New tools! Innovative pilots! Dazzling dashboards! And then … a nap. 

If you’re feeling a little snoozy or burned out on AI adoption, executive coach and talent development expert Naphtali Bryant is here to help. His new course, Accelerating AI Adoption: Leadership Strategies for Talent Development, is unlocked through May 14 to help you find the energy, tactics, and impact to lead with heart.

Naphtali starts from a clear premise: AI adoption doesn’t succeed or fail because of technology alone. It succeeds — or stalls — based on leadership behavior. His course covers the inspirational side of leadership (cultivating exploration, building bravery, and remaining centered amid turbulence) as well as the practical side — how to run successful pilots and sustain adoption in daily workflows.

An idea to use right away: Get the right feedback

When AI adoption loses speed, leaders often look first at the tool itself. Is it intuitive enough? Is it the right platform? Do people need more training? But as Naphtali explains in the course, a more revealing question is often this: What aren’t people saying yet?

People may be unsure whether struggling is acceptable. They may not know if their experience truly matters. And they may not feel confident that speaking up will lead to meaningful change.

When that uncertainty goes unaddressed, learning slows. Experimentation drops — not because people lack capability, but because they lack clarity and confidence.

How asking questions fuels faster AI adoption

When leaders ask for honest feedback on themselves and how they are leading, something important shifts. Bryant illustrates this with an example from his work with a financial services leader who was driving change. Instead of pushing harder, the leader shifted how he listened.

At the start of every monthly team meeting, he asked three simple questions about how the change was going:

• What helped?
• What got in the way?
• What should I adjust?

At first, responses were careful and surface-level. Over time, that changed. People stopped sugarcoating. They began naming what they actually needed. Within a quarter, the leader’s division was moving faster than others, and integrating AI in ways that drove immediate results — not because it had better tools, but because people trusted the process and believed their input mattered.

A simple framework: Ask, Align, Adjust

To make feedback practical and repeatable, Naphtali’s course offers a clear, three-part structure:

ASK: What are people actually experiencing?

Start with real, recent work — not hypotheticals or future plans. Helpful questions include:

• Where did you feel supported trying something new this month?
• Where did I unintentionally get in the way?
• What’s one thing that would help you try again next week?

These questions work because they keep feedback specific. They bring leadership behavior into the conversation. And they signal confidence without defensiveness.

ALIGN: What matters most right now?

Next, turn input into shared understanding by focusing the group on what matters most. Key questions include:

• Where are early signs of value showing up?
• Where are people getting stuck, and why?
• What decision or clarification does the team need?

Alignment reduces noise and focuses energy where it counts.

ADJUST: What will be done with what was heard?

This step determines credibility. Ask:

• What small change will be made this month based on this feedback?
• Who owns the adjustment, and how will progress be checked?
• What will be communicated so the team knows it was heard?

Public adjustment builds trust. People believe what they see leaders do — not what leaders say they’ll consider. Feedback without action erodes momentum faster than silence.

Final thoughts: Momentum is built through leadership, not pressure

AI adoption doesn’t require leaders to have all the answers. It requires creating the conditions where learning can happen quickly and safely.

That’s the throughline of Naphtali’s course. Sometimes, the fastest way to pick up speed is to pause, ask better questions, and show people that their voice truly matters.

Watch the course now: Accelerating AI Adoption: Leadership Strategies for Talent Development.

    

Hiring and onboarding are high-stakes activities at small businesses. The right person can drive success, while a bad fit can have significant negative impacts. 

But it’s tricky to know if you’re making the right hiring decisions, especially when recruiting isn’t your full-time job. There are many steps between identifying a hiring need and employing a fully productive team member, and each step is crucial to a successful hiring outcome. In order to help, LinkedIn has partnered with Gusto to bring you this guide to effective hiring and onboarding.

Use this post as a guide to help you make your next great hire and effectively integrate them into your team.

1. Write a clear, compelling job description

Job descriptions serve two main purposes: To communicate your role’s requirements and to encourage the most qualified candidates to apply.

Take the time to thoroughly assess your hiring needs, even if the role already exists within your organization. Your needs can change as your business — and employee skill sets — grow.

Start by answering a few questions:

• What will this person do? 
• What past accomplishments should candidates possess to ensure their success in this role?
• What are three-month, six-month, and one-year goals for the role?

Then consider why someone might want to work at your company. According to LinkedIn’s Talent Drivers survey, the top three priorities for employees at smaller businesses are excellent compensation and benefits, work-life balance, and flexible work arrangements. LinkedIn’s data also finds that people who choose to work for small businesses are more likely to prioritize a collaborative company culture and a company driven by values that match their own. Highlighting what your organization has to offer in these areas can help you underscore what makes your opportunity unique.

Consolidate all of this information into a clear, compelling job description that helps you attract and engage the right candidates to your organization. Keep in mind that most job seekers scan a job post rather than study it in detail. You can help your business stand out by keeping your job description brief. 

Pro tip: LinkedIn Hiring Pro can help you draft engaging job descriptions, invite passive candidates to apply for open jobs, and streamline application evaluation. Businesses that use generative AI are 45% more likely to report that they can fill open roles than businesses that did not use gen AI, yet LinkedIn research finds that only 58% of small businesses are using gen AI in their hiring process. Using the right tools can save you valuable time while helping ensure you hire the best candidate for your team.

2. Short-list qualified applicants

Nearly a third of U.S. small businesses that have tried to hire this year haven’t been able to find employees who are a good fit. Their top two reasons are that applicants didn’t have the right skills and that there weren’t enough applicants.

Traditional job boards typically provide static resumes, offering a limited view of a candidate’s work history. This can make it challenging to truly assess each candidate’s skills, culture fit, and potential for growth.

LinkedIn Profiles can offer a richer view to help you identify the most qualified candidates. LinkedIn goes beyond the resume with up-to-date profiles, endorsements, skills, and engagements. These deeper candidate insights give you a better perspective of who someone is, how they show up in a professional setting, and the unique skills and experience they bring to the table. A more holistic view enables you to truly understand a candidate’s potential impact on your team and company culture.

It’s all but guaranteed that you won’t find a candidate with the perfect resume, but a candidate’s growth potential can be a strong indicator of future success. While skills and experience are important, the ability to learn, adapt, and evolve is often more valuable in the long run. 

Look for candidates who demonstrate professional growth, whether through promotions, increasing responsibilities, or a history of taking on new challenges. Additionally, professional development certifications, participation in relevant conferences, or a commitment to continuous learning can signal a proactive approach to career growth and a desire to stay current in their field. These indicators suggest a candidate is looking for an opportunity where they can continuously contribute and grow.

3. Assess candidates

A repeatable hiring process is key to properly assessing each candidate and making informed hiring decisions. Your process may include a combination of application screening, interviews, skill assessments, reference checks, and background checks. Make sure that each stage has a clear goal and identify who will be responsible for conducting the evaluation. This clarity will help you build an efficient hiring timeline.

Use structured interviews, where you ask every candidate the same questions, to evaluate candidates on the skills and qualifications outlined in your job description. Taking notes throughout each interview can help you easily recall candidate responses when it’s time to make a decision, leading to better hiring outcomes.

Keep in mind that candidates are evaluating your opportunity as much as you’re evaluating them. Provide a positive candidate experience so they stay engaged in your recruitment process. For example, communicate clearly, be transparent about your process and timeline, and show respect for their time. Identifying the best candidate for your role only matters if they identify your organization as a place they’d want to work.

4. Build an attractive job offer

The job offer is your final opportunity to convince your top-choice candidate that your company is the best place for them to continue their career journey. Make it count by providing a detailed overview of what they’ll receive in return for their contributions.

In addition to salary, include employee benefits like paid time off, retirement benefits, and health insurance in your offer letter. These crucial, attractive components of the offer aren’t just for large enterprises. Nearly two-thirds of small business owners offer benefits to their employees. 

