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The WorkOps Podcast is your weekly conversation with HR leaders and People Ops practitioners doing the real work.
In every episode we dig into one story. A process that went sideways, a system that just didn't work, and what someone actually did about it. Packed with practical lessons you'll want to bring back to your team. Whether you're supporting 500 employees or 5,000, this is how the best People leaders are building for what comes next.
The WorkOps Podcast - L. David Kingsley
Recorded 2026-09-23
L. David Kingsley: By the end of Q1 next year, our org charts will have an agent on them directly reporting to each of my direct reports. So for example, Ingrid will be a direct report on the org chart, probably in Workday. It will have a persona, and Ingrid herself will have a series of sub-agents that she's managing. And she will do that in a directed and autonomous fashion. That's a whole new world.
Jeet Mukherjee: Hey everyone. Today I'm joined by L. David Kingsley, who's the Chief People Officer at Illumio. David, thank you so much for joining us today. Before we jump into things, can you tell us a little bit about your background, a little bit about how you chose HR?
L. David Kingsley: Well, Jeet, it's a pleasure and an honor. Thank you for having me and thank you for what you do for our community overall, just kind of keeping the dialogue going. I really appreciate that. And for anybody who's listening to this, thank you all for engaging. I always learn as much from participating in these as I might be able to share. And I've got a few stories, anecdotes, things I've learned, et cetera. So happy to share those with you and great to be with you here today. Before I get started, I will have to say my first and most important job is as husband and spouse and partner to my wife, Erin, and parent and caregiver to our children, to Jack and Kate and Madeline. They're the reason I do what I do. And they are my north star for life. And so that's my most important job, as a husband and parent and caregiver. My second most important job, which is very close, is the Chief People Officer here at Illumio, where we do zero trust segmentation, network segmentation. And the whole idea of what we do is stopping lateral movement. So we help an eventual and inevitable breach from becoming a cyber disaster. It's moved from not if a company or organization is going to be attacked, it's when, unfortunately. And when the attacker does execute their attack, which with all these new frontier models like Mythos and Mythos-class models, those zero-day attacks are inevitable. And so that's what Illumio does. We control lateral movement after a breach. So that's what we do. How I got into HR? Hmm. That's a little bit of a longer story. I'll tell you, rewinding the clock, I had two chapters in my career. The first chapter was in management consulting for the first 13 years of my career. I was at Accenture and Booz Allen, and at one point I had my frontline managers in a meeting where we were doing some account planning, and the HR business partner was in the room with me and was frankly being pretty disruptive in the meeting, and was talking about HR programs and policies and things that were coming on the horizon. And I stopped the meeting and I was like, buddy, timeout. Like, I'm trying to do account planning here, not trying to plan our HR year. And so I put a pause in the meeting. I called a timeout, took him out in the hall and said, hey, this is disruptive, frankly. It's not productive, but it's disruptive. And I asked him to step out of the meeting. And I remember I was gonna think I was gonna get a call from headquarters saying, did you just kick HR out of the room? And I did not get that call. And the story ends well. He and I, you know, built our relationship, and I got him a little more oriented to our business and what we're trying to accomplish and brought him along as a helper on the journey versus, you know, kind of the what I would call necessary evil of what HR unfortunately traditionally has been perceived as. And so that got me thinking, and I was actually talking to a mentor of mine at the time, and Woody said to me, he goes, well, what are you gonna do about it? And I said, well, you know, I'll work with the guy and bring him along, you know, da da da. And he said, well, what about something more structural? And what Woody was meaning was, David, might you ever want to think about possibly contributing to the HR function? And it kind of stuck in the back of my head. And so the second chapter of my career, which was really now at this point, 13 years in consulting, now 13 years, you know, in-house HR, leading HR teams, that was what got me over on the journey. And the first call I got was from Salesforce. And they reached out to me and said, hey, we want to talk to you about this role in employee success. I said, what's that? They said, it's what we call HR. I said, okay, that's interesting. Interesting branding. And I said, but I'm not an HR guy. I'm a management consultant. I can help you with your org design, leadership development, you know, change management, whatever. And they said, no, no, we're looking for a different profile of leader to come in and lead part of our people team. And I said, well, you have my attention. Because I was thinking back to that interaction where I kicked HR out of the room, and I thought, well, what if HR showed up differently? And that kind of got my wheels turning, and sure enough, joined Salesforce lo these many years ago and have enjoyed it. I've been now in the startup scale-up ecosystem since I was with them, and it's been great to contribute.
Jeet Mukherjee: That is a crazy story. You were kicking out HR and now you are leading HR.
L. David Kingsley: And now I am that guy, huh?
Jeet Mukherjee: I love that. And the rebranding, the employee success, those things do matter, right? Because it helps to reframe what the job is and it helps to kind of elevate where the priorities lie. It's interesting, kind of the consultative and the business background that you brought into the role. I'm kind of curious to hear, would you recommend if someone wants to get into HR, it's like, hey, actually go do other stuff in the business and then move into HR? Or like, how do you help juniors who are considering HR navigate that question?
