Laura Maffucci, VP, Head of Human Resources at Globalization Partners

Show Notes

Episode Summary

In a world where AI is reshaping every corner of work, how can HR teams lead the way without leaving people behind? In this episode of HR Voices, host Emily Fenech speaks with Laura Maffucci, VP and Head of Human Resources at G-P Globalization Partners, a leader in Employer of Record (EOR) services and now, a pioneer in HR compliance AI with their tool GIA.

Laura shares her unique vantage point as both an HR leader and a builder of HR tech, offering a rare look at how GP is approaching AI adoption across a global workforce.

From launching an internal AI council and Slack-driven idea-sharing, to AI “Awesomeness Awards” and strict data security protocols, Laura explains how GP empowers employees to experiment with AI in a safe and supported environment.

This episode explores the psychological hurdles employees face when adopting new tech, the real risks of AI misuse, and how HR can be both enablers and ethical stewards in this new era. If you're wondering how to implement AI in a people-first way or how to help your team feel less afraid of the future this conversation is packed with insights you can use.

Timestamps

• [00:35] – Introduction to Laura Maffucci and her role at GP

• [01:01] – What GP does: EOR services and their AI tool, GIA

• [02:37] – The biggest challenge in 2025: Change fatigue and AI overwhelm

• [03:30] – How GP enables employees to adopt AI with confidence

• [05:28] – Balancing fear and opportunity: Why AI won’t replace you—but could replace those who resist it

• [07:31] – Combatting the stigma: Why using AI isn’t “cheating”

• [09:24] – How GIA was built: Trust, accuracy, and HR-legal vetting

• [12:27] – AI “Awesomeness Awards” and the power of safe experimentation

• [13:42] – Advice for HR leaders feeling behind on AI adoption

Takeaways

• Create a culture of psychological safety to encourage experimentation with AI

• Develop guardrails and governance: clear policies, vetted tools, and education to reduce risk

• Recognize and reward early adopters to build positive momentum internally

• Use AI to automate the mundane, so teams can focus on strategic, people-first work

• Don’t wait for perfection, just start: Find your internal champions and begin small

• GIA is built for HR by HR, offering verified, reliable compliance and policy support worldwide

  
  

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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.

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Emily Fenech (00:01.045)
Welcome to HR Voices. I'm your host, Emily Fenech And today I get to chat with Laura Maffucci, VP and Head of Human Resources at GEP Globalization Partners. Welcome, Laura.

Laura Maffucci (00:13.482)
Hi, thank you, nice to be here.

Emily Fenech (00:16.117)
Yes, we're so glad that you're here today. Laura, could you tell us a little bit more about GP, the organization, the people that work there, and your role supporting them?

Laura Maffucci (00:26.808)
Sure. GP is the industry leader, actually founded the industry in EOR, which is employer of record. So we help employers hire globally, even when they don't have entities in other countries. And we also have a fantastic new product called GPGIA, which is an AI product. It's a first purpose built, agentic AI designed just for compliance and HR purposes.

And day to day I support about 1200 employees. I lead the HR team for our internal employees. There's about 1200 of them. My team about 25 HR professionals. And I'm also, because we are an EOR, I do have some responsibilities overseeing the benefits and other HR inputs for over 10,000 EOR professionals worldwide. So...

It's truly a global workforce that I get to work with every single day. And it's really, you my focus is making them feel supported, making sure they're empowered, that they feel connected, no matter where they're sitting in the whole world, and making sure that they can bring their best selves to work every day and be successful.

Emily Fenech (01:44.129)
Great. As you start to plan for 2026, we're winding down the year, I'm curious what's on your mind and what's the biggest challenge that your people are facing. And since you have a unique role in that you're leading HR, but that you're also your customer is in the HR space, maybe you could answer it from both perspectives. The biggest challenge you're personally facing at your organization, and then maybe the biggest challenge is that your product actually addresses.