Your total compensation package doesn’t just impact your offer acceptance rate — it can impact employee retention as well. HR specialists like Gusto simplify benefits management so you can build an attractive compensation package for your team members.

Call your candidate to extend a verbal offer and share a little about why you hope they’ll accept. You should also use this time to discuss your compensation package, verify their start date, and answer any questions. Follow up with your written offer letter and give them a couple of days to respond. This demonstrates respect for their decision-making process and allows them to fully consider your opportunity.

5. Onboard your new hires

Onboarding serves as a critical transition period as your candidate becomes an employee — yet it’s often treated as an afterthought, with little more than a welcome email and a whirlwind of one-off messages. Take the time before you start hiring to build a 30-day plan that outlines what your new hire will learn, who they’ll meet, and what success looks like early on.

For example:

• Day 1: Complete new hire paperwork, conduct team introductions, and review goals
• Week 1: Learn about the organization’s history, team, culture, and products
• Week 2: Learn role-specific tools and processes
• Week 3: Begin employee development plan
• Week 4: Conduct 30-day check-in and send new hire satisfaction survey

While onboarding is a critical time to build early employee engagement, it’s also crucial that you maintain compliance. Many small business owners feel it’s risky to make mistakes in enrolling and making deductions for required benefits (67%) and ensuring proper worker classification (61%). HR specialists like Gusto have features built into their platform that ensure compliance so you can focus on building strong connections with your new team members.

Final thoughts: Maintain momentum to retain your team members

Hiring and onboarding can require a significant amount of time and effort — but it’s well worth it to have skilled team members who can push your business forward. Maintaining that effort to engage and retain talent can help ensure that your investment pays off.

Continue supporting your team members through regular feedback, professional development opportunities, and clear career progression paths. This long-term perspective on team member success can differentiate your small business as an employer of choice.

Hiring for small businesses is both critically important and extremely difficult, so LinkedIn has partnered with Gusto to offer you three months of free payroll services. These services will complement LinkedIn’s suite of hiring tools and help you grow your business. Click here to learn more about the Gusto offer.

    

Creating a company ready for the age of AI requires one often-overlooked foundation: A strong culture of learning and growth for employees. Teradata, a California-based global company with a leading autonomous AI and knowledge platform and over 5,000 employees, recognized that strengthening culture could also strengthen AI innovation. 

Rebecca Tinsley, vice president of global people experience and people enablement, led the work to evolve talent strategy with growth culture at the center. “We want to empower customers to make better decisions by unlocking the full potential of their data,” she says. “To do that, we need to empower the full potential of our people.” 

The team at Teradata crafted a vision for making the employee experience more connected, human, and impactful across every touchpoint from onboarding to ongoing learning opportunities. Together, they led a shift from disconnected talent functions to a holistic, dynamic, and people-first approach that helps employees take ownership of their learning and career growth, regardless of their role at the company.

Empathy kickstarts transformation 

The people leadership team's first move was deceptively simple: listen. The team reviewed engagement data, analyzed market signals, and conducted “empathy interview” conversations with a dozen employees representing a cross-section of perspectives — supporters, skeptics, and those disengaged. 

They asked open-ended questions about what was working, what was missing, and what would excite them. From those insights, the team designed a human-centered, agile talent strategy anchored in three principles.

1. Agility: a strategy that could flex as fast as the business evolves.
2. Shared Outcomes: alignment across all people functions under one vision.
3. Skills Focus: a future-ready workforce built on a skills-based foundation.
   

While some units, like consulting, had long used a skills-based approach to resourcing, the new goal was to build better systems, including talent architecture, for consistency across the enterprise. “We really wanted to be able to use skills data to inform everything we're doing, from workforce planning to development to internal mobility to compensation and benefits,” Rebecca says. 

The first priority was to create consistent expectations for AI skills. The team set a companywide foundation: every employee would understand AI at some level. Then they partnered with business units to personalize learning. “What our product team needs is completely different from what finance needs,” she explains.

To support upskilling, Teradata leveraged AI-powered tools like LinkedIn Learning’s personalized learning paths and AI coaching features. These tools enable “just-in-time learning,” helping employees access guidance whenever they need it.

Career development powers ongoing growth

If AI fluency and skills architecture are the foundation, career development is the engine that keeps employees engaged. To support ongoing development, Rebecca’s talent team introduced career workbooks, a mentoring portal, and a three-part framework to help employees make progress.

• Explore: reflect on their passions and opportunities to grow at the company.
• Build: develop skills and experiences so they are ready for the next step.
• Commit: take action toward career goals.

“We're giving employees the tools and the resources to be able to say, ‘This is what I want to do, and this is how I want to move forward,’” Rebecca says.  

Managers also have quarterly performance and development conversations with their team members, where they can leverage toolkit resources, including scripts, FAQs, and suggested talking points. The conversations drive clarity about current work and steps for career growth, ensuring that employees feel “seen, supported, and set up to be successful,” Rebecca says.

Managers at Teradata gather to share insights and best practices during monthly calls and ongoing webinars. Plus, managers who exemplify the company’s leadership pillars (Inspire, Transform, and Achieve) are highlighted with quarterly recognition.

Final thoughts: Three hallmarks of Teradata’s transformation

In a time of rapid and unpredictable change, growth culture is one of the most valuable assets a company can build. Teradata’s experience offers a clear example of how to make that happen, with three critical components shining through.

1. Mindset: psychological safety encourages innovation. The team’s empathy interviews with a diverse set of employees — including skeptics and disengaged voices — created opportunities for candid feedback to drive improvement. Manager toolkits and quarterly conversations reinforce trust, allowing ideas to flow more freely. Leadership pillars — Inspire, Transform, and Achieve — set expectations for inclusive behaviors, while recognition programs celebrate managers who raise the bar.
   
2. Practice: learning flows in daily work. Teradata embeds learning into everyday rhythms rather than isolating it in formal programs. AI-powered tools like LinkedIn Learning’s personalized paths and AI coaching provide just-in-time guidance for managers and employees, making development accessible during real-work scenarios.
   
3. System: shared values and rituals create measurable impact. The company’s leadership pillars and core principles, like being customer and market-driven, anchor decision making across the enterprise. Rituals like quarterly performance and development conversations and monthly manager development calls reinforce these values. Teradata’s double-digit increase in engagement scores on career-related questions signals that these shared practices drive tangible outcomes.

With a culture of growth, Rebecca and her team are ensuring the company has the right people with the right skills in the right places to deliver what customers need. “We’re going to continue investing in our people so they are energized, engaged, and ready to grow with us,” Rebecca says. “That’s how we’ll push our business transformation forward.”

    

The cybersecurity landscape is rapidly evolving. As artificial intelligence transforms both defense and attack strategies, organizations face a new reality: the demand for cybersecurity talent is outpacing supply at an unprecedented rate. According to LinkedIn data, companies hiring for cybersecurity skills are up 75% year-over-year, and job postings have surged 31%. Yet, the number of professionals adding cybersecurity to their profiles has grown only 4%. Translation: more jobs, fewer skilled people — the cybersecurity talent gap is widening.

This gap isn’t just a statistic. It’s a call to action for business leaders, IT professionals, and anyone looking to future-proof their career. The rise of AI means defenders must master new tools for threat detection, automation, and behavioral analysis, while attackers leverage AI for more sophisticated phishing, deepfakes, and scalable social engineering. The stakes have never been higher.