L. David Kingsley: Yeah, it's a good question. And look, I'll always have a very, very big place of love in my heart for consulting, for management consulting. It gave me my start and taught me essentially what a hypothesis-driven approach to business questions is. And so candidly, I don't feel like I've ever really left consulting. My clients have just changed. And my clients are now my clients for, you know, 3, 4, 5, 6 years at a time versus, you know, 6-month sprints when I was in management consulting. And so I kinda still try and take a consultative mindset to the work. And so my counsel to someone who's early in their career in HR is not necessarily, you have to be outside the business, but it's more: from whom are you learning how we approach business questions? The way that I share that with my teams is, when I'm sitting in the executive staff boardroom every Monday morning here at Illumio, if a stranger were to walk in the room, I would never want someone to walk in the room and go, there's the HR guy. Right? Because if they did that, they would see me as only speaking on HR topics, versus our first job is to be a good business person. Be a good business person first. And I happen to serve and lead and guide the HR function inside the company. If all of us, to include the CFO, the chief product officer, the chief revenue officer, if all of us are showing up as company first, team second, self last, we're going to show up in a way that's of service to our customers and to the company. And I think that's very, very important for us, especially in HR. Again, back to if I show up in a room and the only thing I'm talking about is HR stuff, I'm probably not going to be focused on what the business is trying to accomplish. I'm probably in it more for what my team needs or what I think are most important, which, spoiler alert, HR is not the most important thing in every company. I think the most important thing in every company is: are we helping our customers succeed with what we're trying to do in the world?
Jeet Mukherjee: I love that. And this is gonna be a bit of a different episode. Normally we focus on kind of a system or process that broke, but I also don't normally call from hotel rooms near airports in different cities. So we're gonna go off the conversation that we had, David, before we were recording this call, last time we spoke.
L. David Kingsley: Sounds good. Yeah.
Jeet Mukherjee: And what we talked about there was, and it kinda links to what you're saying here, is that, okay, well, you gotta align yourselves with someone who can help you understand what are the right questions to ask. And last time we spoke, we spoke about the tensions that businesses go through, and one of them now is AI slop, and AI is so readily available. And I'm curious to hear your thoughts. How do you kind of balance someone who is asking the right questions, wants to learn, but there's also AI there to be able to maybe learn even faster? Like, how should someone think about using AI versus leaning in on the leaders, when the leaders are probably saying, go and use AI to learn the stuff?
L. David Kingsley: Yeah, Jeet, I love the way you frame that because there really is a tension there. And tension is healthy in business, in life, right? It's the thesis, antithesis, synthesis, right? The old Hegelian dialectic from our university days. That's how we create progress. And so those are good things to have. So I don't want to paint that in any other way, because AI unequivocally is a plus and a bonus to what we're trying to do in the world. It helps us accelerate ideas, time to market, speed to value. Unequivocal upside, I think. There are some downsides as well. One downside we talked about even earlier when I was talking about what Illumio does is zero-day attacks are going to happen, because AI is that efficient at identifying vulnerabilities in networks, on endpoints and systems. AI is also really effective and really fast at helping us progress an idea. And so one of the things I've been thinking a good bit about is how do we, in HR specifically, how do we leverage AI to accelerate our time to value for our clients? And I'm seeing an anti-pattern there that is a little concerning to me, just to be very transparent, especially on earlier-in-career team members. They'll meet with their boss, let's say Monday morning, 9 a.m. The boss sits down and says, hey, I want you to build out a strategy on something. And they take it, they're like, yep, boss, I'm right on it. And then by, like, you know, 17 minutes after the hour, they got the task and they come back and they have a 14-slide deck and a one-page slick sheet and an infographic. And they're like, all done. 17 minutes. And it's like, okay, tell me more. And oftentimes it's pretty good quality stuff in terms of, it looks good, it feels good, it tastes good. At the same time, the nutritional content may not always be completely up to snuff, as if you had home-cooked a meal, right? And so there's a little bit in there that I'm starting to be somewhat concerned about, for two reasons. One, people are taking this content that is AI-produced and offering it up as their work and saying, okay, here's what I've produced, here's my deliverable, here you go. And at the same time, once you kind of get under it a little bit, underneath the covers or the hood or the bonnet or whatever analogy you want to use, has it really been pressure tested? And is it completely contextually relevant to the company, to that moment? Whereas it may at first blush look and sound pretty good, is it really exactly what the business or the organization needs right then? And so that's the first part, is like, have we missed the mark a bit? Secondarily, sometimes there's a little bit of slop in there that, and this is a pet peeve of mine just from attention-to-detail stuff, you know, are the headers consistent? Are the fonts consistent? You know, are the spellings right? This spelling is organization with an S, and this organization is spelled with a Z. Like, are we being consistent overall in tone and style and those kinds of things? And does it fit the organization that we're in? So that's kind of the first, and that's more a sort of cosmetic level, right? Those are things that can be addressed, you know, pretty easily. The deeper level that's now getting to be more of a concern to me is, as early-in-career individuals are coming along their journey, they're having the building blocks, the learning blocks in their career, of creating a deliverable from scratch, taking an idea from someone's lips to a whiteboard, then to some draft paper, and then into a first rev, and then getting some peer feedback, getting some feedback from the leader, and then revving on it to get to a final