Harry C. Osle, Principal and CHRO at The Hackett Group

Show Notes

Feeling the pressure of AI acceleration, talent gaps, and organizational change fatigue?

The Hackett Group® AI XPLR™ tool helps organizations identify and evaluate AI opportunities at the work-step level across the front, middle and back office – including agentic workflow designs and ROI forecast.

Discover the tool here: https://www.thehackettgroup.com/ai-xplr/

Harry Osle, Chief Human Resources Officer at The Hackett Group, offers a clear, practical roadmap.

With 1,400+ employees, 300 global contractors, and 28 years helping the world’s leading companies benchmark and transform talent, finance, and operations, Harry brings a rare, dual-lens perspective: advising global enterprises on transformation—while leading it inside his own organization.

Harry shares how HR’s role is shifting from “policy and support” to architecting change velocity ensuring organizations evolve internally fast enough to keep pace with the market. He breaks down what reskilling looks like in practice, how to design learning that people actually engage with, and why education must be treated as an ongoing investment, not a compliance checkbox.

Expect specifics: how Hackett gamified continuous learning, how they identify internal “momentum carriers” to champion AI adoption, and why their first AI automation was intentionally small—birthday and anniversary announcements—to test governance, trust, and workflow readiness before tackling more strategic functions.

Harry also shares a grounded framework for assessing AI use cases, evaluating build-vs-buy decisions, and sequencing change so teams don’t get overwhelmed. And he closes with a powerful reminder: the future of work may be digital—but thriving in it is deeply human.

Timestamps

[00:42] – Who The Hackett Group serves and how they use benchmarking + IP to drive transformation
[02:01] – The new challenge: external change velocity vs. internal readiness
[03:42] – Tactics to stay ahead: reskilling, daily learning, and education as strategic infrastructure
[05:33] – Designing learning that sticks: gamification, chapter pacing, and fresh curriculum
[08:28] – Harnessing internal enthusiasts as AI champions and cultural accelerators
[09:55] – Hackett’s AI Explorer: mapping where AI fits in real workflows
[12:04] – Starting small: automating birthday + anniversary workflows to test trust + governance
[14:56] – Why some AI pilots fail—and how to evaluate “right-sized” opportunities
[17:53] – Operational use cases where AI unlocks the fastest ROI
[19:39] – Harry’s closing insight: balancing tech progress with deeply human leadership

Takeaways

- HR’s role is to reduce the gap between external change and internal capability.Treat education as strategic infrastructure, not a cost center.

- Gamify and refresh learning to keep employees curious and engaged.

- Start AI with small, low-risk, high-volume workflows to build confidence and governance maturity.

- Identify internal “momentum builders” to champion change from within.

- The future of work is not only digital—it’s human-centered transformation at scale.

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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.”

Emily Fenech (00:34)
Welcome to HR Voices. your host, Emily Fenech and today I get to chat with Harry Osle the CHRO of the Hackett Group. Welcome, Harry.

Harry C Osle (00:44)
It's always a pleasure great to see you and hear your voice today. Thank you for joining. Well, I'm gonna join

Emily Fenech (00:48)
Yeah, thank you.

So Harry, the Hackett Group is a consulting firm that helps companies with benchmarking, best practice, digital transformations. I'm sure you've been very busy with AI lately, I'm guessing. So before we jump in, I was hoping you could give us a little bit more context on Hackett Group, your role as CHRO and the people that work there.

Harry C Osle (01:03)
Yes.

Absolutely, I helped start the company 28 years ago And we're considered a boutique intellectual property consultancy what that really means Emily is that we leverage our really deep intellectual property across all the disciplines HR payroll finance procurement and help companies drive to better performance consider us like a fitness coach or a business coach for for companies

Emily Fenech (01:43)
Well, when we think about the clients that you meet with, but also your team specifically, looking ahead, it's November, we're all thinking about 2026. I wanted to start by asking you, what is the biggest challenge that either your clients are coming to you with or that you're facing directly as a people leader at Hackett?

Harry C Osle (02:02)
I think the biggest ⁓ challenge that organizations are facing when we look at our client base and our own organization, ⁓ Emily, it's really around the change velocity. If you look at what's occurring in the marketplace, whether that's through digital transformation, evolution, or simply looking at AI as ⁓ a catalyst in its ability to change and redefine how you do work.

