Summary

A new hire fills out their 90-day survey and says they're not getting meaningful time with their manager. Instead of filing it away for a quarterly review, Bradford Wilkins pulls the data—and within ten seconds, AI shows him that the manager is spending nearly 50% of their time on pre-sales activities that aren't even part of their job.

 Within a week, the team is redesigning job responsibilities, reallocating time, and building a fix that will accelerate ramp for every future hire in that department. In this episode of The Human Element, host Barb Bidan sits down with Bradford Wilkins, VP of People and Organization at Cognite, an industrial AI company, for a fast-moving conversation about what happens when you stop looking at people data in silos and start connecting it the same way you'd connect sensors in an oil refinery. Bradford walks through how Cognite is building knowledge graphs that layer engagement data on top of performance data on top of Salesforce data to surface correlations no one was seeing before, why he says 50% of his job is already gone (and why that's exciting, not scary), and his "cheesecloth" framework for AI-first thinking: push everything through AI first, and whatever's left on the other side is the human work. He and Barb also get into why entry-level hires who grew up on AI may be more valuable right now than your mid-career employees, how org charts are starting to include agent boxes alongside human ones, and why the best time to start was twenty years ago—but the second best time is now.

Timestamps

• 00:39 How Cognite connects people data the same way it connects industrial sensors
• 04:30 The 90-day survey that triggered three fixes in a single week
• 09:54 Where the biggest HR automation opportunities are right now
• 12:59 "50% of my job is gone"—and why that's the exciting part
• 14:12 What still requires the human touch: team composition, empathy, judgment
• 19:42 Building trust by helping employees visualize where their jobs are headed
• 23:51 Managing agents as direct reports: the new org chart
• 26:35 Learning labs, AI champions, and building capability through show and tell

Takeaways

• Push every process through the "cheesecloth" of AI first—what's left on the other side is the genuinely human work
• Connect your people data across silos (engagement, performance, time tracking, CRM) instead of analyzing each in isolation
• Don't add AI on top of a bad process; you're just compounding the problem faster
• Build trust by helping employees visualize what their jobs will look like after AI, not just telling them not to worry
• Create learning labs and AI champion roles to drive adoption intentionally instead of hoping it happens organically
• Recognize that entry-level hires who grew up on AI may be your most valuable asset right now for accelerating adoption

Guest LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bradfordwilkins/

Company website: https://www.cognite.com

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• (00:39) - How Cognite connects people data the same way it connects industrial sensors