Radical Innovators #22 leading with agility: preparing for AI and helping people thrive with PepsiCo’s Becky Schmitt

In this episode of the Radical Innovator’s podcast, host Frank Congiu sits down with Becky Schmitt, CHRO of PepsiCo. Drawing on her career of holding HR leadership roles at Accenture, Walmart, Cognizant and now PepsiCo, Becky shares valuable insights to help HR professionals navigate today’s increasingly complex talent landscape.

This exciting conversation covers everything from how PepsiCo prepares its global workforce for AI-driven change and some uncomfortable truths about AI, to why she sees technology as being like the game Shoots and Ladders. She even reveals her favorite Pepsi products!

Tune in to hear invaluable advice and insights, including:

• navigating career transitions: understanding that past achievements matter less than how you adapt your knowledge to a new company's context
• the evolution of HR: why it’s important to move away from standard to-do lists, and toward building agile, skills-based frameworks that prepare employees for unforeseen challenges
• AI for frontline workers: how technology like dynamic route engineering and digital twins are being used to make frontline jobs safer and more efficient
• innovative HR use cases: a look inside PepsiCo's current tests and rollouts, including AI-driven interview companions, predictive labor analytics and real-time distribution control towers
• understanding the whole person: why companies need to look past rigid job descriptions and find creative ways to tap into employees' holistic skills and personal aptitudes

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:04

We have a hundred million frontline employees. We don't talk enough about like what AI is doing to help them.

SPEAKER_01 0:21

Hey Becky, great to see you. Welcome to the Radical Innovators Podcast.

SPEAKER_00 0:24

Thanks, Frank. I'm happy to be here.

SPEAKER_01 0:26

You know, as I think about your career, you've you've played a um a senior HR role in a number of big organizations across a number of industries. If I think about Walmart, Sam's Club, Cognizant, PepsiCo. How has that been? Has that been a challenge for you to navigate the different approach you you've leveraged within talent management?

SPEAKER_00 0:44

I think as an HR professional, there are things that you're always working on at every organization, no matter whether it's a frontline employees, professional employees, it's researchers, like whatever the group is. I mean, you're always very focused on how do you create an engaging environment? How do people show up as the best version of themselves every day? How do you create meaningful careers and how do they feel like they're doing something that matters? I think personally, when you get to a new place, the more senior you are, you have to like know how to add value right away. And every company has its own personality, its own set of acronyms. And, you know, I reflect back on my 20 years at Accenture and I went from living in the US to living in India. And in some ways, that was like starting at a different company. So I tell people always assume positive intent, seek to understand, and do your homework. And those are ways that you can understand the data and try to figure out how, from your lens, running HR or being a senior HR professional, you can add ROI right away.

SPEAKER_01 1:46

Yeah, I love it. You kind of give three high return practices, but is there any key lesson you'd say that's stayed with you over the years as you've navigated across these different organizations and sectors?

SPEAKER_00 1:55

Even though you're selected to come into one of those jobs and it's obviously based on your past experience, once you get to that place, nobody cares. Doesn't matter what you did in the past. Nobody wants when I got to Walmart, nobody wanted to hear what I did at Accenture. When I got to PepsiGo, nobody wanted to hear what I did at Cognizant. It's about tell me how you're gonna make a difference for me now in my context. And so I think sometimes people always want to say, well, at my old place or when I worked here, not relevant. Like what's what's relevant for you is how you take all that knowledge and make it make sense in your new context. And you really roll up your sleeves and you work on being a part of the team. So that's a lesson I learned probably 15 or 16 years ago. And I really try to orient myself that way.

SPEAKER_01 2:38

Well, so then I want to maybe build on that because this is the Radical Innovators Podcast. And one of the things we're always looking for are what are the most innovative leaders and organizations doing to improve the lives of their employees? I'm curious in in the field of HR or specifically as you think about your current role in Pepsi, is there anything that you're doing now that you're either excited about or something that um you have done already that has ROI that people can that listen and can learn from?