Introducing LinkedIn Learning Cybersecurity Training Labs powered by Hack The Box

Today’s world of cybersecurity requires preparing learners for real-world threats in safe learning environments. That’s why we are partnering with Hack The Box, the global leader in AI-powered cybersecurity readiness and upskilling software solutions, to launch Cybersecurity Training Labs. These labs place learners in simulated attack environments, providing practical, scenario-based skill development that goes far beyond theory. Learners don’t just read about cyber defense. They perform it, with interactive exercises and real-time feedback. Each course culminates in a summative, interactive exam where learners must demonstrate their skills in realistic scenarios. Paired with over 700 courses aligned to the NICE skills framework, learners can build and validate cybersecurity skills with confidence on LinkedIn Learning.

Hack The Box: Setting the Standard for Cyber Mastery

Hack The Box is recognized as a Forrester Wave Technology leader and has trained over 4.5 million cybersecurity analysts, delivering more than 19 million hours of training for red, blue, and purple teams. Their methodology is grounded in realism and gamification, offering threat-informed labs that simulate real-life attacks and update content within days of emerging threats.

Hands-on Labs Prepare Learners for Real Cyber Threats

Our new Cybersecurity Training Labs are designed for the most common and fastest-growing role in cybersecurity: the cybersecurity analyst. Whether you’re just starting out or advancing your expertise, these 11 modules cover the full spectrum of skills needed in today’s threat landscape. Each module features real-world hands-on labs and interactive exams, ensuring learners build practical, job-ready skills.

The 11 Cybersecurity Analyst Modules

1. Network Enumeration with Nmap
Learn to identify live systems, scan ports, and enumerate services using Nmap, which is essential for both attackers and defenders. Skill: Network scanning and enumeration.

2. Footprinting
Master enumeration principles to footprint and extract intelligence from common enterprise services like SMB, NFS, DNS, SMTP, IMAP/POP3, SNMP, MySQL/MSSQL, IPMI, FTP, and remote management protocols for Windows and Linux.

Skills: Infrastructure enumeration and foot printing, service-specific protocol enumeration, and analysis and actionable reporting.  

3. Information Gathering – Web Edition
Develop web reconnaissance skills, including WHOIS lookups, DNS analysis, subdomain discovery, and web fingerprinting. Skill: Web application reconnaissance.

4. Introduction to Network Traffic Analysis
Capture and analyze network traffic using tcpdump and Wireshark to detect anomalies and security issues. Skill: Network traffic analysis and packet inspection.

5. Intermediate Network Traffic Analysis
Detect and analyze advanced network attacks, including ARP spoofing, rogue access points, and application layer threats. Skill: Intrusion detection and advanced traffic analysis.

6. Vulnerability Assessment
Use Nessus and OpenVAS to scan for vulnerabilities, interpret results, and generate assessment reports. Skill: Vulnerability scanning and reporting.

7. Incident Handling Process
Follow the NIST incident handling lifecycle to identify, contain, eradicate, and recover from security incidents. Skill: Incident handling and lifecycle management.

8. Windows Event Logs and Finding Evil
Analyze Windows Event Logs and Sysmon data to detect suspicious activities like DLL hijacking and credential dumping. Skill: Endpoint analysis and intrusion detection.

9. Security Monitoring and SIEM Fundamentals
Understand SOC operations, SIEM systems, and build KQL queries for security monitoring using the Elastic Stack. Skill: Security monitoring and SIEM use case development.

10. Introduction to Threat Hunting and Hunting with Elastic
Learn threat hunting fundamentals, CTI basics, and conduct practical hunts using the Elastic Stack and real-world logs. Skill: Threat hunting and cyber threat intelligence. 

11. Understanding Log Sources and Investigating with Splunk
Investigate security incidents in Splunk, create detection searches, and analyze attacker behaviors using SPL. Skill: SIEM investigation and analytics-driven detection.

Ready to Upskill?

Explore the labs, build your skills, and join the next generation of cyber defenders.

Methodology 

Insights by Nishtha Batra

Cybersecurity demand refers to the number of companies and paid job postings seeking talent with the Cybersecurity skill across 13 markets — Australia, India, Singapore, Japan, Indonesia, Netherlands, United Kingdom, France, Spain, Germany, Brazil, Mexico, and the United States.

Member supply represents the number of professionals who explicitly added the Cybersecurity skill to their LinkedIn profiles. Growth in both supply and demand is measured by comparing the current one-year period (Oct 2024 - Sept 2025) with the previous year (Oct 2023 to Sept 2024).

Job data is sourced from LinkedIn job postings, while member skill data comes from LinkedIn member profile updates. Job postings missing company identifiers are excluded.

    

Global payments technology company Visa is trusted by millions around the world to move money securely and seamlessly. And with over 34,000 employees and nearly $40 billion in revenue, Visa isn’t just moving money — they are moving at the pace of people and technology everywhere.

Visa is navigating the evolving payments landscape, where customers across more than 200 countries and territories expect the company to keep up with every way to pay, whether they are clicking, tapping, swiping, or entering card numbers online. That complexity requires Visa to combine technical innovation, adaptability, and security to safeguard its customers and their data.

Visa’s leadership recognized that staying ahead meant investing in its people as much as in its technology.

Read on to learn how Visa scaled AI adoption through peer-to-peer learning, role-specific AI upskilling, and a culture of experimentation to drive meaningful business outcomes — and what other companies can learn from their approach.

Empowering employees to scale AI innovation

Visa has been an AI leader for decades, using AI models to strengthen identity verification and fraud detection. But when generative AI emerged in 2022, the company saw an opportunity to empower every employee to use AI in their day-to-day work.

“AI is in our DNA as a company,” says Jeremy Broome, global head of talent at Visa. “We’ve always worked with big models, data and algorithms. That meant we had to stay at the forefront of scaling and leveraging AI as quickly as possible.”

To advance their AI maturity, Visa focused internal transformation on two key areas: empowering employees to write better AI prompts and develop AI agents. To enable this transformation, Visa needed to shift employees’ view of AI from a future skill to a present-day capability.

Shifting employee mindsets about AI

Visa’s talent team started by reframing AI from a niche technical skill to a core capability for every employee. The goal wasn’t to turn everyone into engineers, but to help people see how AI could amplify their impact, no matter what their role.

“Where does human capability add value now?” Jeremy asks. “AI enables us to get faster answers, but to succeed, we need people to ask the right questions. We need to maximize the unique contributions our people make to Visa.”

To accelerate human capability, Visa leaned on clear leadership commitment to AI, plus setting organization-wide goals for adoption.

Visa’s top executives model regular AI use in their own work. “I’ve been in meetings where our leaders have said, ‘Come and sit here. I'll show you the prompt I'm writing to get this information,’” Jeremy says. In addition, Visa’s most senior leaders are leading the charge on AI adoption, encouraging Visa employees to explore, experiment, and apply AI to their roles.

Visa also has created a required, organization-wide generative AI certificate-based program leveraging LinkedIn Learning, including courses like Prompt Engineering for Generative AI and Responsible AI: Principles and Practical Applications, with a goal of certifying 90% of employees in generative AI skills by the end of 2026.

Advancing AI literacy across talent, sales, and product

Visa tapped departments to lead in both innovation and change management. In particular, three departments — talent, sales, and product and tech — each led the way in showing how AI could drive performance and growth.

Talent team: Visa has leveraged AI to help employees discover internal opportunities, personalize learning paths, and solve real business problems. To do so, they focused on building a companywide skills plan, role‑based learning pathways, and AI‑powered skills agents that surface gaps and recommend actions. In parallel, employees are taking the initiative to build their own agents — both code and no‑code — to solve workflow problems and align with business goals. Examples include agents that align business OKRs with day‑to‑day work, resource‑finder agents that guide employees to the right content and experts, learning‑assist agents that coach employees through new skills, and answer bots that help teams safely adopt new generative AI tools.

The company is also modernizing its approach to talent management. Visa’s move from the traditional, static job architecture to a more dynamic, AI-enabled talent architecture is allowing their talent and L&D teams to proactively find and address skills gaps, better align recruitment and career development with the organization’s open roles, and create more internal pathways for employees.

