Todd Cunningham, Chief People Officer at AvidXchange

Show Notes

Leading Through Uncertainty: AvidXchange’s CPO on Visible Leadership, AI as Input, and the Power of Human Connection

When uncertainty lingers, decision-making slows and performance suffers.
Todd Cunningham, Chief People Officer at AvidXchange, brings 38 years of HR leadership across Fortune 50 enterprises, mid-sized organizations, and high-growth startups.

Having sat “in every seat” of the HR function, he’s spent the last 11 years helping AvidXchange (a 26-year-old fintech with ~$500M in revenue) deepen its culture and elevate performance.

From Charlotte HQ, where employees intentionally create “collisions” Tue–Thu, Todd explains why leading through ambiguity is a must-have skill and how to be the lighthouse: manage your own mindset, be visible and vulnerable, and re-anchor teams on clear priorities.

He argues that AI isn’t replacing human connection it’s amplifying the need for it. With 2x the volume of AI-generated job applications, AvidXchange is doubling down on human sourcing and referrals, while using AI as an input (not an output) in HR: benefits Q&A, targeted engagement follow-ups, and manager coaching avoiding “cognitive laziness” and hallucinations.

Todd closes with a reminder that deep, trusting relationships are the ultimate performance advantage—and now is the moment to turn uncertainty into competitive distance.

Timestamps

[00:45] – Company and role: AvidXchange’s growth, Charlotte HQ, hybrid rhythm, and “collisions”

[02:30] – The performance cost of prolonged uncertainty: caution, risk-taking, and decision speed

[05:26] – Leading through ambiguity: be the lighthouse; watch the stories you tell yourself

[07:55] – Visible and vulnerable leadership: engage openly, clarify priorities, create advantage

[10:24] – AI at AvidXchange: embrace curiosity; why tech is reinforcing human connection

[11:40] – Recruiting in the AI era: resume deluge, back to human prospecting, input vs. output

[15:15] – HR’s seat at the AI table: guardrails, training, and practical use cases in HR

[17:50] – Reducing recency bias and scaling fairness with AI—plus the human check on hallucinations

[20:06] – Final lens: performance is built on deep, trusting relationships

Takeaways

• Lead through ambiguity be the calm, visible “lighthouse” your team needs.
• Challenge the stories you tell yourself; model vulnerability to invite real dialogue.
• Re-anchor teams on a short list of priorities and why they matter to sustain performance.
• Treat AI as an input, not an output avoid cognitive laziness and add human judgment.
• Put HR at the AI strategy table; set ethics, train the org, and enable practical adoption.
• Rediscover the human edge: source through referral

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What is HR Voices?

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Each episode brings experienced HR and People leaders into realistic, anonymized workplace scenarios—the kind you recognize immediately. Performance issues. Messy conflicts. Investigations that don’t fit neatly into a policy box. Instead of talking about their own companies, guests react to outside cases and walk through how they’d think it through in real time.

There are no right answers here. What you’ll hear is judgment: how seasoned leaders balance risk, fairness, legal reality, and humanity when the stakes are high and the path isn’t obvious.

HR Voices is for HR, People Ops, legal, and leaders who want to hear how other smart humans actually handle employee relations—without confidentiality breaches, hypotheticals that feel fake, or a lecture on “best practices.”

Emily Fenech (00:35)
Welcome to HR Voices. I'm your host, Emily Finick, and today I get to talk with Todd Cunningham, the Chief People Officer at AvidXchange Welcome, Todd. Thank you for being here.

Todd Cunningham (00:45)
Thanks, Emily, it's great to be here.

Emily Fenech (00:47)
Yeah. So Todd, AvidXchange is a fintech company and you help other businesses automate invoices, payment processing. Can you give us a little bit more context on the business, your role as CPO and the people that work at AvidXchange?

Todd Cunningham (01:02)
Yeah, sure, be happy to. So we've actually been around 20, this is our 26th year as a company. We were locally founded by Michael Prager back in 2000 actually. And it was just a startup ⁓ that has become this rocket ship ⁓ that now ⁓ about 500 million in revenue. have mostly US customers, but we're also North American based. And we basically help companies.

transform how they pay their bills and how they manage their bills. And believe it or not, it's a lot of work for companies to do in their accounts payables departments. so we help them through our technology.

Emily Fenech (01:42)
tell me about the people that work at AvidXchange. Are you guys all in an office? Are you distributed? What sort of, what's the makeup there?

Todd Cunningham (01:49)
Yeah, so we are headquartered here in Charlotte, North Carolina. ⁓ We ⁓ did have some offices in other ⁓ sites across the US, but over the years and through COVID, we've kind of centralized here in Charlotte. 40 % of our workforce is remote and non-Charlotte, and the rest are right here in our beautiful headquarters in uptown Charlotte. And so we come in to work Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. We encourage Monday, Friday as well.

and we get a fair amount to do. But we're definitely kind of a high energy, fast paced, love to be kind of around one another. We talk about collisions a lot. ⁓ You know, we like to think that if you're gonna be in the workplace, you're gonna have a chance to grow and be part of decisions just because of the natural collisions that occur in hallways that maybe you don't get to experience remotely.