deliverable. There is so much learning that happens at each of those stages of the journey, going from the words to the whiteboard to the first draft to the finished product, that then gets incorporated over time, that the person is able to start including in the way they build product. Or said differently, we would call it pattern matching. And you're able to build that over a career of years. Now, I know I sound like an old guy on his porch, like yelling, get off my lawn. At the same time, though, just from a learning-to-learn perspective, AI, if used improperly, can leapfrog a lot of that in a way that on the face of it doesn't seem too bad. It's like, I got this great deliverable, and it's written in the tone of someone who's been doing this for 20 years. However, the learning that happened in the process of building that never got done. And then at some point, when there's no AI there, to include the next time you're sitting in front of a board of directors and someone in a meeting says, give me your thoughts on X, and the person can't stop and type that prompt into AI and wait for it to regurgitate the information, they're gonna be kind of caught flat-footed. And that, I think, is doing a disservice to someone coming along their journey. So I think it's just a watchword for us all to be mindful of: how are we using the tooling in a way that doesn't deprive our teams, and frankly even ourselves, of the learning that happens when we're building something, you know, with our own two hands, our own brain? Now, I'm the first person to leverage AI for our work product. I heard a different leader talking about the calculus that should go into this. And it should never take longer to consume an AI-generated product than it took someone to create it themselves. So if I write a 3-page document and it takes someone, whatever, 20 minutes to read that thing, I would be doing them a disservice if it only took me 2 minutes to produce that. Because again, I probably haven't put the time in and I haven't paid the freight. I haven't put the work into it that it requires to make sure it's truly up to snuff. And it's a little disrespectful to the audience and frankly the organization if I'm just cranking things out and throwing it over the transom and saying, okay, my work is done. Next, on to you. So just a little reminder to myself that I'm trying to keep in mind as I'm producing things myself these days, because I still have my hands in documents and deliverables myself.
Jeet Mukherjee: Yeah, it's such a great proxy. I heard someone put on LinkedIn, which I also have a lovely relationship with, where they were saying that there is no better way to signal to someone that your time is more important than theirs than to send them a voice note. Because it's gonna take you less time to do that than for them to click it, open it, listen to it, and then reply back to it. So I think that's a really good proxy.
L. David Kingsley: Interesting. Yeah. And just typing the note out with my two little stubby thumbs, I'm thinking about it: are my words coming across the way that I want them to be seen? It's different than when we're in conversation and someone can say, well, what'd you mean by that? Or, there was a tone there, did I miss something? When it's in written format, I think to your point, Jeet, we've got to take the time to make sure it's spot on and respect the audience and respect ourselves and the communication that we're trying to have, to be effective in our relationship.
Jeet Mukherjee: Totally, totally. We're seeing so many Claude artifacts that are just created, which are like 17 pages long. And you can tell that it's made by Claude because it comes with all the dashes and the nuances, and it's like, hey, actually now it's gonna take me even more time to sift through what could have been much, much shorter. And I'm kinda curious to hear from you. You mentioned the phrase kind of, if used properly, then it can deliver a lot of value. I'm wondering, like, what does that practically look like? Because AI requires a bit of governance, guardrails, and also guidance for folks who are potentially new to it, and even folks who are really excited about it. So I'm wondering, like, practically, how are you kind of helping your team navigate, or how are you seeing other peers or other departments navigate this?
L. David Kingsley: Yeah, I think there's a way to leverage it and still get a lot of the speed. And I'll just give you a practical use case example. One of my team, we were talking about process mapping in talent acquisition. And I said, back in the day in consulting, when we would sit down with a client, we would build out process maps. And it was in Microsoft Visio. And it took a lot of time to build those little arrows and those little stop signs, decision boxes, and you had to put the little thing on the graph paper and all that stuff. And, you know, a week later you'd have a deliverable. Well, now, my guidance to my team was: I'd encourage you just to get on a Zoom and let the Zoom AI recorder record the call and get the transcript, and talk about it. Talk about the process. How is it today? How would we like it to be? Where are the pitfalls? Where are the downfalls? Where is it coming up short? And what could we do differently? Just have a conversation about it. Then let your, in our case, Microsoft Copilot, take that transcript and those notes from that call and say, please build me out a draft wireframe of the process flow that we talked about on this call, both as-is and as we'd like it to be. And sure enough, Jeet, that thing will crank out in a matter of seconds a process map that used to take us days or, heaven forbid, weeks to put together. That's a fantastic use case for accelerating our time to value using the tooling that we have. And so the ideas are coming out of our own heads and out of our own mouths. These are human-generated, talking about relevant business context topics, that then accelerates the development of the process map. And then you can go in and put a critical eye to it to say, okay, how did it capture that? Does that fit our business? No, that's wrong. And then you can actually engage with your AI tool, with your agent, to say, go fix this, polish that up, change that, this should be a little bit different. So that's a good use case, I think, where it can really accelerate us, where we still keep the human and the innovation and the learning that needs to happen, while accelerating what we used to call at MuleSoft the donkey work, right? The hard kind of slog part, where it's doing those little boxes and lines on a thing that's not really super value-add, it's just time-consuming. So let's let an agentic capability do that part and let's keep the human part human.