Sales team: AI has helped the sales team shift from selling a single value proposition to more than 200 tailored pitches that reflect Visa’s diverse product portfolio. Sales teammates can now practice their pitches in a safe space, receive automated, AI-driven feedback, and build confidence without fear of judgment.

Jeremy also sees an opportunity for AI to improve client care and customer success. Visa is exploring how using AI agents can help customer success managers provide more timely, accurate answers to customer questions and help clients get more value from Visa products.

Product and tech teams: Visa’s product and tech teams partnered with talent and learning functions to improve employee development. They are experimenting with internal AI-powered objective and key result (OKR) agents — digital assistants designed to track progress, set goals, and simplify performance management. These agents look to help employees track progress, set goals, and stay aligned with business priorities. Managers will get real-time data and insights for better conversations, while learning teams use agents to proactively spot and close skill gaps before they slow employees’ growth. 

By developing AI fluency internally, Visa positioned itself to innovate faster for customers externally. The company recently introduced agentic commerce, enabling customers to make purchases and resolve payment disputes through emerging channels like chatbots and digital agents. Behind the scenes, every Visa engineer is leveraging generative AI tools to write code more efficiently and accelerate the development of AI agents that power these new agentic commerce experiences.

The company’s AI rollout across the talent, sales, product and tech teams has provided a roadmap for empowering employees to apply AI skills within their daily work and create real business outcomes, no matter where they sit in the organization.

Peer learning and manager enablement

Visa’s AI success wasn’t just about investing in tools but investing in its people. The company invested in systems and practices that made learning scalable, social, and strategic, including:

• Peer-to-peer learning: Employees were encouraged to share what they learned within their functional departments and scale what worked. Many built their own AI agents and shared them with colleagues. “When people both have AI tools and examples of colleagues using AI within their functions, they find a path very quickly,” Jeremy says.
• Embedded enablement: Learning was delivered in the flow of work and department-specific upskilling, not in isolated L&D programs. This helped employees apply new skills in real time.
• A safe sandbox: Visa provided controlled environments for experimentation, including mini hackathons and internal events to encourage learning and cross-functional collaboration. “It's vital to get employees excited about how they can use AI to more efficiently and effectively achieve results. That helps them get over any AI paralysis or fear,’” Jeremy says.
• Manager support: Using OKR agents and other generative AI tools, leaders were equipped to better understand their team’s current skills and identify and close capability gaps. This helped align AI upskilling with both individual career growth and broader business strategy.
• Strong governance: Visa took a security-first approach to AI. Compliance training, keeping a human in the loop, and using a governance committee to validate data, security, and Visa’s AI models ensure employees use the technology safely. “Humans make decisions. AI doesn't make decisions, it makes recommendations,” Jeremy says. “AI can help, but ultimately human accountability is absolutely critical.”

Together, these practices have created a foundation for responsible AI adoption — one that empowers employees to lead, learn, and innovate.

Measurable outcomes

Visa’s investment in AI upskilling has delivered tangible results:

• Sales performance: Visa’s use of AI-powered coaching has led to a 78% increase in seller confidence when pitching Visa products, with 83% of sales leaders reporting a clear value when their teams used AI-powered practice tools.
• Enhanced productivity: Product and tech teams are more productive: AI has improved output per person, lines of code generated, and accelerated project delivery – examples include 84% of its coders using generative AI to write code and realizing nearly 20% efficiency gains in tech operations.
• Talent assessment: Visa has leveraged AI to evolve how they evaluate early-career candidates to a more skills-based and data-driven approach, focusing on lateral thinking, critical assessment, and the ability to ask good questions.
• AI use: Nearly 90% of Visa employees with AI access use it every week — and many employees use it several times a day — with functions like sales, product, finance and technology leading the way.
• Learning engagement: Employees are actively building skills in generative AI, prompt engineering, and data science — alongside leadership and communication — showing a balanced focus on technical and human-centered growth.
• Increased employee confidence leveraging AI: Early data shows that since Visa began their targeted push around AI upskilling, they have seen a 2x increase in employee confidence using AI.

These outcomes reflect Visa’s holistic approach to AI not just as a technology, but as a catalyst for performance and innovation.

Final thoughts

For organizations beginning their own AI journey, the first step isn’t about having all the answers, but setting up the right systems and conditions for continuous AI upskilling. Start by asking:

• What tools are already available?
• Where are employees already using AI in their workflows?
• How can managers support learning and experimentation?
• How can AI create efficiencies and results in each specific department in our organization?

One of the most powerful ways to scale AI is through peer learning, giving employees the space and support to share knowledge. “That is a place where every organization can start,” Jeremy says.

Visa’s story proves that progress in AI starts with people: confident, capable employees who know how to turn technology into business results and serve Visa cardholders everywhere. The companies that succeed in this new era of work won’t only do so because of technology, but by empowering employees to leverage AI to both grow their careers — and drive meaningful business outcomes.

    

Across the UK, France, Germany, and the Netherlands, up to 49% of CPOs and HR leaders list scaling AI adoption as a top strategic priority — marking a decisive shift from experimentation to execution across EMEA. (YouGov, 2025).  

AI is already transforming how organisations hire, engage, and develop talent, but adoption without trust, compliance, and workforce readiness risks eroding confidence before value is realised. Across the UK, France, Germany, and the Netherlands, adoption pace, workforce confidence, and readiness remain inconsistent. 

Artificial intelligence is no longer a futuristic concept for HR — it’s here, transforming how organisations across EMEA hire, engage, and develop their people. Yet even as leaders look to scale its impact, the pathway to an agentic future isn’t just about technology. It’s about trust, readiness, and how effective HR, IT, and other business functions move together to embed responsible innovation. 

Across the UK, France, Germany, and the Netherlands, HR leaders recognise that the agentic future will define competitive advantage — but their pace of adoption, workforce confidence, and readiness to operationalise AI vary. 

Scaling adoption requires leadership readiness and supported upskilling 

Technology adoption isn’t a simple exercise — it’s a cultural transformation that demands visible leadership. CHRO and Talent leaders must actively champion change, setting the tone and direction for how their functions and the wider organisation embrace the agentic future.  

The Workplace Learning Report 2024 highlights that AI literacy is among the top learning priorities for HR, alongside leadership and data fluency, but less than 40% of EMEA HR leaders listed ‘AI & Tech Literacy’ in the top three skills needed. to lead their organisations forward. To unlock transformation at scale, leaders must therefore treat AI readiness as a cultural skill, not a coding skill and encourage hands-on learning and upskilling. 

Here’s how forward-thinking organisations are putting this into practice. Saint-Gobain is using LinkedIn’s platform to upskill managers and talent teams as part of its digital transformation journey — empowering them to make data-driven, human-centered decisions. Meanwhile, Octopus Energy is embedding continuous learning and AI-enabled tools across its hiring processes to help recruiters focus on what matters most: candidate connection and quality of hire. 

Both examples show that when leaders prioritise AI literacy and upskilling, scaled adoption follows. 

AI is no longer optional — but trust and literacy determine its value 

Across EMEA, enthusiasm to incorporate AI into processes is high while readiness remains uneven. (YouGov 2025 shows) Our research shows that 49% of UK HR leaders prioritise scaling AI, compared with 28% in Germany and France and 19% in the Netherlands. So, while some leaders are prioritising scaling AI, others are slower.  

As we try to determine why that is, lack of AI skills & literacy became an emerging trend we’ve seen. Our LinkedIn Talent Campaign 2025 finds that nearly three out of four respondents agreed that to be an effective HR leader they need to improve their AI literacy skills. The Global Talent Trends 2024 report also showed that ‘most organisations are curious and excited about AI’s potential but are stuck on how to make that potential a reality in the day-to-day of work.’ — which could explain why there is a slow climb to scaling AI for some regions.  

