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Josh Greenwald (00:02)
I think in the next one to three years, we’re going to see a much more radical shift and it’s going to fundamentally change how work gets done.

Susan White (00:13)
Welcome to The JoyPowered® Workspace Podcast, where we help HR and business leaders embrace joy in the workplace. I’m Susan White, owner of Susan Tinder White HR Consulting Practice. Joining me is my co-host and dear friend JoDee Curtis, owner of Purple Ink, a large-scale HR and talent development firm that I am an executive collaborator with.

On May 5th, 2025, we launched an episode number 220 entitled, “How HR Leaders Should Be Thinking About AI (with Josh Tanenbaum).” We heard from many of you since then about how helpful that episode was and received requests to share suggestions for practical applications of AI in the delivery of HR services.

Globalization Partners, or GP, recently released the results of a 2025 AI at Work report they created with Wakefield Research that solicited information from 2,850 global executives and 500 US-based HR professionals. They said their survey confirmed that despite leaders’ enthusiasm, a lack of trust in AI’s output remains a barrier to adoption. Leaders rely on AI for research but are still very cautious about using AI for decision-making. The GP report notes some common areas where AI is helping HR leaders through. JoDee, why don’t you start us off?

JoDee Curtis (01:48)
Number one, simplifying compliance and enabling HR professionals to dedicate more time to workforce initiatives.

Susan White (01:58)
Makes sense. Number two, getting real-time multi-jurisdiction compliance checks on employment contracts. I think just keeping track of wherever all your employees are, what are the things, the laws that we need to stay in compliance with, AI would be a wonderful help to that.

JoDee Curtis (02:17)
Staying up to date with regional regulations for benefits and entitlements, ensuring a smooth employee experience.

Susan White (02:28)
And then number four, and finally, creating personalized professional development plans that meet regulatory requirements.

I believe we are just touching the tip of the iceberg on where AI can be a valuable tool to all of us in HR. To go deeper, we wanted to talk to an experienced HR leader who has embraced using AI and has applied it to practical business needs. Consequently, our guest today is Josh Greenwald.

Josh is a senior HR executive with a track record of leading enterprise talent strategy, transformation, and workforce innovation across Fortune 100 companies. Most recently, he served as CHRO of Elevance Health, where he led workforce restructuring, HR modernization, and AI-enabled transformation. He previously held senior HR and talent leadership roles at TIAA and Bank of America, where he drove talent strategy, organizational design, culture change, and leadership development across global businesses. Josh also advises CEOs and boards on succession, organizational transformation, and building high-performing, future-ready organizations.

JoDee Curtis (03:43)
Josh, thanks so much for joining us today. Can you share how you see AI most being leveraged in businesses today?

Josh Greenwald (03:54)
Yeah, well, thanks, JoDee. And thanks, Susan. It’s a pleasure to be here. It’s a very exciting topic. So fundamentally, I think I see the AI transformation in a couple of different segments of the journey. But this first journey, I see very much of the productivity lag. so we’re seeing many companies lean into automating rules-based transaction processing. That’s sort of the easiest phase. Or helping to drive productivity using chat bots and things like that, streamlining admin work, driving more digital containment and customer contact centers. I think in the next one to three years, we’re going to see a much more radical shift and it’s going to fundamentally change how work gets done.

JoDee Curtis (04:39)
Mm-hmm. I do too.

Susan White (04:40)
I think you’re, yeah, I think you’re right. So Josh, tell us more, if you would, about the AI enablement that you worked on, the AI enabled transformation when you were at Elevance.

Josh Greenwald (04:52)
Yeah, so there were really two concurrent paths. The first was with the business. And so in the business of health insurance, where a large portion of the work is transactional kind of rules-based processing, and particularly in an industry that’s notorious for really, really low margins, the business was really leaning heavily into that. And our job as the HR team was to really support the automation journey in terms of how roles would change, how organizational structures would change, the culture you needed, behaviors, that kind of thing. And so the very aggressively into automating things like claims utilization management, working on digital containment for the contact center, things like that.

And so concurrently though, we also wanted to embed it within HR and we wanted to lead from the front. We felt that was really important, too, that in order to get the associates to adopt it, they need to experience it themselves as customers. What better way than through HR? And so what we did is as we looked at our HR service delivery model, not too dissimilar from other large companies, the most senior strategic decision makers tend to get the highest touch HR support. And the deeper you go in the organization, particularly as a frontline leader who tend to have the largest bands of control and the largest volume of employee needs, get the least amount of personalized HR support.

So recognizing that we wanted to fix that paradigm and we also had expense challenges that we wanted to drive more efficiency, we created a digital front door, essentially an HR digital assistant, to ultimately support frontline managers out of the gate. So we piloted with a friendly group and we queried them and said, what are the top 10 most frequent questions you’re calling the contact center for, you’re asking — if you can find an HR VP, you’re asking them for. And then when we looked at our associate relations volume, we saw a pretty significant spike coming from this group as well.