Emily Fenech (02:42)
right the only person I'm colliding with is my dog so he's got good ideas. ⁓ Well as we're thinking about next year and thinking about your workforce what is the biggest challenge that the people who work at AvidXchange that you're supporting what's sort of the biggest challenge that they're facing as we roll into the new year?

Todd Cunningham (02:45)
Thank

You know what, ⁓ what I believe and see every day is it's this extended period of uncertainty that we are in. You know, if you pick any domain to evaluate that, geopolitical issues around the world, local, state, federal, government issues, ⁓ know, inflation concerns, just on any level, we've been in this period of uncertainty that just kind of has lingered more. I've been through a lot of

ups and downs of cycles, this one's linger. And so the question is, well, yeah, I get that. But why does that have anything to do with work or avid exchange? And to me, I find that the best way to think about how something impacts the workplace is to first think about it outside of the workplace. So here's what I mean. So ⁓ I'll just speak for myself, but I hope our listeners can relate to this. In this extended period of uncertainty,

There's no doubt. I ⁓ I found myself to be more cautious on some of my bigger decisions financially or otherwise with my family. I find myself frustrated at times. unfortunately, a neighbor of mine just got caught up in some downsizing. And it impacts the way I think, my mood sometimes, the decisions I make. And so now take that into the workplace and what

I certainly see at AvidXchange, but I think ⁓ exists at many of our companies, is more cautious decision making. Now, that might make sense right now, but I'm not so sure I want in a world where we're driving for high performance each and every day at the individual level, the team level, and the organization level, I don't want everyone to completely stop taking risks, right? ⁓ And I certainly don't want to slow it down and...

decision making and I don't want self doubt and anxiety to begin to be an anchor on our business and then the people that help make our business come to life. So I think uncertainty right now is impacting performance for our companies and that's where I've spent a lot of time with our leaders and with my people team to really talk about what do you do about

Emily Fenech (05:27)
Yeah, well that was my next question, right? I that does speak to me. I love how you've taken it to a personal level and then sort of zoom out to how each individual person dealing with some of the things that you mentioned, how that can impact it. I mean, I recognize those same things in myself, right? So the next obvious question is, how does this translate to leadership? Do you have any advice for leaders, people leaders, managers, right? Knowing that this is the context in which we're working.

How do you sort of adapt?

Todd Cunningham (05:58)
So one of the top skills or leadership traits that I've always believed to be really, really important is leading through ambiguity. And that to me is number one. ⁓ And I think our people teams and our leaders are especially positioned to be the lighthouse, to be the calm in the storm when we have extended periods of uncertainty. And so

I think that is the answer, is that our leaders and our people teams need to be ⁓ that stabilizing force that's not naive, it's the opposite, that's engaging proactively and talking about the uncertainty ⁓ with our teammates. So I definitely think leaders and people teams can play a big role. ⁓ There's a couple things that I've leaned in pretty heavily on this year with our leaders. ⁓

First is be careful of the stories you tell yourself. Back to human beings. mean, we can not not interpret. I mean, that's what we do, right? We interpret. We try to take in the world around us. ⁓ But where that becomes troublesome is you can take interpretations and stories and suddenly they become real to you at least. ⁓ And we begin then to react to those stories and those interpretations.

One the first things I tell my leaders and my people team is, careful of the stories you tell yourself. When you find yourself beginning to be worried, anxious, ⁓ concerned about either your own employment situation or whatever it is, ⁓ recognize that and then lean on people you trust to talk about it and engage. ⁓ So I think our leaders, it's kind of the old put your mask on before, you know.

your children, put your mask on first, make sure you're in the right head space. And then two, I think the second thing we can be doing is being leaders that are out front. So I had mentioned to you, I think this is the time to engage to be visible. I like to talk about visible and vulnerable. And so teammates won't come naturally for the most part and just share some of these anxieties and concerns. We all like to...

come across as we've got it all handled and you know we're fine. ⁓ So I encourage our leaders and our people teammates to get out, spend time engaging, be real, share your own uncertainties and then invite others to kind of step into that too and let's just talk about what we all know to be true but then let's talk about how we can acknowledge it but not let it control us or change us.

in who we're trying to be each and every day.

Emily Fenech (08:55)
I love that. I saw a keynote speaker at Transform, I think back in March, who said that good leadership is that balance between, you know, the reality, like paint, don't, don't sugarcoat things. You know, you have to describe the reality of the business, the reality of the context in which the business runs, right? But also if it's, if it's, you have to balance that with hope and you have to balance that, like you said, with vulnerability and compassion and empathy. And so.

