Two people leaders say governance and change management – not mandates – determine whether AI adoption actually sticks in the workplace
Global organisations are racing to formalise artificial intelligence (AI) use in the workplace, but two senior people leaders say the businesses getting it right are treating AI as a leadership problem, not a technology rollout.
That is the shared message from Dusty Holcomb, US-based leadership consultant and former chief executive, and Julie Coleman, chief people officer at Australian based battery recycler Livium.
Each leader told HRD that human resources (HR) departments are the ones best placed to make AI adoption work – provided they act as practitioners of the technology themselves, rather than administrators of a policy.
Holcomb, who has just signed a book deal on leadership in the AI era, said the mistake he sees most often among executives is treating AI as a separate problem from people leadership.
"You need to stop thinking about leaders, tools and artificial intelligence," he said. "You need to start thinking about how you're going to lead people, because if you lead people well, then you will be able to lead the machines and the tools well, because the principles are exactly the same."
Piloting before rolling out
Coleman's experience at Livium illustrates that approach in practice. She said the trigger for formal AI governance came in mid-2025, when staff had already begun using generative tools such as ChatGPT on their own initiative.
Rather than issue a blanket policy, Coleman said the business ran a structured pilot with a small group of users, tracking time saved on tasks and error reduction over several months before expanding access more broadly. The company now reports on AI use to its board every quarter.
Governance was built around the Australian Institute of Company Directors' (AICD) eight elements of safe and responsible AI governance, developed with the University of Technology Sydney's Human Technology Institute.
"We went back to the AICD principles ... just to again make sure that from a senior management and board perspective, that we were putting the right infrastructure and governance in place when implementing it," Coleman said.
That meant revisiting privacy, cybersecurity, discrimination and work health and safety policies to ensure they covered generative AI use, rather than drafting AI-specific rules in isolation.
One training principle Coleman said resonated with staff was framing AI as, in her words, "a brilliant graduate on day one" – capable, but requiring careful prompting, fact-checking and direction rather than blind trust.
"It's not rocket science, to be frank," she said, "but it's just making sure that it really does integrate with what you already have in place."
Why mandates backfire
Holcomb was blunt about the alternative approach – forcing adoption through targets or usage mandates.
"Mandates that people use the tools are an exercise in misguided futility," he said, warning that poorly designed usage targets simply produce activity without outcomes.
He pointed to a stark split in the market: citing a recent statistic from his own conversations with chief executives, Holcomb said roughly 14 per cent of leaders sit in the top third of AI tool deployment, while the remaining majority are "lagging" and unsure where to start.
HR as the connective tissue
Both interviewees converged on the same conclusion: HR's role is not to police AI use but to translate it into outcomes people understand.
"HR is kind of the connective tissue," Holcomb said, arguing that HR leaders need to use the tools themselves first so they can "ask better questions of the teams" and address the fear that often accompanies automation of routine work.
For Coleman, that connective role has extended into cybersecurity, with Livium folding AI use into its incident-response and cyber-insurance arrangements as a proactive measure.
Her advice to HR leaders earlier in their AI journey is to anchor implementation in existing organisational strategy and governance frameworks first, then follow up with ongoing training and measurement rather than a one-off rollout.
The message for boards and HR leaders converges on recent findings that senior leaders show the widest AI governance gaps, reinforcing why practitioner-level fluency, not just policy sign-off, is becoming a baseline expectation for HR executives.
It also tracks with separate reporting on why executive sponsorship determines whether AI adoption succeeds, and with data showing most AI adoption in Australian workplaces is still employee-led rather than organisation-led.
For Holcomb, the stakes go beyond productivity. "I think the biggest [thing] we're going to have to navigate over the next five to 10 years is going to be change management at a speed and scale and intensity that we've never had to manage before," he said – a shift he argues will test HR's ability to lead people through uncertainty as much as it tests any piece of technology.