AI & HR technology deliver value only when people trust, understand and use it. CPO, CHRO and People leaders should invest in literacy and confidence as actively as infrastructure & tools, to ensure successful AI HR technology adoption. By prioritising literacy, governance, and transparency, they’ll turn adoption into empowerment — creating workplaces ready to thrive in the agentic era.  

Shared accountability between HR & IT functions is critical to scale with confidence

Building an agentic future requires HR and IT functions to move in lockstep. CPOs, CHROs and Talent leaders must learn the language of data models and architecture, while IT must recognise how technology choices influence workforce trust and culture. In the YouGov study, HR leaders in the UK and Germany strongly agreed HR–IT are going to work more closely together to support AI and workplace transformation. 

Barriers to progress: ROI pressure, skills gap, and change management 

Despite strong momentum, obstacles remain. According to YouGov 2025, organisations across EMEA face a range of barriers to achieving their priorities — from “struggling to show ROI on investment” in France (33%), to “a skills gap across the organisation” in the UK (38%), and “employees resistant to change” in Germany (31%). 

People leaders now need to demonstrate impact beyond speed — connecting AI initiatives to business KPIs such as quality of hire, retention, engagement, and workforce agility — so that AI in people functions is seen as a value driver, not just a cost-cutting tool. 

From vision to action: 5 steps for CPOs & Talent leaders to accelerate AI adoption 

1. Run an AI readiness audit: Assess where HR processes can benefit most from agentic technologies. Map each by impact vs. risk to identify ROI — including the full value of AI adoption in HR — and any literacy gaps that could contribute to barriers of progress. 

2. Invest in layered AI literacy:  

• Build foundations for HR — covering responsible data use, AI principles, and the fundamentals of interpreting AI‑driven insights.  
• Develop toolkits for leaders — provide guidance on coaching teams with AI tools, asking the right questions about data bias, and embedding responsible‑use checkpoints into decision‑making.  
• Provide micro‑learning for employees — focused on day‑to‑day use, from understanding and implementing AI‑assisted workflows to free up their time for higher‑value work. 

3. Create and support cross‑functional AI councils: Form dedicated groups that unite HR, IT, and Legal leaders to define responsible AI standards, oversee vendor due diligence, monitor the outcomes of using AI tools, and set up transparent governance frameworks. Ensure councils meet regularly to review progress, address risks, and communicate updates across the organisation to maintain trust and alignment. 

4. Communicate with a people‑first lens: Position the agentic future as empowering people through augmentation — helping them focus on higher‑value, more human work. Use transparent, storytelling‑driven communication to show how AI supports employees, strengthens their impact, and enhances collaboration, rather than viewing AI as a replacement for their role. Ensure that common questions are answered, and reassurance is felt throughout the organisation. 

5. Pilot and scale intentionally: Start with high‑impact, low‑risk use cases — such as interview scheduling, automating initial screening tasks, or reviewing candidate profiles. Track adoption, accuracy, and time‑to‑fill metrics to demonstrate tangible outcomes, and use proven cases to guide larger‑scale, enterprise‑wide implementation. 

LinkedIn’s approach: trusted, responsible AI for talent 

LinkedIn’s principle is people‑first: technology should empower, not replace. Our AI tools simplify workflows, reduce manual effort, and help organisations make faster, fairer hiring decisions — with transparency and human oversight at the core. 

LinkedIn Hiring Assistant (LIHA), the only AI agent for recruiters powered by the world’s most dynamic talent network, helps teams move faster while staying human‑led. It supports conversational intakes, candidate sourcing, applicant evaluation, and AI‑powered messaging — learning from recruiter actions to surface stronger matches and reduce busy work. The result: faster, higher‑quality hires and more time to focus on candidate and stakeholder relationships. 

AI‑Assisted Messages and AI‑Assisted Search further streamline hiring by automating early steps without losing personal touch or precision. Recruiters can quickly draft personalised outreach and discover candidates who meet nuanced criteria — including skills and experiences that may not appear on traditional profiles. 

Together, these innovations reflect LinkedIn’s Responsible AI Principles — ensuring every solution is transparent, fair, and rooted in human judgement. The goal is simple: to help talent leaders build the future workforce with confidence, speed, and trust. 

Conclusion: from pilots to people‑powered transformation 

Organisations that accelerate AI’s benefits will treat it as a people‑first evolution, not a technology-only project. AI adoption depends on governance, literacy, and collaboration, with CPOs & HR leaders at the helm. LinkedIn Insights 2025 shows that organisations that build both digital and human‑centric capabilities already lead in agility and retention. 

The next phase is moving from experimentation to enablement — embedding agentic technologies across the talent lifecycle with clear guardrails and shared accountability. That demands leadership commitment, strong HR–IT partnerships, and transparent communication that builds confidence. 

The organisations that truly accelerate the benefits of AI won’t treat it as a technological initiative alone. They’ll see it as a people‑first movement — one that builds confidence, capability, and cohesion across functions. With literacy, governance, and HR–IT partnership at the core, leaders across EMEA can move from pilots to enterprise‑scale impact — realising both performance and trust in equal measure. 

Sources 

LinkedIn Global Talent Trends 2024

LinkedIn Workplace Learning Report 2024

LinkedIn Hiring Assistant Product News 2025

LinkedIn Responsible AI Principles 

YouGov ‘Leading Through Change’ 2025 

LinkedIn Talent Campaign 2025

LinkedIn Platform Insights 2025 

Methodology 

Survey data 

LinkedIn’s Talent Campaign 2025

Research Date: 28.11.2024 - 18.12.2024. Issue Date: January 2025. 8,035 HR professionals & talent acquisition leaders across the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Ireland, the Netherlands, Italy, and Sweden (18+) Consumer and Global HR Professionals Research: This research was conducted by Censuswide. 

YouGov ‘Leading Through Change’ 2025 

Research Date: 9.07.25– 29.07.2025. 883 C-level HR leaders (Chief Human Resources Officers, Chief People Officers, Chief Talent Officers) from companies with 500+ employees globally. 

LinkedIn Platform Insights 2025 

All data reflects aggregated LinkedIn member activity as of August 2025. Behavioral insights for this report were derived from the billions of data points generated by 1 billion members, 14 million jobs, and 5 million profile updates per minute.  

    

Last fall, I sat in a conference room at Talent Connect 2024 surrounded by senior recruitment leaders digging into a discussion about the impact of artificial intelligence. AI is no longer new and many leaders are curious and experimenting but most are still early on their adoption journey. 

One CEO sat in that room, surrounded by arid desert, and expressed genuine fear. “This isn’t great,” he said. “We are all going to be replaced by technology and I’m going to have to significantly reduce my workforce. I’m no tech guy and I don’t really understand what’s going on right now.”

The conversation in the room shifted to one of concern, focusing on what will be left behind and the threat of change. I sat back and watched it play out, until eventually another chief executive stepped up with a far more optimistic take. She talked about the power of the recruitment industry to materially change people’s lives, at a time when employment dominates at least a third of our lives and Gen Z is looking to switch roles every two years. 

“We have never been more needed,” she said. “We can sit back, or we can embrace the opportunity to redefine ourselves and our value proposition.”

The truth is the real tension in that room is not about technology but about the reinvention of what it means to be a recruiter. And that’s because we now live in a world where the pace of change is such that even if we’re not changing jobs, our jobs are changing on us. We know that 70% of the skills that were needed for the average job in 2015 are going to be different by 2030, so we need to change the way we hire. And skills need to be at the heart of that.

Skills have to be the new currency

In our current knowledge-based economy, hiring decisions have been centered on formal education and past job titles, with both of those serving as a proxy for what someone might be able to do.

