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
Wisq is the AI platform for HR. We built Harper, the world's first AI HR teammate — designed to handle the judgment-heavy work that has historically consumed HR teams: job changes, performance concerns, leaves of absence, onboarding, and employee relations issues. Where HCM bolt-ons and chatbots deflect the easiest questions, Harper resolves full cases, end-to-end. The result is an HR function with the capacity and strategic bandwidth to focus on the work that moves the business.

Companies get Harper live in weeks, not quarters, with implementation support built on deep HR domain expertise. Wisq serves HR leaders at leading companies across industries, helping them raise the bar on employee experience and expand what their teams are capable of.

For more information, visit https://www.wisq.com

Summary
In this episode of The Human Element, Chief People Officer John Foster (Tala) makes the case that the biggest risk for HR leaders isn't doing bad work — it's doing great work that the organization isn't ready to receive. John shares the framework he calls scratch OD, his argument for why AI won't fix performance management but will replace it, and the career moment when a boss told him to take his foot off his throat. Essential listening for people leaders who want to use the AI era to redesign, not just optimize.

Chapters
00:00 Introduction: John Foster, Tala, and the Gamut framework
02:30 AI as restructuring work, not optimizing it
05:30 Organization market fit: the Cambrian explosion analogy
09:30 Applying AI at Tala: rethinking software development and workflows
11:30 Performance management's 10-second reinvention
15:30 Using AI as a thinking partner for organizational rethinking
19:00 Scratch OD: the chef framework for HR design
23:00 The change agent's trap: empathy for overwhelmed leaders
26:30 When HR is correct but not effective
28:00 The winning organization in 2026: customer-centric and modular
30:00 Lightning round: Trader Joe's, Ford, and what HR most often skips

Takeaways

1. Being entirely right about the work does not make you effective at changing the organization.
2. Scratch OD starts with the ingredients — what people actually need from work — not with which best practice to borrow.
3. AI makes individual performance clarity at scale possible for the first time, shifting the model from top-down judgment to individual empowerment.
4. The organizations that thrive in the AI era will be customer-centric and modular, not defined by their product or technology.
5. If you can imagine what you want to build and describe it in detail, you already have an entry point into using AI to construct it.

Connect with the Guest
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnfoster-gamut/
Website: https://tala.co/careers/

Sponsor
Wisq is the AI platform for HR. We built Harper, the world's first AI HR teammate — designed to handle the judgment-heavy work that has historically consumed HR teams: job changes, performance concerns, leaves of absence, onboarding, and employee relations issues. Where HCM bolt-ons and chatbots deflect the easiest questions, Harper resolves full cases, end-to-end. The result is an HR function with the capacity and strategic bandwidth to focus on the work that moves the business.

Companies get Harper live in weeks, not quarters, with implementation support built on deep HR domain expertise. Wisq serves HR leaders at leading companies across industries, helping them raise the bar on employee experience and expand what their teams are capable of.

For more information, visit wisq.com.

• (00:00) - Introduction: John Foster, Tala, and the Gamut framework
• (02:30) - AI as restructuring work, not optimizing it
• (05:30) - Organization market fit: the Cambrian explosion analogy
• (09:30) - Applying AI at Tala: rethinking software development and workflows
• (11:30) - Performance management's 10-second reinvention
• (15:30) - Using AI as a thinking partner for organizational rethinking
• (19:00) - Scratch OD: the chef framework for HR design
• (23:00) - The change agent's trap: empathy for overwhelmed leaders
• (26:30) - When HR is correct but not effective
• (28:00) - The winning organization in 2026: customer-centric and modular
• (30:00) - Lightning round: Trader Joe's, Ford, and what HR most often skips

Summary

In this episode of The Human Element, Barb talks with Heather Oxley, CHRO at Perficient, about what it looks like to run HR for a firm whose entire business is helping other companies transform. Heather walks through three areas where she's deploying AI across the talent life cycle: project staffing, learning and development, and recruiting. Her central argument is that the value of AI in HR isn't primarily about cost reduction — it's about bringing clarity to the decisions that define the function. She also names the one thing AI should never touch.

Chapters

00:00 Host Intro: HR at a Firm Built on Transformation
01:30 Heather's Role at Perficient and the AI-First Mandate
03:30 AI in Project Staffing: Beyond Skills and Availability
09:00 The Leapfrog Moment for Smaller Teams
12:30 Learning as Career Navigation, Not Content Delivery
17:00 90% Voluntary Adoption in Two Weeks
19:30 AI in Recruiting: Where the Legal Stakes Are Highest
22:30 Closing the Candidate Black Hole and Debiasing Panels
24:30 The Fork in the Road: Cost Reduction vs. Decision Clarity
26:00 Lightning Round: The Line AI Should Never Cross

Takeaways

1. AI in recruiting should augment human judgment, not replace it, especially as legislation in New York, California, and Colorado continues to evolve.
2. Using agents to close the loop with every candidate who doesn't advance is one of the highest-value, lowest-risk uses of AI in HR.
3. The fork facing HR leaders today is cost reduction vs. decision clarity, and most organizations are defaulting to cost.
4. Moments that matter (offers, terminations, promotions, hard conversations) should always involve a person, not an agent.
5. The HR leaders who matter in this era are the ones who prove the function can be as agentic as any other part of the business.

Connect with the Guest
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/heatheroxley/
Website: https://www.perficient.com/

Sponsor

The Human Element is brought to you by Harper, Wisq's always-on AI HR Generalist transforming how work gets done. Powered by deep HR intelligence, Harper delivers instant, accurate, and empathetic support—from policy questions to performance coaching—so your people get answers fast and your teams stay focused.

Learn more at https://www.wisq.com/

• (00:00) - Host Intro: HR at a Firm Built on Transformation
• (01:30) - Heather's Role at Perficient and the AI-First Mandate
• (03:30) - AI in Project Staffing: Beyond Skills and Availability
• (09:00) - The Leapfrog Moment for Smaller Teams
• (12:30) - Learning as Career Navigation, Not Content Delivery
• (17:00) - 90% Voluntary Adoption in Two Weeks
• (19:30) - AI in Recruiting: Where the Legal Stakes Are Highest
• (22:30) - Closing the Candidate Black Hole and Debiasing Panels
• (24:30) - The Fork in the Road: Cost Reduction vs. Decision Clarity
• (26:00) - Lightning Round: The Line AI Should Never Cross