SPEAKER_00 3:02

Our jobs have changed a lot over this period of time from being a generalist, being personnel, being in the office, to now really looking at how do you like open up all of these different levers in the ecosystem so that people can thrive and the company can thrive. A lot of that means we have to change our orientation, our understanding. Like, what is our responsibility for data in the company? What is our responsibility for helping people learn new things for us changing ourselves first, a little bit uh like the shoemaker's children, or you know, you're always asking everybody else to change, but can you change yourself or put your oxygen mask on before anybody else before you help others on the plane? And that's not always our orientation, I think, in HR, because we um, you know, we like to do certain things, we like to be pleasers, a lot of people. I'm not saying everyone, but I certainly like to make people happy and I've derived a lot of satisfaction over helping people get things done. But I think it's been reorienting over the last five to seven years. It's not about my to-do list anymore. It's actually about helping people get into a position to be agile. And that is a really complex thing, Frank. It's um helping them think differently about data, really think about the things they do outside of the company in their regular life, and then why do we not bring in those same practices? Nobody trains us how to use our iPhone or shop on Amazon, but yet we come back to the office and we want like all this paper, and it's like, how do we help people make sense of the outside and apply it to the inside, or vice versa? And really think about lateral experiences are just as rewarding as hierarchical experiences because the jobs in the future are going to be different. And so I think that that's really what our calling in right now is for HR. And how do we best prepare ourselves? We have to do those things to ourselves. We have to eat our own dog food, drink our own champagne, whatever you want to say. Uh, but it is about this agility and mobilizing and looking at solving problems as experiences or tools that go into your toolbox for the next challenge. Because we don't know what the next challenge is. And that's really how I think about orienting myself and my team versus, well, my my business leader says to do this, and these are the things I'm working on. Okay, well, that's like the old way of doing HR. The new way of doing HR is yes, those things will get done. They're gonna get done in different ways, but now it's about how do we get people like on deck for the next challenge and be the most equipped.

SPEAKER_01 5:38

In there, you mentioned something about being a people pleaser, and I was thinking about, I mean, something that you must do that that the organization enjoys, which is the ask Becky Anything sessions. Yes. What do those sessions mean for you? And then I'm curious what kind of feedback you get from the organization and and the team.

SPEAKER_00 5:53

So many years ago, when I stepped into like my first big leadership role, I was really struggling with like moving from being a peer to being the leader. And I felt like people weren't sharing things with me anymore because now I was the boss when we used to talk about all of these things when I was a peer. So I created just like an open QA session. And I found that like if you could sort of open yourself up and be vulnerable, people would start to ask questions. And if one person has the question, five people have the question. And in some places over time, I did this as coffee talks or here we say, like, have a Pepsi with Becky. And so uh working with um, you know, my chief of staff over the last couple of years, we said, like, what are different ways we can get information out or understand the pulse of what's going on? I have also had some really special guests come, and we're fortunate that PepsiCo has such a rich uh human resources history, and we have a lot of amazing alumni. And so I've invited some of them to come back as well and talk to people about their own journey. And I find that we're all struggling with the same things. Uh, whether you're talking about a financial services company or a digital first company from California versus a hundred-year-old consumer goods company. We're all going through a very similar HR transformation. Even companies that are like immersed in AI, their people are still having changes or challenges with the pace of change. It makes us like understand that we're not alone and we should use our network to learn things, as well as like I'm also not pushing them just for the sake of pushing them, I'm pushing them so that we make PepsiCo a great company for the next 50 years.

SPEAKER_01 7:38

So I have to ask if if there's a favorite uh special guest that's joined previously.

SPEAKER_00 7:43

You know, I like all my guests and I learned something from all of them. I have someone who's a very special mentor to me. Um, I think you you know her as well. It's Jackie Canney. She's been a guest on here. I worked for her both at Walmart and at Accenture, and now we're just very good friends. Uh, but my team loved her, and I think uh someone who really always leads with people at the heart at empathy first, but delivers hardcore results. She's pretty inspiring. And I think the team saw that as well.

SPEAKER_01 8:16

Everybody loves Jackie wherever she goes. Let me shift a little bit to um moving to strategy. So a couple years ago, Pepsi announced unveiling a new brand identity, um, Food, Drink, Smiles.

SPEAKER_00 8:26

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 8:27

Which the message is clear, but what does it mean for employees?

SPEAKER_00 8:30

Food, drinks, smiles uh is something we've always talked about in different segments, but when you put it together, it really reflects the future we're building. And we have really focused uh in the last year about partner, the last couple years about partnering with our full ecosystem. So all the way from seed to smile. And for our people, um, you know, we talk about like how do you come here and you build the best career? Like, what is your advancement, your belonging, and the care uh that we can provide for you? And those are really the ABCs of the Food Drinks Smiles.

