HRchat Podcast
Listen to the HRchat Podcast by HR Gazette to get insights and tips from HR leaders, influencers and tech experts. Topics covered include HR Tech, HR, AI, Leadership, Talent, Recruitment, Employee Engagement, Recognition, Wellness, DEI, and Company Culture.
Hosted by Bill Banham, Pauline James, and other HR enthusiasts, the HRchat show publishes interviews with influencers, leaders, analysts, and those in the HR trenches 2-4 times each week.
The show is approaching 1000 episodes and past guests are from organizations including ADP, SAP, Ceridian, IBM, UPS, Deloitte Consulting LLP, Simon Sinek Inc, NASA, Gartner, SHRM, Government of Canada, Hacking HR, McLean & Company, UPS, Microsoft, Shopify, DisruptHR, McKinsey and Co, Virgin Pulse, Salesforce, Make-A-Wish Foundation, and Coca-Cola Beverages Company.
Want to be featured on the show? Learn more here.
Podcast Music Credit"Funky One"Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
HRchat Podcast
From Generative to Agentic: Reimagining People Practices Through AI with Kim Chaumillon
Kim Chaumillon believes HR leaders must champion AI adoption from the inside out. "HR goes first" isn't just her mantra—it's the foundation of effective organizational transformation. Drawing from 30 years of global HR experience, Kim reveals how she's reimagining traditional people practices through AI implementation at two different organizations where she serves as fractional Chief People Officer.
Kim's conversation with hosts Pauline James and David Creelman explores practical strategies for building AI fluency within HR teams, starting with curated use cases and ongoing experimentation. Kim distinguishes between leveraging existing solutions with embedded AI capabilities and developing bespoke applications—highlighting three key opportunities for custom solutions: automating repetitive tasks, creating disruptive capabilities, and developing "chief of staff" functionality that transforms how work gets managed.
What makes Kim's approach particularly effective is her focus on enablement rather than restriction. While addressing important governance and ethical considerations, she frames AI guidelines in terms of possibilities rather than limitations. This positive orientation accelerates adoption and fosters innovation while maintaining appropriate boundaries around confidential information and potential biases.
The discussion provides a compelling vision of AI as HR's historic opportunity. Just as finance led during the 2008 financial crisis and HR guided organizations through COVID-19, AI transformation offers HR leaders the chance to drive tremendous business value while fundamentally reimagining work. For those who have long sought "a seat at the table," AI implementation provides the perfect blend of business impact and people-centered innovation—so significant that Kim delayed her retirement to participate in this transformative period.
Ready to take your HR function from reactive to proactive? Connect with Kim on LinkedIn to continue the conversation about leading your organization's AI transformation journey.
Feature Your Brand on the HRchat Podcast
The HRchat show has had 100,000s of downloads and is frequently listed as one of the most popular global podcasts for HR pros, Talent execs and leaders. It is ranked in the top ten in the world based on traffic, social media followers, domain authority & freshness. The podcast is also ranked as the Best Canadian HR Podcast by FeedSpot and one of the top 10% most popular shows by Listen Score.
Want to share the story of how your business is helping to shape the world of work? We offer sponsored episodes, audio adverts, email campaigns, and a host of other options. Check out packages here.
Welcome to the HR Chat Show, one of the world's most downloaded and shared podcasts designed for HR pros, talent execs, tech enthusiasts and business leaders. For hundreds more episodes and what's new in the world of work, subscribe to the show, follow us on social media and visit hrgazettecom and visit hrgazettecom.
Speaker 2:Hello and welcome to the HR Chat Podcast. I'm Pauline James, founder and CEO of Anchor HR and associate editor of the HR Gazette. It's my pleasure to be your host. Along with David Krillman, CEO of Krillman Research, we're partnering with the HR Chat Podcast on a series to help HR professionals and leaders navigate AI's impact on organizations, jobs and people.
Speaker 3:In this episode we speak with Kim Chaumillon, a seasoned HR executive and forward-thinking fractional chief people officer. Kim brings over 30 years of global HR experience, with a passion for reinventing traditional people practices to support growth, adaptability and performance in fast-changing environments. Kim shares her proactive, hands-on approach to embedding AI in HR from championing HR goes first to curating practical use cases, to experimenting with agentic AI and even vibe-coding custom solutions. We explore how she's enabling her teams to develop AI fluency, fostering smart cross-functional partnerships and creating future-ready governance frameworks. Whether you're just starting to explore AI in HR or you're looking to deepen your impact, kim offers inspiring, actionable insights on how HR can and should lead the way.
