Two senior HR leaders on using people-centred design to drive AI adoption, workforce planning, and employee experience
Artificial intelligence is reshaping how organisations manage their workforces but the evidence is mounting that technology alone does not deliver results. The difference between tools that transform work and tools that gather dust comes down to one factor: whether HR has a seat at the table from the start.
That is the shared view of two senior people leaders with markedly different organisational contexts but strikingly similar conclusions. Phillips Pham, chief people officer at Mainetti Vietnam, and Kate Major, head of people and culture at the ACC New Zealand both argue that a people-first approach to technology is not a soft preference. It is what determines whether implementation succeeds or fails.
When technology works and when it doesn't
ACC's experience illustrates the stakes clearly. The organisation has more than 40 active AI initiatives underway and, according to Major, was among the first organisations across Australasia to roll out Microsoft Copilot to all staff. Yet even with that level of commitment to innovation, not every tool landed as intended.
"We've got one call summarisation tool that we rolled out to our frontline," Major said. "From a technical perspective it was working well, but the practicality meant that it wasn't producing any useful outputs that actually genuinely made their jobs easier. So people didn't adopt it."
The assumption from the technology side was that low uptake meant resistance to change. The reality was different. When Major's team applied a people lens – sitting alongside frontline staff and understanding what they actually needed – the problem became clear: the tool's outputs did not match the workflow. Once customised to produce results aligned with how people worked, adoption followed.
"It just shows the importance of why HR needs to be involved in AI," Major said. "If you design it from a people-first perspective, then you get better adoption, you get better outcomes and you get fewer unintended impacts."
This mirrors a broader pattern Pham identifies across organisations. HR leaders exploring how technology is reshaping talent management globally will recognise the gap between what platforms promise and what employees experience day to day.
The hidden gaps in HR technology adoption
Beyond implementation failures, Pham pointed to structural areas where organisations are systematically underleveraging technology. Internal mobility is one. Around half of employees are unaware of internal opportunities or where to find them – meaning roles remain effectively invisible to the people best placed to fill them.
AI-powered internal talent marketplaces can address this by giving HR leaders a broad view of available skills and automatically matching employees to suited roles.
Workforce planning is another: "While many HR teams have access to talent management systems and recruitment platforms, fewer have the forecasting and scenario modelling tools that would allow them to anticipate gaps in skillset or align people strategies with business priorities more proactively," Pham said.
The question he puts to HR leaders is a practical one: where could technology genuinely improve our people-centred work? "Technology then becomes a way to enhance visibility, fairness and connection, rather than only simply speeding up an existing process," he said.
For organisations building more strategic HR technology frameworks, that reframing – from efficiency tool to strategic enabler – marks a significant shift in how people functions are positioned within the business.
Building AI literacy from the top down
At ACC, one of the clearest lessons from years of rolling out AI initiatives is that leadership capability sets the ceiling for organisational adoption. Major's team is now putting all executives and leaders through structured AI training to establish a common baseline of literacy and capability.
"Leaders really do set the tone," she said. "So what we're doing is putting all of our executives and all of our leaders through training for AI, so we all have the same base capability and the same literacy. Leaders can model a safe and transparent way to practise in AI, have good habits and build confidence."
The practical payoff is already visible in ACC's call centres. After the call summarisation tool was redesigned around employee needs, productivity measurably improved. Staff who previously had to manually transcribe notes across multiple systems and copy and paste information between platforms after every call now have that process automated.
"It drastically reduces their time and it just means that they can then focus on another call or more valued work," Major said.
ACC is also piloting an AI call simulator for new starters, which is particularly valuable for frontline staff who must make difficult calls to clients, including notifying people that their compensation will be ending.
Human context must remain central
Both leaders converge on the same underlying risk: that as HR becomes more data-driven, employees can begin to feel reduced to metrics rather than recognised as people.
Pham is direct on this point: "There is a real risk that employees may feel reduced to data points – such as scores on a dashboard and outputs in a system – rather than being recognised as individuals," he said. "To avoid dehumanisation, technology needs to always serve a clearly defined human goal."
People analytics, he argued, should function as a starting point for conversation – not a verdict. The numbers surface patterns; it takes human judgement to understand them. This view is supported by the World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025, which identified empathy, complex reasoning, and adaptability as among the most critical workforce competencies even as automation accelerates.
For HR leaders navigating the pace of change, Major's counsel is similarly grounded: "The thing with AI is that it's not just a one and done – or it shouldn't be anyway. You've got to constantly iterate."
Pham put it plainly: "HR is a people profession and should remain so even as the tools become more sophisticated. The essential work of listening, understanding context and making thoughtful decisions about people should not be outsourced to systems."
For teams working on employee experience and workforce technology strategy in 2026, that principle – keep the human outcome at the centre of every technology decision – may be the most durable lesson of all.
