AI Belongs to the CHRO

You have the board pressure, the budget, and a CTO ready to move — so why isn't AI delivering ROI? PwC surveyed 4,454 CEOs and found 56% saw AI move neither revenue nor cost. That's the problem. Here's the cost: quarters of time, real capital, and board credibility spent on adoption metrics that never reach the P&L — while the business result you actually owe goes undelivered. Layoffs get blamed on AI, then quietly reversed.

Jackson Lynch and Scott Morris argue the failure is upstream of any vendor. CEOs make AI adoption the goal and call the CTO first, so the tool lands on unchanged work. The fix is a different sequence: name the business constraint, design what the workforce must do differently, then ask the CTO which technologies have the highest propensity to enable it. That's what separates the ~6% of companies with real EBIT impact from the 88% still deploying without return.

You'll leave with four plays to run Monday morning — and a cleaner way to think about AI adoption before you spend another dollar.

Subscribe to The Talent Sherpa Podcast for weekly conversations on running talent like a business system. If this hit, listen next: 43% of CEOs Got the Diagnosis Wrong (E147). More at mytalentsherpa.com.

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You have a board asking for AI. You have budget allocated. You have a CTO who's ready to move. You have everything except the answer to one question that determines whether any of it matters. What's the workforce supposed to do differently? And for what result?

Hey there, senior leader, and welcome to the Talent Sherpa Podcast, where senior leaders come to rethink how human capital really works. I'm your host, Jackson Lynch, and today I am joined by my co-host. His name is Scott Morris. He's a former CHRO with all of the scar tissue to prove it. He's the only former CHRO on record who talked a CEO into returning an AI subscription before it went live, on the grounds that no one had really defined what the problem was supposed to solve — which is on brand. And he's also the founder of Propulsion AI. Scott, good to see you.

Nice to see you too.

So, Scott, we have talked about AI on the show before, and we have named the ROI gap and the accountability problem. But today I think we're going to go after the root cause underneath all of it, because CEOs in the argument have the wrong mental model. Not the wrong vendor, not the wrong team — the wrong starting point. And the wrong starting point sends every dollar and every quarter downstream in the wrong direction. Today we're going to name it. We're going to trace it. We're going to give every senior leader listening a different way to think before they spend another dollar on AI.

Well, you know, mindset is everything, Jackson. And what I want to say from the start is that the logic that's producing the current outcome isn't reckless. The CEO who made AI adoption a first-order goal didn't get there by being careless. They got there by responding rationally to what was likely board pressure and conversation that was pointed in the wrong direction. And that's what makes it so expensive and so persistent. Hey, but before we get into it, Jackson, let's do a shout-out to a listener. And this week's listener is Julia from Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. Julia, thank you so much for being a part of the community, for listening regularly. It means something real that you're here and that you get value from the show. And to everyone listening, whether you are from Dallas, Georgia, or from Twin Lakes, Michigan, we are genuinely glad that you showed up today.

Yeah, thanks, Julia, for joining us. So let's dive into it, everybody. Here's what the data shows. PwC surveyed more than 4,400 CEOs across 95 countries in their most recent global survey. 56% reported that AI produced neither higher revenues nor lower costs for their organization. Zero measurable movement on either side of the ledger. McKinsey found that roughly 6% of organizations clear the bar for a meaningful EBIT impact from AI, which they define as about 5% or more of earnings. 6%. And meanwhile, 88% of organizations are already running AI in at least one function. The deployment is happening at scale, and the returns are not following. And the gap between those two numbers traces to design, not technology. I think you've got your thumb right on it.

So let me push a little deeper on that. When you look at that 6% against the 94%, what does the data show as the actual differentiator? Because as you just said, technology is broadly the same across both groups.

