HR team focuses on closing digital skill gaps to prepare their people for AI-driven change. In fact, Alex Rylance believes every company needs to start rethinking their upskilling strategy and creating new job roles, such as Head of AI. 

However, Alex’s thought leadership also has one important message - every company needs to start seeing themselves as a tech company. 

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11. Nicolas Behbahani, Global People Analytics & HR Data Director, Confidential 

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“Generative AI could boost HR productivity up to 30% in the near future.” 

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Nicolas sees huge potential for generative AI to increase value for HR in many areas. With data and automatic processes, HR teams can personalize the employee journey from “hire-to-retire”. 

Through research analysis, Nicolas Behbahani encourages HR teams to experiment with systems and set goals for executing workforce transformation with AI:

• Create a general GenAI cross-functional SWAT team in HR
• Determine the skills mix required for this AI team
• Communicate changes to the organization to drive engagement

12. Egle Vinauskaite, AI Learning Strategist, Nodes 

As HR and learning teams open new AI-related roles, L&D teams need to have practical frameworks in place for people to successfully adopt technology. And a simple workshop won’t suffice. 

Instead, Egle has created a framework connecting the individual, the tech and the context to increase talent’s technical skills and successfully integrate AI into operations.  

The framework has to be developed around the individual - referred to as human-centered design. L&D leaders have to identify the skills people need to work with AI in the relevant context and build their confidence in using technology to deliver high-quality results.

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13. Josh Cavalier, Founder at JoshCavalier.ai

What role does generative AI play in learning journeys? And how accessible is it for learning teams? 

Josh Cavalier believes that AI can revolutionize upskilling with educational videos. Typically perceived as too expensive, time-consuming and lacking a delivery platform, most L&D teams face significant barriers to integrating videos and gamification into learning flows. 

However, generative AI is removing these barriers. Josh promotes that AI will transform how L&D teams design learning journeys and diversify their content to increase learner engagement. Now every L&D professional can be a content designer in many formats. 

Josh’s content updates L&D teams on latest AI tools such as Adobe’s new Firefly AI Models, GPT-4 Vision and Adobe Captivate AI CO-pilot. 

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Humanized AI is key to solving world challenges 

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AI has the potential to solve human health and environmental challenges. But solving problems with AI requires one vital aspect of human intelligence - empathy.

14. Raymond Hannes, Co-Founder at Future Forward Collective

Raymond supports that “Design Thinking principles” will optimize AI to solve real-life challenges and encourages careful consideration in how we apply it. Because ultimately AI should never replace skills or tasks humans couldn’t perform, but augment existing capabilities. 

Therefore, Raymond teaches people to ask these questions before employing AI and adopt a human-centric and responsible approach:
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• Do I understand how this AI works?
• Can I evaluate its results?
• Is it augmenting my skills, or am I sidelining critical thinking?
  

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15. Ali Fenwick, Professor of Organizational Development & Innovation, Hult International Business School 

“I predict that in the next 5 to 6 years, if companies don’t make AI in the workplace more human-centric, employees will be less willing to work for these organizations and customers less willing to buy from them as well.” 

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Businesses aren’t always using AI in the right way. Too often the focus of technology bypasses the impact on humans and prioritizes increasing efficiency and productivity in operations. 

That’s why Ali talks about humanizing AI. He believes that AI needs to be designed around people and incorporate factors such as ethics or biases. These human-centered factors should be turned into actionable policies to gain people’s trust - both customers and employees - and sustainable value from AI. 

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16. Aruna Pattam, Head of Generative AI in Asia Pacific Region, Capgemini 

Generative AI will impact many business units in the life science industry, including finance, sales, IT and HR. But it brings challenges because healthcare is deeply rooted in helping people. 

That’s why Aruna emphasizes that AI solutions need to be built around human empathy. This is especially important when using AI in diagnoses and the impact on patients should be addressed on three levels: 

• Patient acceptance and trust
• Ethical considerations 
• Balancing human skills with AI  

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Upskilling & closing capability gaps for AI integration 

Upskilling solutions for AI need to impact every business unit. Since AI will impact the majority of jobs - not just developers, data scientists or engineers - businesses need to adopt a skills-based initiative at scale.

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17. Frank Koo, Head of Asia Talent & Learning Solutions, LinkedIn 

Frank helps organizations implement AI with a skills-based approach. And upskilling programs need to impact every area of a company’s workforce - training basic and advanced AI skill sets.

So how can companies start this transformation? 

It  requires at least one member of the leadership team to take the role as AI lead and identify opportunities. But the entire leadership team needs to create the right learning culture and mindset to implement an organization-wide roadmap and drive better outcomes with AI. 

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18. Karin Kimbrough, Chief Economist, LinkedIn 

Karin analyzes the impact of AI on jobs. And it goes beyond technical roles. To integrate AI, she also believes that companies must shift to a skills-based approach across every job function in a company. 

Upskilling should target skills such as AI literacy as well as human-centric capabilities to work with new technologies. 

But upskilling for AI also gives talent new career opportunities and increases retention. That’s why Karin encourages senior leadership teams to act fast and refocus upskilling initiatives to gain the full benefits of AI. 

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The last voices drive the core message behind AI - practical value in your context

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No matter how business teams use and implement AI, the most important factor is driving value with technology to solve problems in your specific context. People have to select what applies to their individual needs and be intentional with AI technology.

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19. Rob Lennon, AI Expert & Chief Experience Officer, Stealth Mode Startup

Rob Lennon is a key voice in this discussion. With the AI hype, the purpose of technology is getting lost. Rob has identified precisely what people want to know about AI:

1. Business tactics, strategies and tips
2. How to apply AI in a business context 

His content isn’t focused on clickbait, but helping people to use AI and solve real business challenges. That’s why Rob designs AI frameworks based on three fundamental questions: 

• What is the actual business problem? 
• Why use a specific tool or prompt? 
• How will it move the needle? 

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“For all the creators in this space, I think this is where we're heading. A merging of our own expertise and skills and our ability to amplify those skills with AI.”

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20. Chris Chiancone, Chief Information Officer, City of Carrollton 

AI’s potential isn’t only limited to private companies. It can also solve challenges and significantly improve the efficiency of the public sector. 

CIO, Chris Chiancone, has vast experiences in designing technology solutions and sees an opportunity for AI to help local governments improve service-delivery for communities. 

His thought leadership focuses on how AI could enhance; resource allocation, processing complaints, policy-making, transport and above all, faster and more accurate decision-making to impact local communities.

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What message are these 20 experts creating around AI to unlock business & people transformation? 

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AI alone won’t deliver businesses new commercial opportunities. Instead, human intelligence and empathy have to dictate how, when, and where businesses use AI to unlock sustainable talent and economic growth. 

For teams to optimize and grow with AI, businesses have to start taking action now. And this change must come from leadership teams.

They need to start investing in new job roles such as AI Leads and shaping cultures of innovation through upskilling initiatives. AI upskilling needs to impact every business area to ensure workforce-readiness for new technology, from recruitment to HR teams. 

While there’s a broad AI hype out there, what matters is finding how AI is relevant to your work and the challenges it can solve - without compromising your people. 

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Interested to find out how AI can transform your people and your business? Sign up for our panel discussion with AI experts Ross Stevenson, Clemens Lechner and Peter Meerman here.