Maral Kazanjian, Chief People Officer at Moody’s Corporation

Show Notes

Episode Summary

What if AI could free your workforce to focus on the work only humans can do best? In this episode of HR Voices by All Voices, host Emily Fenech sits down with Maral Kazanjian, Chief People Officer at Moody’s, to explore how a 115-year-old global company is embracing AI to transform both business outcomes and employee experience.

Maral shares how Moody’s has integrated large language models (LLMs) and agentic AI into its operations, not just to deliver smarter insights to clients, but to reshape how employees work, learn, and grow. From bonusing employees for experimenting with AI tools to creating a pioneering role, Head of AI Workforce Enablement

Maral details how HR can lead the way in balancing innovation, governance, and humanity.

Whether you’re curious about practical HR use cases for AI, or wondering how to keep your workforce engaged through transformation, this conversation offers a roadmap for building a culture of experimentation, empowerment, and responsible tech adoption.

Key Timestamps

• [00:45] – Maral’s introduction and overview of Moody’s

• [02:07] – Using AI and agentic tools to unlock business opportunities

• [03:49] – How Moody’s people team is embedding AI into daily work

• [06:26] – The viral “Head of AI Workforce Enablement” role and its vision

• [09:25] – Governance, ethics, and balancing risk with innovation

• [14:37] – Recruiting transformation with tech tools like HiredScore and Paradox

• [17:53] – Advice for HR leaders who feel “behind” on AI adoption

  [20:24] – Why curiosity and play are the keys to building AI confidence

  
  

Takeaways

• Embed AI into culture by creating structured learning, rewards, and experimentation opportunities.

• Reframe workforce planning—AI is not about replacement, but enabling people to do more meaningful work.

• Lead from HR, not just tech—people teams are uniquely positioned to balance innovation with responsible boundaries.

• Focus on high-impact use cases—target specific pain points like recruiting efficiency or transactional HR support.

• Cultivate curiosity—small, consistent habits of experimentation help employees build confidence with AI tools.

Our Sponsor

AllVoices brings all your employee relations work together in one place. No more jumping between spreadsheets, emails, and legacy systems—just one place to document and manage reports, cases, investigations, and performance conversations. It helps you run a more consistent process, takes busywork off your plate with AI, and makes it easier to spot trends early, so you can work proactively, not just put out fires. See a demo at ⁠⁠allvoices.co⁠⁠.

What is HR Voices?

HR Voices is a scenario-based podcast for People Leaders who’ve actually had to make the call.

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 (00:01.255)
Welcome to HR Voices by All Voices. I'm your host, Emily Fenech and today I'm joined by Maral Kazanjian, the Chief People Officer of Moody's. Welcome, Maral.

Maral Kazanjian (00:12.47)
Emily, it's great to be with you.

Emily Fenech (00:14.491)
Yeah, thank you for coming here. Maral for most people, think Moody's is a household name, but just in case folks are joining us today and they haven't heard of Moody's, could you give us a little bit of context about the organization, some background, and who are the people working at Moody's?

Maral Kazanjian (00:31.374)
Amazing. Thank you for asking that. So Moody's is 115 year old company. We have two operating divisions. have 14,000 employees across 44 countries. And we serve really two primary purposes. One, historically, our credit rating agency is the predominant voice on credit risk. And then we have this teenager, which is our Moody's analytics business, which serves

the entire market in frankly unlocking all kinds of business risks and opportunities. And principally Moody's Analytics, is our fastest growing business serves banks, insurance companies, corporations, governments, asset managers. And what we're trying to do is help them understand the risks incumbent in their business so that they can unlock the opportunities associated with those risks and not fall into the traps of those risks.

Emily Fenech (01:28.059)
Awesome. So what is the biggest challenge that you and the Moody's Workforce is facing in this moment?

Maral Kazanjian (01:35.842)
Yeah, so it's amazing. About two years ago, we started on this journey. One of the things is we talk about risk being exponential. And the Moody's workforce is really a very highly educated group of smart people trying to solve big problems through a lot of data and facts. So.