Jeet Mukherjee: Love it. You mentioned Copilot, and that kind of brings a story to mind that I heard last week, where a manager had decided to draft a termination letter for one of their employees. And Copilot decided to then send that termination letter, through whatever workflows that they'd built, to the individual who was being let go.
L. David Kingsley: Oh, no.
Jeet Mukherjee: Now, the individual took it really well. The company was quite clear about the fact that we're going to be experimenting with AI; they knew they were on their way out. But that's gonna be an edge case of someone being okay with that kind of thing. And I'm really interested to hear, I mean, a core focus of the business is security and making sure that AI doesn't mess things up. But when we're using something like Copilot, and you're talking about putting transcripts into different AI tools to understand and communicate with it, I'm guessing that actually there's not that much visibility into how people are using the AI and what prompts they're using, and maybe auditability is not as high as you'd want. How are you navigating that in a company that provides controls for keeping things secure, when that kind of visibility is not maybe there as much as you'd like it to be?
L. David Kingsley: Yeah, it's definitely top of mind for us. And you're right. When you call yourself a zero trust segmentation cybersecurity company, you better have that top of mind. And it certainly is. We literally just yesterday had a meeting where we are, we've had a process in place to do our AI governance for the company now for more than a year, in fact. We're refining that approach even a bit more now, where inside of Illumio, we have an AI steering committee comprised of 3 members of the executive team, and I'm on that committee, and then we have an AI working group. So we've put a little bit more architecture in place to say, what is the governance that we're going to use inside the company? For us, again, we're a Microsoft shop, Microsoft Copilot. It's an Illumio instance of Copilot, where I call it the walled garden. I know that's not the real term, but the stuff stays inside of Illumio. We're not exporting information to train models, which many companies have chosen to take that tack, and it's a little bit more expensive. What we have done is given guidance to our people to say, these are the tools that you have. Now, in Copilot, you can choose Claude Opus, you can choose Sonnet, you can use whatever model you want to use. And obviously, consuming the credits, hashtag token maxing, to do that. But we've given guardrails and parameters about, here are the tools you may use, and here's where this goes inside the company. Now, we've given pretty broad latitude. So, for example, you take somebody on our people operations team, they have access to everyone's home addresses, for example, in Workday, our HRIS. I'm fine if they export those addresses from Workday and use their Copilot, their agent, to do some analysis of our workforce and where people live based upon commute times to the office. We're a headquarters-based, in-office workforce; we're here 4 days a week, for the people who are headquarters-assigned. There's real work that needs to be done to assess that in terms of what is the employee experience. That team is fully within their rights to use their Copilot to interrogate that data inside of our Illumio-licensed Copilot application. That's permissible, and we've given guardrails for that. What's not permissible is to go out to your own instance of ChatGPT on your own personal account and throw a bunch of company information there to do some analysis on it. Now, some people may say, well, I like the way that this model or that app does it better than this one. I'm willing to make that trade-off. We may leave some value on the table. Most of the time, what I've found is what we have in-house is very capable, if not fully capable, of doing something you found out of house. It's a matter of how you've configured it or how you're using it. So we're spending a lot of time on educating and working with our teams about how we're using AI in a responsible way, both from a security standpoint, but then also from a value delivery standpoint. And we now, just late-breaking news, like many companies are, we're having forward-deployed engineers who are sitting in IT, who are now working with the business on how we're using AI. So it's a whole cool new discipline. I call it like HR business partners for IT: AI business partners who are forward-deployed into the business to help us leverage AI and do so securely and in a compliant fashion, but also maximize the value and utility.
Jeet Mukherjee: That's awesome. And I have a feeling that folks listening in on this are gonna say, well, you're part of the committee, you have the working group, you have support from IT, to the point where they're gonna help you build, you're gonna accelerate faster. I don't have that. I don't have the same agency. My HR may not be seen, you know, to your point, as the most important department in the business. What needs to be true for someone to be able to step up and say, look, AI is not just a tooling problem, it's fundamentally a people problem. It's a change management problem. So HR needs to be involved here. Any kind of tips on how to drive more influence for someone who doesn't have that right now?