Yeah, I think the sequencing is different, Scott. I could be wrong on this, but I think the 6% started with a business outcome and worked backwards toward a tool. They knew what they were solving for. The 94% probably started with a tool and then tried to work forward to a result. And if I'm right about that, I think it's the whole story. The dominant narrative frames this as an adoption problem — that we're not deploying broadly enough, or employees aren't using the tools consistently enough. And as I've sat and worked with some CEOs, that is the thing that I hear from them. It's about "let's try things and become comfortable with it." But I think that diagnosis sends everyone back to the tool layer for a problem that doesn't live in the tool layer. Deloitte, I think, did something earlier this year. They found that only 20% of organizations say their workforce is highly prepared for broad AI adoption. And what happens from there is most people read that as a readiness gap. I read it differently. I think it's a design gap. You can't prepare a workforce for a deployment that was never designed, regardless of how hard you try. Readiness is low because nobody told the workforce what business result their use of the tool was ultimately going to be connected to.

Well, you know what I think makes that so interesting is that kind of logic, that kind of constraint thinking that you and I talk about all the time, should be present in everything that they're doing. So it isn't a tack-on, it is the core. What does it look like, Jackson, inside of a real leadership team when it's happening?

Right. Yeah. Scott, I think it looks like a CEO that walks into a leadership meeting and says, "Okay, we need to show the board what we are doing on AI." And that sentence is not grounded in a business outcome. It's about the signal. And the moment the meeting is organized around that one sentence, every decision downstream is going to be organized around signaling too. So you buy platforms that are visible, you measure rollout percentages, you report training completion rates, you focus in on those activity metrics. None of those are necessarily connected to the top line or the bottom line, which is where they need to be. They connect to the optics of appearing to be an AI-enabled company. And the board sees activity, and ultimately the income statement sees nothing. Once the CEO is organized around signaling, where does the pressure go from there? I think the loop ends up tightening, because the signal doesn't produce a result. Then what happens is the board is going to ask harder questions, and the CEO will double down on investment or activity to show that they're doing things. And 56% of the organizations spending heavily on AI can't point to a single income statement line that moved. And I don't believe that's a people failure or even a rollout failure. I think it's a design failure. It started before someone chose a vendor, before anyone wrote a line of code, and it started in the room where the CEO decided what they were solving for. And they, in the words of Indiana Jones, they chose poorly.

You know, the logic that you just laid out feels really reasonable. Put your fingernail a little bit more deeply. What went wrong in the room?

Yeah, again, I think the CEO was responding to board pressure and peer pressure to demonstrate AI capability. In the absence of a much more defined, clearer mandate, I think the most defensible move is visible activity. We've talked before about the dopamine hit of activity versus the harder path toward the outcome. So if you show "I'm buying platforms, I'm launching pilots, I'm reporting adoption rates," all of that's auditable. It feels like progress. A business outcome that has not landed yet doesn't feel that way. So the CEO defaults to what they could point to. The board was asking probably the wrong question. The CEO answered that question correctly. So I think if you pull everything else aside, the result is an organization that spent the money and still owes the result, largely because they didn't define what they were trying to accomplish.

I think you're totally spot on that. And I think there are two faulty assumptions underneath that pattern that you just described. From my point of view, the first one is the most important to name because it feels completely rational. The CEO made AI adoption the goal — not the result, not a business outcome, but the adoption of a technology itself. Board conversations, investor calls, leadership reviews — the first-order objective became demonstrating the presence of a technology, in this case, artificial intelligence. And that assumption feels like urgency. Everyone around the CEO is measuring whether they are an AI company. So they organize around that measure.

Yeah, it's funny. I saw a shoe company that actually rebranded themselves as an AI-enabled shoe company, and their stock price went up. And you're like, okay, this is getting out of hand. I'm curious from your perspective, because you're talking to these people all the time — why does that feel like the right call to the person that's making it?