But as we move into what Aneesh Raman, LinkedIn’s chief economic opportunity officer, calls the innovation age, computers will know so much that technical skills will no longer be what matters. Instead, workers will need attributes like creativity, curiosity, and courage to stand out, and those can’t be judged so easily by past accomplishments.

My son has just sat his 11-plus exams to get into high school, and he asked me the other day about the skills he’s going to need to get a good job and build a successful career. He’s a smart boy but I told him that what will set him apart will be his ability to have good human conversations, to be relatable, compassionate, and communicative.

Those are the skills that the future recruiter will have to identify because in an era of unending transformation businesses will be looking for agile talent that can be reskilled and upskilled to meet demand.

Skills-first hiring isn’t simply an industry trend, it’s the new competitive advantage. We don’t know the jobs of the future yet but we do know the skills they’re going to require.

Widening the aperture

Skills-first hiring means thinking more creatively and casting the net wider. Not only does it hold the key to accessing the talent of tomorrow, it also has the potential to unlock the reality of far more inclusive workplaces.

By focusing on an employee’s skills and abilities, rather than their work history, recruiters can add up to 20 times more qualified workers to employer talent pools. Skills-first hiring also democratizes access to jobs, potentially increasing the talent pool of workers without degrees by 9% more than it does the pool of workers with degrees. And in jobs where women are currently underrepresented, a skills-first approach can increase the proportion of women in candidate pools 24% more than it would for men.

When emerging tech is such a big focus for hiring managers, the ability to zero in AI skills is particularly relevant. Our data shows 71% of leaders would rather hire a less experienced candidate with AI skills than a more experienced candidate without them.

We can see skills-first hiring already happening: The share of paid job posts on LinkedIn that didn’t require a degree jumped 16% between 2020 and 2023. Making a good hire requires far more attention to potential rather than past pedigree: 93% of recruiting professionals now recognize that accurately assessing a candidate’s skills is crucial for improving quality of hire.

If you’re not hiring for adaptability, you’re hiring for obsolescence.

Becoming talent strategists

Skills-based hiring isn’t easy and there is no doubt that businesses need help unlocking fresh strategies and tools. The good news is that AI can help recruiters analyze CVs for skills, automate skills assessments, remove bias from hiring processes, standardize interviews, and much more. In fact, a quarter of recruiters already using AI tools say they are using time saved to focus on skill assessments.

We also know that companies with the most skills-based searches are 12% more likely to make a quality hire, compared with those with no skills-based searches. By focusing on what candidates can do, rather than what they’ve done, skills-first approaches uncover new potential.

In this kind of market, if all recruiters have access to the same candidates it will be the recruitment teams that can lean on data and insights that will stand out as talent strategists. The ability to tell a business that they won’t find what they’re looking for unless they look two degrees to the left or right is what will set firms apart.

Final thoughts

When we talk about tech transformation, it is easy to focus on what is going to be left behind. But we need to reframe those conversations. When I started as a recruiter 25 years ago, it was all about relationships — now standing out requires both technology and touch.

Skills-first hiring is going to be critical in a rapidly shifting economy. Those able to seize the opportunity now have the tools to take recruitment to the next level. 

    

The biggest threat for companies today is the status quo. 

AI is reshaping work in real time, yet many organizations are still moving at yesterday’s pace. 

The top challenge is whether organizations can see skills shifting fast enough to respond. According to new LinkedIn research, 90% of chief people officers say they need real-time visibility into skills. They want to know what their teams can do today, what they’ll need tomorrow, and how to help employees move from here to there. Employees are asking for the same thing in different words: clear guidance on the best goals to set and skills to master for career momentum.

That’s why today I’m excited to share that LinkedIn Learning Career Hub is now available globally — the only career development platform powered by your talent architecture and real-time insights from the world’s most dynamic talent network.

When you connect LinkedIn’s unique skills intelligence with career pathing, something powerful happens. With visibility into how skills and careers are shifting across a billion professionals, leaders can mobilize talent faster and with confidence. Employees gain a clear view of where they can go — and how to start building toward it. Together, that combination becomes the engine of skills agility.

What customers are saying

We’ve been adding career development capabilities to LinkedIn Learning over several years, and we’ve seen inspiring results. Customers already see employees developing AI skills at a rate 3.4x faster compared to those without it. And customers who use career features see employees learning 5x faster. They’re also achieving 20% higher internal mobility and 22% longer employee tenure.

In recent months, we’ve been in the trenches with over a dozen enterprise companies around the world, working with them on how best to deliver value. Early adopters shared that they’re cutting down the time and complexity of their talent architecture work, with flexible uploads and LinkedIn-powered suggestions providing a fast starting point. They’re excited to bring clearer career paths directly to employees, supporting improved retention as employees grow with the business.

What’s new: skills intelligence to close skill gaps and fuel workforce agility

With Career Hub, we’re putting a stake in the ground as a career development platform. But it’s also worth noting that this platform is built on the foundations our customers already rely on:

Trusted expertise. High-quality courses, hands-on practice, and credentials from real experts ensure every skill is relevant and reliable.

Faster skill growth. Personalized experiences, like AI-powered coaching and role play, accelerate learning for employees, while giving leaders the data to measure impact.

Here are the new launch features built on that foundation:

• Intelligent Talent Architecture customization powered by LinkedIn insights
• AI Role Play customization and reporting for organizations
• HCM integration to seamlessly ingest your talent architecture (plus, employee profiles coming soon, starting with Workday)
• Trending Skills insights to compare your employees’ skills to peer benchmarks and highlight the fastest-growing skills in the market to power your jobs-to-skill architecture
• Enhanced reporting on career and internal mobility insights, showing employee goal breakdowns, progress towards those goals, and the roles employees are interested in moving to
• Revamped employee and admin experience, centered on career growth
• And projects and gigs coming next year

Watch a video about what to expect

What makes Career Hub different 

LinkedIn Learning Career Hub is uniquely suited for customers who are reimagining their talent strategies for an entirely new world of work. The platform offers four key areas of strength:

Unmatched skills intelligence: Career Hub draws on data and insights from LinkedIn’s Economic Graph, with deep understanding of the world’s professionals, including data from 1 billion careers, more than 500 million skills added to LinkedIn profiles each year, and 5 million profile updates per minute. This is how Career Hub keeps talent architectures current, connects evolving roles to the skills they require, and powers personalization for the employee experience.

Enterprise scale and integration: By connecting with LinkedIn Recruiter and fitting into your existing systems, Career Hub delivers value across HR, learning, and talent without disrupting workflows.

Enterprise-grade trust: Built with Microsoft’s Responsible AI principles, Career Hub gives companies confidence to adopt AI responsibly and at scale.

Meets employees where they are: Powered by LinkedIn, where employees already grow their careers and engage with learning, Career Hub uses employees’ existing skills to personalize development from the start.

Our charter customers are already finding value

Here are two stories we’ve heard from our early charter customers.

Tripadvisor: Boosting Retention Through Transparent Career Paths  

Bree Sykes is the senior learning and organizational development lead at the Tripadvisor Group, supporting multiple brands — including Tripadvisor, TheFork, and Viator — with unique needs and cultures. Her challenge is aligning these diverse teams and all their stakeholders under a single organizational development strategy and getting to the right approvals. 

“We’ve talked about building a job-to-skills map,” she says, “but it felt insurmountable.” Career Hub gave Bree and her team a head start by generating job descriptions and skill recommendations from LinkedIn data with just a simple CSV upload of role titles.

By leveraging LinkedIn’s Intelligent Talent Architecture, Tripadvisor streamlined job-to-skills mapping across more than 2,500 global employees, aligning roles and careers for diverse brands under one global strategy. 

“Career Hub allows us to bring transparent career paths directly to employees,” Bree says. “An up-to-date talent architecture means better employee career development plans — and better retention when employees are learning and growing along with the business.”