It's really ⁓ quite impressive. It can create both excitement and anxiety in our associates and in the business. Our job as CHRO individuals or individuals that lead talent is really to build confidence through education, through reskilling, through tools to help our associates change within that velocity and help the business change within that velocity. There's always kind of that adage around if the velocity of change

change externally is faster than the internal change or the ability for you to change internally then the end is near. our role as CHROs is to help the organization and the associates change and drive that velocity of change quicker.

Emily Fenech (03:19)
So what are some tactics for that? I I feel that myself personally within our team at All Voices, every time I go for dinner with friends, that's what we're talking about. Everything is moving so fast. So we have an audience here of people leaders. What are some tactics? Where do you even begin to sort of speed up internally so that those external velocity doesn't crush you?

Harry C Osle (03:42)
It's a great question. So think about your dinner that you just spoke about. When you went to dinner, you probably looked up the restaurant, you looked up reviews, you looked up how to get there faster, what are the directions to get there. All that is AI driven. And a lot of the things that we're doing today are going to be transformed through AI. So I got this question from one of our associates the other day, and I said, well, Harry, how do you keep up with that change? And I said, you read.

At least an hour at the beginning of the day just in fact I use chat GBT to send me the top five issues in in in human resources on a global scale on a global basis And send that to me every morning So I'm ahead of the game and what I'm looking at reading if I like one of the and it sends me links So if I like one of the articles I dig in deeper the reality is you have to be able to stay ahead by

educating yourself. Now, as a CHO of the organization, my responsibility to the 1,400 plus employees that, associates that we have, plus 300 or 400 of our contractors globally in eight different countries is to provide a platform for them to be able to 24-7 that they can help educate themselves as well, not only in AI, but in everything that we do for our client base, whether that's how to position, work a little bit better, how to be a little bit more

innovative, how to deliver in a faster, more efficient way. It's always incumbent upon the talent executive, CHRO if you want to call them up, the Chief People Officer, to make sure that there's an education platform that is available, that's available, and it is impactful for all your associates.

Emily Fenech (05:33)
Do you have any specifics on that and what that looks like? Like a knowledge base, a learning and development tool? what? Help us paint that picture.

Harry C Osle (05:42)
So there's knowledge-based tools that you can utilize. We do a lot of knowledge-based education. And what we also do is make sure that we also go through a process where we're testing through the different chapters. So we make it fun, making sure that you're gamifying the education is very, important these days. But as well as making sure that the topics aren't stale. What happens is that if you look at education,

⁓

in the past like a cost of doing business you're Right out of the gate you're behind because it's really an investment so one of the first things that I do when I speak to any any

talent executive or any human resource executive is ask them about their education process or education platforms. When they speak in terms of cost, I know that it's probably going to be a little bit of a tougher discussion. When we speak in terms of investment, Emily, then I'm speaking to an executive who understands that this has to be an evolution process, a platform that has to grow with the business,

a platform that must look at education and its curriculum to see if it's really stale. You have to stay at the pace. The toughest issue, and it's not an easy issue to address, Emily, is the fact that AI is changing so fast and the tools are being created so quickly that it's hard to stay ahead of some of these platforms and be able to educate in a given process. I think the most important thing is our ⁓

Are you providing that education? Are you gamifying that education so it makes it interesting to take the courses? And then also, what are you doing beyond your curriculum to help re-skill the individuals? And that's what it's going to take. It's really about re-skilling. Are there outside courses that you can take? is there outside talent that you can bring into the organization that will help

Emily Fenech (07:41)
Mm-hmm.

Harry C Osle (07:52)
drive this new way of thinking in a more positive way.

Emily Fenech (07:57)
Yeah.

I also liked the idea of harnessing internal talent, right? Like you said, some people, this will spark anxiety. For others, it sparks energy, curiosity, enthusiasm. you, you know, I bet if anyone listening thinks about their own organization, there's probably a few people that pop right to mind as, you know, the AI enthusiasts who are in the weeds, who are loving this, right? And how can you tap them to be a resource?

for the rest of your co-workers.

Harry C Osle (08:28)
exactly how do you utilize them to be a catalyst within the organization you have those those we'll call them athletes within the locker room that'll drive

Emily Fenech (08:33)
Okay.

Harry C Osle (08:41)
a ⁓ sense of urgency and a sense of competitiveness and a sense of can-do attitude. Those are the individuals you want to make sure that they're not going to know everything about the given subject. But they are going to be able to say, can learn about this together, we can drive this together. And that momentum, those momentum type of individuals or individuals that drive momentum are critical to the success of the organization really expanding beyond your current

capabilities.