Well, you know what? Because we're human. And because the signals are everywhere. And because we're reacting like humans tend to react. We're trying to optimize for the moment. Competitors are announcing their AI initiatives. Investors are raising it in board meetings. In that environment, a CEO who is not visibly moving looks like they're asleep, and nobody wants to look like that. So they move. The problem is they're moving in the wrong direction, because they're not describing to those stakeholders what it is that's going to set the foundation for true success. The problem is that the CEO's actual accountability hasn't changed. Expand commercial operations, grow the bottom line — that's the CEO's job. Cascade vision and translate vision out. But whether they get there with AI, or with a different operating model, or a sharper workforce design, is a secondary question. The moment AI adoption becomes the metric, the CEO is measuring themselves against a standard that has nothing to do with what they were hired to deliver.

So I lived that a little bit, because I was inside a company as all of this stuff was breaking. And the town hall — the CEO says, "We're going to adopt AI." And then he actually linked it to "so that we don't need as many people in this area." And I'm like, okay, what did we just tell the broader organization? AI is coming for your job. And we didn't actually evaluate whether we could do the job better. We evaluated it based on: did I have enough adoption that allowed me to rethink? Now, as it turns out, we didn't do that, because we didn't actually know what to solve for other than "do AI." And so I guess — you tell me, you play in this space regularly every day and you're talking to people — what do you think it actually costs before anyone catches on that they've aimed in the wrong direction?

I'll give you my answer, but I want to point out that I think you put your finger on the quintessential example, right? Why would we lay off? It's not because we've got the systems deployed and are producing results and we don't need the people anymore. It's because it's a visibility metric, and it's one that everybody responds to. But you also know the statistics on boomerang hires and what's happening right now with companies that have done layoffs that they've blamed on AI. They are pulling people back. So my direct answer to your question is: it costs quarters of time, and it costs capital, and it costs credibility to a certain extent, because the board eventually asks what that investment produced, and the answer is adoption metrics. And they're not going to respond to that, because it's not a balance sheet item. It's not a P&L item. It doesn't show up in the places that matter. At that point, the CEO has spent the money, and as you said a minute ago in the open, they are still owed the business result. And the most insidious part, Jackson, is that the organization spent time building infrastructure around what I think you and I would jointly agree is the wrong goal. And undoing that is not a fast operation.

It's not. But is that the only assumption producing the pattern? Or do you think there's something else that's also there?

No. Thank you for bringing me back to that. Because I think there are two faulty assumptions. That one that we just named is the first. The second assumption sits, I think, independently of the first. Even when a CEO has the goal right — even when they have named the specific business outcome and they are clear about it — the default move is still to call the CTO first, as if it were a technology implementation problem, because the word "technology" is in the name. And I think that logic feels all right to the CEO that's holding it, but I think it's fundamentally flawed as an assumption.

Well, at least they're continuing on, because they call the human capital people as long as "people" is somewhere in the middle of it. So this is not a new pattern. It's one that we've seen before, unfortunately. And what I've seen coming from that is: now that CTO is running it, and for the HR element of it, it becomes a training exercise or a communication exercise. But before we paint with a broad brush, what do you think the CTO is actually equipped to answer? Because you're saying it's wrong, but what can they be doing in this space?

First of all, let me make sure that everybody's super clear about my point, which is not that CTOs are bad, or that they don't think in the right terms, or that they don't think about the business outcomes. That's not my point at all. But when you speak to a CTO, it's kind of like what I've learned — and maybe what you've learned — about speaking to lawyers. You don't say, "Can I do this?" Because the answer is going to be no, because they are programmed to insulate the institution from risk. And the CTO the same way. They are programmed to think about what's the optimum deployment of a technology. The CTO is going to answer for you what is buildable, what's deployable, how to implement it at scale, how to make sure it doesn't break. That's an essential set of answers, but I think it starts in the wrong place. It's the wrong set of questions to ask first, because the first question should be not "how do we deploy it," but — if you've got the right goal in mind — the first question should be about the workforce. What does the workforce need to do differently in order to produce that particular result that relaxes the constraint that is in the CEO's mind? That's a work design question. The person who is equipped to answer it, ideally, is the CHRO, not the CTO. And what I think that says to our CTO or our CHRO listeners is that you need to be prepared for that question, and you need to answer it in business-constraint terms.

