Podcast

The AI Implementation Strategy That Closes the Gap

Gemma Versace — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 23:04:59 GMT

Your AI implementation strategy is only as good as the talent you have to execute it.

This episode of Keep Moving Forward is adapted from a live webinar hosted in partnership with SmartBrief featuring Craig Stewart, senior vice president of product and engineering at Stord, Paola Jacobs, vice president of human resources at Stord, and Christine Park, chief people and AI transformation officer at Branch.

We talk about why executives report far more confidence in their organization's AI talent than the people doing the day-to-day work actually feel, what AI talent really means once you get past the headlines about scarcity and costs, and how three different leaders are closing that fluency gap from their own perspectives. We also cover why organizations using embedded AI teams, rather than internal staff alone or short-term contractors, are seeing meaningfully stronger outcomes.

The Enterprise AI Adoption Signal You Won't Find in a Dashboard

Gemma Versace — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 12:49:45 GMT

Most organizations track enterprise AI adoption by counting the numbers: logins, usage rates, automation percentages, hours saved. Porter Orr, Head of Enterprise AI at workplace benefits provider The Standard, watches for something else entirely: what they call the tool.

Why Better AI Governance Is Your Fastest Path to Scale

Gemma Versace — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 16:51:43 GMT

Most organizations treat AI governance like a speed bump. Something to get through before the real work starts.

Arnaud Grunwald on AI and Performance Management's Future

Gemma Versace — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 16:52:35 GMT

Most organizations collect more feedback than they know what to do with. Surveys, pulse checks, one-on-ones, performance reviews — the data exists. What rarely follows is evidence that any of it changed anything. Arnaud Grunwald has spent the better part of a decade working on that gap, and he has a clear view of why it's still so hard to close.

Arnaud is chief product officer at ClearCo, a talent platform covering the full employee lifecycle — from sourcing and hiring through performance, learning, and compensation — for more than 3,000 mid-market companies. He came to the role through Betterworks, where he led product for four years after selling his employee listening startup Hyphen to them. The through line across those chapters is the same problem: building systems that make feedback useful, not just frequent.

In this episode of Keep Moving Forward, Arnaud joins host Gemma Versace to talk about why the philosophy behind the annual performance review no longer holds up, what real AI adoption looks like when it reaches every team in the business, and what the next era of performance management is actually going to demand.

AI Literacy: Why Confidence ≠ Capability in Skill Assessment

Gemma Versace — Thu, 21 May 2026 20:13:43 GMT

Most people think they have a pretty good idea of what thay are capable of at work. What Dustin Clinard has found, repeatedly, is that they don’t. The data shows people tend to overestimate their communication skills and underestimate their analytical thinking. The leaders who are most confident about their self-awareness tend to score the worst.

Dustin is the CEO of Ignis AI, which produces verified, confidence-weighted skill profiles based on scenario-based observation rather than self-reporting. The research roots run through Harvard, Microsoft and the OECD.

On this episode of the Keep Moving Forward podcast, Dustin and I explore the consequences of making talent decisions based on such unreliable data and why the Ignis team decided to focus on developing verified, confidence-weighted skill profiles based on scenario-based observation rather than self-reporting.

Rethinking Hybrid Work: Agile and Intentional Workspaces

Gemma Versace — Wed, 06 May 2026 17:34:03 GMT

The return-to-office debate has been running for years, and most of it has been framed wrong.

When Experimentation Can't Outrun Accountability

Gemma Versace — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 15:15:39 GMT

For most tech leaders, a bad call means a missed milestone. For Kevin Andrews, it might mean a lot of people won’t get paid.

Kevin is president of PrismHR and CTO of Vensure Employer Solutions — two companies at the center of an HR and payroll network serving more than 160,000 small businesses and processing nearly $160 billion in payroll annually. Vensure has completed more than 100 acquisitions since 2018, and Kevin has been at the helm of integrating all of it. He co-founded his first company straight out of college, scaled it through a private equity roll-up, and eventually sold to Alight Solutions — a Blackstone-backed company — before helping take Alight public. He's been building and operating mission-critical platforms ever since.

In this episode of Keep Moving Forward, I met with Kevin to examine what responsible innovation looks like when the stakes are this concrete — where "move fast and break things" simply isn't a philosophy available to you. We covered AI governance, the limits of vibe coding at scale, the upskilling imperative, and the leadership principle he returns to again and again: give your people the tools, and then trust them.

How to Make Communication Skills Training Stick

Gemma Versace — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 14:42:12 GMT

Your team just completed a communication skills training session. The role play went well, everyone said it was valuable, and you left feeling like something had shifted.

Three weeks later, nothing has changed.

Esha Joshi has watched this play out at Fortune 100 and 500 companies for years. As co-founder and chief customer officer of Yoodli, an AI-powered communication and skills coaching platform, she works with sales, customer success, support, and solutions engineering teams on the conversations that define how they perform. Before Yoodli, she was a software engineer at Apple. She and her co-founder started the company out of the Allen AI Institute in Seattle after noticing the same problem everywhere they looked: brilliant people who couldn't get heard because they didn't have the confidence or training to speak up.

In this episode of Keep Moving Forward, Esha talks about why communication skills training rarely transfers to real work, what burnout taught her about the difference between being available and being effective, and what has to change structurally, not just culturally, for leaders to stop being the bottleneck in their own organizations.

Why 70% of AI's Value Has Nothing to Do With the Technology

Gemma Versace — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 17:31:09 GMT

Most organizations don't fail at transformation because they lack a strategy. They fail because nobody is willing to say out loud what's actually broken.

Victoria Pelletier, global vice president at Kyndryl and keynote speaker, has built her reputation on being exactly that person. Her approach to transformation is grounded not in telling executives what they want to hear, but in holding a mirror up to what needs to change, often before anyone else in the room is willing to.

On this episode of Keep Moving Forward, Victoria shares what she's learned leading large-scale change across some of the most complex environments in technology and professional services. Victoria has earned the title of CEO Whisperer for her ability to understand that the approach to transformation varies with goals and objectives. Getting people to buy into the process is a huge part of that. “You need to build belief in why we are doing this.”

Transformation stalls because organizations treat the human side of change as an afterthought. Getting that right requires belief-building, cultural alignment, and an honest assessment of who's actually in the right role. That’s what separates transformation that sticks from transformation that's all theater.

When AI Trains on Bad Data: The Hidden Risk

Gemma Versace — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 05:07:07 GMT

There's a project plan sitting in your enterprise planning system right now that looks clean. Gantt chart intact. Dates assigned. Resources named. The problem is, nobody's touched it since kickoff. The real plan — the one with every schedule slip, every scope change, every week of firefighting — lives in an Excel file on a project manager's laptop.

Richard Sonnenblick has watched this play out across industries. As chief data scientist at Planview, he sees what happens when organizations point AI at that pristine system of record: the model learns from optimistic fiction and delivers confident answers built on it.

"The LLM or the machine learning algorithm will have a false sense of perfection around how these plans were actually executed," he shared on Keep Moving Forward. "If you ask the LLM to make a plan based on my historical plans for this team, it's going to make the same mistakes those old plans made — because they were never updated to reflect reality."

Before Planview, Rich spent years in pharma and healthcare, where a decision built on bad data isn't a missed deadline. It's a wrong drug recommendation. That background sharpens his read on what the current AI moment actually demands of senior leaders: not more tech capability, but much better data hygiene.