Summary

Most HR leaders talk about going AI-first. Jennifer Erfurth, Global Head of HR at the cybersecurity company OPSWAT, is actually doing it, and not the way you'd expect. She canceled a planned Workday rollout, built AI agents on top of BambooHR, rewrote her employer value proposition to lead with AI, and kept her human HR team in place as the safety net.

In this conversation with host Barb Bidan, Jennifer breaks down the three bets behind an AI-first people function: what to build, who to hire, and how to drive adoption without forcing it. She's candid about the parts that are still messy, including a chatbot that hallucinates an HR contact named "Aaron," and why 25 years of experience is the thing that keeps AI honest.

Takeaways

• Why OPSWAT spent six months on its knowledge base before turning on a single agent
• How an engineer built a skills-inventory app in under an hour, replacing tools like Eightfold and Fuel50
• The AI-first EVP that attracts the right talent and filters out the rest
• The "teach a man to fish" adoption move that gets employees to self-serve
• How to keep a human in the loop when the AI is right five times and wrong the sixth
• What the CHRO role looks like when HR owns both the human and the AI workforce

Chapters

00:00 Meet Jennifer Erfurth and OPSWAT

02:30 Building an AI-first people function from scratch

04:30 Change management and "what's in it for me"

07:30 Running HR like a product: launch at 80% and iterate

08:00 The AI-first EVP and screening for AI fluency

12:30 Why they scrapped Workday and built on BambooHR

15:30 Tier zero (AI) and tier one (human) HR

17:00 The skills-inventory app built in an hour

21:00 Bringing an existing team along: learn, organize, recognize

23:30 The future of the CHRO role

25:00 Lightning round

27:30 Barb's takeaways and the last word

Connect with the Guest
LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/globalhrexecutive
Website: https://www.opswat.com/contact

Sponsor
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