It's very unashamed nerds that I'm so proud to be a part of. some of the challenges that we're trying to solve, getting more more complex as the world gets more and more complex. And so we've been on a little bit of a shopping spree buying different kinds of modeling and information firms to really try to round out all of the raw data. And about two years ago, as LLMs proliferated in the world, what we realized is

That's actually an unlock for us. And we can use LLMs to deliver more information and insights to our customers.

through all the underlying data and models that we have. And so we have been on a real rapid journey to modernize and evolve using initially LLMs and now agentic AI to really power our business and to deliver better, faster, more insightful information to our customers.

Emily Fenech (02:59.707)
Yeah, that's amazing. I mean, the amount of data that you guys must be working with is probably an AI nerd's dream. Yeah, but...

Emily Fenech (03:18.747)
Yeah, that's fascinating. So that's sort of AI to improve the customer experience. How are your employees using, particularly within the people team, how are you guys using AI in your day-to-day roles? Not just for the product, but for you as employees and Moody's.

Maral Kazanjian (03:34.862)
So this is something that I'm super excited and super passionate about, Emily. Starting that two years ago, looking back, our company really decided to think differently about how we can use AI and this technological innovation as an unlock for our people as much as for our customers. And so in 2023, and there's a Harvard Business Review on this, what we did was we said,

we're going to have a learning campaign, a reward campaign, and a use campaign to make normal the use of LLMs in everything we do. And so we did a huge learning journey and we actually bonused people on participating in that learning journey, which

got people interested and excited and then they started using it and they realized that that actually can save me time. And so I don't have to spend a ton of time writing a job description or doing a market mapping. Something else can do it for me and I can spend time delivering value to my customer, whether I'm a business partner or I'm a compensation expert or I'm processing a transaction. so we've been incorporating that in how we do business. And now when we look ahead, we're saying, okay,

There's different tech tools, right? There's bots, there's language learning models, and now there's this thing called agents. And our next phase of learning is coming because now we can really do a huge unlock and think about the workforce, not just as people, but as people powered by digital workers. And there's even more work that those digital workers can do.

with a lot of high quality so that it can unlock people to do the things that the people are the best at doing that we don't want technology doing, like emotional intelligence, exercising judgment, being agile about priorities. And so we're very excited about this next phase that we're going entering into because we think the people team is going to sit really at an important inflection point with our tech team in delivering the

Maral Kazanjian (05:48.612)
technology but also putting the power in people's hands and really reimagining how work gets done.

Emily Fenech (05:54.915)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, that's a nice transition to another question I was really excited to ask you about. So about a month ago, the LinkedIn algorithms delivered to me a job description from Moody's. This is before I had met you and before we had this conversation planned, but I saw a role you had open for the head of AI workforce enablement reporting into you, I presume, on the people team.

Maral Kazanjian (06:22.37)
Yes.

Emily Fenech (06:24.528)
Job posting, it's rare a job posting goes viral, but that was viral because I think it got a lot of people really excited. It's one thing to talk about prepping your workforce for AI, it's another thing to see that written out as a leadership role on paper. So I'm so curious if you could tell us about that role, how that came to be, how that was created.

Maral Kazanjian (06:45.706)
Yeah, so I'm a Gemini and I'm really bad at being mono in what I do. And as I saw sort of this agent thing happening, I had the benefit of my colleagues in the business coming to me and saying, hey, we're going to use agents for this. Hey, we're going to use agents for this. Hey, here's how people teams are thinking about supporting businesses using agents. And I...

Emily Fenech (06:54.202)
Mm-hmm.

Maral Kazanjian (07:13.678)
sort of went into a rabbit hole of my own journey. And I met with the CHRO of ServiceNow and I met with the CHRO of IBM and I participated in a number of panel discussions. And I wrote sort of my mission statement to my boss saying, hey, I think there's a really valuable role for the people team to play in bringing the workforce in a positive way on this.

agentic enablement journey. And I just wrote out like, hey, here's the things I think we can do. I think we can turn workforce planning into something dynamic and powerful, not something scary and negative. Here's how I think that agents can help us like take grunt work off of people's plates and let them do the things they're passionate about, which is interacting with other people. And amazingly, he said, I agree with you.

