Sunaina Lobo, Chief People Officer at Omnissa

Show Notes

AI-Native HR: Omnissa’s CPO on Hyper-Personalization, Skills Intelligence, and Human Connection

Summary

How can HR lead AI adoption without losing the human core of work?

Sunaina Lobo, Chief People Officer at Omnissa—an AI-driven digital workforce platform carved out of VMware—shares how she’s building a modern “hire-to-retire” experience just six weeks into the role.

Sunaina explains why people teams must be change leaders, not just technology adopters, and how AI lets HR leapfrog legacy models like shared services to deliver truly personalized, scalable support.

She walks through a practical talent development use case—using conversational intelligence to transform career conversations—so managers can focus on relationships while AI captures insights and suggests development paths.

Sunaina also breaks down personalization in total rewards, the realities of a distributed workforce across 18 countries, the shift from rear-view HR metrics to predictive, insights-driven decision-making, and why engagement depends on hyper-human interaction and purpose-led cultures. If you’re redefining HR’s operating system, this episode offers a clear blueprint.

Timestamps

[00:45] – Guest intro: Omnissa’s VMware roots and Sunaina’s “hire-to-retire” mandate

[02:50] – Why HR must lead AI adoption: change management over tools

[04:45] – Leapfrogging shared services: AI bots for personalized employee support

[06:20] – Talent development, reimagined: conversational intelligence for career conversations

[09:00] – Total rewards in the AI era: from one-size-fits-all to hyper-personalization

[11:30] – Engagement is human: community, connection, and “putting the H back in HR”

[15:30] – Five focus areas: hyper-personalization, global talent, insights-driven HR, purpose, skills intelligence

[18:10] – Aligning product and people: building an AI-native employee experience

[18:50] – From anecdotes to evidence: using AI to connect HR metrics to business outcomes

[20:40] – Guardrails: augment with AI, but keep the human conversation central

Takeaways

- Lead AI adoption as a change initiative—design for human behavior, not just new tools.

- Map HR processes end-to-end; automate repeatable steps and reserve managers for high-value conversations.

- Flip career conversations with conversational intelligence to capture insights and generate development options.

- Personalize benefits and rewards based on employee life stage and preferences, not averages.

- Build community and manager capability to counter remote isolation and boost engagement.

- Shift from rear-view reporting to predictive, insights-driven HR and tie people data to business outcomes.

- Treat skills intelligence as a strategic asset—identify, develop, and deploy skills for competitive advantage.

Sponsor

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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.”

Rebecca Taylor (00:17)
Hello and welcome to this episode of HR Voices. I'm your host, Rebecca Taylor, and I'm here with Sunaina Lobo the Chief People Officer at Omnissa Sunni, welcome. Thank you so much for coming.

Sunaina Lobo (00:27)
Thanks for having me, Rebecca.

Rebecca Taylor (00:29)
Yeah. How's your day going so far? I you said you've been back to back in meetings. So life of HR, right?

Sunaina Lobo (00:35)
I know it's pretty much Monday. Monday is the day, right? It's been good. It's been really great. Thanks for us.

Rebecca Taylor (00:41)
Good,

very nice. So I know being a Chief People Officer is always sort of a very broad type of title, So, you know, because it can cover so many different sort of areas and gambits within HR. So can we start just with sort of a basic understanding of what your role is, Adam Nissa, and kind of who you're managing, who you're taking care of, who you're representing, what does sort of your role really entail?

Sunaina Lobo (01:07)
So I'll just start with who we are, because a lot of people probably don't know Amnisa. We've been around for a long time and we were part of VMware. So we're a carve out from VMware as a standalone company just under a couple of years ago. We're a software company and we provide AI driven digital workforce platform, to mainly enterprise customers. And what...

Rebecca Taylor (01:11)
Yeah.