Laura Maffucci (02:13.706)
I think they're really similar. think that everything is moving so fast in the world, in our jobs. People feel really uncertain. People feel scared just in general. Everything's very overwhelming. We're having to constantly adapt in our personal and our professional lives. And I especially with all the technology and with AI, I think everyone's really overwhelmed by it all. It changes so fast and it's got having such a big impact.

and you know making sure that people understand that they shouldn't be afraid of that, how to learn how to help it make them better so they can do better at their jobs and not be scared that it's going to replace them. I think that's really the biggest challenge that we're all facing right now is just keeping up.

Emily Fenech (03:05.342)
Keeping up, I feel that. So how are you addressing that challenge? How are you supporting your people?

Laura Maffucci (03:11.768)
So, you we've really embraced AI, done what a lot of companies have done with, you know, saying we expect everyone to use it as part of their jobs. And being that we are an AI company now with our AI product, it became even extra important to do that. But what I'm really proud of that we've done is I know a lot of companies have just thrown it out there and said, okay, you have to use AI in your job, but then they don't help employees to do that. They don't tell them what that means. So our chief technology officer started an AI council

that I am a part of. And we focus on the AI policy, which is a policy that we don't really.

Set and forget, we really are reviewing that like once a month to make sure that it's up to date because things change so quickly. You really have to do that. It's not a policy that you can just leave alone, but also really focusing on enabling employees. We have a Slack channel for all employees that we monitor to see what they're talking about, their ideas around AI, their concerns, but all the employees are on there sharing how they're using it. We put a process in place to help them get approval to bring on new AI tools quickly and without a lot of red tape.

because we want to encourage them to go out and find them, but you do want to be careful, security, all of those things. You want to make sure that you're keeping an eye on it. So we have a process in place for that. We have an AI awesomeness awards that we do where employees can submit themselves or someone else for using AI in certain ways that support their jobs in the business that we give out frequently. So we've really tried to engage employees around it and also enable them instead of just tossing it out there to them.

You know, there's so much.

Emily Fenech (04:50.177)
you

Laura Maffucci (04:52.226)
There's so much opportunity that it really presents and I understand people being nervous. You know, I'm pretty nervous about it in general as well. Not so much in the workplace. I just think in the world it's concerning. But that being said, it's here and it's not going anywhere. And so it's a situation where you need to learn to use it and you need to learn the critical thinking and the discernment that is required and really make an of your work as opposed to viewing it as something that's going to

place your work.

Emily Fenech (05:23.329)
How do you balance sort of, know, at All Voices, we feel the same way, right? That it helps you do more, but it can't replace you, at least not yet, right? However, you still see these headlines, right? You still have a workforce that, you know, is on the internet and can see the headlines of pretty large organizations doing reduction in force or eliminating people based on a lack of AI skills, sort of as they adapt for the future.

How, as a people team, would you recommend sort of navigating the two truths at one time, how to hold that?

Laura Maffucci (05:58.144)
Yeah, I think what we say is it won't replace people. It will replace people who don't know how to use AI. So it's important to get over the fear and really working with employees to get over that fear. mean, our research shows that over a third of employees are really

thinking that even if they use it, it's gonna make their manager value them less, which isn't the case in most instances, because if you're using it smartly, it's actually a skill that we need, and we need you to show other employees how to use it. And use it to take the...

the repetitive tasks away, the manual tasks away, the things that are really time consuming, especially in HR, there's so many things. You know, if you're working on a policy, use AI to get the information you need to build the foundation of that policy so that you can really think about it philosophically and how to put it into use it in your organization. That's what our product, Gia, allows you to do is it allows you to get that those compliance answers, get those policy answers all together from a reliable source because you want to make sure that you're using

reliable and free you up to be more strategic and add more value. know, especially if you're global organization, policies become much more complicated because you don't want to have a policy in every single country that's different and you want consistency where you can find it. So that takes a lot of thought and a lot of ways of thinking about your philosophical approach that you need time to be able to think through those things. So really using it to free you up to be better at the more value-added work.