From Spreadsheets to Skills-Based Architecture: LinkedIn’s Career Hub Journey 

Julie Lyon, an HRIS leader at LinkedIn, faced fragmented talent architecture with scattered spreadsheets and inconsistent job descriptions. By combining Intelligent Talent Architecture and Career Hub, her team reduced manual administrative work, integrated with core HR systems, and aligned role data to business needs. “The integration is absolutely making it easier on our team to scale this work. Rather than navigating a ton of disparate CSV files, we can manage it all in one place — our HR system of truth,” she says.

LinkedIn is piloting Career Hub with the strategic finance, comms, and content teams, leveraging tools like CSV file uploads and Workday integration. The results? Transparent career paths, personalized development plans, and reduced administrative work. Employees across LinkedIn are actively testing Role Guides, Next Role Explorer, Career Goal Setting, and AI-powered Learning Plans — giving them clearer visibility into growth opportunities and tailored development paths. LinkedIn’s success proves Intelligent Talent Architecture and Career Hub can scale impact, streamline processes, and empower employees to drive career growth.

What’s next for Career Hub

We have loved seeing how early adopters are using Career Hub to create more agile, future-ready workforces — and how clarity around internal career paths is transforming employee development. 

This launch is an important milestone — and only the beginning. We’re building toward a future where Career Hub scales globally, integrates seamlessly into the flow of work, and empowers employees with projects and gigs. We’re just getting started.

    

We’re in a hiring era defined by contradiction.

On the one hand, companies say they’re committed to equity and skills-based hiring. On the other, millions of workers are still getting screened out, not because they lack ability but because they don’t have a degree.

At this year’s Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity, LinkedIn chief economist Karin Kimbrough sat down with Michelle Hillman, chief campaign development officer at the Ad Council, in the LinkedIn Studio to talk about the systemic barriers that keep STARs (workers Skilled Through Alternative Routes) out of jobs they’re fully qualified to do. Their conversation was personal, focused, and rooted in a shared belief that changing the future of work starts with changing the way we define talent.

And it started with a simple question: What does it mean to tear the paper ceiling?

“It’s about removing invisible barriers that people don’t even realize are there,” says Michelle. These barriers are often embedded in job requirements that default to a four-year degree even when the role doesn’t actually demand one.

“We talk about opening up opportunities,” Karen explains, “but the structures aren’t always built to support that. When you require a college degree as your filter, you miss out on a huge population of talented people.”

The real-world cost of credential bias

More than 70 million workers in the U.S. don't have a bachelor's degree, but have gained valuable skills through alternative routes like military service, community college, apprenticeships, or on-the-job training. Yet a 2024 report from the Burning Glass Institute found that removing degree requirements resulted in just a 0.14 percent increase — roughly 1 in 700 — in hiring of candidates without degrees.

As Michelle points out in the conversation, changing a policy isn’t enough. “You have to change mindsets,” she says.

Karin adds that relying on degrees as a proxy for ability doesn’t make sense in today’s labor market. “A degree has been used as a shortcut for quality,” she says. “But it’s not always the best measure of someone’s capability, especially now that skills are evolving so quickly.”

What hiring leaders can do differently

Both leaders emphasized that shifting to skills-based hiring is not just about expanding access. It’s also about gaining a competitive edge. Companies that broaden their view of talent can tap into new perspectives, unlock innovation, and build teams that reflect the real world.

“This is about equity,” Michelle says, “but it’s also about business. Diverse experiences lead to better ideas, better products, better outcomes.”

So how can leaders begin to make the shift?

1. Start by auditing job descriptions and removing degree requirements that aren’t necessary. 
2. Go beyond traditional resumes and think critically about how to assess real-world experience. 
3. Equip hiring managers with the tools and training they need to evaluate candidates more fairly.

“We’ve got to equip people with the language and frameworks to support these decisions,” Karin says. “Because if we don’t, we’ll default back to the familiar even when it doesn’t serve us.”

Changing the narrative starts with visibility

The Ad Council’s Tear the Paper Ceiling campaign, created in partnership with Opportunity@Work, aims to do just that — make invisible barriers visible and give STARs a platform to be seen for their skills, not just their credentials.

“We wanted to spark awareness,” Michelle says. “But we also wanted to show what’s possible when you give people a shot.”

For hiring leaders the message is clear. Tearing the paper ceiling isn’t just about dropping degree requirements. It’s about rethinking what makes someone qualified and being open to talent that doesn’t follow the traditional path.

Watch the full conversation between Karin Kimbrough and Michelle Hillman to hear how two leaders are challenging outdated systems and helping reshape the future of hiring.

    

Siloed talent systems limit business’ competitive edge. Without a unified ecosystem, leaders can’t see or build the skills their workforce needs for the age of AI.

New York Life, one of the largest mutual life insurance companies in the U.S., recognized these challenges, as well as an opportunity to redirect resources to AI-driven innovation, and took action. Tina Gupta, head of talent management, led the organization through a shift — from stand-alone HR operations to a single, integrated talent ecosystem.

The transformation came at a pivotal moment for the 180-year-old company. The CEO’s call to “turn our 12,000 employees into 12,000 innovators” raised expectations and accountability across New York Life, making learning a shared mission.

Read on to learn how New York Life broke down silos, boosted employees’ AI skills and managers’ career coaching skills, and what lessons leaders can draw from their unified approach to talent management.

The challenge: disconnected systems, missed opportunities

When Tina joined New York Life, their talent acquisition and learning and development teams worked in silos.

Recruiting, learning, performance, and talent management weren’t fully integrated. This made it difficult for recruiters to connect internal talent to open opportunities, challenging for capability-building to align directly with enterprise priorities, and hard for managers to match employees’ aspirations with available roles. The overlap in processes revealed an opportunity: to bring greater cohesion, streamline efforts, and sharpen the overall focus of talent development.

An unintegrated data ecosystem also didn’t help. Tina says the company needed better data about what was working and what wasn’t around recruiting, learning, and mobility.

“I couldn't tell a really good, cohesive story about the organization,” she says. “There were pockets of information about who we have, what they do, what they've done before, what they aspire to do, but they were not in any way, shape, or form consistent, nor were they easy to pull together.”

Bridging these data gaps and internal silos was critical to understanding “how employees and leaders experience New York Life and making that experience feel more seamless and connected,” Tina says.

With this goal in mind, New York Life kicked off an internal transformation to support internal mobility, arm employees with future-ready skills, empower managers to lead with confidence, and tie performance and development to key business outcomes.

The process involved not just changing HR systems and practices but also embracing a new way of thinking.

Key mindset shift: from HR partner to business partner

To change what people do, you often have to change how people think.

That’s why a mindset shift was the first big change at New York Life. Instead of “doing what’s always been done,” Tina encouraged teams to pause and ask: “Are we advancing company strategy? Are our programs delivering real business results?”

“Be more than an HR person. Be a businessperson,” Tina says. “If it doesn’t move the needle for the business, stop doing it.”

Workforce, business, and technology disruptions call for HR leaders to become business-savvy transformation enablers, not just program managers. In today’s environment, a thriving workforce requires agility and alignment, not silos. By evolving into true partners to the business, HR leaders can drive change that creates more connected, collaborative, and high-performing organizations.

To meet this need, Tina led an effort to align the company’s talent strategy with its business strategy. HR’s new business mindset was key to advancing an innovation mindset across the company, of which one pillar centered around AI upskilling. New York Life launched an initiative called Ignite AI, which focused on aligning emerging technologies and skills with business needs.

Through Ignite AI, New York Life shows the real outcomes and impact organizations can deliver when they focus on enabling business priorities, work collaboratively with partners across the business and integrate their talent ecosystem.