Sunaina Lobo (01:35)
excites me about ⁓ what we can do from a people perspective with the business is the fact that the two things are really well interlinked. What we do in HR is to provide a great employee experience from the hire to retire. And I call it the hire to retire cycle. When we hire folks to the time folks make a decision to leave us or look for other opportunities. And that whole continuum.

from hire to retire is what my team and I are responsible for at Omnissa. So you asked about, what do we do and what does the business do? It actually is interlinked quite well. And that's what excited me about coming to Omnissa, the product, what we do for our customers, and then what we can do in the people group as a product to our internal customers.

Rebecca Taylor (02:25)
Yeah, that's really cool. It's rare to kind of be in a position where you're working for a company that essentially does or supports the job that you're also doing sort of within the organization. Like that's really cool. So, you know, I've been doing some research on Omnisci even just before we kind of got to chatting, because I was really curious, because coming from HR myself, I see workplace experience, I see all this, I'm like, ooh, I want to know more. So I imagine, you know, that

the talk about AI and how to incorporate AI into sort of people workflows is probably, I don't want to assume, but would it be something that you're kind of living in maybe a little bit more than someone in a different field might be living in?

Sunaina Lobo (03:04)
You know, I think being in a tech world these days, with a tech industry and supporting, you know, tech organizations from a people perspective, know, AI is always front and center, irrespective of what the goals are of the company. Right. And the reason I say that is because as you you've probably heard a lot of people say, it's not about technology. It's not about technology. It's about the change management aspects of adoption of

of that technology. It's the human aspects of the adoption of the technology. we are really well placed within our business because we are so AI native in the work that we do from a product perspective. It's a natural evolution for us to be thinking about it from a people perspective. And when I think about the challenges that people teams face, it's about not only being

part of the adoption of AI, but actually leading the adoption of AI in organizations, because ⁓ it's all about change. It's not about the technology. if you are a people leader, you're front and center of change and transformation for any business. helping the business accelerate their business goals via the adoption of AI is a natural fit for the people organization.

I've just joined Omnissa five weeks ago. This is week six. It's the start of week six. Thank you. And so we're crafting our people strategy and our people team org design. And that's front and center of the conversations we're having, right? How do we make sure that ⁓ operationally, you know, the people team gets the stuff that we need to do done. And

Rebecca Taylor (04:29)
Welcome.

Sunaina Lobo (04:50)
How do we leapfrog this whole effort of, in the operations arm of HR, I want to create a shared services center, for example, could be a goal. Now, how do we leapfrog? Let's not create a shared services center. Let's actually just use AI to create a personalized employee experience versus go via a shared services center. We can just actually go via an AI bot.

And think when you're developing your people strategy for folks, new Chief People Officers, or also for folks who have been there a while in their roles, keeping AI front and center of the employee experience and how you can actually enhance that employee experience, which you will not be able to do in a normal world, or we would not be able to do without the onset of AI, is exciting for me, and it's exciting for my team.

Rebecca Taylor (05:40)
Yeah, yeah. I love your, you know, your, your alluding to the idea of kind of automating some parts of the job, especially within the shared services space, using something like AI. You know, and I know that there's a lot of, you know, folks who might be listening to this, their next natural question might be something like how. So what are some sort of key components to really doing that right? You know, so if you are going to think about

a piece of a shared services department that you could create a bot or automate different technology. What are some of the key things to make sure you have in place to be able to even consider making that happen?

Sunaina Lobo (06:18)
You know, it's a really good question and you know, we can talk about it from a shared services perspective because a lot of people go there, right? Or from a talent acquisition perspective because again, a lot of people go there. I'd like to talk a little bit about a talent development use case, you know, which people don't naturally go to, right? So if you think about how we develop talent in organizations traditionally, you know, there was a big emphasis on say, you know, starting with a career conversation with your manager.