SPEAKER_01 9:03

I mean, you got a large workforce, right? You 300,000 employees uh worldwide working across different brands. How does this um trickle down from the top all the way down to people that are making those deliveries?

SPEAKER_00 9:15

People are very proud of our products. I have been all over the world. I've been on trucks with people in Egypt, stocking shelves in Brazil. I mean, you name it. I went on the tour. I still continue to do that. And whenever I'm with our people, they want to show me every detail. I mean, there's so much pride in our products. I think when you when you have like the right wrapper to put around it, it like makes our people feel like, okay, now everybody else can see what I see every day. I feel so moved when I'm with a group of our frontline people and they talk about how they show up. No matter what the snow is, those trucks are out today. They are delivering products because all of us sitting at home want our Instacart or DoorDash or whatever else to show up with our things, and our team doesn't disappoint. And I mean, we owe it to them to make sure that uh we communicate clearly to everybody else about what goes on here.

SPEAKER_01 10:11

I love that. So anytime we can celebrate people and help bring people along for the journey, it's phenomenal. Like all companies, Pepsi is expanding its use of AI. AI comes up on every podcast, whether I bring it up or somebody brings it up. Your new collaborations with Siemens, NVIDIA to implement AI, digital twin at your plants in your warehouses. How are you preparing employees for something like this, particularly given the wide range of demographic of employees you have?

SPEAKER_00 10:34

I mean, this is a really challenging thing because I think there is a lot of fear in the media, what AI means, when it's coming. You know, we hear all these things all the time. Most of us are experiencing AI every day in our life, right? And as I said before, like if you have a smartphone, there's AI running on that the whole time. Like you're texting, it's auto-filling for you. All of these things are part of our life. I think in the context of employment, what has become more scary is what does it mean for my job? And I always remind people like, I'm not doing the same HR work that I did 28 years ago. And no one on my team is either. We're doing very different things now. And if you go to a plant or you're driving, you are doing things in a different way. We have dynamic route engineering. So if there's traffic or you're running late, we reschedule your route so that it's the most efficient for you to deliver product. And we have things now like an interview companion, because we know when people interview, they never write good notes. I'm sure every uh talent acquisition leader, this is the bane of their existence. Now we have a tool to help you. People love that. So I think all of those things are happening. We have tons of use cases, and I'm really excited that our chief strategy and transformation officer, Athena Caniora, is a great partner to me. And we're always looking for ways to do this with empathy, follow our standards, and help people move forward. Now, to really address like the elephant in the room, there are some, like, let's call them uncomfortable truths with AI. There are some jobs that will be fully automated, but there are new jobs that will come. And so, as I talked about earlier, is like how do I give people experiences that put like tools in their toolbox and keep them agile? This is like what I'm always thinking about. Like, I have 300,000 employees. I should be able to grow a ton of top line revenue and keep repositioning my same employees. And of course, some will retire, some will opt out, I need to keep bringing campus in. But just because like I had a job 28 years ago, which allowed me to grow in HR, doesn't mean that, you know, my people coming out with labor and industrial relations degrees need to do that same kind of job. But I can give them a very different experience. And that is like my mission for like this year and uh and probably ongoing, I don't know what's gonna stop because technology keeps changing. Is how do we get people to keep learning skills? We don't define the next job by what hierarchy you already went through. It is gonna be a skills-based framework. And we have to lean into the fact that yes, things will change, but we're gonna be here to help you. And some things are gonna change faster than we expected, some things will be slower, it won't be smooth, but it's this like open feedback loop that needs to feel safe so that we can help people move along. I was explaining this to my team and I said, remember that game shoots and ladders where you're like on a path, and sometimes you go back to the beginning or you slide down to the next one. That's kind of how I feel about technology right now. We're on a path, we think it's going here, but we may loop back because it didn't work out, or we may skip ahead. But it's preparing people to adjust for that, I think is really key.

SPEAKER_01 13:44

And you know, there's so many different, to your point, competing messages. Is there's some people that approach this from an abundance mindset and talk about the new jobs that will be created? Uh, conversely, at our dinner we had the most recent one, um, this uh someone from Anthropic who spoke about and their CEO has openly said unemployment will likely go to 10 to 20% before it comes back. Then you have someone like if I think about it the same dinner in December, Bob Tuey said, is this not just like any other uh transformation we've gone through? It's just coming at us way faster.