L. David Kingsley: Yeah, I think maybe I'll take sort of a philosophical answer to that question, thinking about the why of HR. Maybe let's rewind all the way back to that, because then we deploy it in all kinds of ways, to include the use case example you just gave. I think about the people function on a continuum. And back to my example of when I asked HR to step out of the room, in some cases, in some organizations, HR is seen as the necessary evil. And that's kind of here on the continuum, right? Only give me as much as I have to have, not an ounce more. Only let me talk to them when I have to. Full stop. We move along that continuum from necessary evil to critical enabler. Critical enabler is the example when the people function is perceived as, hey, they do some important things in the company and we need them to help run the organization. And then as we continue along that continuum over here, we get to trusted advisor. And trusted advisor looks like this. Jeet's having a meeting with his senior leadership team and he says, hey, we can't start the meeting. You know, David's not in the room. I need my HR person in the room to start this meeting. They need to be here fundamentally from the start. Because the decisions that you make in that room could be suboptimized if you don't have all of your trusted advisors, to include your finance business partner, you know, you name it, whoever your key critical people are. In the necessary evil, Jeet has the meeting and then later, like, informs HR: hey, we've decided the following 6 things. Now go push the buttons. Okay. Critical enabler: okay, you know, we had the first meeting, we made some decisions, now we're gonna bring you into the second meeting and we'll talk about how this is gonna deploy. But trusted advisor, that model, when a team and a person is operating in that way, again, it's: don't start the meeting, I gotta have them in the room. And so, back to your question on a use case example from an AI perspective: if I, the HR leader or the HR contributor or the team member, am still perceived, because of the way that I've shown up, my organization has shown up, or maybe no fault of my own, just the way the organization perceives the discipline of HR, as this necessary evil, there's no way I have a seat at the table to start talking about human behavior in the organization in the face of AI. People are gonna be like, yeah, that's not your job. I'll decide that. Versus if you've spent the time, you've paid the freight to come along the journey, to show up in a way that's business-relevant and contributing as a business person first, then you're gonna be included in the conversation. You'll be invited to the table to be in that dialogue around how are we seeing the transformation of the nature of work. My goodness, that's a big question, right? I can promise you, to date, most of us in HR have never been asked by our board, you know, David, tell me about the nature of work and how it's changing in the face of AI. Like, whoa, that's big. I mean, I'm thinking back to, you know, the COVID days, right? All of us immediately became like junior epidemiologists and nose swab officials. I literally was asked to do that. I was like, can you oversee the nose swabbing? I was like, really? I'm in no way qualified to oversee the taking of a medical, you know, specimen exam. But it was like, well, HR is the closest thing we got. Go do that. So I've been asked some really interesting questions in my HR journey. However, in the last, you know, 6 months, a year, it's gotten a bit more heady when it's talking about the future of work, the nature of what is it to be human in an organization. Like, this is some big stuff. I don't know, maybe all of us should go back to school for a couple more years.
Jeet Mukherjee: Yeah, this feels different, you know, somehow. It's like the pace of change. There has been change before, which HR has always navigated, but the pace of change feels different this time. And you mentioned that, hey, okay, we gotta kind of embrace that change and step up and form those relationships first, and then you already have a seat at the table. Some HR teams may not want to take on that responsibility, to say that AI change management is our responsibility. Where do you think that responsibility sits? And I know we spoke a little bit about parenting before, and we'll get into that in a little bit more detail, but when we spoke previously it was like, does HR need to be the parent of the company and guide them through this new change, or is it not the responsibility at all?
L. David Kingsley: Yeah, it's a good question. I think, and my heart goes out to all my colleagues who are in this discipline, this is a hard job. I mean, you wake up in the morning, you have your work list, you have your, like, here are the 5 things I'm gonna accomplish today, and then you get some email or some Slack or some text message from somebody in the company, and you're like, well, there goes my morning. And that's just the world that we live in, right? It's the old adage. I was in the Navy for 8 years as a reserve intelligence officer, and the old adage of no battle plan survives the enemy. Right? The first shots go off and all of a sudden your battle plan is out the window. It's still important to have a plan, just like we do in HR every day, every week, every quarter, every year. And there has to be recognition of the fact that we exist for the business, right? We are a cost center. And so there are certain things the business needs us to do to run the company. We're not every day gonna wake up and think big thoughts. It's just not how HR is. Some days you're gonna be doing some technical, you know, sleeves-rolled-up, hands-in-the-dirt work that has to be done. So I don't want to paint it all with rose-colored glasses, that it's just about thinking big thoughts and having big conversations in boardrooms with whiteboards. You still gotta help run the company. And at the same time, in those quiet moments that you do have with a leader, when the moment is right, to ask that one well-placed, thoughtful, business-relevant question to prompt their thinking. To use an AI analogy, we have to prompt their thinking around: how's that going? Or, it sounds like that's going differently than you want it to. What do you think is standing in the way? Ultimately, at the end of the day, it is the business owner's job to own their part of the business, right? I'm not the chief product officer of Illumio. Last time I touched a line of code was 1995, and it was in C. You don't want me in the code. Right. Now, who knows, with Cursor and AI, now maybe I could jump back in and try my hand at it, but ultimately I think I've chosen my lot in life on the HR side. So my job isn't to help Mario decide how he wants to run his business. My job is to be a source of counsel to him, to ask good questions, to be a source of thought leadership in some cases on the way that human beings operate in organizations, to be a bringer of data and perspectives to prompt thinking, and then ultimately to help him decide how he wants to run his part of the business. And then be a trusted advisor as he does that. And I gotta make sure I stay in my lane, if you will, in that way, that I don't get over my skis. It's not my job to ideate on how we do software development in companies. There are people who are far more proficient at that. My job is to ask the question and be a source of counsel and guidance on that.