And when we unpacked it, most of it was they just didn’t know how to navigate. They couldn’t find information. When they found a policy online in the intranet, they couldn’t understand it. It was outdated. And so we built a digital HR assistant, piloted with claims managers, and the feedback was positive. It wasn’t perfect. It was a little slower than we wanted it to be and it takes a continual amount of training, but I think it’s absolutely moving in the right direction.

Susan White (07:13)
Did you give them a name? Did you give them a persona?

Josh Greenwald (07:22)
We argued over what the right name would be. And so we came up with something really boring like Your HR Digital Assistant. But I’m sure there’ll be something clever coming in the future.

JoDee Curtis (07:29)
Well, at least it was very clear what it was. So. What are other evolving trends in HR service delivery that we should all be paying attention to?

Josh Greenwald (07:50)
Yeah, I really see AI fundamentally impacting HR just like it’s going to impact the business. And so I think you’re seeing, particularly with larger HR organizations that tend to have a centralized service model, you’re seeing more and more digital front doors and ways that it’s sort of the ability to better deliver commodity-like advice, if you will, around policies and procedures and time off and I need to go on a leave of absence, where do I go, or I have a question about my PTO, or I think my payroll is wrong. Things like that, you’re starting to see more and more of.

Secondly, many HR organizations are just in a race to really build the right kind of data infrastructure because, you know, as you all know, without really good data or content, the AI just doesn’t work. And so you’re starting to see many, many HR organizations really investing heavily, trying to, if possible, to simplify their HR tech stack, consolidate the data, and then start to lean more into content management, which is becoming more of a craft sort of industry within HR, writing policies for humans to understand.

I do think that the transactional sort of HR service will be the first to be automated and I actually think that will be a win for the business. what’s interesting is as a result of that, the concept I think of talent management consulting will become more and more of a premium. Because that’s really what the business tends to really lean heavily on HR for, is help me fix this problem or help me grow or transform. Then the last thing — I think I mentioned this earlier — is just, you’re gonna see more and more HR being asked to lead from the front and being a first adopter of the technology.

JoDee Curtis (09:33)
Yeah.

Susan White (09:34)
Yeah, that makes good sense. So Josh, what practical applications of AI in HR have you seen leveraged well and think that makes sense for all HR departments to consider?

Josh Greenwald (09:44)
Yeah. Yeah, there’s some really cool stuff on the market right now. Talent acquisition matching. So helping to sort of sift through larger candidate pools one of the first things out of the gate. And that’s just only getting better and better. And some really cool stuff there. You’re now seeing an ability to create internal slates to facilitate mobility, which is really great. And again, it’s all based on the data. If you have good data in the system, we’re able to do now kind of this matching process and the technology’s smart enough to be able to mine people’s experiences to understand if they have enough adjacent experience to say, yeah, this person might be actually really good. You’re seeing AI companies like Eightfold create custom skills taxonomy. It’s really interesting. So they’re using job skills that may be out there to determine what are the core skills that are needed the context of this company.

Learning personalization, really interesting. I’ll just give you a personal example. If you ever use Percipio, they have an AI coach. So amongst the, you know, they have a number of different things they can help you with, but one of them happens to be executive presence. So you can type into the search bar and say, what do you need help with? And let’s say you type in, “I need help with executive presence. I really want to have a stronger command presence.” Then the system comes back and says, well, it sounds like you need to bolster your confidence in speaking. And then it engages, like, in a dialogue with you, which is amazing. So it’s really phenomenal. But at a minimum, it’s able to then take a look at your development plans in the learning library and then specific content for you. It’s able to put nudges into things like Microsoft Teams. You’re about to go into a staff meeting and you want to make sure you’re hearing from people. It can give you a nudge that says, make sure you’re hearing from the people who are most quiet during the meeting. You know, there’s amazing things.

And then two other things that I would say that I’ve directly experienced. One is sentiment analysis. So we do an employee engagement survey at Elevance and over a hundred thousand employees. You can just imagine the number verbatim comments that we get.

Susan White (11:46)
Yes, books and books.

Josh Greenwald (12:03)
Books, absolutely. So AI is able to do a sentiment analysis, it’s really fabulous. And it’s also great for pay, comp equity, and then ratings equity analysis, which historically has always been a really manual process and tends to fall too late in the game to do anything about it. But you can really start to see if you have bias in your rates.

JoDee Curtis (12:22)
Right. Right. That’s fascinating. I find myself just using it or trying to use it every single day so that I can learn something or get better or get faster or be smarter. So, but what about resistance? Have… did you face resistance in your transformation project or what resistance do you expect us maybe to continue to find as we use it more and more?