if you look at that one aspect of the talent development cycle. So very key to be thinking about, what is it that you're trying to solve for on a holistic level, whether it's shared services, talent development, recruitment, breaking that down into pieces and figuring out which pieces can we leverage AI for and which pieces actually need the human intervention. So that's the place to start. So when you think about talent development,

as an entire life cycle in a continuum. you say career conversations is something that I think we can revolutionize. So today, the way organizations do it is an employee writes down his or her goals and then what their career objectives are and the manager reviews that and they have a conversation and they think about next steps in terms of development. What if you were completely going to flip that on its head and you had a conversational intelligence software?

that was actually recording an employee's thoughts around their own career. And then putting that down into a format that is decipherable, right? And then that is shared with the manager. And the conversation with the manager and the employee, which is very essential, we don't want that to go away. And we've identified that we don't want that to go away when we mapped out the process.

Rebecca Taylor (07:59)
Right.

Sunaina Lobo (07:59)
That is really important. That conversation can be about the conversation and not about taking down notes and writing down next steps, right? Because all of that is automated and all of that is, you know, there's insight drawn into that conversation via AI tools and technology, which can actually spit out that conversation for you in a format that is, again, decipherable and can suggest developmental options for

Rebecca Taylor (08:07)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Sunaina Lobo (08:26)
the individual for the manager, almost like a career coach. So the conversation with your manager is actually focused on that conversation and building that relationship. Because what creates stickiness with employees, we all know, is the ability to bring themselves, their whole selves to work, to be able to have a real conversation with people, to find purpose and meaning in what they do. That can come from the conversation with the manager. All of the attributes can be automated.

Rebecca Taylor (08:31)
Yep.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Sunaina Lobo (08:56)
And I'm going to reach out, right? So

that's just a nice use case to think through when you're thinking about any aspect of your HR process or cycle, whether it's operations or talent acquisition, talent development. Total rewards is an area that's ripe for change and transformation, right? Because it's all about analyzing spreadsheets and numbers and can we leverage AI to do that? And then we focus on the things that really matter.

which are, what really do our employees want when it comes to rewards, when it comes to benefits? Are we tailoring our benefits to suit our employees' needs, depending on where they are at in their own journey and life cycle? Or are we doing a one size fits all? So one of the things that I think is gonna be really important moving forward with AI is this hyper-personalization of the employee experience. So you don't have to come in and be like pulled into this

Rebecca Taylor (09:25)
Mm-hmm.

Sunaina Lobo (09:51)
organizational construct, we can actually come to you and say, because of who you are as a person and where you're at in your life cycle or your journey or career journey, here's what we would recommend for you. So it's a proactive, data-driven approach addressing employee concerns, but also employee development.

Rebecca Taylor (10:08)
Yeah.

Yeah, I love that as a focus for employee development too, because that sometimes can be one of the more charged types of situations that managers have to deal with, right? You know, giving feedback, defending feedback sometimes, and making sure that whatever feedback that you're giving is really grounded in behavioral things that you may have witnessed and not assumptions that you're making. That can be really, really hard, especially in remote teams. I mean, I know Omnissa works with remote.

teams everywhere, right? So I can imagine even just seeing it across customers, but even within your own remote organization, it's harder for managers to witness behaviors, to give that as feedback to an employee, just because you're not around them as much. And that's where, to your point, where AI being incorporated into the conversation can really help. Because if you have it as someone who can even just bear witness to a conversation between you and your manager, turn that conversation into some sort of input to help

you know, the employee kind of figure out what their development plan might be, how a manager might feel about it. You know, what I'm liking about sort of the way that you're framing it is really that it's a tool that kind of keeps those conversations going. It's not something that replaces those conversations. It just helps everyone show up maybe a little bit more equipped for them and makes them more productive, but it doesn't replace the actual act of having them, which is where the that's where the work is, right?

Sunaina Lobo (11:35)
That's what the work is and that's where the requirement is, right? mean, all of the research we've done on technology and whether AI will replace your job brings us back to the whole point of hyper-personization but hyper-human interaction. There's a big need for human interaction with how we work these days, which is remote, which is often alone. Having that community to lean on.