Emily Fenech (09:12)
Yeah. And with the velocity being so fast, it's almost the optimistic take on that is that, you know, everyone's behind. So it's more about your, it's more about your mindset sometimes and your attitude, ⁓ your willingness to, jump in. No one is an expert is what I'm trying to say.

Harry C Osle (09:19)
That's right.

That is correct.

Not at this point. I mean there are experts. I mean we've become really really good. In fact, we have this tool that allows our clients to become experts kind of quickly. Let me kind of explain this a little bit because it's an AI tool, Emily, that allows you to look, it's called AI Explorer. And it's a tool that allows you to look at any process within any of the kind of enterprise.

Emily Fenech (09:34)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Harry C Osle (09:55)
functions. Let's take human resources. It can look at, can adjust your current recruiting process or you can start with our recruiting process and it can tell you at a work step level where AI might be a great fit. just given, let's just say you're an Oracle ACM platform or you have SAP or Workday or whatever. It'll tell you for those softwares what that work step, if there's an embedded

AI within that current version and if not Which typically there isn't it's more AI is more embedded across the process It'll tell you what areas of opportunity you may have to implement And I think in that process just think about that you're in a workshop You're kind of going through this you're recruiting it as nothing experts and you're seeing this in play That's part of the education process

that is where you start seeing, OK, I can see how this tool actually kind of works.

Emily Fenech (10:55)
Yeah, I can see that being incredibly helpful. mentioned for HR teams sitting down to map the employee flow, the employee experience, you know, from day one all the way through to exit, right?

Harry C Osle (11:03)
Exactly right.

Exactly, because

there's embedded AI within any platform. There's configurable AI, is that you can configure either using an AI tool within that platform. And then there's extended AI, which you can extend it beyond outside the walls of the ACM system. Any one of those are available to our clients and the audience today. The question becomes, really, where do you begin? How do you begin?

What are some of the first steps to take? And I think to answer that question, to answer my own question, I would say is to really start at the assessment piece. Where is the greatest opportunity for you and where you have critical mass and how is that opportunity going to be a solution through an AI tool?

Emily Fenech (11:55)
Mm-hmm. That's great advice. Have there been any use cases for your team, that you're thinking about some wins, some experiments that went well? Do you have anything that comes to mind for you?

Harry C Osle (12:04)
Yeah.

we experimented and some things didn't work and some others didn't work and the ones that didn't work. Our first thought that we assessed where we would have some areas of opportunity that were in our assessment that were easy to achieve.

So we wanted something that was easy to achieve, easy to implement, and that had some return on investment. And we came up with, you'll find this kind of routine, but birthday announcements and anniversary announcements. It was taking time. It was taking four or five, six hours a month of different individuals to get this done. And we solutioned this within a week.

and eliminated a lot of manual intervention and eliminated a lot of errors in that process and actually increased, very much increased engagement because now the announcements are timely, individuals can reach out directly to the employees on their birthdays and what have you. And I think that, just that simple task was a big eye opener for us.

we're gonna attack more of the upstream processes like in the recruitment process, in the comp process, in the skill, in the re-skilling or skills assessment process. We're gonna get beginning into all those. Now that we understand the components and how this kind of works, it's gonna be very, very key.

Emily Fenech (13:38)
I really like your example though, because I think when people say niche, that's what they mean. Like if it's taking time and someone's doing it and you know, it can be automated, like that's a win and it might be something minor, but that's a good place to start. And also a very low risk place to start. You know, it's internal.

Harry C Osle (13:44)
Yeah.

Yes, and it also.

And it also, Emily, allows us to test our governance. it allows us, you have to have a sense of understanding of the data that you have and where there's some personal information you can't be sharing, what have you. So it also tests your governance and your kind of the empathy really around how do you manage some of this data in a very ethical way.

So it really starts to test it at that level. And if you start thinking about that, I mean, and you look at it from an assessment perspective and starting small, I think those are the keys to success.

Emily Fenech (14:38)
Yeah, I saw something on your LinkedIn that was about like, there's been a lot of chatter lately about AI implementations being, so there's a data suggesting that those aren't effective. And I think the perception was, let's push back on that for a second, because it's not that the AI is less effective, right? It's the how of the implementation. Could you talk to me more about that, what you're seeing?

Harry C Osle (14:56)
Yes.

