Skilled

Nick Lawrence, Executive Director of People & Culture, Chick-fil-A local franchise - Indianapolis, on servant leadership, second mile service, and what separates a great culture from a good poster.

Tim Toomey, Managing Director and Americas Lead for Accenture LearnVantage, on the death spiral of AI investment, why humans must stay in the lead, and what the skills economy owes the next generation of workers.

Adam Hickman, VP, Employee Development, Talent Management, and HRIS, Partners Federal Credit Union, serving The Walt Disney Company, on listening for talent, why beliefs determine whether training lands, and what it means to build a workplace people actually love.

Learn more about Adam at adamhickman.com.

Misha Santa Barbara, VP of Technical Skills and Learning at Kyndryl, joins Skilled to talk about piloting AI-powered learning at scale.

She breaks down Kyndryl's experiment with AI avatars for sales training, the hard lessons on cost and experience design, and why skills are the literal product at a 70,000-person tech services company.

Plus: the three types of learners every L&D leader needs a strategy for, and why "personalized scale" doesn't have to be a contradiction.

Cisco's Chief Learning Officer Marci Paino on building a skills intelligence engine for 86,000 employees, and why job titles can't keep up with how fast skills change.

In this episode of The Skilled Podcast, Marci breaks down the data model powering personalized learning at Cisco, how the company cuts production time on new learning experiences from three months to about a week, and why she leads an 11-company consortium tracking how AI is reshaping the workforce.

We also dig into Cisco's four-persona approach to AI adoption, the "leader uplift" effect, and Marci's advice for letting go of perfectionism in a world where the map is still being written.

What does it mean to lead HR like a business driver, not an order taker? Kelli Ezell of BMI breaks down the three-legged stool of HR execution, AI adoption done right, and the career advice she wishes she'd heard earlier.

Julie Stone, Chief Learning Officer at TTEC, leads AI-powered learning for 65,000+ employees across six continents.

In this episode, she shares why she stopped a fully self-paced program from launching — and why it would have failed — and what that moment taught her about the role humans must play in AI-powered learning.

She also breaks down why the most dangerous skill gap in organizations today isn't AI fluency, it's discernment: the ability to challenge what AI gives you and know whether the substance is actually there. If you're navigating AI transformation in L&D, this is the episode to listen to.

Chapters:

• 0:00 — Introduction: Meet Julie Stone, CLO at TTEC
• 3:00 — When L&D is the product: TTEC's dual mandate
• 8:00 — The program that almost launched: why she pulled the human out and what happened
• 14:00 — The Learning Wizards Suite and the Brandon Hall Gold Award
• 20:00 — Running L&D like a software team: pilots, releases, and the cost of constant change
• 26:00 — The speed of AI will always be constrained by the people
• 32:00 — The skill gap nobody is naming: discernment in an AI-generated world

Connect with Julie on LinkedIn, and follow TTEC.

What does it actually take to walk into an iconic American brand as a new CHRO and build culture, values, and an HR strategy from scratch?In this episode of the Skilled Podcast by ‪Growthspace, Omer Glass and Samantha Thomas sit down with Gena Smith, CHRO of J.Crew, to talk about what she learned in 14 years at LVMH, why values mean nothing without accountability, and how she's thinking about AI adoption in a creativity-first organization.Gena shares her honest take on the difference between companies that talk about values and companies that actually live them — and what it takes to make that shift stick across every level of the business.

What you'll learn:

Why employee experience has to come before customer experience

How to define values concretely enough that people can actually be held accountable to them

The three pillars of successful AI adoption: mindset, skills, and tools — in that order

Why "just start" is the most important message any leader can give their team right now

What the paradox of AI really means for human skills and leadershipWhether you're a CHRO navigating transformation, an L&D leader trying to embed values into development programs, or a people leader figuring out how to bring your team along on the AI journey — this conversation is for you.

In this episode, Ron Storn, CHRO, Truckstop, shares what 20 years of building people-first HR actually looks like: why engagement scores are a symptom, not a strategy; what Mark Zuckerberg taught him about hiring; and the one quality that predicts whether someone will grow or plateau. Plus: how TruckStop is approaching AI adoption without mandates, and why

How Moody's measures whether learning actually sticks — and why most L&D teams are tracking the wrong thing. Paul Tiesler, SVP, Talent Development, joins Skilled to talk about his unconventional career path into HR from Broadway as a professional actor, why culture matters more than you think, and how Moody's created a new measurement system to report on the impact of L&D at scale.