David Hughes, the Global People Leader for Costa Coffee (now at HSBC), discusses the company’s innovative approach to hiring using AI. Costa Coffee, a global brand with over 2,000 stores in the UK, faces significant hiring challenges due to high turnover rates and the need to hire thousands of baristas annually. David explains how Costa has shifted its focus from hiring the “best” talent to finding the “best fit” talent that aligns with the company’s values and culture. Using Sapia’s AI chat-based assessment, Costa has built a simple 5-question open chat survey that lets Costa identify the culture, behavioral, and work skills for best fit. This process not only scales to 350,000+ candidates, it also gives each candidate a personalized assessment and is rated 9 out of 10 on netpromoter score. In other words, candidates love it! David emphasizes the importance of patience and persistence in adopting AI, highlighting the...

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AI-driven recruiting is on the hot seat and it’s only getting hotter. Most job seekers now experience AI-interviewers, AI-based screening, and even chatbots that can automate the entire process. And as this market grows, two new lawsuits (one against Workday, one against Eightfold) have emerged, indicating the “fear” job seekers have about this technology. In the meantime, vendors are gobbling up these tools. This includes Workday’s $1 billion acquisition of Paradox (and Hiredscore), SAP’s acquisition of Smartrecruiters, Outmatch’s acquisition of Pymetrics (renamed Harver), UKG’s acquisition of Chattr (renamed Rapid Hire), Radancy’s acquisition of myInterview, Hirevue’s acquisition of Modern Hire, Cornerstone’s acquisition of Skyhive (following acquisition of Clustree), Lightcast’s acquisition of Rhetorik, and more. Where is all this going? As I discuss, this is an enormous ($840 billion) market and there’s a lot yet to come. As I discuss, we are entering a whole new set of demands, demands for quality,...

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Overview Driving successful AI transformation is no small task. In 2025, we spent the year discussing the growing “superworker” opportunity—where every employee can become more productive, innovative, and impactful through the use of AI. While we saw AI adoption and utilization increase, companywide AI excellence that delivers real financial returns remains unrealized at most organizations. HR plays a pivotal role in moving from AI experimentation to work reinvention. In the latest sprint of The Big Reset, one of our three breakouts—“Orchestrating Enterprise AI Excellence”—discussed just this. We addressed questions such as: What does AI excellence look like at the enterprise level? How can HR lead by example and reinvent its own operating model with AI? And how does developing strong leaders and managers—one of HR’s biggest responsibilities—contribute to creating an AI-powered superworker company? This perspective recaps five weeks of discussion on AI excellence and homes in on a central theme:...

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In this podcast I talk with Nathan Perrott, VP of Innovation at Radancy. Radancy is a major provider of integrated recruiting tools, all integrated in what’s called the Radancy Talent Acquisition Cloud. You may not recognize the name, but Radancy is actually one of the pioneers in talent acquisition, originally started as TMP Worldwide. Over the last 40 years the company has been involved in all aspects of technology-enabled recruitment, (including Monster.com), so they understand job advertising, social media, candidate experience, branding, automated screening, and now AI-powered interviewing. The company’s integrated platform is one of the most end-to-end recruitment systems in the market (handles everything except the ATS) and more than 700 large corporations rely on Radancy. Nathan has been in this space for many years so I ask him to explain how the market has changed, what their new AI copilot is all about, and how companies can save...

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Human Resources (HR) has always struggled with two identities. Is HR a strategic partner, a driver of organizational value and inspired human capital growth? Or is it an administrative function, acting as the “company police,” here to enforce rules, policies, legal, and labour regulations? The first is a value creator and demands human skills; the second is an administrative function, which should be automated as much as possible. This dual role has defined the profession for years. In fact there is a meme out there called “Don’t Trust HR,” which tried to convince employees that HR was the bad guys. Well we are now entering a transformational time. Starting in 2026, the HR profession is undergoing a massive, AI-driven reinvention that will resolve this conflict, moving HR away from administrative overhead and toward a truly strategic, “full-stack” model. The Weight of History: A Profession Growing in Complexity The HR profession...

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The HR profession is about to go through its biggest transformation in decades. To use a new phrase, this is a “rupture” from the past as we shift to new world of AI agents and superagents automating much of what we do. In this podcast I explain how 30-40% of AI jobs and roles will change, and how HR will become even more strategic as a result. And this is not a story of layoffs or cost reduction: rather we see AI helping to transform HR into a business function that accelerates scale, time to market, customer value, and both employee and customer experience. I also discuss why and how AI accuracy and trust is going to become enormously more important overnight as agents speed up and automate our human capital work. I’m very inspired by what’s about to happen and I want you, as a business or HR professional,...

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