Emily Fenech (07:35.918)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, I'll take two. You said a lot there. I want to unpack it a little bit. No, that's great. I read a charter report pretty recently that women, especially more than men, often view AI as like cheating somehow. And you mentioned, you know, that a third of employees feel as if their manager will be disappointed. I think those are related, right? Like if you're using AI to do your job, that somehow you're not really doing your job.

Laura Maffucci (07:40.216)
Sorry.

Laura Maffucci (07:52.643)
Yeah.

Emily Fenech (08:04.705)
So is that something that you feel has that something that your organization has shown its head there or?

Laura Maffucci (08:10.156)
I think when they first announced the man, you that you must use it in your job, there was a lot of concern. Like, what does that mean? And I don't know how much of my job, how much do I have to be using it? And so I think organizations getting out there and encouraging it and we're, you know, we have those awards awarding for using it. So it's very, very clear that the organization values you using AI as opposed to is going to judge you for using AI and think that you're cheating. So I think it,

Organizations have to be really careful how they do it. And I do think some of the organizations, quite frankly, that have gone and eliminated a bunch of people and are relying solely on AI, I think that's going to backfire. Ultimately, I think we see pendulum shifts and you know, things go way too far one way and then we come back. And I think eventually you're going to see that that come back to a certain degree. But I think that's a huge responsibility that organizations have is to make sure that, you know, if you're expecting your employees to use AI, then you need to create an environment where it's

to do so and enable them to do it.

Emily Fenech (09:10.721)
And walking that, I mean, it's difficult for HR leaders though to walk that line between, you you don't want to be seen as the police of everything. You don't want to fall into that sort of stereotype of policy writer and police enforcer. You want to enable people, right? But at the same time, you had to even mention that you have to be careful, right? So how are you walking that line as a leader and as an organization that's making AI part of your offering?

Laura Maffucci (09:37.207)
Yeah, so.

So the AI offering, I'll talk about that first. That's actually the thing I'm most proud about it is, you know, we've been in the global employment industry for over a decade and we have over a hundred thousand use cases and the knowledge and the expertise and the in-country expertise around those use cases. And all of that went into building GIA. So everything in GIA is trusted, reliable. It's vetted by HR professionals. It's vetted by legal professionals. It was built by HR and legal professionals.

So and we even have a little badge GP verified so that you know, it's been reviewed by our in-house experts You know, there's certain things obviously policy updates things like that Of course pull in things from the internet and internet scraping but it's really built on our expertise and you know a recent report just showed that when you're using

Emily Fenech (10:14.593)
Mmm.

Laura Maffucci (10:30.766)
AI for general questions. So say you're an HR and you go and you look up something for compliance, it might be pulling that answer from Reddit. It might be pulling that answer from Wikipedia. And that's not where you most, most large language models. That's what they're pulling from. They're just pulling it from the internet. So you have no idea if it's actually accurate. mean, how many times have you been asking the AI something and they, gives you an answer and you know what's wrong and you tell it, tell it it's wrong. And it's like, Oh, I'm sorry. And then it just apologizes to you. So I think I'm really proud that people can

Emily Fenech (10:55.754)
Bye.

Laura Maffucci (11:00.72)
very much rely on GIA to be accurate and compliant.

because there's not a lot out there that can say that. From an internal standpoint, part of the enablement efforts is education around how to use it responsibly, how to use it securely. No, do not copy and paste an entire email with confidential information into ChatGPT. That's not secure. We brought on an enterprise application for AI, and actually we don't allow people to use ChatGPT, but we have in-house tools that are vetted.

Emily Fenech (11:26.005)
Thank you.

Laura Maffucci (11:35.736)
the data is not leaving GP. It's staying with us even though we're using this tool. And so we've created a safe environment for them to use it plus that education which I think benefits them both at work but also personally because it's really a whole new world and you have to consciously remind yourself now, wait is it what I'm looking at real?