Jeet Mukherjee: I agree fully. Equally, it does seem like the remit of HR, you know, to your point, you have 4 things on your list or 5 things and you get a bunch more stuff and there goes that list. And it feels like that's happening more often. It feels like the remit is just expanding and expanding like never before. Is that just because more people are talking about it? Do you think that remit was always there? Last time we spoke about relabeling or evolving the role of chief people officer to chief workforce officer. That feels much broader. Like, where do you feel that sits currently on that trajectory towards that expansion?
L. David Kingsley: Yeah, I facilitated a discussion just recently with some of the ServiceNow executives. We were talking about that very topic, the chief workforce officer. And that's a heady topic. And frankly, just full transparency, I don't know if I'm qualified to even be in that job yet. I need to do a little bit more study, a little more learning before I'm willing to rebrand myself a chief workforce officer. I think that all of us as leaders, though, are called to add that to our job jar, that my job is now to think about the work at a meta level, to think about how are my people working, how are they executing their work, not in terms of just the productivity and the speed, but how do they see themselves as knowledge workers? And then what is my role as a leader in that, to be in dialogue with them about that? How are you doing as a knowledge worker on the team? How are you self-perceiving? How are you feeling supported in that? And you're right, the remit keeps expanding. And I give a lot of credit to my colleagues in the industry. We've been putting in the work to earn a seat at the table, to keep a seat at the table, to show up in a business-relevant way, that we're being invited into more of those conversations than we ever were before. And I think that's helpful, because the old adage that many hands make light work, we now have many more hands that can help out in organizations, whereas previously many of us were considered that necessary evil, and we were only brought in at the tail end of things, versus now we're in the conversation earlier on, if not from day one. That said, it does make our jobs a heck of a lot more complex. And it means we have to be absolutely ruthless in our prioritization about what we're taking on. And what are we saying? This is the most important thing. This is the second most important thing. This is the third most important thing. And then staying on that and getting mind share from our colleagues, from our board, and also from our team members to say, hey, look, here's how I'm seeing the world. What do you think? Where should we be on this stuff? And then collectively set those goals so that when the next new thing comes out of the ether and kind of flies across our radar, we don't jump at the shiny object. We say, nope, we've said that these are the things that we're gonna deliver for the company, even in the face of an ever-expanding remit.
Jeet Mukherjee: Yeah. And you just mentioned kind of the change, and I'm curious to hear, how do you think AI is gonna change the shape of the HR team, so that you're ready for whatever next change comes along?
L. David Kingsley: Yeah, it definitely is changing it already. I'm thinking just in terms of, if we look through the talent acquisition lens, and Felice Ageloni runs our talent team here at Illumio, a fantastic seasoned leader, and she and I were talking about this the other day, that we're going to have different numbers of team members in different jobs. So for example, whereas previously in talent acquisition, you'd have a legion of recruiting coordinators who are working with candidates to say, okay, what slots can you interview, and then working with the business: what slots can you have available, et cetera? That job, not quite overnight, but almost overnight, has really evolved, if not gone away, in that we can now automate a lot of that, provided, public service announcement, people are keeping their calendars current. If people don't have a current calendar, that stuff does not work. So that said, watchword on deploying the AI to do recruiting coordination. So that job has shifted. Now, those recruiting coordinators, those roles, while those have evolved, we could now have those folks talking about what is the candidate experience. What does sourcing look like, in terms of, yes, the AI sources candidates to put them in the pile, but do we have people then who are applying human intelligence, HI, against that list that artificial intelligence has produced? It's not gonna be perfect. It's going to make mistakes. It doesn't hallucinate like it used to. However, back to my example of, if you produce, you know, a 5-page deliverable in 5 minutes, it's probably not gonna be as good as if you put the work in. So we're seeing kind of roles evolve and shift, and how people are spending their time in organizations, that there may not be a need for someone to cut their teeth as a recruiting coordinator at the start of talent. They're going to jump into more client interactions sooner to talk about, you know, what is this role? What's this job? What do you need to do? And then let's design the JD to align to where you're trying to take the business, so that we can dial our sourcing in really well, and then jump into talking to candidates, talking to live human beings, having those conversations, identifying where are we trying to take the company, where are you in your journey, what do you want to do? And do we have a potential mutual fit there? And I love that it's actually gonna let us be more human than we had been before. It's gonna let us reinvest that time back into the human-to-human interactions. Because again, back to my Microsoft Visio example, I'm not spending hours doing a little pencil drawing with arrows and stop signs. I'm actually talking with the client about what they're trying to do with their business.