And he let me put this job description out there. And I said, this is what I think it looks like. I think we have to operate really in close partnership with our tech colleagues and our risk colleagues. But I think we can do something really special and turn this away from that, the bots are going to replace the people conversation to a conversation of we're going to power people and we're going to power our business and our talent so that

We can do 10 X what anybody else can do, and so I'm really excited to say we have made our hires. We've built a tiny squad. It's like a three person squad. My team members starting next week. She's joining us from Microsoft. She's super experienced in this space and I just think the sky is the limit on how.

We can help our people and I'm really, really excited about it. I'm so grateful that you got excited about it too.

Emily Fenech (09:08.4)
yeah, I did. I can't wait to meet her. When she gets started, I hope you'll introduce me because I would just love to hear how that person is creating that space, powering those people up. Some of my favorite parts of the job description were it's everything from the talent strategy to make sure that you're attracting people who want to leverage AI, the learning and the upskilling, the workforce planning that you already mentioned.

Maral Kazanjian (09:13.39)
You'll definitely have to meet her.

Emily Fenech (09:35.74)
Then also like the governance and ethics to make sure it's used responsibly and in places where Moody's wants it to be used and not in places where you don't. Could you talk to me a little bit more about that piece of the role or that piece of your role?

Maral Kazanjian (09:49.068)
Yes. And I love both points that you mentioned because one, what you really just hit on Emily is sort of the cultural evolution of the company. And, you know, like I started out saying, we're a hundred year old company, but we are in a very dynamic inflection point. And what that requires is really thinking differently about what got us here probably won't get us to the next place. And so we have to evolve and change and just

Being really transparent and positive about that can be a great thing, not a bad thing. I think we have to own. so driving that culture change is going to be a big part of the journey. But also we are partly a regulated business. have a duty. We have a social responsibility to frankly humanity. And that sounds really big and audacious, but I believe it because we're setting a tone for

what it means to responsibly have this powerful technology serve everyone. And I do think we have a duty to draw the parameters the way we think is appropriate. And so we have to decide early days, obviously working with our colleagues across the company. Like I sort of want AI to process transactions. I do not want AI to have

really important career conversations or figure out like what is going to drive a business to success. There's going to be just like there's a role for live training and virtual training. Same is going to be true here, right? There's going to be things that technology you want to do, but there's things that you want people to do that only people should do. And I think we're going to be very focused on getting very clear about that delineation. And of course, making sure we're not fueling

Emily Fenech (11:38.673)
Mm-hmm.

Maral Kazanjian (11:46.444)
these tools with information that is dangerous, inaccurate, and creates bad, incorrect outcomes.

Emily Fenech (11:55.694)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, and there's a, and I think that's a balance. Yeah, and I just think it's great too. think the number one thing I liked about it was that this role could easily have sat on the tech team, but it's sitting on the people team. Because I think what people leaders like yourself are really good at is that balance between, you know, between not police, like enabling people.

Maral Kazanjian (11:57.762)
That's what we're thinking about it.

Emily Fenech (12:17.349)
while also keeping the boundaries very clear. Because that's a balance, right? If you go too far in one direction, you're policing people and innovation suffers. But if you go too far in the other direction, you're creating a ton of risk that you don't want for your business. And Moody's knows a lot about risk. So I just feel like people teams are great at walking that line and creating that balance.

Maral Kazanjian (12:17.827)
Yeah.

Yes, totally.

Maral Kazanjian (12:36.854)
I love that you say that because I feel like I am constantly balancing. You must, you have a great pulse on what HR leaders are thinking about because that is very much what I'm thinking about. And I'm lucky I have a tech partner who's also pretty dynamic about thinking about that balance. But I do think it is a unique skill because we have the luxury of being able to look at both sides and say,

everything is a calibration of risk, right? If you do something, there's a risk. If you don't do something, there's a risk. And gosh, it seems like in this moment in time, doing nothing is not a good idea. So how do we enable you to do something that is positive?

Emily Fenech (13:19.985)
Mm-hmm. I remember the first time I learned that lesson, there's the cost of, there's the ROI, but then there's also the cost of doing nothing. And that can almost be as powerful.