Speaker 2:Kim, we're so pleased to have this time with you to hear your insights about how you, your team, your organization are leveraging AI. Can you tell us a little bit about your background and your current work?
Speaker 4:Yes, first of all, thanks for having me here and giving me the opportunity to share my experience. I have about 30 years of global HR experience, mostly in tech companies and in the latter half of my career, in executive leadership roles. Honestly, I've spent the second half of my career, I would say, throwing out the old HR playbook and rethinking how work gets done in more complex, fast-changing environments. I think I have some specialty around designing human-centered systems that really support organizations' performance, growth and adaptability. I currently serve as a fractional chief people officer for two companies. One is a smaller boutique professional services firm in the innovation space and the other is a tech company startup with cutting-edge hardware and software solutions for the connected device supply chain, particularly reverse logistics part for mobile phones, and I'm just really working to embed AI into our people practices and their business practices so that both the business and its people can thrive.
Speaker 3:So what has been your strategy about getting AI into HR, into what HR is doing?
Speaker 4:Well, I have. Anybody who's ever worked for me knows that I have a mantra, which is HR goes first. Whether it be rolling out a new performance management system or a new way of thinking about work, I always believe that HR goes first. So that is the place where I'm starting. Is that, in order for HR to be those who help guide the organization and I do think there is a pivotal role like there's lots of places that AI could sit in an organization, but it really my point of view is it should sit in HR to be driving this. But in order for us to drive it, we absolutely have to understand it and use it ourselves. So that's the first place where I've expected, required, enabled, supported the HR team to play with the tools since they first started coming out and then, because it's moving so fast, is continually trying to stay up with it. And that's my first place that I'm starting is our own adoption of it.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and just to dig a little bit deeper into HR going first, what does IT say when you say actually AI is something HR should be leading?
Speaker 4:I've always been fortunate to have a partner in IT. I look at it as a partnership. I feel that HR has two teams that we can commiserate with finance and IT, because we both live in the support world and we both live in a resource constrained world and if we're working together, I believe that it's the three-legged stool of people process and place that those three teams come together. So I've really tried to bring those people along to help them be more strategic, but also in a manipulative isn't the right word, but a self-interested way that they're not working against me. So it's like, hey, this is an opportunity for you to really add more value and in working together we can find a way to add more value to the business.
Speaker 3:So you said one of the first things you did is to get the HR professionals themselves involved in using AI. Can you tell me some of the specifics about how you got that happening?
Speaker 4:Because I understand sometimes the first barrier to something new, like I'm personally wired as an early adopter and my number one strength in StrengthsFinder is learner. I value learning all day, all along, and I realize not everyone's wired that way. So I try to curate the most important things and then share what I'm doing with it and give people use cases. So then, like, go, go, try to, instead of writing that policy by hand, why don't you ask you know when generative AI was popular, why don't you try that? Or hey, I think this needs to be reworked. Would you go prompt AI to ask for its opinion about what you know? Like? So I try to give use cases and try to point people to tools because I'm leading edge in terms of trying them out and I know that that's I've heard a lot with AI is the obstacle is people. Maybe they tried out ChatGPT two years ago and it gave some weird response and they never went back. Or they tried a couple prompts and it didn't work and they didn't go back. And yet this technology is moving so fast that it works better every week that you try it. So to try to encourage people to keep going back out at it. That's the main thing.
Speaker 4:And then back to your IT question, trying to be a little disruptive, because what happens in organizations right now is not a lot of systems are approved for use within the company, but I have agreed to pay for people's memberships, encourage them to use the tools with the right guidelines and guardrails Like it's fine to ask it questions. It's fine to ask it questions. It's fine to ask it to help you. Just don't put any confidential information in there from the company and you can use chat, gpt or I have most of my team on Burson's Galileo was one of the first ones that we started using. That's HR specific. In short, what I try to do is curate and recommend use cases and ask specifically for people to use it for certain tasks.
