Beyond the Expo: UNLEASH World 2025 with Workhuman CEO

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I am the CEO of Workhuman. Workhuman is a social recognition company. We help companies empower and engage their employees by allowing them to recognize one another for a job well done. 

How do you help CHROs navigate today’s talent landscape?

I talk to CHROs and business leaders all the time, and what I sense out there at the moment, is that there’s a lot of fear, actually. And the feat comes from the fact that there’s such an unbelievable change happening; the change with AI, the change with trying to become a skills-based organization. 

These are really seismic, like an avalanche of change that’s going to affect business and CHROs, business leaders, managers – they really don’t know how to navigate such a big kind of pivot in the way we manage companies. Companies are forever being managed in a top-down, hierarchical way (the old org chart), and now they have to reinvent everything because it’s not just humans that are doing the work, but potentially AI systems and agents that are doing the work. Plus, they have to manage talent by managing skills, which is fundamentally different to managing people.

There’s just a human amount of change to navigate at the moment.

Can you share an example of where Workhuman has made an impact you’re proud of?

A great example is British Airways. 

We’ve worked with British Airways for many years. And, of course, coming through the pandemic, British Airways – like every other travel organization – was impacted greatly. So, they had to rebuild the culture, rebuild engagement, and employee NPS in their organization. 

They launched with us a recognition program, which really enabled all of the employees of British Airways to take care of each other and to appreciate each other’s work.   

When you have all of your employees looking out for the good in other employees, it really lifts the whole organization, which they were able to do. They were able to increase employee NPS and engagement across the whole employee base and really mould a new culture for British Airways for now and into the future.

An incredible company and an incredible success story.

How are you helping CHROs convince their C-Suite that change is needed?

I think there are a number of new elements to the recognition world and the HR world in general. When we speak to companies and new customers that we’re going to potentially partner with, it’s all about the Return on Investment for the project. And, I always advise CHROs to start with the end in mind – ‘What are you trying to achieve?’, ”What is the ultimate Return on Investment for this project?’ – because this project is going to touch every employee in your whole company on a global basis. It could be tens of thousands of employees, so there has to be an endgame. There has to be a return.

The ROI for launching a recognition program that touches everyone is that you’re going to lift and energize the whole workforce. You’re going to blanket the workforce in a kind of goodwill and positivity. But it’s not just that. You’re going to generate an incredible amount of data, because once you capture how everyone talks about everyone else’s work, you now have this incredible text that’s basically laden with insights about the work that’s being done in the company. So, you can learn from that information, that data, and you can put AI to use in terms of mining that data and synthesizing that data to get insights about who’s doing the best work, who the top performers are, who’s ready for promotion, who’s influential, and who has informal power.

All of these talent insights are in that data from a recognition program. You just have to harness it and use next-generation technologies like AI, machine learning, and natural language processing to really get those insights out of the data.

I always tell CHROs to start with that aim in mind, and the very first meeting about this project, picture yourself in a year’s time having everyone in the organization have access to unlimited insight about talent and performance throughout the company.

What is Workhuman’s differentiator?

For many decades, we’ve worked with some of the world’s most admired companies. Everyone from Pfizer to GE, British Airways, as we discussed. And, over 25 years, we’ve built this incredible store of data about recognition. So, we’ve been able to map all of the work, all of the little victories, all of the projects in these incredible companies – 8 million employees in 150 countries around the world – but we also invested in a data intelligence division called Workhuman iQ. This is a division in Workhuman filled with organizational psychologists, AI experts, machine learning experts, and data scientists, and put them to work on the big corpus of data that comes from all of those customers. 

What they’ve been able to do then is train LLMs, train artificial intelligence, because we have that data. Our approach in investing in creating those AI technologies has enabled us to be able to productize that for our customers. No one else has gone that far with the investment in these next-generation technologies ti really unlock the power of the data that comes from those recognition programs. 

What’s coming in the near future?

AI is going to change everything. But AI doesn’t stop with what we know about AI today. 

AI is going to evolve and change, and at Workhuman, we’re focused on building the next gen. 

We have a whole generation of human intelligence products that we’ve released already. But, of course, we’re not sitting still. 

We’re working on the next generation of all those technologies today. And, a big frontier that we’re focused on is being able to predict the future of talent using those technologies. We think that’s a great unlock for all our customers to be able to find out who the next generation of talent and next generation of leaders in their organization are so that they can put their arms around them and nurture them and let them become who they should become in their organizations. That’s one of the incredible, forward-reaching things that we’re doing.