Yeah, I think that's right. As you were walking us through that, my mind instantly came back to two separate conversations I've had with two different organizations — one of which my wife happens to work at. And the question was adoption, and that's what they were trying to go after. And in both these situations, the employee brought forward a "here's the right thing to allow me to get the work done at an increased pace." And the answer came back, "No, just use co-work." And when pushed on why: "Well, it's just as good, and it doesn't have any security concerns." Well, I would argue both are wrong. But to your point on the risk-elimination piece — you don't have to defend saying no, and that becomes something that ultimately gets in the way, provided you know what you're trying to solve for. And in this case, the two people I'm referring to, they were solving for something other than security. They were actually solving for impact, and the CTO is getting in the way. Which is not to say all CTOs would do that. I know plenty that are really fashion-forward on new technology. But there is that element of it, especially when we have some of the leaders of the LLM companies and the frontier models saying, "Oh, this is going to be really devastating, and be careful." It reinforces that same hesitation. But building on what you were talking about, I'm curious as to your thoughts on the pattern and why you think it holds even when the CEO is sophisticated enough. In almost every other business logic — why aren't they applying that same sophistication here, do you think?

Well, let me just make sure I understand your question. When you say the pattern, you're talking about the pattern of the CEO reaching for the CTO first, not the CHRO. That's it.

Well, no — but I think you and I have done episodes about this. The fight for a seat at the table, proverbially, or the way you and I like to say it, a voice in the debate, is not just about us as CHRO or HR leaders being able to have an equivalent value to our other executive colleagues. You need that voice in the debate early, so that when these situations come, you've already built the trust that lets the CEO reach for you. Historically, the CHRO has not been in the room when technology investment conversations happen. It's an afterthought. The pattern is so ingrained that most CEOs don't even think to make that call, even when they would agree in the abstract that it's the right call to make. So the CTO answers the question that they were asked, and they do it incredibly well. The workforce design doesn't happen — it just becomes about the technology. The tool lands on top of unchanged work, and the ROI doesn't appear, for reasons that the CTO had no ability to prevent, because they're doing exactly what it is that they're supposed to do.

Before we get to what we do about this, I do want to take a second and name the mechanism running underneath both of these assumptions. Because I think the fix most organizations reach for — better tools, more training, new vendor — all of that treats the symptoms and leaves the loop continuing to run underneath. And I think there are two mechanisms. The first runs at the CEO level. Board pressure creates an AI adoption goal. That goal directs investment toward tooling, and the tooling lands on unchanged work, to your point. The work wasn't redesigned, so the output doesn't change, the ROI doesn't materialize — that's what all the data says — and then the CEO has a choice. They either scrap it or they add more investment to show the board more activity. And they almost always lean on "I'm going to double down." The loop tightens, money goes in, nothing comes out, the cycle repeats. You said there were two of them. What's the second one?

The second loop runs, I think, at the organizational level. The CTO ends up getting the mandate without the CHRO. And the CHRO is thought about as "okay, I'm going to help you implement things," and they're part of the execution team rather than the design team. So the technology gets deployed without the workforce design. Friction almost immediately appears at the point where the tool meets the workflow. And then the change management gets called in after the deployment is already live, because "we need to increase our adoption rates." At that stage, the work is kind of baked. It's hard to redesign it without undoing the deployment. So the CHRO is not in the room, and their absence is now causing a structural issue. And the next AI initiative can oftentimes run on the same rails, because the pattern was never named.

You and I use this word "loop" a lot. And every time we do, the word that is in my mind is "trap." Because it's this cycle of how do you get into it. And the problem here is neither of these loops that you just named has a natural exit from within itself.