Todd Cunningham (09:21)
100%.

And I think that's the third part of my message to our leaders is this is the time to then remind people what are the priorities for the year, where are we against them, why are they important, and how can each of our teams lean into that. So let's, to your point, let's make sure people remember what is the focus and why, and after that. ⁓ I really think...

Emily Fenech (09:48)
Mm-hmm.

Todd Cunningham (09:51)
If my hypothesis is right, and because human beings are human beings and we're dealing with this uncertainty, and by definition that can distract our performance, then that means this is an incredible chance for, in our case, AvidXchange, to leapfrog our competition who may not be leaning in on this topic as much as we are. So this is an opportunity to actually, from a business standpoint, outperform and distance ourselves from our competition.

Emily Fenech (10:19)
Yeah, I love that perspective. ⁓ The next question I have for you is, I'm curious, you mentioned a lot of the things that are changing. Another thing that's changing we haven't talked about yet is technology. ⁓ Another one of those things that we can't really control, it seems to be moving really fast. The velocity can be overwhelming at times, right? How are you guys navigating that at AvidXchange? ⁓ You're in the office, you have a lot of...

your FinTech company technology is at the core of what you do, right? How's that impacting your workforce?

Todd Cunningham (10:55)
Yeah, so we're leaning in pretty heavy on artificial intelligence. You can't have this conversation about the future and technology without talking about AI. ⁓ And so we're definitely leaning in on it. But actually, the angle we're taking is that you have to embrace it. You have to be curious about it. And there is no doubt. I I'm blown away by not just the capability of AI, but what we've all, those of us that embraced it, what it's already doing.

If this is what's occurring in what, you know, the first year or two of companies really starting to explore with it, holy cow, what can it look like five years from now? But our angle is to acknowledge that. But here's kind of the angle we've been embracing, and that is there's a fair amount of chatter and I think reasonable concern about does AI replace the human connection? Will AI replace human resources? Will AI replace?

you know, all these things that can, once again, contribute to anxiety and those kinds of things. I believe strongly that it actually is going to reinforce the human connection, and I'm already seeing it. ⁓ So what we're seeing in AvidXchange is a couple quick examples. Last year, we had about 40,000 job applications for the jobs that were open.

at our company. This year, year to date, it's more than 2x. We're approaching 100,000 job applications year to date. Now, why does that matter? Well, first of all, the reason it's occurring is because we all now know that all you got to do is tell AI to apply. First of all, create a resume for you. And then just go apply to every job that AI can find on the internet around the country.

The problem with that is we're getting inundated with all of these honestly fairly bland resumes that all look alike because they're generated from AI and they're all applications that came from AI. So what's that doing? That's causing the human connection, the need for that to now resurface in a big way. So we are now spending much more time old school prospecting for candidates.

Emily Fenech (13:21)
You

Todd Cunningham (13:21)
Because it's so hard to weed through the noise of these AI-built resumes, AI-generated applications. And so we find that the human touch in where we find candidates in referrals, in how we engage with candidates, is kind of back to the future. And we're finding a lot of luck with that because to fight kind of the noise of all the AI

randomness really began to slow us and result in more ineffective hiring than what we'd seen in the past. So that's an example of where I think AI is incredibly ⁓ beneficial from efficiency, speed. As an input to other things, it's amazing. But we have to be careful that we don't have cognitive laziness with AI.

Because it's not always the output. In fact, I would say most of the time it's not the output. if I am just treating it as the answer and so I will write my performance review from AI and then send, that's treating it like an output and that's gonna result in a lot of problems. Now, could it help organize my emails throughout the year with one of my direct reports?

and remind me the top things I talk to my direct report about throughout the year so that I can kind of begin to really get my hands around how I want to approach performance management. Absolutely. And that's using it as an input. So.

Emily Fenech (15:03)
Yeah,

I like that distinction, using it as an input, not an output. I felt, you mentioned cognitive laziness. I actually had a rule for myself that my writing, if it was meant to be from me, like an email from me or a LinkedIn post from me, I'm not going to use it anymore because I was struggling to just get words onto a page without that assistance. It sounds like a mental crutch and it scared me a little bit, right? So when I, and I also noticed that when I,

in the past was writing with AI, it always performs better when I leverage my own voice. And I think that goes back to your initial point about how the more automated everything becomes, the more a human touch will stand out. You know, a human voice, a human experience. Hopefully we'll be able to recognize that a little bit better.

Todd Cunningham (15:47)
That's right.

100%. And so

what we're really focused on here at AvidXchange when it comes to our people strategy is several things. I think I would encourage our listeners ⁓ to be at the table setting the business strategy of AI. ⁓ The HR team needs to have a strong voice at the table on that topic, because there are some boundaries that probably need to be discussed, some ethics. How we use it really does matter.