Speaker 2:Thank you. I love those examples and how practical they are to leverage and also to encourage adoption. Have there been tools that you've adopted within HR?
Speaker 4:I would say we're on that curve of you know, the first wave was generative AI, and we are now. Most of my team is using generative AI on a daily basis, and using generative AI both for first drafting, for brainstorming I need to write this better, so revisioning but also for brainstorming and sensemaking, like I'm trying to figure out what to do next. How should I be thinking about it? So I think my team is largely using it for all of those use cases. We are now on to the agentic phase and trying to figure out how we implement agentic AI. I just had a team meeting yesterday in fact where we're really trying to say, okay, we all should be using AI daily from a generative HR capability, generative AI capability, excuse me, we need to move to agentic. And so I mapped out a decision tree around where I think agentic is going, which I can walk you through how I'm thinking about it. One I think there's two pieces to the initial part of the tree there's bespoke agentic solutions and there's existing solutions with AI embedded. So, as we said, where are we going to implement agents? If I look at that existing solutions that have AI embedded we either need to enable it within the current solutions that we have, for example, in one of the organizations we use, lattice, and Lattice has just rolled out some AI capability. So we need to figure that out, implement it, structure it. However, we need to and just turn it on and try it out. There's other solutions. We have an applicant tracking system that I will not mention by name that is not really best in class associated with this. So what we are going to do because we believe that recruiting is one of the key places where agentic AI in HR is going to be a force multiplier, and so we're looking to just switch to the solution that is out there that delivers the best embedded agentic AI solution. So that's kind of for the world of existing solutions and then for bespoke solutions.
Speaker 4:I see three key paths. There is the work that we do that is repetitive and low value add that we could turn agentic and we can put an agent on checking to see how many employees have completed their compliance training and send them to reminders and pester them. The other place is disruptive. What are the things that we could add up our game in people and culture if we had this capability? Could we generate new? Could we consume all of the data around our people download all their LinkedIn profiles, map it to their jobs and really scenario plan, organizational design and workforce planning growth, like something totally would have been impossible for us to do right now, so disruptive.
Speaker 4:And then the third one is what I call the chief of staff solution. How do we and it's fairly generic, but some sort of custom solution that manages all of our time and the team's work that we're doing and sits over top of our Trello boards, our task lists, our calendars, and is custom to how we want to manage our work and helps us manage the work? Because my dream and I'm slowly building it is I actually want a micromanager for me personally. If I think about the best use of AI for me, it is somebody that I wake up every morning like a chief of staff and they're like Kim, your day is to do this, this and this. These are the strategic things. You need to time block this Don't forget to follow up with this Something that just manages us all so that the people, leaders and me, as a leader of the team I'm not managing the work, I'm just managing the people.
Speaker 2:I love that and I love how you're embracing this as enabling technology and how you're going about lifting the skill set of your team and considering the use cases. You mentioned also at the outset partnering with the business, considering business use cases. How has it been implemented throughout the organization?
Speaker 4:It's interesting because I've got two different organizations. The professional services firm that I've worked for for the last couple of years. I was their chief people officer and then I've transitioned just to a fractional role. They've changed scope and size and that made more sense for them. They have been at the cutting edge of AI adoption and, probably for a solid two years now, had created their own in-house model or in-house instance that allowed us to. They taught it all of our methodology, they taught it our tone and it was really a place that you could leverage. Sorry, they really rethought a lot of their work and how they could enable it through AI. So I've seen that where it's completely embedded in that business, it is business-led. It is core to how they think about being able to accelerate the work that they do.
Speaker 4:In the other organization, the tech organization that I'm in, I would say it's been slower, partly because the company has been on a rapid growth tear during this key moment in the last year and there just hasn't been the headspace for people to think about what it means. We're experiencing a little bit of a lull. The founder and CEO has also personally discovered the value of AI, so we're at the early stages. I'm sort of this leading edge catalyst right now that's pushing the organization to adopt AI, because I see for a startup that this is going to be a massive solve. For how do we scale the company? Because we don't have to do so much hiring, or we could be very much more intentional in our hiring to create scale and profitability, quite frankly, for the company, so we could do more with the same amount of people or go faster with the same amount of people. That is really compelling to investors. And so I've got two different environments that I'm working in One I'm the catalyst in and one I'm just following the business.