Well, that's the problem. Exactly right. Both loops are self-sealing. You get in and you can't get out. They run until something external interrupts them. That interruption, I think, has to start with a completely different question than the one that started us down the path to begin with. So, Scott, given everything we've named — the wrong goal, the wrong first call, a couple of loops that are self-sustaining — what do you think is the frame that actually changes how a CEO can see the problem? Help us figure out what to do with your.

Well, I think the frame is this: AI is a business outcome design problem. Technology is one potential enabler, but it shouldn't be the starting point necessarily. The question the CEO needs to start with is not "which AI should we adopt," certainly, but "what does the business need to produce differently, and what does the workforce need to do differently in order to get to that item?" The question that needs to be asked is the one that belongs to the CHRO, to be honest with you. Not as a handoff, but as the very first conversation — not about technology, about business outcome design.

So I agree with you, but let me steel-man the argument here. I don't know if anyone in the organization has the work design chops today. And so if you were to hand this to the CHRO, what role on that team does that person need to have to own the work? Because my personal view is very few have a design specialist, and so you'll hand it to an HRBP who — you know, the sink catcher for anything that you want to put down the drain — and they're not, in most cases, ready for that kind of work. And this is specialized stuff. So who are we missing on the HR team if we were to get it? Or do you think I'm just over-engineering?

No, I don't think you're over-engineering at all. And I think it goes back to other episodes that you and I have done about the significance of the change of the CHRO role. The CHRO is not just the head of HR, is not an HR person first and foremost. They are a business person first and foremost. And if you're listening and you're a CHRO and you don't understand how the business operates, that really indicates an area of personal development that you absolutely have to invest in. And here's why: because when you become that business-focused executive, rather than a disciplinary or a functional-focused executive, you start to become a better partner. And that's where everything downstream changes. When the CEO and the CHRO define the outcome, the business outcome, together — the constraint that they're trying to relax, the workforce behavior that would relax it — then the CTO enters a fundamentally different conversation. Because now we have an endpoint to it. Now we're not just deploying technology, we're deploying technology as a means to an end to do something in the business. So the piece that's missing — that return that we keep talking about — is already declared. The CTO gets a different question altogether: given this business outcome that we have defined, which technologies, including AI, have the highest propensity to enable what we want? It's a fundamentally different question. It yields a fundamentally different kind of answer. That's a question that the CTO is extraordinarily well equipped to answer. But we're giving them a point of reference in space and time. This is where we're trying to end up. What's the best way for us to get there? And the answer that they're going to give us is far more useful than any answer that they can give to a generic question like "where should we add artificial intelligence?"

I agree a million percent on what you're saying. I do want to pause and say, I think this is a moment where if you're a sitting CHRO and you don't have a design thinker on your team, this is the time where you need to really think about how do I add somebody in that has that as the reason for waking up in the morning and the reason for going to bed. When I coach my folks in the Ascent Academy, it's one of the roles that in my first cohort we didn't have, and I've added it into the second, because I think it is that important, and it is a skill set that is just generally missing inside of most HR teams. So it's not — you mentioned a personal development element of it. Of course, that's 100% right. And by the way, if you want that personal development, I'm the guy to call. But there's also a role inside the organization that doesn't exist today. Right now it's parted out across multiple people, none of whom have ever been given this kind of a mandate before. So even if we're called into the question early, we've got to buttress our ability to answer the call. Because I'm not sure in most organizations, and specifically in the gritty SMB space that a lot of my clients are playing in, that we have people with the skill set to be able to go and do this work. And presuming you can get into those decisions earlier, I think that becomes a success criteria. But let me come back — you were talking about the constraint framing, and I think that's also a really important point. I'd love to hear more about where you're seeing CHROs struggle as you're making the shift.