Jeet Mukherjee: Yeah, I am so on board with that. I think we should be using AI to elevate the human elements. And your recruiting coordination example is interesting for many reasons, one being that it kinda shows that AI can be really super smart and it can also be really dumb, because if the fundamental calendars don't sync up correctly, then AI can't do anything there. And from what we've been discussing so far, you seem like an optimist, a cautious optimist for AI. And I'm sure that you guys are already doing stuff internally. And I think last time we spoke, you were mentioning how the pace of change with improvements is fantastical. And I think you were mentioning that in 3, 6 months you're expecting some parts of this to be even more perfect than it already is. I'm kind of curious to hear, outside of recruitment, what are some of the areas that you guys have invested in internally to build out, perhaps with your FDEs from the IT team, and what are some of the use cases that you're excited about next to look at?
L. David Kingsley: Yeah, I'll rewind it down to something even a bit more basic. About 9 months ago, maybe a little bit more, 10 months ago, I got the whole team together. We had a people team all-hands meeting, and I said, okay, folks, we're all going to embrace what is going to be the agentic workforce. And everybody went, wow, okay, that's a big topic, David, for you to put on the table. I said, we're gonna start out this way. By the end of the month, whatever, I think it was September, October last year, I said, by the end of the month, everyone's going to have their own agent, named. And everybody went, huh? I said, you're gonna create an agent and you have to give it a cheeky name. And I said, and I am the self-appointed arbiter of cheekiness. I will decide if you've given it a cheeky enough name. And so the team got really creative and came up with their own names for their individual agents. And today in our compensation team, we have someone called LL Coolpay, complete with the chains and the hat and the whole bit. And LL Coolpay helps us to do compensation analysis from the candidate stage all the way through to making sure that we're adhering to all the equitable pay laws. And so LL Coolpay, while creatively named, is a highly sophisticated agent who's helping with that. The reason I did that, though, is I wanted two things. One, I wanted us to acknowledge that this can and should be an exercise in creativity. And it starts out with just naming the thing. Who is your agent? And we talk about our agents now with their names. So for example, our head of people operations, Ida, Ida's agent is named Ingrid. And Ingrid is kind of Ida's alter ego. And she's named it, and we talk about Ingrid in the team, and she'll say, well, Ingrid recommended this, or I ran this through Ingrid, and here's what she said. So we've even gendered our agents, to the point where we have a relationship with them, that we acknowledge them as someone on our team. So it started out with, let's have a bit of fun with this. Let's embrace this, that I am in charge of this agent who's going to work with me and for me, not the other way around. Because I said to my team, folks, if a year from now we don't have a point of view on this inside the people function, Andrew, our CEO and my boss, is going to come to me with some fancy consulting firm and is going to say, hey, here are the consultants. They're here to tell you how to run HR with AI now. And I said, I don't want to do that. First of all, I want to save the company that money. But second of all, I want us to be in charge of what our journey is with AI. And so introducing it in that way, that started out with a bit of humor, a bit of fun, at the same time personalizing it and making sure that we are owning and driving this journey, I think set us up on that. Now, to the point of where we're going in the movie, by the end of really kind of Q1 next year, our org charts will have an agent on them directly reporting to each of my direct reports. So for example, back on people operations, Ingrid will be a direct report on the org chart, probably in Workday. It will have a persona, and Ingrid herself will have a series of sub-agents that she's managing. And she will do that in a directed and autonomous fashion with the areas that we've tasked her with. That's a whole new world, because now Ida has her direct reports on her team, but she'll also have this other direct report now that is not just a call-and-response agent, but: I've tasked my agent to do these 5 things in an automated way, 24/7, repeated, to execute those within these parameters. Now, back to your example, Jeet. We're gonna have to be mindful that we don't get over our skis there and automatically start sending termination letters without a human in the loop to make sure that the timing is right. So it takes a good bit of architecture to get that right. But that's where we're going with it. And we're gonna have one of those for each team. So LL Coolpay on our compensation team. We've got Ingrid on our people operations team. We've got K2 Sherpa, the one on our HR business partner team. And we don't yet have a name for our talent acquisition one, but we'll come up with that one as well. Those will be members of our team in a full-fledged fashion, and I think if we don't have that by, call it, the middle of the calendar year next year, I'll feel like we're behind the eight ball as an HR team.
Jeet Mukherjee: I cannot wait to see LL Coolpay in Workday. Can you please send me a screenshot of that org chart when, like...
L. David Kingsley: Well, and I'll tell you, the little emoji that Ronnie, who runs our compensation team, has developed is fantastic. And I think he had it help name itself and make its own image. So you can have this kind of recursive function where it's self-improving, and, you know, hey, I like your fedora, but make it even cooler.
Jeet Mukherjee: That's amazing. I mean, we build AI tools, right? And we're always trying to answer this question of where do we draw the line between human intelligence and artificial intelligence, and where's the right place to draw the line, regardless of whether technology allows certain things or not. And I'm kind of curious to hear, like, how important do you think it is to humanize AI by personifying, giving names, and why is it important to have them on the org chart? Like, what do those two things unlock for people?