Speaker 3:Now you talked a little bit about the guidelines. Do you have a governance committee or just generally, how do you approach governance?
Speaker 4:In both organizations I am on the kind of AI committee that would probably be a fancy word. It's like me and the IT leader working in concert to define guidelines and guardrails. So in both organizations we have stated policies associated with what you can do, what you can't do associated with them, but also recommendations around how we want people to think about it, how we want people to think about it.
Speaker 4:When I came into the current organization, the tech organization, they had more policy around it and it was more like you shouldn't do this, you shouldn't do that. We did an all hands meeting about three weeks ago where I had the CEO do similar to the Shopify. In any case, you know the CEOs come out and declare, oh, Duolingo was the other one, so he did a similar thing and with that we produced a set of guidelines which shared more like here's how you would use it, Use it for first draft, Use it for brainstorming, here's the generative AI. So we've helped people understand when they might want to use it and then, within that context, what is okay and what is not okay.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and, by the way, that's very innovative, because all I ever hear are people saying don't do this, don't do that, don't do the other thing, be scared. Not the best way to present an important new technology.
Speaker 4:Yeah, yeah, no, because it's understandable. If anybody has any risk aversion, they might think, well, why would I do this? So, like, the previous policy was like you can't use anything but the company approved solution and now we have. You can use other solutions as long as you're not using and feeding company information into it. But if you're like, how should I think about planning my day? It's fine to use chat GPT, there's nothing wrong with that.
Speaker 3:What about ethical guidelines or concerns?
Speaker 4:Yeah, we've actually had a number of employees who have raised the concerns around the environment. And how are we thinking about the environmental aspect of compute time? I think that is a factor it does. The industry seems to be aware of it. I don't honestly know how we're going to manage through that, honestly know how we're going to manage through that. I do think about it when I ask for long prompts or I see it going away and doing a ton of work. I think about trees being cut down somewhere or power lines transmitting.
Speaker 4:So there's that environmental ethics side of it, ethics side of it. And then there is the model bias. I do follow OpenAI and Sam Altman and some of the key leaders in this and they seem to be deeply sensitive to the risks associated with it, and one of the things that we include in our guidelines for employees is like there was a period of time with the release of open, with 4.0 mini, and that it was very obsequious and it sometimes the ai are, the models are driven towards people pleasing and that can reinforce existing biases, and so I think the skill to teach people is to ask the AI to adopt a different perspective or to critique what you're thinking so that we don't reinforce existing biases. Don't reinforce existing biases. So I think there's going to be some user requirement to mitigate the bias and also just some sort of, especially by using it as a thought partner and to critique our work.
Speaker 2:Often we're not as evidence-based when we endeavor our human skills and ability to influence and assess situations. We're not always being evidence-based, but that human touch is so important and we can actually leverage AI in that way as a coach to support us?
Speaker 4:Yeah, I do wonder. You know there's some wonderful tools out there. For example, zoom in their AI transcripting has a meeting coach built into Zoom. Don't know if you've ever played with that, but as the meeting host, it will tell you how many times you ummed and ahed. It'll give you a score, it will tell you how much you dominated the conversation and you can even ask it how could I have run a better meeting? And it will give you feedback.
Speaker 4:I'm always really interested in how we unlock a culture of feedback in organizations, because that is the bane of HR, of people, of how do we improve performance. We know that we improve performance with feedback. Feedback is really rough to give for all the reasons that we know. Feedback is really hard to ask for and all of a sudden, we have this tool that you can ask for feedback, and I know for myself I'm much more open to the feedback that AI is going to give me around my ideas, because it's super safe and it's a great place to say how could I do better, how could I write this better, what's flawed in my thinking, and that's the place where I really encourage people to play with it, because it's pretty good, honestly.
Speaker 2:Thank you. With you sharing the use cases and how you've been approaching it with this organization, there's been lots of advice embedded in what you've relayed to us. Is there other specific advice that you would share with our audience, with HR leaders, I think?