SPEAKER_00 14:12

We have a hundred million frontline employees in the US. And this is everything from the person who is the cashier at CVS. It can be a pharmacist, right? Which is a highly degreed, skilled person. Uh, it's the person delivering your food, it's the people working in our plants. We don't talk enough about like what AI is doing to help them. Because I think we can make those jobs safer, I think we can make them more predictable. At PepsiCo, we keep talking about like what is the AI for good and how do we help these jobs be better? And you mentioned what our partnership with NVIDIA and this digital twin, right? We're able to like replicate a version of our factory in the digital twin and run our like our new technologies and our tests um with high accuracy, which actually is much more safer when we roll something out. It also allows our people who are doing the work now to give us feedback. And I think that is like where I think we're not getting enough attention right now on this topic because I don't think those jobs are going away for a while, right? Though our hundred uh million frontline workers, they will change, uh, but we still are gonna expect a nurse to be in the hospital when you're delivering a baby, right? So, how does that job get better?

SPEAKER_01 15:22

Now, how are you guys using AI specifically in the HR function? Is there anything um novel that you're testing and trying or anything that you'd say this has worked quite well over the last year?

SPEAKER_00 15:33

Yes, we have actually um probably over 30 use cases going on right now. I mentioned one, the interview companion tool, which is launching right now, and it's been co-designed by people who are professional recruiters and hiring managers, and it enhances the fairness and consistency in hiring. Uh, because how many times have you gotten to you some inner somebody's interviewed and then they come to interview with you and you're like, where are the notes? What am I looking for? And for the candidates, a terrible experience. You're like, Frank just asked me those questions, Becky. Why are you asking me them again? It's like we're not talking to each other. So I think this um transcription interviews, categorizes responses, and creates summaries as well as like questions where to probe. And of course, one of our recruiters is reviewing it. It doesn't go blindly, but it just really helps the candidate experience. It helps us get more consistent feedback. So I'm super excited about that. We also are doing more with predictive labor analytics, and this is an AI-powered tool that helps manage union-related risks. So we do have a large part of our business both in the US and around the world, that we deal with works councils, unions, collective bargaining agreements, and this really helps us identify and enable interventions faster. And that's super important for our frontline teams because we really can't have a disruption there. Then we continue to have other things. Uh, one that's really exciting, and as I'm going to Mexico this week, and this team really piloted this, it's the control center. And this control tower keeps in touch with all of our people who are moving and distributing product. And this is super important for safety reasons. Anything from weather to um if you're going into an area that's having some sort of political or social disruption, we're able to message to the driver, see what's happening in their cab, they're able to alert us, or we can reroute them. And so again, this is a great place when we talk about how does AI make us safety? We don't have to say, like, oh my gosh, I got to alert on my phone, I better text all the drivers. No, it's happening dynamically and it's already rerouting them even before they get close to the disruption. So I'm I'm very excited about that because it is all about being able to come and like do your job in a safe way that you feel good. Um, and I'm really focused on that.

SPEAKER_01 17:48

So we're still early in the new year. Um curious what some of the current HR initiatives are or the big programs are that you're uh heavily invested or more excited about as the year progresses.

SPEAKER_00 17:58

We used to all write our own objectives, and then yes, there was maybe two or three that were global, but this is the first year we took like my team, which is probably like 17 people, and we work together. We're like, what are our big rocks? We agreed on the big the 10 big rocks, and we actually um the way we organize ourselves, Frank, is we create committees, and so somebody for the big rock is the like the captain, and then we get a cross uh group of people from either different subfunctions in HR or different countries, and we work on solving it, and we have a stand up every week to move things through. We have like some let's call it basic things that we're continuing to work on. You know, we pay in a commission model, it's making sure that that is for our salespeople accurate on time, no issues. And when you're paying hundreds of thousands of people uh in 200 countries, like that's a complex process to be fully automated. So, of course, Maslow's hierarchy, making sure that's right. We have a direct access uh initiative, and really we're rolling out uh new mypepsico.com, which is our internal um our share our internal site where people will have an agent that will be able to help them answer questions, find things. And so a big piece of this is like our own knowledge management and how do we really move to kind of a global way of operating in terms of policies, um understanding where people can get self-service and also like what are all the things coming in that they're frustrated with and they can't be solved, and how do we solve that? Is that solving with HR? Is it solving with our agent? There's just not enough time in the day to get all of that. And then another big one is just on our skills journey and how do we keep equipping people, whether it's uh very personalized, custom learning tracks, uh, what are the building blocks, how do we refresh uh as quickly as things are changing, we need to refresh all of our collateral and our approach.

