‘People are really our biggest differentiator’: Inside New York Life’s approach to future-proofing skills

HR leaders are faced with a challenge: many can’t hire quickly enough to fill the roles of new skills and capabilities that are needed from external markets.  

For New York Life’s SVP of Talent Management, Tina Gupta, this dilemma reflects a moment of workforce transformation that is “second to none” in terms of speed and impact.

Tina Gupta, SVP of Talent Management at New York Life

With this being said, businesses also have a responsibility to nurture their current talent to support individual growth, which will in turn benefit the business.

New York Life – which achieved a record financial results in 2024, driven by $1.9 billion in insurance sales – has therefore commitment to helping its workforce “improve their skills, be relevant, and really think about their career trajectory,” which Gupta describes as “a simple math problem” as there’s “a lot of change and a lot of skills needed.”

To learn more about how HR leaders can adapt to these changes in skills, roles, and expectations, UNLEASH spoke exclusively to Gupta – who will be taking center stage at UNLEASH America 2026 – to gain a deeper understanding of how she, and New York Life, are navigating disruption. 

Creating future leaders at New York Life

Readying a workforce for the future involves a lot of moving parts – understanding the importance of upskilling and internal mobility is just one facet that makes a successful organization ‘tick’.

For Gupta, this involves learning how an employee base can be properly supported by preparing individuals to grow with the workforce as it evolves. This has therefore been “the crux” of Gupta’s focus, as she and her team help prepare New York Life to be “future ready” – especially “given the pace of change”. 

She therefore believes it is New York Life’s “responsibility to really help shepherd employees into paths and opportunities that are going to be best for them”.

Adding: “We’re all on the journey together. Our role is to help everyone engage with AI confidently and meaningfully.”

Although skills are invaluable to the workforce, Gupta also highlights the importance of mindset – especially when trying to identify leaders of the future. 

To assist with identifying potential future leaders, New York Life launched Lead Forward, a program sent to every manager and executive at the company – around 2,400 of its 23,000 employees.

“It’s not really a traditional learning and development program,” Gupta shares, “it’s actually focused on behaviors, and it’s really about what those traits are. 

When I say traits, I mean things like growth mindset, problem-solving, digital-native leaders – things that have been an undercurrent of some of the work we’ve done before but we’ve never had them front and center.

“So really focused on capability-building, mindset shifting, and helping people think about how they turn up and how they lead teams in different ways. When we say future-ready leader, that’s the kind of thing we’ve been homing in on.”

The Lead Forward program therefore demonstrates an effort to move away from focusing on just traditional sets of experiences and skills and towards employees who are leaning in to learning and adapting to change.

Providing the example of AI, Gupta believes that the individuals who are already experimenting with the digital workforce and considering how it can impact their teams will be the ones that will “truly stand out as future leaders.”

Integrating AI and gigs into the workforce

To support the AI transformation, New York Life is focusing on two key areas. 

Firstly, enabling every employee to become comfortable and work confidently with AI as a partner. This isn’t just about providing employees with the tools, but rather encouraging them to innovate and experiment with them. 

In essence, employees are encouraged to “think differently about AI” as a partner.

Secondly, New York Life has been leveraging AI to think about how it brings career development, growth and learning to life for employees. 

To accommodate this, the business introduced ‘the Career Hub’, which is an AI-native tool to help employees think through their skills, career paths, identify short-term gigs and learning opportunities, and to “help people think through learning in a different way”. 

In fact, gigs are just one way in which New York Life promotes employee growth – by encouraging individuals to explore new areas of the business.

If you think about when you learn best, it’s when you’re actively using your skills, participating in something, working in a team,” Gupta expresses. “So the gig concept brings that to life.”

Launched through the Career Hub last summer, Gupta describes gigs as a “safe place” allowing employees to “explore, try something new, or bring their skill set to something they haven’t worked on before”. 

She continues to explain that gigs are “time-boxed assignments”, which are aligned with strategic initiative over the short term. They therefore allow people to think through how they want to build up their skillset, network, or apply new skills, for example. 

Since implementing these gigs, New York Like has seen around 86 successful cases. 

One example Gupta shares is of a new employee who was asked to create a proof of concept for LLM, Anthropic’s Claude. 

Although he had experience using Claude, he felt he needed further support, so he posted a gig.

A couple of employees from that team joined him – they brought business context, aligned the project to business problems, trained him on Claude, and built their skills. 

Between them they created a business case, a proof of concept, and successfully deployed something in Claude, which has now been adopted as an enterprise process. 

Gigs have also been shown to boost internal mobility, as it “creates a structure around who you can work with – not just tapping people you already know”.

“Managers are excited,” Gupta explains. “Not only can their employee build a skill and bring it back, but managers themselves can post gigs to get help with work they’re stuck with. 

“It’s creating an ecosystem and mindset of enterprise talent, with the tool surfacing matches based on skills, capabilities, and aspirations. It lets us scale in a way that just wasn’t possible in the past.”

This is particularly important for Gupta, who expresses that “people are really our [New York Life’s] biggest differentiator”. 

For this reason, future-proofing a business “isn’t just about business strategy,” but rather about how leaders think about their workforce. 

“Making sure we commit to giving employees opportunities to grow, the tools, the techniques, the space to explore and experiment – all the things they need to lean into changing ways of working,” Gupta adds. 

“Our responsibility is to do that, and the equal responsibility is on employees, leaders, and managers to meet us in the middle and take advantage. 

If you can get the people’s differentiator right, you’re onto something golden, and I think we’re really good about the path we’re on right now.”

More from Tina Gupta at UNLEASH America 2026

If you want to hear more from New York Life’s Tina Gupta, be sure to attend her session at UNLEASH America 2026.

Gupta will be taking center stage to discuss Creating Future Skills Pathways That Evolve With Technology and the Workforce on March 18 2026.

Joined by Tina Kao Mylon, Chief Talent and Diversity Officer at Schneider Electric and Ankit Saxena, Global Head of People Insights and HR Technology at PPG, Gupta will discuss cultivating an organization with an AI-ready mindset, enabling continuous learning and scalable upskilling strategies, how to aligning HR, IT, and business leaders around shared transformation goals, and much more.

She says: “I want to share my experience having actually been in the driving seat leading AI adoption, using a change management approach to build future skills and drive an AI-enabled organization successfully at a 180-year-old company.

“I’ll share how we’re doing this at New York Life in a way that’s practical, measurable and built to last.

I’m looking forward to being in a room with leaders who are willing to challenge comfortable thinking. I’ve found the best conversations at UNLEASH are where peers are honest about trade-offs, missteps and what it really takes to scale change.

“Those unfiltered conversations are what help accelerate progress — that’s where the real value is, and I’ll be sharing some of my own as well.”