Is this AI? Is this safe to put this information in here? So I think it's helping them not just at work, but also in their personal lives to navigate all of it.

Emily Fenech (12:07.873)
On our last episode, had a Chief Human Resources Officer that actually encouraged using their enterprise LLM for personal use just because she thought that it proves that it fast tracks that light bulb moment of you plan a trip with it and now you're figuring out all the applications at work as well. Thought that was a cool idea.

Laura Maffucci (12:18.54)
Yes.

Laura Maffucci (12:25.134)
That's a great idea.

Laura Maffucci (12:29.772)
Yeah, cool. That's a really good idea. I'm gonna steal that.

Emily Fenech (12:36.609)
Tell me about a stealable idea. My next question would be any cool experiments that you've tried lately, but do you have any sort of ideas or maybe something from the AI awesomeness awards or just some experiment or some use case that you thought was worth sharing today?

Laura Maffucci (12:53.288)
There's been so many. I think just the awards in general, I can't even begin to try to think of just one because we get so many submissions. And I think that that's actually the key takeaway is people are so smart and they're so creative. And when they're excited to embrace something, the limits to what they're able to do and come up with, there really aren't any. They've been in...

Emily Fenech (13:01.824)
Yeah.

Laura Maffucci (13:18.656)
improving processes and shaving time off of things and finding efficiencies and even, you know, they share personal wins as well. And it's just, I think the takeaway is when you enable people to do it and you create an environment where they'll safe, there's no, there's no limit.

Emily Fenech (13:38.009)
So creating the safe environment and then rewarding the behavior, it kind of sounds like if you can get those two motions going, you'll have some success. Do you have any sort of, you know, maybe for leaders who feel maybe a bit behind in their adoption or they're still feeling a bit uncertain, do you have any sort of words of wisdom or advice for them?

Laura Maffucci (13:45.536)
Absolutely. Absolutely.

Laura Maffucci (14:00.974)
Bye.

Find the people in your organization who are enthusiastic about it. think I've been speaking at a couple of conferences and things and non-tech companies express a concern like they don't even know where to start because they don't have AI people working there. And I think people, there's people in your organization who are enthusiastic about it outside of work and you might not know that. So look for those people, find those internal champions and let them help you pull

together a program. And also from an HR standpoint, become best friends with your IT, your chief technology officer, your IT team, and partner with them to make sure that not only you have that technical expertise, but you also have the security mind.

Emily Fenech (14:49.505)
That's right. I've heard a lot of debate who should be leading within the organization the AI fluency. Like should it be people? Should it be IT? And I always read those and think like, isn't it both? Like what?

Laura Maffucci (15:03.63)
Yeah, and I think it's a unique thing for HR. I think that we are on the forefront of it and we're not usually on the forefront of a technology shift. So it's a unique opportunity for us to really show the value of what we can bring from our change management and human behavior and that whole standpoint. But it's absolutely a partnership with technology. Arm and arm.

Emily Fenech (15:16.097)
and

Emily Fenech (15:33.343)
Yeah, well I hope a lot of HR folks listening are encouraged to seize the moment because I do think it's a special point in time where all of those skills can be brought to the spotlight, like HR's moment to shine.

Laura Maffucci (15:45.804)
Yeah, it is. really is. And I people who don't look at it that way, think it's, no, we're in jeopardy. no, people are messy. And you still need that human interpretation. And those one-on-one interactions are just too important.

Emily Fenech (16:01.793)
People are messy and then you give them AI, you're just scaling it.

Laura Maffucci (16:04.846)
Oh, they're messier. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah.

Emily Fenech (16:08.417)
It gets messier. Well, I've really enjoyed our conversation today, Laura. Thank you for joining us and sharing what you're building and also as a product and as a people function.

Laura Maffucci (16:12.449)
too.

Laura Maffucci (16:19.884)
Thank you. It was great chatting with you.

Emily Fenech (16:22.156)
tape.