Maral Kazanjian (13:28.622)
Totally. I would love, when did that happen for you?

Emily Fenech (13:32.549)
I'm a marketer and so, you know, oftentimes, you know, people ask me about the tools that at different roles, you know, what is the return on this tool? What is the return on this tool? And it was just, you know, a light bulb moment of actually the biggest, the biggest reason you should leverage all voices, for example, right? Is because if you don't, it's more the cost of inaction versus the return on action. If that makes sense.

Maral Kazanjian (13:55.074)
I totally think that's it. I completely make sense. And I'm constantly challenging, like, now the question becomes prioritizing, right? So how am I going to enable the most important things? And I think early days for this Agenic AI Workforce Enablement Team, they're going to be focused on prioritization, because it's going to be about what are the biggest problems?

That we can solve or improve upon to enable the business because you could very easily see a world where you get bogged down in the. You know, 50 cent ideas instead of really how am I really going to drive this business? What are the big ideas and. If I don't fix that, does it really matter if I did the little thing? Maybe less.

Emily Fenech (14:32.933)
Mm-hmm.

Emily Fenech (14:42.801)
Mm-hmm. Right. Right, that's great. Do you have, sounds like you've been doing a ton of experimentation. It seems like you've been, I love that you're bonusing people for participating in AI experimentation and leveraging LLMs. Do you have any favorite tools, automations, or stories that has come from all that experimentation that you could share with us?

Maral Kazanjian (15:03.906)
Yeah, so I'll tell you one quick story and then I'll talk about I'll talk about the tool of right now and then tool that's coming for to my mind. When I was when I first took this role, we had a.

A little bit of a pain point in recruiting where it was just taking us really long to find people and we weren't telling our brand story very well. So we are very focused now and we have to tell our story. We are an incredible company and people need to know who we are for them to be interested in wanting to be part of our community. So I had this recruiting pain point and we were solving it by just throwing bodies at the problem. And I had a friend.

who had been at Moody's and left and she learned all about recruiting operations. And she was like, look, you're not leveraging technology. You need higher score and paradox and you are going to shortcut time to hire.

And you're going to also improve the quality of recruiters because instead of sourcing and scheduling interviews, they're going to be focused on understanding the business and finding the talent and telling our brand story. And that's exactly what's happened. So I am a huge Hired Score Paradox fan and also a fan of this woman that I persuaded to rejoin us because we have the tools at our disposal and now we just need recruiters.

to get great about understanding our business and telling our story. So that's been win number one. And sort of where I'm looking next, I'm very hopeful that Copilot Studio or something like it is gonna enable us to build digital workers within the people team and outside the people team.

Maral Kazanjian (16:48.812)
that are going to help us fix other transactional pain points. So right now we do a lot of operational transaction processing. We answer a lot of questions. We answer the same questions lots and lots of times. And the low stakes, low emotion questions, they should be two second answers, not, you know, I'll get back to you in a day. And I think agents can do that so that our business people can go back to doing their work instead of worrying about

Gosh, how many vacation days do I have or what do I need to know about when the next promotion cycle is? And I think that can, if you aggregate it, be huge value unlocks. And I'm very hopeful Copilot Studio is going to help us with that. But right now we're just teaching everyone.

Emily Fenech (17:24.272)
Mm-hmm.

Emily Fenech (17:32.08)
Yes. Yeah, there's so many interesting tools out there that are what I love about some of the other founders I've met that are, they're just so focused on like really niche areas. And I think that's what I think that's appropriate for the time, right? Is instead of trying to automate everything, it's automating one painful process at a time. And I saw that MIT study that was very popular about how the most successful implementations are the ones that are laser focused on one.

manual painful business process at a time. So yeah, sounds...

Maral Kazanjian (18:04.558)
I'm curious which one in your research you've heard the most about as a real success marker. Yeah.

Emily Fenech (18:09.029)
Which tools? I mean, I'm biased, but All Voices has had, it's very focused on employee relations and automating. Yes, but it's great at automating some of the most painful parts of employee relations. So for example, it drafts employee responses to your anonymous intake just to make sure people feel heard and they get back to them really quickly. It's a big deal. Yeah, it also does, it surfaces similar cases.