Well, okay, constraint thinking is where my answer is going to go. And I thank you for teeing me up for at least the easy question in this whole one, and to do a commercial for our previous episodes, because we talk about this a lot. A constraint is the specific thing that is standing between the organization and some kind of business result that it's trying to achieve. So you have to think first about what the result is that you don't have today that you want, and then you've got to think about what's holding you back from that. That is not an HR program topic. And if that's the first thing that we reach for as HR leaders, that's another, in my opinion, indicator that there's some personal development that needs to be done about how the business makes money and how the business gets held back. It's not an engagement theme. Engagement is a means to an end to those things. And it's one of the means to an end, not the only one. It's a precise diagnosis. That's what a constraint is. This outcome is blocked because the workforce doesn't currently do this other specific thing. And that's really as complicated as it gets. But finding it is not easy. It's simply said and difficult to do. And when the CHRO can name the constraint at the level of specificity that the CEO can do something real with, that's really critical. The conversation then becomes between the CEO and the CHRO: if we relax this constraint, does the business result follow? Is it likely to follow? If yes, then design the work to relax that particular constraint, and then ask the CTO which tools are going to help. That's the sequence.

So push deeper on that one, because I think it's really important. What does it mean practically for the CHRO and CTO to build that plan together?

I actually think it's essential, but it's not essential for them to name the constraints together. That's CHRO and CEO work. Then the partnership shifts and it becomes CHRO and CTO. And it's two owners with different accountabilities coming together for a common endpoint. The CHRO owns the workforce design — what roles do differently, what they must necessarily do differently to relax the constraint, how that change is structured, how the accountability attaches to the outcomes at the individual level. It's not good enough for us to say we have change initiatives. Those have to be translated down to the individual level. The CTO, on the other hand, owns the technology architecture that is going to support those changes — which tools, how they integrate, what the implementation path looks like. Neither one presents to the CEO alone. They are both presenting a complete plan to the CEO together. And that joint accountability signals to the whole organization what the initiative actually is, which is a change initiative, not a tech deployment initiative.

And then how does that signal manifest itself into behavior? What does it look like?

Well, it changes whether people engage from a compliance standpoint or from an ownership standpoint. I think that's the first logical outcome, especially if it's framed around "this is a change initiative, not a technology deployment." Change initiative says we're going to do things fundamentally different. We're all going to have to adapt to get there. Tech deployment says, "I'm going to give you a tool and you need to start using it." When the organization reads this as an IT project — no disrespect to the other, really successfully implemented technology — but when the organization reads it as an IT project, then the behavior is compliance-related. Here's a tool. We want you to use it. People use the tool because they were told that they had to use the tool. That's not a good way to approach anything in terms of organizational change. But when they read it as a workforce-redesign initiative that's tied to a specific business outcome, the business outcome is what we're after. The behavior then becomes one of ownership. How do we get there? What do you need to do differently? What do we need to do differently? What does the tech need to do differently? People use the tool because they understand why they're using it and what it's supposed to do when they use it. And that difference is exactly what separates the 6% from the 94%. It's not budget, it's not vendor, it's not the platform, it's not willingness. The 6% design for the work first.