And then we also need to set the strategy on the education component, the training component, and really allowing teammates to understand that we don't just want them to be curious. I mean, they need to engage. This really will be a phenomenal business tool when used the right way. So I think step one is HR needs to be at that table. Step two needs to be then executing the training, the education. And then I...

Emily Fenech (16:34)
Mm-hmm.

Todd Cunningham (16:47)
know, step three needs to be using it in the right way in the processes of HR. I mean, we've very quickly, like a lot of companies, used it to help address benefit questions. Questions used to come to the HR inbox. Recently, we've begun this year to use it more with our teammate engagement ⁓ strategy. And so it formulates questions and then...

For a particular group, it knows how that group has responded throughout the year. And so the questions get much more specific as the year goes on around particular trends. And then we've also, for a leader to have ideas on how to react to the engagement survey, it's phenomenal in generating ideas and thoughts, again, as an input, not as the output. ⁓ So I think ⁓ HR teams leveraging AI ⁓ is absolutely the right answer.

But I do have those cautions that I mentioned and I do believe that the human connection ⁓ is just being strengthened. The yearning for that almost artisan approach to engagement of people one to one and one to many, ⁓ that's getting strengthened.

Emily Fenech (18:01)
I want to go back to your other example. When you're using it as an input, mean, human memory is so flawed and human bias is so prevalent in most of these conversations, right? So think about performance. Like most, I've managed large teams, 30 people. I can't possibly remember the wins of all 30 people as much as I want to, and as much as my intent is there to do right by them. I can't remember that much stuff. Right. And then

Todd Cunningham (18:28)
Yeah, 100%.

Emily Fenech (18:30)
And, AI can in terms of if there is essential repository of all the performance conversations we've had emails to your point, it's just going to create a better experience for both of us. You know, I can actually have, you know, realize my good intentions of I want to recognize your good work. I want to, I just can't remember the past six months of everyone's performance. Right. So

Todd Cunningham (18:51)
Yeah,

yeah. Otherwise you get the recency bias and a lot of other things happen.

Emily Fenech (18:54)
Recency bias right whoever

has performed the best in the last six weeks and then you have people gaming the system Oh performance reviews are coming up Make sure we dangle some shiny objects in front of the boss Yeah, I mean It really helps people. Yeah, it does but you know, it's I Think I don't know I see the potential in it as an input also as you know things like employee relations. You have a high volume Sometimes it's really hard to remember. You don't have all of your policies memorized

Todd Cunningham (19:05)
That doesn't happen.

Emily Fenech (19:23)
You don't know how every time in the past something has been addressed or resolved. Again, so if you did have that, again, as an input to say, is how your organization has resolved this in the past, it can lead to more fair outcomes, right? So it can also lead to, know, it scales what you input, right? So bias in, bias out, but I do think it can help us.

as that knowledge, that's what I get excited about, it's just that knowledge-based tool that helps us address our own flawed memories is the most exciting use case in my opinion.

Todd Cunningham (19:55)
That's right. And just ⁓ to put that fine point on it, it has hallucinations that occur. And so you then take all that input and from that position of strength, you can kind of add your own personal touch to make sure it represents the product you want, the output you want.

Emily Fenech (20:01)
Yes, right.

Yeah, I really like that framing, Todd. Thank you for that. I'm going to use that. I really enjoyed our conversation. I wanted to ask if there's ⁓ any sort of final words of advice. We've talked, covered a lot of ground today. We've covered uncertainty, covered how to address that in your leadership style, technology. What would you like to leave as sort of last thoughts for our audience today?

Todd Cunningham (20:38)
Yeah, great question. ⁓ Honestly, here's what I've been doing this long year, a long time, 38 years in HR. The thing that gets me really excited and the thing that I'm very passionate about is performance. And here's what I'd leave with our listeners. ⁓ It's all about the human connection. At the end of the day, deep trusting relationships, we know this to be true in our personal lives. Deep trusting relationships?

is where you grow. Sure, you have some arguments, you have to apologize from time to time, but you trust one another, you make great, better decisions, and you win together, you lose some time together. Somewhere long ago, we began to say the workplace is different than, I guess you'd call it the home place. And what I believe deeply is, I think we should push back on that. Yes, there should be boundaries. But the fact is, deep trusting relationships is what builds trust.

is what builds performance in companies for faster decision making and deeper relationships so that people can win together. So ⁓ I think our people teams can really lean in in a unique way with that in helping organizations unlock that kind of potential to get to a new level of performance.

Emily Fenech (21:58)
Well, thank you so much Todd. I enjoyed our conversation and I hope you have a good rest of your day.

Todd Cunningham (22:04)
Thanks, Emily. Appreciate it being on here.

Emily Fenech (22:06)
Take care.