SPEAKER_01 20:03

It feels like it's a skills-based organization and those conversations have been happening forever. Are we are we look getting a little bit closer? Is this the year? Because I feel like this is maybe, and going back to one of your former organizations, Accenture was way ahead of this and IBM and a few others that were talking about this for a long time, but it feels like it never, we never haven't, we haven't quite gotten there yet.

SPEAKER_00 20:20

So I grew up in a skills-based organization, right? Working at Accenture for over 20 years. I mean, we had that's all we did. Everybody was, and we had proficiency levels, you went through a capability assessment model, you were interviewed because that's how that company makes its money. It's based on the sort of recipe of the person, the combination of the skills. What I learned from that is um, you know, every time you group somebody by a label, you're solving for an average and you miss like all the highs and the lows. And that's like what I think sometimes job descriptions do. And so I think it's an easy sell to talk about, tell us your skills. And there's actually something I learned from uh my colleague at Verizon. They found that people update LinkedIn way better than anything we have on the inside, which I'm sure you know. No, that's no surprise. And so they actually created a platform where they allow people to opt in and they're like, can we scrub your LinkedIn to build your skills profile? I when I was talking to Christina who works there, like everybody did it. Everybody wanted to do it. And now they have this really robust skills data. So I think there's a lot of examples of where companies are like, we're just trying to figure out like who you are, right? Like, what does Frank do besides this job description? And when I think about our frontline people, if we're not gonna have, you know, people putting boxes on shelves and warehouses, but I need more mechanics, which there's a huge shortage for in the US, how do I figure out who works on their car at home? Who tinkers with electronics? Who's actually like, you know, building a garage or a shed at their house and is interested in that? Because those are the kind of people that have the aptitude. And so I think we're looking more holistically, not just about if this is your job description, what are your skills, how do we assess you, but like who are you overall? And like, how do I take all of that in? Because you're already a person who fits in here with our culture, you're a good performer, you're proud of working at our environment. And I need to take all those pieces and reformulate them into like what's the recipe to serve the next order. And I don't really know what all those jobs are yet, but that's how I talk about it, that's how I think about it. And somehow people get that rather than saying, well, how do you know if I did if that's my skill or not? Well, no, let's do this together.

SPEAKER_01 22:37

You know, it's interesting. It's like uh another input could be uh Facebook and any other social media at this point, right? Because to your point, the there's so many things that people know that are skills they wouldn't even think to put forward.

SPEAKER_00 22:49

Yes, and humans are very creative, as we know. So there's a lot of stuff that I think people don't even know to tell us that actually could be useful.

SPEAKER_01 22:58

All right, so I'm gonna move to the hard questions. Rolling Stones or the Beatles?

SPEAKER_00 23:03

Oh, the Beatles.

SPEAKER_01 23:05

All right.

SPEAKER_00 23:06

Yeah, I know all the words.

SPEAKER_01 23:09

Same for the Rolling Stones. Are you a morning person or a night owl?

SPEAKER_00 23:12

Morning. Early morning.

SPEAKER_01 23:15

Favorite Pepsi product?

SPEAKER_00 23:17

Uh to drink, I like the Pepsi uh zero sugar or Pepsi Max as it's known outside. And I'm a classic Lay's person. I could just eat like plain potato chips all day long.

SPEAKER_01 23:26

And favorite sports scene.

SPEAKER_00 23:28

Well, this is a controversial one, but it is the Detroit Lions because I am from Michigan and I know they missed their year a few years ago, but I they have my loyalty.

SPEAKER_01 23:39

No controversy here. Um, as long as you're, let's see, not a Seahawks fan.

SPEAKER_00 23:43

That's that's what my No, I really I really wanted Matthew Stafford to win yesterday because he's slogged for Detroit for a long time. So, but it'll be a great game.

SPEAKER_01 23:54

Well, Becky, thanks so much for joining us on the Radical Innovators Podcast, and I hope to see you again in person sometime soon.

SPEAKER_00 24:00

Yes, enjoy your day today. Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 24:02

Thank you for you too.