I think that's well said. And look, the great news is there are people on the cutting edge of helping us with this. So one of our guests on previously, a guy named Dave Foley from Vendi — you can find him at meetvendi.com — they're doing a lot of work around understanding the entirety of the process and helping you to map out what it really is, so that you can figure out what gets applied at the agentic level, where you have a human above the loop, and where you might need some elastic. We have Jamie Jacobson joining us here in another couple of weeks, maybe next week I think, and she's going to talk a little bit about that different labor model. One of the things that your company did as you started out was "let me take and ingest what the organization thinks a job should do and turn it into outcomes." And that's been able to expand a whole bunch of things inside of your organization that helps private equity in before and after the deal. But at its very core, that amount of clarity is not something that people on the HR team necessarily need to have today. You do need to know who you need to call. And those are three different vehicles that can help you go through that. But let's shift now, because I want us to talk a little bit about how a CEO and a CHRO can move on this starting Monday morning. So I think play one starts with the CEO. Change your starting point. Before your next AI conversation, before you call a vendor, before you ask anyone to do anything, before you sit down with your CTO or your CHRO — get really, really clear on what you're solving for in a clearly defined way. And it's not "we need to do more AI" or "we need AI to get rid of heads." That might be a downstream outcome, but that's not really what you're solving for, at least you shouldn't be. As we talked about before, AI is going to be a growth and innovation enabler more than it is a labor-reduction approach. And if you don't believe me, look at all the folks at Amazon and Microsoft that tried to go down that way and realized it was more expensive in tokens than it was in humans. So what I think you should have is a real dialogue around the constraints that are standing between you and the business outcome that you want. What's blocked? Why is it blocked? And that's a collective conversation. Only after that answer is clear should you start evaluating how you address it. If you start with a solution, you will aim it at the wrong problem six days a week and twice on Sunday. The solution is never the first conversation. What you're solving for, and the constraint, is.

Yeah. And if you're a part of our CEO audience listening to this, ask these questions out loud. That is leadership in and of itself. You are directing your organization in a new way. Play two, Jackson, is for the CHRO, I think. And it requires a real mindset shift, as most things that are meaningful do. Stop thinking in terms of HR programs. Start thinking in terms of how your CEO thinks, which is in terms of what's holding the business back and how do you relax those things. That's the constraint. It's constraint-based thinking. What's the specific thing that is standing between us and the business result that we want? And what does our workforce need to do differently to remove that constraint? Technology can be an answer to that, but there are probably more answers than just tech. You need to see all of them. If you're not operating in that language today, this is going to be hard. And not to break into commercial, but Jackson's CHRO Ascent Academy is exactly where that capability can be built. You should look into it. The shift from program thinking to constraint thinking is what gets the CHRO into the right conversation at the right time.

And thank you for the plug. Play three is the CEO-to-CTO conversation. And the question in that conversation, I think, has to change. It changes to: given this specific business outcome that we've designed for, which technologies, including AI, have the highest propensity to enable it? And that question forces a completely different answer. The CTO is going to stop recommending a platform and start recommending a path. The conversation becomes strategic. And the relationship between investment and results becomes really explicit before anyone spends a dollar. And I do want to say, Scott, you've really hardened my thinking on this, and I appreciate you pushing me out of what I think was more a traditional mindset to where I am today. And I can — as the reformed smoker, I didn't really ever smoke, but as a reformed smoker on here — listen to what Scott's saying, because he's working with businesses every day on this point. And I think it's really, really important.

You know what I think is funny about that, Jackson, is that we make tech, we make artificial intelligence, but we're not a tech company. The first thing that we deliver is a mindset change, and then the tech can be absorbed in the way that you and I are talking about. Let me get to the fourth play, and I don't know whether you have a fifth one beyond it, but I think the fourth play here is about ownership structure. The CHRO and the CTO build the execution plan together. They present it together. They are thinking about the same outcome from two sides, together. And that's an important semicolon with that word — together. The CHRO owns the workforce design and change accountability. The CTO owns the technology architecture. They both own the outcome. Neither one is presenting to the CEO without the other one in the room. That's not coordination for the sake of coordination. It's about clarity in not only who owns what, but two sides working together to get to the same business outcome, and the whole organization can see that.

We're going to have to have a side conversation later about whether it was a semicolon or a full colon or whether it's three dots. I'm not quite sure which, but your point is well made.

You've got to give me the chance to use the word "ellipsis," not "three dots," because I know you like it when I use big words.

I do. But notice I offered words in tripartite form. So, okay, senior leaders. Time to get serious. Here is the Talent Sherpa summary. Or, as Scott always says: "We have fully deployed AI across 11 workflows. We are currently working backwards to determine what each one was supposed to produce, and we expect to have that clarity by the end of quarter three, 2029." Please don't listen to that. But do listen to the summary.