⁓ manager being part of that community, but also your peers and the folks that you work with, your team members. How do you create an environment where you're feeling like you can actually leverage the whole of that community versus feeling like you're on your own, which is why we've seen a lowering of engagement, to be honest, in organizations. Engagement is at an all-time low because

We don't know what's going to happen to our jobs. We feel like, you know, some technology is going to come and take it away. We don't have connections anymore at work. So, you know, if we look at all of the data points, it's all about putting the H back into HR. You know, the human aspect of HR is actually going to be paramount. And the strategic aspect of HR, you know, one of the work that's repeatable and can be operationalized or is operationalized in HR, we can leverage AI for.

Rebecca Taylor (12:31)
Yeah.

Sunaina Lobo (12:52)
But the work that really needs you to be strategic, be a thought leader, have the conversations, create community, create engagement, cannot be operationalized. We can't leverage AI for it. Of course, there's an aspects, of course, you can, not everything.

Rebecca Taylor (13:06)
Right.

Yeah, you can use it to kind of maybe analyze data that shows some indications of things that you might need to look into or to do, right? You know, for maybe identifying friction points between teams, right? Maybe that's something that AI can kind of flag, but there certainly is, you know, it's still up to us to be the ones to help address that, fix that, guide them, you know, to a more productive kind of working environment.

Sunaina Lobo (13:20)
No, absolutely.

Rebecca Taylor (13:31)
I think something that you mentioned that really kind of stood out to me too is you talked about it as a way to personalize the experience too. So personalization is, it's one of those things that I think that we just as people, as consumers, we've gotten so used to having highly personalized algorithms, ads sent to us, right? So if we can use that as way to highly personalize the work experience in some way, then that could, this is just a theory that I have, right? I don't have the scholarly research for it, but.

Sunaina Lobo (13:46)
Yes.

Rebecca Taylor (14:00)
I think it's one of those things that when people feel like their work experience is somehow curated for them, you're going to start to see more engagement because it's them investing and engaging in themselves, which is then good for the company, right? It's like a good effect that way.

Sunaina Lobo (14:15)
Absolutely. mean, you know, you when we started this conversation, actually, when we didn't start recording, but before that, you're talking about, know, what are what are the things, you know, the the top things that will drive the employee experience or, you know, people teams in the future. I really strongly think that the first one is this AI driven hyper personalization, you know, for an employee, because we're doing that everywhere else in in our, you know,

in our communities, why not do it as an employee for organizations? The second one is really a reshaped global talent landscape. How do you average global talent? Because most organizations are hyper global these days. My company is we are in 18 different countries as legal entities, and then we employ, we have people all over the world. So we have people all over the world in different countries, but we have 18.

Rebecca Taylor (14:52)
Mm.

Sunaina Lobo (15:10)
legal entities. So, you know, how do you think about distributed work, economies, you know, the macroeconomic environment that we live in, that's going to really pertinent to people teams and how to leverage that and think that through. We'll have a new era of insights driven HR. So most of the HR technology we use these days is very rear view looking. ⁓

Rebecca Taylor (15:33)
looking back,

Sunaina Lobo (15:34)
thinking about how do we leverage what we have, which is a whole wealth of data from employees, to drive insights, to help us figure out how the workplace should be designed in the future. The other one is purpose-led ⁓ culture building, thinking about how do we drive a strong sense of purpose and joy within an organization, ⁓ which is more than just

Rebecca Taylor (15:48)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Sunaina Lobo (16:03)
the monetary benefits of being there, it's aligned to something a higher order, which moves that, you know, once you draw that link with employees, your productivity, you know, will follow very quickly. And skills intelligence as a competitive advantage, you know, how do you think about skills and how do you develop those skills to be a competitive advantage for you in the industry?