Josh Greenwald (12:58)
Yeah, it’s such an important question and it is, you can have the best technology, but if people don’t adopt it, it’s not going to work. And so I think generally speaking right now where we are in the change curve, just in the business, I would say people are fearful. They are fearful of what’s going to happen to their job and will they have job security? I’d say within HR, at least, I’ve experienced this, I don’t want to say this is across the board, but generally I find that HR tends to be one of the slowest to adopt new technology, largely because they’re taking care of the rest of the organization and they either don’t have the budget or the time or energy to invest in it.

And so when I introduced this, I would say it definitely came with some skepticism. Is this thing really going to work? What problem are we solving? it worth the effort? How do you scale this thing? What does that mean for the service delivery model? And these are all honestly questions that are being answered right now.

If you were to go to a firm like IBM, they have a completely digital front door and, like, something like 95% of their volume is answered by their chatbot. And then if anything needs to get escalated, there’s a contact center, then they have a pooled resource model. So I think seeing that HR is generally, in my opinion, is a little skeptical of it. And depending upon the size and scale and resources of company, particularly if you’re a little bit down market, it’s harder to be able to embrace this actively.

JoDee Curtis (14:31)
Yeah, makes sense.

Susan White (14:33)
Gosh, so Josh, what advice do you have for our listeners who are business leaders and HR professionals to build a future ready talent strategy in the AI area?

Josh Greenwald (14:44)
I think it’s just like what JoDee said, it’s, just, just learn every day. There’s almost no problem that in theory AI probably couldn’t help solve within HR. And so what I find is I’ve actually, I don’t know about you, but I, I’m using ChatGPT or Claude more frequently than I’m using Google. And I love it and I just love to be able to ask a question. Sometimes I’ll ask super random questions because I’m just interested to learn. I’ll read something in the paper or whatever and I want to really validate or understand it better. But within HR, if you just type in what are the different applications you can use, you’d be amazed at the things that come back.

And then you ask for sources if you want to make sure you validate the sources, the content, that it’s accurate. But you can start to double click into those things. So I just think that I would really encourage people to experiment as much as possible. My former company, Elevance, said that they did a really smart thing. They downloaded a ChatGPT on everybody’s desktop and encouraged them to use it every day, and it was really designed just be an assist for them. And there was initially some conversation, we should make this a productivity tool and have an expense target. And I think people came to the point of view that, which I totally agree with, is this isn’t about productivity at this point, we want people to start to learn and feel comfortable in experiments. So I don’t think you can do enough of that.

JoDee Curtis (16:06)
Josh, I, you, one point you made is important. Maybe everyone knows this, but I just learned this not too long ago and I’m including it now in most all of my questions that I ask is to cite the sources. That I think was when it earlier came out and people were getting all this information out there and not knowing what was accurate or not, but you can ask to cite the sources and that’s been so helpful to me.

Josh Greenwald (16:43)
You really need to validate what you get.

JoDee Curtis (16:46)
Josh, we like to ask all of our guests a JoyPowered® question. What’s one small step or change you made during your career that boosted your joy at work?

Josh Greenwald (16:58)
Yeah, I love this question. I think it’s so important. I think everybody probably should philosophically answer that when they have the chance. For me, it was really two things.

When I made the shift to work for TIAA, which for those of you who don’t know TIAA, it’s second largest retirement provider next to the federal government. And it serves the not-for-profit sectors, academia, higher ed in particular, government, healthcare, et cetera. And they pride themselves in the ability to truly let people retire comfortably and that’s the easiest way to describe it. And they have a great product which does that. And so shifting from quarterly earnings to now helping people retire, live their dreams and, and, and recognizing you’re part of that purpose, that sense of purpose and that journey for people is really, really powerful.

And then secondly, I got great advice from a mentor, which is be unapologetically caring in the workplace. Somewhere along the lines, maybe it was business school or the way we were raised, you’re not supposed to be vulnerable. And that’s just how I’m not wired. I deeply care about people. I want people to have great experiences. I want them to be energized. And I’m human. And I make mistakes. And so I think the ability to lower my guard, be vulnerable, and just lean into who I am naturally and just be unapologetically caring, still, you know, business-focused and results-oriented, was some of the best advice I ever got.

JoDee Curtis (18:34)
Nice, great advice.

Susan White (18:37)
I love that advice too. So Josh, we’re so glad you came today to talk to us. How could our listeners connect with you if they wanted to learn more?

Josh Greenwald (18:46)
Yeah, sure, I’d love to. they can reach me on LinkedIn. My profile is out there. Or they can send me an email directly at josh_greenwald at yahoo dot com. Again, it’s josh_greenwald at yahoo dot com.