Yeah, it's almost like, let me put it in perspective, it's almost like a plumber, right? You have a plumber and you have a phenomenal plumber and you have a plumber that's that, that, that good. They're both good people to try to do the right thing, but one has better tools than the other. And that's what AI is. AI is a phenomenal tool. And how to utilize that tool is very, very key. There are some individuals who kind of raced into the AI arena and didn't

do their homework when it came to understanding the right governance, understanding the right policies and procedures in place. We're an IP-centric organization. We just can't be providing our intellectual property everywhere and into a large language model.

sharing that you have to be reasonable and very smart about how you are going to leverage your data. Especially when you speak about individuals personal information. So first and foremost, you have to have that government structure in place. It's not going to be perfect, they want. And those companies who are stating that they didn't get the bang for the buck and what have you, it might be true. And that's why I think.

that are going through a tool set in a process like AR Explorer is so key because it does identify your richest areas of opportunity. Now they may be very complex.

That's okay. But if you start staggering them and get to the point where you have less complexity with some return on investment, and you kind of circle those and you go after those, then great. Some other companies, their culture is not built that way. So it really depends on the company. Some cultures are around, let's go for the biggest bang for the buck. Even if it's complex, we'll learn through the process. That's good for them. So I go back to assessing, Emily, where are your greatest opportunities?

opportunities are across a dimension of processes, whether that's payroll, HR, what have you, finance, identifying that and then making a collective decision around what makes sense for your organization, that's key. Those organizations who did not get the biggest bang for the buck ran into it or ran into the situation without really having ⁓ a good governance model, without knowing the return on investment opportunities.

What happens is you lose cycle times and then the return is not there. So that's kind basic business 101.

Emily Fenech (17:30)
Yeah, I saw that MIT study that was making the rounds a while ago about the sort of lack of return on AI pilots. But one thing that stuck out most to me was just that where those pilots were and to your point about getting really precise about where's their return. The greatest return was in like the ops and admin use cases. Yet if you look at where the dollars were spent, they were all spent in sales and marketing. Where, but it's like, yeah.

Harry C Osle (17:53)
That's correct. Which is hard to measure kind of sometimes. let's

get out of human resources. Let's talk about, now tracks. Let's think about a construction company who goes through a number of RFPs and proposals. Those proposals cannot be that different from one project to another project. Let's just think about the 80 % of ingesting all these proposals that you have and saying,

Emily Fenech (18:01)
Yeah.

Harry C Osle (18:23)
Have this X company. Here's a square footage. Here's the size of the building Here's the kind of the architectural design that we want and adjusting that and it kind of creating a proposal right off the bat that proposal Typically will take a few months to create wherein this will take a few maybe a day in as much as creating the proposal kind of Refining the proposal and what happened. So just think in those terms when you speak then you

And you you nailed it is when you speak about kind of the operational side That's where the money is at if you can if you can speed that up and you can get one individual to Produce 11 proposals as compared to one individual producing two proposals You've really really increased the return on investment for that talent spent

Emily Fenech (19:17)
Absolutely right. I'd love to try out that tool sometime. Maybe you can maybe I can get the HR voices special. Try it out.

Harry C Osle (19:24)
We'll do it.

We'll spend another episode on that. That's episode number two. Yes.

Emily Fenech (19:29)
Yeah, episode number two. Well, it's been really

great talking with you, Harry. Do you have any sort of last words of advice that you want to share with HR listeners today?

Harry C Osle (19:39)
I would say that in my experience we're at a defining moment in HR where technology is really finally and truly delivering on the promise of evolutionary change. But we can't lose sight of the actual purpose.

The future of work isn't just really digital, it's really deeply human. So you have to balance between this incredible digital opportunity that we have and this tool that we have with the human aspect of it. So as CHROs, as HR executives, our legacy really is going to be measured on how well we help people thrive through this transformation. How well we help people, our associates, drive through this transformation and stay ahead of this

Velocity curve as well as the business see as HR executives and talent executives. We have two constituents We have our associates and the business and the balancing of those two things is always very very critical, but to me the being able to Understand this that this is an incredible moment of change and being able to help both our associates and the business drive to that change is very very key and it's an absolute

great time to be in human resource. Absolutely great time.

Emily Fenech (20:59)
Yeah, this is HR's moment.

Harry C Osle (21:01)
It is a thrice moment. You can't say it any better.

Emily Fenech (21:05)
Thanks for spending time with us today, Harry. I appreciate it.

Harry C Osle (21:08)
Emily, thank you so much for having me and I look forward to the next time I'll be able to speak with you. Thank you. Take care

Emily Fenech (21:14)
Take care.