Strategic programs: building capabilities and confidence

Stopping what didn’t work

Using data to guide their strategy, New York Life ended programs that didn’t show measurable value and refocused resources on high-impact strategies. This sent a message that results and continuous improvement — not tradition — drive culture.

“We used to run a number of programs that were highly costly, but I couldn’t tell you the ROI of those programs,” says Tina. “Running the same program for 10+ years without clear success measures is actually pretty unhealthy.”

After pausing multiple longstanding initiatives , including some development experiences for senior leaders and custom business trainings for individual departments within New York Life, teams turned their focus to two focused initiatives to drive company-wide priorities: leadership development and AI skills. 

Ignite AI: demystifying technology and accelerating results

New York Life built Ignite AI, a strategic organization-wide initiative to enable AI skills. The program focused on developing AI mindsets, skill sets, and tool sets internally, providing practical learning opportunities and support that encouraged responsible and creative AI use.

This program included a 90-day sprint designed to show employees how AI could boost productivity and decision-making while enabling AI adoption across New York Life. Key elements included:

• Watch parties for team-based learning and brainstorming.
• Hands-on sessions to test how AI could automate reports, analyze data, and streamline work.
• Role-specific consulting so employees at every level could see how AI applied to their jobs.
• An enterprise AI goal and employee recognition to measure and celebrate progress.
• Internal AI influencers across every department to help employees increase companywide AI adoption.

Throughout the 90 days, employees saw that AI could simplify work, save time, and help managers make smarter, data-driven decisions. Seventy-two percent of surveyed employees said AI tools could significantly boost their productivity, even before the full rollout. More than 6,000 employees participated in AI mindset courses, building a stronger culture of innovation.

Cross-departmental partnership was key to the program’s success. Gupta was explicit about shared leadership and developing a unified strategy: “HR didn’t go it alone. It was a close partnership with Don Vu, our head of data and AI. Working hand-in-hand with our technology team made all the difference.”

Don and Tina built the company’s AI upskilling strategy together and jointly presented it to leadership. “That gave more credibility to the work, the strategy, and the way that we wanted to build workforce agility by empowering employees at every level to embrace AI,” Tina says.

HR also partnered with the employee communications team to create branding that brought the company’s AI vision to life. When employees walked into New York Life’s offices, they saw Ignite AI visuals, received emails from leadership, and were tasked with discussing their AI plans with their managers, which made it clear AI was a strategic priority.

And externally, the company quoted Don Vu to put a face to the Ignite AI program to make investments in AI upskilling part of New York Life’s employer brand. “We’re empowering our people with secure, cutting-edge AI tools that elevate client, agent and employee experiences while transforming our business for the long term. This shift requires thoughtful change management and reimagining how we work to unlock AI’s full potential,” says Don Vu in a LinkedIn post from the company page.

This collaborative spirit is still alive within the company, Tina says. Her team stood up a talent council of cross-functional business leaders and key stakeholders who represent all of the departments across New York Life who together shape organization-wide talent priorities. Tina stresses that this isn’t a forum for presenting already baked ideas. Instead, it’s a safe space for dialogue, feedback, and shared decision-making.

This is one way to build the workforce agility leaders need — and create alignment that drives action.

The leap forward: future-ready leadership

New York Life also focused on empowering leaders, helping them embrace career development, skills agility, and mobility as business imperatives. These efforts are critical, since the 2025 LinkedIn Future of Recruiting Report revealed that employees at companies with high internal mobility rates stay 60% longer than those with lower rates.

To ensure change stuck, all managers and executives took part in leadership training. The curriculum focused on adaptability, leading through change, and turning strategy into action — to help them drive seamless, business-aligned learning across their teams. Program highlights:

• Equipped more than 1,000 managers with practical coaching and accountability tools.
• Fostered a unified leadership style built on transparency and communication.
• Accelerated the internal leadership pipeline, ensuring talent was ready for evolving business needs.

Managers often want to support their teams’ growth, but setting aside dedicated time for learning can be challenging. The top barriers standing in the way of career development are lack of time and resources; The 2025 LinkedIn Workplace Learning Report revealed that 50% of L&D pros surveyed say managers lack proper support to help employees upskill, and 45% of L&D pros say employees lacked support to upskill.

As AI continues to change work, continuous upskilling is becoming business-critical. To get managers on board, Tina says it’s important to clearly communicate what’s in it for them long term and develop tools, resources, and programs that support their growth as leaders.

“We’re helping management stay ahead of the curve in today’s disruptive age. We haven't hidden behind the fact that if you're not getting on board, others are,” she says. “But we're going to help you lean in.”

Systems and data: powering personalization

To create a future-ready workforce, organizations also need to build systems that help people succeed, including shared data and talent architecture.

New York Life used integrated platforms and invested in AI-enabled software to create a real-time view of skills, backgrounds, and aspirations, making workforce planning and targeted learning possible. They also launched an online career portal for employees to explore new roles, build skills, connect with mentors, and map out personalized career journeys.

Performance management became more agile, with frequent check-ins enhanced by AI tools making feedback timely and actionable. Custom GPTs sped up reviews and engagement analysis, giving leaders insights to keep teams focused and productive.

Using technology and data to drive change will allow New York Life to:

• Unify employee profiles and increase talent visibility
• Perform data-driven matching of internal talent to open opportunities, reducing recruiting costs and boosting retention.
• Create personalized development pathways to keep employees engaged and aligned with strategic goals.

These changes will help employees and managers gain clarity, support, and a sense of purpose toward their career goals. And this alignment is all the more vital for building innovation from within — the 2025 LinkedIn Workplace Learning report revealed that making progress toward their career goals is employees’ No. 1 motivation to learn.

Measurable outcomes

“We want to ensure that every moment an employee spends upskilling is on mission-critical, business-aligned skills like AI and leadership and management,” Tina says. “That’s why we’re modernizing learning and using AI to accelerate creation, improve quality, and make our upskilling more engaging.”

New York Life’s unified talent ecosystem, investments in leadership and AI upskilling have transformed the company in several ways: 

• Better data: New York Life has moved beyond traditional HR metrics to real-time skills data, internal mobility metrics and predictive workforce data. Insights such as time-to-fill for internal moves, success rates of internal placements, real-time skills inventories and gap analyses, along with 12– to 18-month talent demand forecasts and flight-risk indicators now inform the company’s global talent management strategy.
• Increased internal mobility: Today, New York Life fills 33% of all roles with internal candidates, indicating their investments in employee development and mobility are paying off.
• Improved skills agility: The talent team is monitoring how quickly employees gain in-demand skills for high-priority areas like AI. These insights will be used to inform the talent acquisition strategy, allowing the company to focus hiring on areas where the employees simply can’t upskill quickly enough.
• Stronger talent pipeline: New York Life can better track when employees are ready to advance to critical roles, which internal pipelines are thin because of upcoming retirements and better align external hiring with succession planning.
• Tangible companywide AI outcomes, including:
  • AI learning pathways embedded into onboarding for all employees, ensuring all new hires build AI skills from day one.
  • 20+ AI forums created for collaboration and experimentation, including office hours with experts, AI Discovery Days, showcases, AI demos, Company-wide and function-specific Teams channels, and more.
  • 15,000+ hours of AI learning completed by New York Life employees (with a particular focus on courses around building an on AI Mindset, Responsible AI, Copilot and ChatGPT Essentials).
    

Final thoughts

New York Life’s journey shows what’s possible when talent strategy is synonymous with business strategy. Tina Gupta’s advice for leaders is to start small, gather data, and scale up. “Prove the value of your ideas with data,” she says, “and measure the data to show the ROI of your programs.”

For those talent professionals still working at organizations where talent development and talent acquisition operate in siloed organizations, Tina says, “Go where the energy is. Help prove that you know how to have an impact. And then when it makes sense, you scale.”