ADP tells leaders to ‘avoid pressure’ and ‘stay curious’ to be ‘bridge between AI innovation and adoption’

“AI should never be a one-size-fits-all play – it has to align with your strategy and your culture,” Jay Caldwell, Chief Talent Officer at ADP tells UNLEASH in an exclusive interview.

For Caldwell, this means organizations must focus on deploying AI in the areas of their business that are “most critical for success,” while ensuring technology investment supports the company’s core strategy. 

Caldwell therefore stresses that AI deployment should reflect an organization’s unique strategy and culture. For example, if a business is service-oriented and people-first, AI should be used to “elevate the employee experience,” by giving the workforce “everything they need to deliver the best possible customer experience.”

Likewise, if a business needs operational excellence, the focus should be placed on “using AI to sharpen execution and unlock smarter workflows.”

At ADP, Caldwell and his team are leveraging people insights, skills, and practices to drive action and growth. He shares that a recent priority for has been “enhancing leader effectiveness” and the “environment of skills growth” that ADP provides to its associates, to ensure “leaders can thrive in the future of work.” 

In turn, Caldwell explains that this will “drive the retention and engagement,” while aligning with ADP’s goal of leveraging the right HR technology to improve the company’s impact, while providing “a seamless associate experience.”

Start by familiarizing leaders with AI before implementing

Leadership buy-in and capability is “crucial” to successful adoption of AI, as leaders can pave the way for others, according to Caldwell.

“If you want AI to truly take root across the organization, it has to start at the top,” he says. “Leaders cannot coach what they do not understand. 

When leaders feel confident in their AI tools and training, they can then bring AI to their teams and, most importantly, show their teams how to use AI in an ethical, responsible manner.” 

Leaders must also be trained to “recognize the behaviors and skills” within performance management practices, enabling them to demonstrate the importance and personal impact of adopting AI. 

For this reason, Caldwell believes that “leaders are the bridge between AI innovation and adoption.”

However, successful adoption isn’t just about equipping managers with the right skills – it’s also ensuring there is a universal mindset shift from “can we automate this?” to “should we?”

Fostering a culture where leaders keep AI ethics and responsibility at the forefront of their decision making – especially in areas such as hiring, performance, and decision-making – is a means to protect both the business’s people and its brand.

“The technologies we have today are becoming more and more limitless,” Caldwell notes. “Anything seems feasible.”

“So much so that organizations are now faced with technology opportunities that can challenge their values and beliefs.”

To support this, he provides the example of performing work that is inherently people-based – or at the heart of value provided to clients and customers.

HR leaders should therefore ask which work truly requires humans and drives core value before using AI, with Caldwell stating AI shouldn’t be adopted “if it’s not necessarily needed”. 

“Don’t jump into AI because you feel you have to,” he warns. “Understand it first, including its shortcomings and flaws, impacts to your people and business, and alignment to your values.”

Reframe productivity and collaboration for the AI age

It’s clear that AI will continue to change how work gets done, but how will this impact performance measurement, beyond traditional productivity metrics?

Caldwell expressed that AI runs the risk of blurring “traditional measures of productivity”. 

For example, responding to emails and managing expenses are typically seen as straightforward, check-list tasks that can “make workers feel productive.”

But as AI automates some of these “black-and-white” tasks, workers can focus more time on long-term projects that require critical thinking and can feel more “open-ended.”

Yet Caldwell warns that although these projects are “absolutely essential for business success,” they may be harder to “measure and track on a day-to-day basis”. 

“Workers might not feel as productive when they work on these tasks because it could take months or years to finally realize a measurable outcome,” he says. “With this in mind, the world of work needs to think about a new approach to measuring productivity and helping workers feel productive.”

Additionally, these projects are at risk of causing some employees to feel isolated, with a lack of support. Caldwell calls for more leaders to “double down on intentional connections” as AI may reduce the number of co-worker interactions. 

He explains: “If in the past your new hires learned best by partnering closely with their more tenured peers, and now AI is now putting that knowledge into their fingertips, what happens to all the collaboration that was organically occurring? 

How do you replace those interactions with intentionality to ensure the engagement and collaboration continues?

“Depending on the impact, leaders may need to create more opportunities for employees to collaborate, share what they’re learning, and feel part of something bigger. It’s how you balance progress with belonging.”

Global operations require different global mindsets for ethical AI

Finding this balance has been a top priority for ADP, as the business operates on global scale. 

One way in which this is achieved, is by leveraging AI in a way that ensures the business is “ethical and compliant”. 

As AI and privacy laws vary widely across the globe, it’s critical for teams to appropriately leverage AI experts in different areas, while striking the right balance between enterprise governance and visibility with local innovation. 

“This means creating practices and approaches that are relevant globally, and can also enable local teams to propose and develop use cases that are targeted for their needs,” Caldwell adds.

As a result, responsible AI is of the highest importance, to ensure businesses, brands and employees are protected. 

Caldwell explains that unclear or poorly governed AI can create “fear, confusion, or inappropriate application,” which can lead to concern about jobs security, bias, and privacy, while impacting employees’ trust. 

“For the organization, irresponsible AI use can damage credibility, create legal scrutiny or compliance and privacy risk, and weaken the employment brand,” he expands. “These are each massive impacts individually.

“AI can be a tremendous workplace tool, but it needs to be managed with the utmost care and responsibility.

Yet with this in mind, Caldwell assured HR leaders that no matter how fast AI is moving, they “shouldn’t feel pressure to rush ahead without understanding it.”

“My advice is to stay curious, stay grounded in your values, and bring your people with you,” he concludes. “Invest time in learning what AI can do well, where it falls short, and how it will truly impact your workforce. 

When leaders approach AI with clarity, intention, and responsibility, it becomes a powerful tool to elevate people and performance – not a source of fear or confusion. The organizations that will thrive are the ones that treat AI as a capability to be thoughtfully integrated, not a shortcut to be blindly adopted,” he concludes.