Maral Kazanjian (18:16.514)
Well, I'm a fan of all voices.

Maral Kazanjian (18:30.488)
Big deal.

Yeah, then.

Emily Fenech (18:35.193)
precedent and policies like in the moment. So a tricky investigation or a tricky case lands on your plate, you can immediately see how that has been resolved in the past. So surfacing that and then also for larger, some of the larger companies that we serve too, just the data, like it's hard to go through and manually try to spot a pattern. It'll sort of bring it to the surface to say, hey, I think in this store, in this region, in this team.

Maral Kazanjian (18:46.784)
That's amazing.

Emily Fenech (19:00.623)
you're having some issues bubbling up and it allows you to sort of address them more proactively. So I'm biased, but I also have Opry is a tool that I'm obsessed with for performance management. So you should check them out. It sort of takes all the unstructured data throughout your business and makes that available to managers for kind of always on performance reviews instead of just...

What do I remember, you know, every six months, what do I remember from last six weeks? It sort of helps you with your memory of what have the performance conversations been like over time. So they're doing some really cool things. Those are two that come to mind. Yeah. Well, is there, your organization is...

Maral Kazanjian (19:40.174)
Thank you. Thank you for sharing that.

Emily Fenech (19:48.301)
inspiring, the role that you're hiring, the way that you're approaching this is inspiring. For folks who are listening who might feel a little bit behind, who might feel like, I'm not there yet, I haven't hired a role like this yet, I haven't done as much experimentation as Maral has, do you have some advice or some last words that you can give to the folks who are listening who want to sort of be at the level that you're at?

Maral Kazanjian (20:12.184)
Yeah, so I think I'm still a beginner in all disclosure. I think that I'm frankly still a beginner in the world of HR. I was a lawyer a very long time and I am five years into my HR journey and I love every minute of it. I think this profession is so important in.

bringing sort of to light the importance of humanity and, I don't understate that. I think the thing with beginners is you always start by being curious and just jumping in. And I was saying to someone else a couple of weeks ago, there's no magic to learning how any of these tools work. It's really just building a habit. So what, one of the things I do,

By requirement, I live in, I work in New York City. I live in New Jersey. I commute every day. And as I'm commuting, I will spend 15 minutes of my commute every day, just like working out, playing in perplexity or Gemini or Grok or whatever, co-pilot. And I do that with great intention, whether it's like, build me the schedule for my daughter's dance

for 2025 or it's act like a financial advisor and advise someone receiving equity in six months on how to best reinvest, know, whether it's questions that are for my job or for my life, I just play and I, and then I'll challenge myself, right? Like act like a challenger to the advice you just gave and what would you say are the weaknesses of what you just said? And I'll keep iterating and I start a lot of speeches now with

that is my co co-writer and it gets me always to a better outcome. But I also always learn something about, Hey, here's where the tool's good and here's where the tool's wobbly or needs to get better. And then it gets me better because I feel like more confident about, okay, that went well today. I'll try something different tomorrow. And just exercising that, even if it's five minutes, it's better than zero minutes. And

Maral Kazanjian (22:30.656)
very quickly you feel like, I've got this, I can do this. Today I was building avatars of, I have an offsite for my team next week. So I was building avatars from pictures from the team in the past. And I was comparing what the different tools look like when they build an avatar, because I wanted the least ugly avatars. So just, just.

Emily Fenech (22:35.203)
Yeah.

Maral Kazanjian (22:54.818)
Get out there and play, you know? Like, we can all act like the 10-year-old in us again and experiment and learn our way through it. And then we have the benefit of, we can also read the science under it and rely on partners to teach us. I think it's a big, fun journey. And I'm excited for your listeners to just go out there and try.

Emily Fenech (23:18.148)
love that attitude. I don't think we could end on a better, more positive, inspiring note than that. So thank you so much for being here today, Maral I really loved our conversation.

Maral Kazanjian (23:29.174)
I did too, Emily. Thanks so much for having me. Wish you continued success. Bye.

Emily Fenech (23:31.865)
Yeah, see ya!