L. David Kingsley: Yeah. I like to start with the customer in mind. So thinking about what is the customer experience. And I think about that, you know, from how we're running Illumio as a business: who are our customers around the world who are trying to protect themselves, to stop breaches from becoming cyber disasters? That's our customer. So let's work back from that: how are we running the company, how are we building product, how are we adding features, based on what is the customer experience. If we take that same approach and we think about the customer for me internally, it's the employee, it's the Illumineer. We call our people Illumineers. That Illumineer, in some cases, wants to have a human experience. In some cases, that Illumineer wants to have an automated experience. So for example, if you order a pair of shoes online, right, and you want to know, you know, where are my shoes? You don't want to have to wait on hold to talk to a live human for them to say, you know, they just left the warehouse. You want to go probably to a chatbot on the website, put in your order number, and for it to give you a status update and hopefully the tracking number from the label, through FedEx or UPS or whatever. You don't want to have a human experience in that way. So let's make sure that we're delivering to our customers the human experiences when they want human experiences, and the automated experiences when they want automated experiences. The only way to know that is to ask and to say, do you want to talk about job architecture with an agent, or do you want to talk about that with a live business partner? Where is that line? And so the voice of the customer matters a lot, because if we get that wrong and we over-agentify the things that should be human, or we humanize the things that should be agentified, we're going to get it wrong. We're gonna suboptimize, we're gonna spend our money the wrong ways, but more importantly, we're going to frustrate our customer. And so the human element still has to be front and center in how we make decisions and then how we deploy technology to deliver value in the organization. Because we can sit in our little HR cave and think up great ideas. Back to my example of my HR colleague that got excused from the meeting: we think we know how to serve the business, but if the business doesn't agree, then we're not being of service at all. And there's not one answer to that question; you just got to ask the question and have the discussion. And that may not be the same for every company. It's gonna vary organization by organization, it's gonna vary workforce by workforce. I'm thinking about when I deployed, you know, systems back in the day in consulting, and we had some workforces that were warehouse-based. That's a lot different than having a desk-based knowledge worker center where someone's at a laptop every day. If you've got a warehouse-based or a mobile workforce that's out on their phone, working with customers out in the field, that's a very different customer employee experience that you need to deliver. So it's gonna be one size fits none. It's gonna be a bespoke approach, organization by organization, team by team, in some cases person by person.
Jeet Mukherjee: Interesting. You mentioned customer experience. Do you worry about a world where employees are now having to eventually manage agent after agent, and know who to reach out to, and get confused in the same way that they do now? Is that a concern? Do you kind of see, like, there needs to be one super agent that all employees interact with, let's say for HR stuff, and then one for IT stuff? Or is that not a worry for you, and they can interact with LL Coolpay and the other ones as they see fit?
L. David Kingsley: Yeah, no, definitely. You're asking the question in a very interesting way, and I agree with the premise of it. Everybody knows that one person in your organization, your team, who just knows where to go, right? There's that one person. Everybody listening to this is like, yeah, that's Sally, or that's Bob, or that's Bill, or whatever. I go to them and they know: go talk to this person, or go there, or this is how this is done. What we need to do is industrialize that person's brain and persona inside the company, so that the employee can go to one source, and then that one source can kind of traffic cop or air traffic control where the person needs to go. Again, we don't wake up in the morning and go, gosh, I sure look forward to talking to HR for 8 hours today. No. The employee wants to talk to HR, most of the time, as little as possible, to get the thing they need to get back to their job, right? And so if that means a single point of entry that can say, okay, you need this or that, let me get you over there, and then let me help refine your question so you can get an answer faster, I think that's what our customers or employees are gonna want, versus having to remember, I go here for that and here for that and here for that. Now, that's gonna require all those different, what I like to call sometimes, silos of excellence to come together to have one point of view about how we show up to the customer. And that's gonna be a very deliberate, thoughtful, planful way to do that. And it follows the old adage in sailing that slow is smooth and smooth is fast. So you've actually got to go slow to go fast in this case. Be planful, be thoughtful, and think with the customer in mind, and reverse engineer the process from what the customer experiences.
Jeet Mukherjee: Gotcha. David, I've loved this conversation. Before we wrap things up, are there any final thoughts that you want to share with listeners around how to navigate this change? Because there's a lot here, and I'm wondering if there's a nugget that you could leave folks with.
L. David Kingsley: I think it goes back to the fundamentals of how do we show up as great people teams, great HR teams? And I think the key critical thing is: are we on our clients' agenda? Do we know what the business is trying to accomplish? Have we taken the time to pause and ask that? Where are you trying to take your business? What's keeping you up at night? And then we, as a people team, as an HR function, should show up in a way that's in service to that. And if we start there, we're generally always gonna be on the right track. We're gonna be invited into the meeting and we're gonna be asked back.
Jeet Mukherjee: Love that. David, thank you so much for joining us on The WorkOps Podcast.
L. David Kingsley: My pleasure. It's been a lot of fun, Jeet. Thank you for your time, and thank you for doing what you're doing to help advance the dialogue and the discipline in your part of the world as well. This is super important, that all of us are helping each other up the mountain, and I'm grateful for what you're doing in that area as well.
Jeet Mukherjee: Likewise. Thank you, David. Appreciate it.
L. David Kingsley: Take care.