Speaker 4:what's great about this is, you know, during COVID. Let me back up. Let me restate this I think the opportunity here is for HR to lead in a place that is creative. I recall during COVID the expression was during the financial crisis of 2008, finance was the organization that really mattered In COVID it was HR. All the attention was on HR to get us through this safely, to plan, return to work, and it felt like it was all HR all the time. But in this crazy, reactive, unfun place, having lived through that, this feels like a place where HR can lead in a thing that really, really matters for our organizations and for our people. So that's what I'm excited.
Speaker 4:It's like HR has always wanted to have a seat at the table and be seen as business driven and business focused, and this seems like this perfect blend of really really business, high business value but significant impact on people, with change management, with understanding work. David and I have worked many years looking at how do we move away from the jobs model, how do we deconstruct work, and to me, this creates this tremendous tool that requires us to really understand the work, think about how the work gets done, redesign the work so that we can bring AI into where it is. So I guess my main advice is lean into it and don't be afraid of it. It is the opportunity of a lifetime in HR. I was on the verge of retiring this year and I've decided to stay in the game just because I want to see this through. I think it's going to be transformative.
Speaker 3:I think that's fantastic and it's very encouraging to find someone who's so proactive and positive about it, and I think this will have a big impact on our listeners.
Speaker 4:This is probably not going to be everyone's jam, but I'm vibe coding now, so I am trying out this whole space of vibe coding. It is really, really impressive. To start, for example, I initially played with Manus.
Speaker 3:And, by the way, you may want to explain to people what vibe coding is. And, by the way, you may want to explain to people what vibe coding is yeah, yeah.
Speaker 4:So vibe coding is this idea that now we no longer need software engineers to write software to create software, that we all now have the tools available to us to write software using normal human language. Right, I don't need to understand code at all. If I have an idea that I would love software to do, I have the ability to just start saying, hey, I'd like to create this tool Now. For example, the thing that I'm vibe coding right now, I really want some sort of interview guide generation tool and I've not found anything that exists in this space that does quite what I want it to do. So I'm vibe coding, the thing I'm creating, bringing into existence the thing that I've always looked for as a point solution. I've started in lovable, which is the tool to. You can start start there to design the UI.
Speaker 4:In literally 10 sentences I could describe roughly what the application is and it creates it. It is mind blowing. So then you say, oh, okay, now I want to tweak it, I want to make it a different color, and you just say, change the color to purple, and it changes it purple. And then I say move this button from here to there. And it does it, and so it's like having a software engineer working for me, but I don't. I'm just doing it in my spare time.
Speaker 4:Now I've moved on to I've reached the limits of that, so now I have using cursor, which is what software organizations are using for their software engineers. So now I'm getting into industry strength stuff teeny bit of a learning curve but I'm confident that give me another week or two I was hoping to be there. By this call I will have built the application that I want, and I might be 40 hours of my time in over a three, four month period, just working a couple hours here and there on the weekends learning and pushing it along, and so in 40 hours of my time I could have an application that does exactly what I want. For's pretty cool, and part of me wonders if this gets good enough, if I will buy HR software in the future.
Speaker 2:I'm really grateful for your insights, Kim. It's been a really helpful and inspiring conversation.
Speaker 4:And.
Speaker 2:I just really appreciate the call-outs to around HR's central role in this, whether or not we're comfortable with tech, when you think about change management, enabling organizations all the roles we have to play in that regard, and, in addition, this tech makes it easier for us to be technologically savvy regardless. So thank you.
Speaker 4:Yeah, yeah, thanks for being here. I love to share all of this information with HR. I am passionate about our role. I would add resources to learn more that I've found very useful. So, in the spirit of curating, obviously, josh Burson's podcast is excellent. Josh Burson is saying all of these things to HR. He is making a very, very compelling case for us to play a leadership role. Another great podcast is the AI Daily Brief and it's a 20-minute-a-day. It brings you up to speed on how organizations are implementing AI. Organizations are implementing AI, agentic AI, what's going on in the news for AI. Those are two really powerful resources to learn more.
Speaker 2:Thank you. This has been a short conversation. If listeners would like to learn more to connect, what's the best way for them to do so?
Speaker 4:The best way to connect with me would be connect with me on LinkedIn.
Speaker 1:Find me on LinkedIn and connect there episodes published by HR Gazette and remember for what's new in the world of work. Subscribe to the show, follow us on social media and visit hrgazettecom.