Here it comes. Point one: 56% of organizations are investing heavily in AI, and they cannot point to a single income statement line that moved. The failure was determined by the design upstream. The decision about what the workforce was supposed to do differently just didn't get made. Point two: the CEO made AI adoption the goal, and the organization followed suit. The actual goal hasn't changed — expand commercial operations, grow the bottom line, cascade strategy, enable productivity, all of those things. Making AI the metric means measuring yourself against a standard that has nothing to do, at the end of the day, with what the board hired you to deliver as a CEO. Point three: AI has "technology" in the name, so the CTO is the first call — but he or she should not be. The first question is what the workforce needs to do differently to produce the result. It's constraint-based thinking. That question belongs to the CHRO first. Get that sequence wrong, and technology lands on top of unchanged work, not a productive end. Fourth and finally: the fix is sequencing the change. The CEO should be the one in the lead to name the constraint, and they should have a CHRO as a partner in identifying it. The CHRO then designs the work at the same time that the CTO gets a very different question: given this outcome, what technologies have the highest propensity to help us get where we want to get? That's my summary, Jackson.

Brilliant as always. And here is the frame I want every leader to carry out. This is a work design initiative to deliver a business outcome. Nothing more, nothing less. If you start there, everything else that follows is going to have a purpose. So thank you so much for tuning into the Talent Sherpa Podcast, where senior leaders come to rethink how human capital really works. And as I say every week, but I mean it sincerely, this is so much fun to do with you, Scott, and with everyone that's listening.

You know, Jackson, I look forward every week to doing this with you and to sharing our thoughts and ideas with our audience. And when you and I started this, we had no idea if anybody would even listen to us. And as it turns out, we are climbing on the charts. And so, one way that you can help us is to hit the like button on the episode right now. That takes you one and a half seconds to do. Better yet, subscribe, so that you get every episode delivered to you. But not only that — that subscription that costs you nothing helps the algorithm share this podcast with other senior leaders who may need more help than you do. Leave us a review on your favorite platform, whether that's Apple Podcasts or Spotify or YouTube. We are across all of those. It's a real benefit to the community to do that. And we most certainly appreciate it, because it helps us help other senior leaders.

And I want to talk a little bit about Scott's company while we're at it. Propulsion AI is workforce intelligence for private equity. Their AI teammates surface workforce risk before the close. They help leadership teams drive execution afterwards, and they can help you translate strategy into individual accountability. They can help you coach managers to define roles by outcomes, and they can give every employee a clear line of sight to what actually matters. It is really good stuff. I've had the ability to look behind the scenes a little bit at what's coming down the pike. It is great stuff. And one of the nice things about Scott, I think, is if you're not quite sure where you would be in this journey and you want to talk to someone to help you think through it, reach out to us. There's a little tab in the show notes that allows you to find us. Grab time with Scott. I'm sure that he would find time with you to walk you through what your company is going through. And maybe they can help you. I think they probably can, but maybe he can push you in a different direction. So I just signed Scott up for some time. I hope that that's okay. But if you do want to learn more before you reach out to Scott, do so at the very cleverly named getpropulsion.ai.

Thank you, Jackson. I appreciate that. And I think the willingness to help our community doesn't stop at me. I know it extends to you as well. And so I'll tell our audience: if you are a new CHRO, or if you are an existing CHRO and you heard us talk about the professional development opportunities, or if you're preparing to step into the role — any of those three use cases — Jackson has built all of the tools that you need in order to operate at the altitude that this role demands. Personal coaching, the CHRO Ascent Academy, even his best-selling Substack — everything that you need, you can find at mytalentsherpa.com.

And not nearly as cleverly named, but I do appreciate it, Scott. And thank you to everyone who is listening. Until next time, keep raising the bar. Start with the constraint before you reach for the conclusion, and keep on climbing.