People Managing People

AI promises efficiency, but the real question is what teams do with the time they get back. In this conversation from Transform in Las Vegas, Oyster’s Erin Goodey joins David Rice to unpack how global HR teams are balancing automation with human connection—especially when managing distributed workforces across countries, compliance requirements, and sensitive employee situations.
Erin shares how Oyster is using AI to eliminate repetitive administrative work, freeing HR teams to focus on the moments that actually require empathy, judgment, and strategic thinking. From global expansion challenges to the evolving role of HR business partners, this episode explores what “human-centric” HR really looks like in an AI-enabled workplace.
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Most leaders think they’re navigating another wave of disruption. Sara Loncka argues we’re in something far more unsettling: discontinuity. The old assumptions don’t just need tweaking—they’ve stopped working altogether. Past experience, the thing leaders have spent entire careers building confidence around, is suddenly less reliable as a guide for the future. And that’s creating a strange kind of friction: teams keep pushing harder with familiar playbooks while the terrain underneath them quietly changes shape.
In this conversation, David Rice and Sara unpack why experienced leaders are often the most vulnerable in moments like this, how organizations get trapped by expertise, and why the future of strategy looks less like certainty and more like continuous inquiry. They also explore collective intelligence, learning agility, and why redesigning work now requires leaders to think more like designers than operators.
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Kyle Holm has spent 25 years advising companies on compensation, and right now he’s watching the logic of corporate hierarchy break in real time. Not because executives suddenly discovered organizational theory, but because AI is collapsing the distance between capability and influence. The old model—slow progression through management layers, credential accumulation, carefully staged promotions—is running into a technology that rewards direct value creation instead. And executives are noticing.
In this conversation from Transform Las Vegas, Kyle and David unpack what happens when AI-native companies stop hiring “mid-level” talent altogether, why compensation systems built on titles and tenure are struggling to keep up, and how the next generation of workers may leapfrog traditional career ladders entirely. It’s a conversation about compensation on the surface, but underneath it’s really about power: who gets heard, who creates leverage, and who gets left behind when organizations flatten faster than expected.
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Most companies say they’re building community. What they often mean is: they launched a Slack channel no one reads, hosted an event with a neon sign and a DJ, watched people post about it on Instagram, and called the whole thing a success. Meanwhile, the people in the room never actually connected.
In this episode, David sits down with Jessie Jacob, Culture First Community Manager at Culture Amp, to unpack why relational atrophy is becoming one of the defining workplace problems of the AI era. Jessie manages a global community of more than 100,000 people, and her argument is simple: if people don’t feel safe, welcomed, or genuinely connected, no amount of “community strategy” will save you. In a world increasingly optimized for efficiency, automation, and performative engagement, human connection is quickly becoming the real competitive advantage.
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AI is speeding up people decisions at exactly the moment those decisions require more care, more context, and frankly, more humility. In this episode, Matt Poepsel from The Predictive Index joins David Rice at Transform to unpack the growing gap between what AI can do and what organizations actually understand about the people data they’re feeding into it. Because while everyone is obsessed with automation, agents, and productivity gains, most managers still don’t know how to ask the most important question: “Do we actually have the right context for this decision?”
The conversation digs into the uncomfortable reality underneath modern workplace AI adoption. Companies are compressing timelines because AI can generate outputs faster, but they’re still operating from old assumptions about productivity, management, and collaboration. The result? Burnout, shallow decision-making, and what Matt calls “work slop” — endless AI-generated summaries, presentations, and outputs that create distance between people while pretending to improve teamwork. The deeper challenge isn’t technological. It’s behavioral. And most organizations still aren’t equipped to deal with that.
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