Susan White (18:58)
We’ll put those in our show notes so our listeners could reach you if they want to connect. Thank you so much. Very enlightening.

JoDee Curtis (19:07)
Yes. Thanks, Josh. Thanks.

Josh Greenwald (19:09)
Really appreciate it. Thanks for having me on. All right, take care.

JoDee Curtis (19:14)
Susan, our listener question today is, came from a February 2025 listener who asked, “I love your podcast. How did you guys get started with your podcast and how do you pick topics?”

Susan White (19:29)
JoDee, I love this question. Thank you, listener. Yeah. When I was working like crazy in human resources in corporate America, I had daydreamed of having a radio show, like, “Go Ask HR,” and listeners could call in with their, you know, difficulty with their person in the office with them or the fact that their burps too much or whatever, whatever the problem was in the workplace, they could call, I would give them advice. And then lickety split, they’re gone and I would never have to manage the outcome. I just thought it’d be really fun. And I did feel in corporate America that often HR was just the sounding board that just gave advice right and left. I thought, wouldn’t that be fun to do on the radio?

So I was sharing this idea at one of your Purple Ink strategic off sites and JoDee’s like, I’ll do it. Yeah, let’s do a radio show. And her marketing person, Emily, who is our producer, Emily Miller, she said, you know, radio is really not where it’s happening right now, it’s podcasting. So she helped us think this all through. We launched our podcast. And from that very first time that JoDee and I were together and we were, whatever the topic was — and forgive me, I don’t remember — I just thought this is so much fun. JoDee and I never had time in all of our dealings with each other to just really explore different HR topics and issues. And so this has been just a delightful journey for me to get a chance to do this. So JoDee, thank you for all the time.

How we pick our topics? Well, it’s usually somebody asks us a question and we think we could do a show around that because if this individual has a question, I bet other people do as well. And now when we, for those of you that are SHRM certified or HRCI certified or other institution where you need to keep getting continuing ed hours, if you want continuing ed hours, you need to fill out a survey because that help gives us feedback and we can give you a certificate of completion. Well, we get tons of questions through that because we say, what questions do you have for us? Right now we have a backlog as we usually do. I think I looked at the queue when I was preparing for today. We have 92 questions in the queue. Please forgive us listeners if we don’t get to your question. We do sometimes take a number of the questions and turn them into an episode. So hopefully you’re going to get an answer in one way, shape, or form.

JoDee Curtis (21:55)
Right, right. And Susan, how, so thanks for the idea because we sure have had a lot of fun recording this. But how long ago was that? When did we start recording?

Susan White (22:08)
Okay, I’m gonna say I think 2017, but I could be wrong. So that would be eight years, right?

JoDee Curtis (22:14)
I thought you would know for sure, but yeah, I think it was, I was going to say 2016, but one of those about that time we’ve been doing it. So thanks for listening to us as we have fun exploring HR.

Susan White (22:25)
Amazing. JoDee, it’s time for In the News. HRmorning.com had an article entitled, “Generational Differences in Happiness at Work,” posted on their website by Dr. Mary Hayes on May 21st, 2025. What caught our interest was ADP’s research findings that Dr. Hayes cited. First of all, 49% of Generation Z,

those born in 1997 and later, would prefer unemployment over a job that makes them unhappy. That’s almost half.

JoDee Curtis (23:04)
Yeah, yeah. And 43% of millennials, born between 1981 and 1996, would prefer unemployment over a job that makes them unhappy.

Susan White (23:19)
That’s not that far behind our Gen Zers. For the remaining workers born prior to that, probably mid to late career workers, 71% of them say they would endure unhappiness in their jobs rather than face unemployment. And that is exactly where I would be. Yeah, I want a job and I want to be earning money. So I’m completely in that other generations.

JoDee Curtis (23:20)
Right. So. And very clear distinction there between generations.

Susan White (23:46)
Isn’t… Yes. These stats ring true with what we learned in our recent episode, “Gen Z at Work,” that dropped on June 30th, 2025. We as business and HR leaders need to create workspaces where our talent finds their joy. If we hope to attract and retain skills and experience that we need to be successful. Because as we’re learning, people would rather not work at all if they can’t have jobs that they enjoy.

JoDee Curtis (24:12)
Right, right, and good for them.

Please tune in next time and make it a JoyPowered® day. If you’re SHRM certified, you can get credit for listening to this episode. To get the code, go to getjoypowered.com slash SHRM and fill out a short evaluation. When you finish the evaluation, you’ll get the code and a link to a proof of

participation certificate. That code will expire on August 11, 2026. Again, that’s getjoypowered.com slash shrm to get the code and it will expire on August 11, 2026. Thank you for listening and thank you for your dedication to the HR profession.

Susan White (25:10)
Make it a JoyPowered® day.