Rebecca Taylor (16:08)
Yeah.

it'll increase, yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

I think the skill development piece, especially within the context of specific organizations, is really, really juicy and interesting and probably something I could talk about for days at a time just on itself. Because it's, you know, people's ability to perform at work is a combination of their own skills that they might already have, their level of sort of mental connection and engagement to the work that they're doing, and then also the context of the environment that allows those skills to thrive or that might

hold those skills back. And that's where there's, you know, it's interesting because you're five weeks into a new job, right? I'm still new to even being the host of HR Voices. So we're kind of getting onboarded to new things ourselves. And it's kind of like an interesting reflection point to see, okay, how did the skills that I'm using in my job now show up in my last job? Are they translating? How is the environment of the job, you know, making them either come out or hide or whatever that might look like?

Sunaina Lobo (17:00)
So.

Rebecca Taylor (17:25)
So I think that context is really the part that makes it really kind of juicy and interesting.

Sunaina Lobo (17:30)
Yeah, no, I think it's spot on, spot on.

Rebecca Taylor (17:33)
Yeah. So what's something you're excited about that you're working on right now with you and your team? I know you're just kind of getting started, so maybe everything's exciting.

Sunaina Lobo (17:41)
think the potential of what we can do within this AI-driven context that we are operating within and to connect what we do from a product perspective with our customers, for product perspective for our internal customers, and making sure that we're not lagging behind, but we're actually kind of leapfrogging ahead.

That's what's exciting for my team and I. We've had several conversations and we're particularly excited about that aspect.

Rebecca Taylor (18:12)
cool. And I agree there is sort of this, think technology is allowing us in HR to have something that's a little bit more future focused and looking ahead. So we can truly be proactive, as opposed to just sort of more of those lagging indicators of engagement, performance, you know, whatever that is. And I think what's kind of been interesting is that I've seen, you know, I've spoken to a lot of HR leaders in my career, and even even here just starting this series, it's like, there's a lot that we already kind of knew, you know, we can always say we know that

employees who aren't engaged don't perform as well, right? Now I think AI is actually making it easier for us to actually have the data to connect the dots to really prove that and show that because that used to be something that it wasn't necessarily subjective, but you had to dig deep to get the business numbers to tie that to the HR numbers to tell that story. And I think that's us being able to be better storytellers is going to help us to really usher in the new era of what HR can really do.

Sunaina Lobo (19:00)
Yes.

Yep, absolutely. I think, you know, I always see technology as, oh, you know, my team always says that I'm a glass half full person. And sometimes they say I'm a glass half overflowing person. it's interesting feedback. But I always look at, you know, a change in the regular operation and motion of how we operate as a business, whether it is a pandemic or whether it's a technological revolution or

a skills revolution as something that is an opportunity for us to leverage. how cool is it that we're in the center of this AI world and we are in technology, in tech companies, very, very close to it. A lot of our products are AI native products. So we are much closer to it than most other people. So why not use that as an opportunity to leverage what AI can bring, which is, ⁓ you know,

Rebecca Taylor (19:43)
Yeah.

Sunaina Lobo (20:08)
connecting dots from data and also creating better experiences for us. So as long as we keep in mind that we need the human interaction, we need the connection, which will drive further productivity and not reduce that, I think that's something to keep in mind for us.

Rebecca Taylor (20:24)
Right.

Yeah, I could not agree more. I love that. Well, I know we're coming to the end of our conversation here. Do you have any closing thoughts you want to share with everybody listening?

Sunaina Lobo (20:36)
You know, I did my closing thoughts earlier, which was all around hyper-personalization, reshaping the global talent landscape, ⁓ data-driven insights for HR, purpose cultures, and skills intelligence.

Rebecca Taylor (20:40)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's great. I think it's a really good sort of bullet point of, know, sort of where to put, where to focus your HR strategy for the next, probably even three, four five years, right? Not even just for this year. This is sort of a, it's a longer journey than just something that we can all kind of force to happen really quickly, right? Yeah. Well, Suni, thank you so much for being here. I really enjoyed this conversation and thank you to everybody who's listening and, you know, tune into our next episode and thank you for being here. Bye.

Sunaina Lobo (21:04)
long game.

Okay.