Michael Rochelle, Chief Strategy Officer and Principal Analyst at Brandon Hall Group™, sits down with Bob Szostak of V2X Professional Services (VPS) for a candid look at where AI stands in learning and development today. Bob brings nearly three decades of industry experience to a conversation that moves past the hype cycle and into what organizations actually need to get right before they scale AI adoption.

In this episode of the Brandon Hall Group™ Excellence at Work Podcast, host Michael Rochelle, Chief Strategy Officer and Principal Analyst at Brandon Hall Group™, talks with Steve Lange, General Manager of the Metrics That Matter business unit at Explorance, about a framework Lange unveiled at Explorance World 2026.

In this episode of the Brandon Hall Group™ Excellence at Work podcast, host David Wentworth, Managing Director of Learning and Talent at Brandon Hall Group™, talks with Melissa Loble, Chief Learning Officer at Instructure, about what it really takes to become a skills-driven organization. Every company says skills are a priority. Far fewer can say what a skill actually means inside their own walls, let alone how it connects to the outcomes leadership cares about.

Loble makes the case that no platform, library or borrowed framework does that work for you. Becoming skills-driven is a matter of culture, definition and follow through, and Loble walks through what that looks like in practice, from the executive team down to the individual employee.

In this episode of the Brandon Hall Group™ Excellence at Work podcast, host Rachel Cooke, Chief Operating Officer of Brandon Hall Group, sits down with Heidi Grecsek, Managing Director of Human Capital Management at Brandon Hall Group, to unpack one of the most underrated workforce challenges: financial stress. New research points to a stark disconnect.

Six in 10 employers believe they support employee financial wellness well. Fewer than three in 10 employees agree. Grecsek walks through why financial stress reaches far beyond absenteeism and productivity, who inside an organization should own the issue and a practical operating model for building a financial wellness strategy that actually changes behavior.

In this episode of the Brandon Hall Group™ Excellence at Work podcast, host Rachel Cooke, COO of Brandon Hall Group, sits down with Lisa Cannell, Senior Managing Director of University of Virginia Darden Executive Education and Lifelong Learning, for a conversation that is equal parts strategic wake-up call and practical playbook. Lisa brings 25 years of HR and organizational development experience across corporations and higher education, and what she offers is not a technology perspective on AI but a deeply human one. Her argument is simple and urgent: organizations are getting AI adoption wrong not because they lack tools or talent, but because they are underestimating the people challenge at the center of it. This conversation covers why CHROs are sitting on a rare strategic opportunity, what most organizations are missing in their AI rollouts, and how Darden is helping leadership teams move beyond pilots and into transformation.

In this episode of the Brandon Hall Group™ Excellence at Work podcast, host, David Wentworth, Managing Director of Learning and Talent, Brandon Hall Group, sits down with Mahesh Kumar, Founder of TraineryHCM, for a wide-ranging conversation that is equal parts origin story and industry forecast. Mahesh brings an unconventional lens to the world of HR technology, one shaped by over two decades on Wall Street across three continents. What emerged from that career was not a planned pivot into SaaS, but what Mahesh himself calls an "accidental" one. The result is a company built with the sensibilities of an enterprise operator: obsessed with scalability, skeptical of hype, and relentlessly focused on client outcomes. This conversation covers how TraineryHCM came to be, what scalability really means in today's learning technology landscape, and how Mahesh is thinking about AI, not as a feature to bolt on, but as something to weave into the fabric of a product.

In this Brandon Hall Group™ Excellence at Work Podcast, Rachel Cooke, Chief Operating Officer at Brandon Hall Group, Michael Murphy, Director of the U.S. Office of Sustainable Development for Generations at Boehringer Ingelheim, and Jason Parrish, Director of Corporate Programs at UGA Executive Education, explore how Boehringer Ingelheim's award-winning Sustainable Development Excellence (SDX) program is building a culture of sustainability from the inside out, and why the best solutions to the world's biggest challenges are built through partnership.