AI in the workplace

TranscriptTeaser 1: We need to get up the value chain to thinking about these more strategic issues because that's where we can have the biggest bang for our buck.

Teaser 2: Productivity ultimately is a macroeconomic measure. It doesn't actually mean very much in a company. What matters in a company is performance.

Teaser 3: If it's right to be somewhat cautious when we adopt new technology, what does fear of AI cost organisations?

Teaser 4: How we do culture build feels to me to to be a big differentiator between which boats will float with the rising tide of AI remaking workplaces and which boats will not float.

[Intro music fades]

Lisa Pearl (LP): Hello and welcome to a very special episode of the HR People Pod, the CIPD's fortnightly podcast, bringing you expert insight on the big issues shaping work and the people profession. 

I'm Lisa Pearl, People and Change Director at the CIPD and I am delighted to be joined today by our new CIPD Chief Executive, also my boss, Neil Carberry. Neil, hello and welcome to the HR People Pod.

Neil Carberry (NC): Hello, Lisa.

It's a delight to be here and a delight to finally be here as well. It's a very odd experience to accept a job in March and not be able to start until September, but fantastic to finally be here. And I'm looking forward to you ignoring the fact that I'm your boss in the Paxman style interrogation you're about to give me.

LP: Okay, thanks Neil. 

So outside of the CIPD, Neil was appointed an OBE in the King's Birthday Honours in 2025. He's also an RFU qualified refereeing coach and one of the 8,000 co-owners who made Heart of Midlothian the UK's biggest fan-owned football club. 

And throughout the episode, we'll explore a number of themes as Neil settles into his new role, the importance of the profession, developing business acumen and a commercial mindset, the need to unlock greater productivity and performance and the role of AI in well-managed workplaces. 

But before we get into all of that, Neil, I know that you've said that your first responsibility in the role is to listen, to learn and to understand. And I know that you've had the privilege of travelling up and down the country in recent weeks, engaging with our CIPD members across the regions. 

So from your travels, what are people professionals telling you they're being asked to deliver right now? And what are the common challenges and opportunities that you've been hearing about?

NC: Well, thanks, Lisa. I think that there's a really interesting dynamic in the profession at the moment. And we're recording this on Friday of week three for me. And so far, I've been in Edinburgh, I've been in Belfast, I've been in Manchester, I've been in Birmingham, I have, of course, been in Wimbledon at CIPD head office. 

When you look at what we're hearing, I think there's two big things that come through. One is that we as a profession have huge opportunities because every organisation, whether it's private sector businesses or public sector, I was with the senior civil service HR team earlier this week, are facing the challenge of reorientating their operating model, how they do business, what the people do and what the machines do over the next few years. And doing that well is fundamentally a people management challenge, isn't it? So there's something there in terms of the opportunity we have. 

On the flip side of that, I talk to a lot of people who feel that the knowledge, the skills, the behaviours they need to do that, maybe they need to brush up on a few things. But broadly, there's a sense of, well, do we have the confidence as a profession to go out and make those changes? And I think there, one of the things I'm really keen that the CIPD does is support the profession to be confident in the value that we drive and establish the value that we drive really clearly in ways which businesses understand. So you or public sector employers understand we use the language of the service that we're trying to deliver to make a difference.

LP: Yeah, we're going to explore that a little bit further as we move through the conversation. I know you shared a post recently where you highlighted that economic growth is struggling to get up off the mat and employers are navigating weak productivity, skill shortages, technological change and shifting expectations of work. And I know that boards and CEOs are looking to their people professionals for a lot at the moment. So what are you hearing about those expectations? And what do people, professionals say they need to meet them?

NC: What's interesting, growth in 2026 has actually been rather better than we've seen for a couple of years. And I put that down to the fact that at some stage you've got to do something. 

There's been a lot of uncertainty around that has caused both households, you know, consumers, you and me, to sit on their hands a bit, sit on cash and companies to do the same, not to invest. And those things are individually perhaps quite prudent, but collectively quite damaging to the economy. And now I think more and more leaders are getting to the point where they know they've got to move and what is challenging and uncertain for them is they know the answer is not staying where we are, but they know that any given destination they pick now will probably be wrong. Nobody has a crystal ball here and it's wrong to think that the line has a crystal ball in the way that we don't have in HR. All we can do is make some choices to do the right sorts of things that get us to roughly where we think we might want to be. And what we've seen over the last year, 18 months is I think people start to move. 

It was really telling that the good growth figures we saw in the middle of October, a lot of it was coming out of services and it was coming out of services in areas where people were grasping that question of what does the AI do versus what does the people do really effectively? And I think that will build up pace. 

So if we're thinking back to what we need to do, that understanding of what the business is trying to drive, what our role is in managing that delivered in really commercially relevant terms and then really bringing the ideas to the table. You and I have talked about this before. I don't believe in going on about HR's place at the table because I think you get your place at the table because you demonstrate the impact that we have. And right now out there around the country, there are great teams doing great things, making big changes. And it's our job at the CIPD to walk alongside members in doing that, but also help those who are a little unsure to find their way.

LP: Yeah, and we know that people professionals can often bring, I guess, exceptional insight into how the people drive that value and sort of really make that link into that commercial conversation. So if we're building that fluency in terms of that conversation, what opportunities does it open up for the profession?

NC: I think a really great example is AI. So a lot of AI chat in HR is about what AI can do for HR. And clearly it can take some costs out and it can make some of our servicing options more effective for the business. But actually the question is what will AI do to the production model of the organisation which we serve? 

And when you think about that, the line is going to have a lot of knowledge about what it needs to get done, but it's also predisposed to think about this week, this month, this quarter, this year. We can afford to think of it long term. So, if you saw the recent John Amaechi TikTok, because I am young enough to have a TikTok account just about, about the flat-bottom rhombus, you see that kind of purely finance or purely line-driven decisions about entry-level jobs ultimately damage the ability of the organisation to compete. 

My favourite fact, which you've heard about 50 times now, Lisa, is that the market cap of the six big American tech firms is now bigger than the GDP of the People's Republic of China. In some way that's going to be monetised. So things like token costs for AI are not going to be in three years time where they are now. I was talking to an HRD earlier today who was saying, I'm actually having to think about how I take people out so that I can afford higher token costs. That's a really challenging commercial place to be. 

So all that stuff about organisation design, production design, how to maintain the workforce. Talking to the Philippa O'Connor, the HRD of PWC earlier in the weekend, she was saying there are tasks which they could automate that they've chosen not to because of the learning and development value of doing those tasks. 

So I think for us in HR, there's this moment of there is a bow wave of excitement about AI and there should be, there's lots to do. But we should be thinking about how does this become a sustainable production model, sustainable operating model for the organisations we're in and hold that two, three-year strategic view close to our heart. Because I don't think many others around that boardroom table are going to be doing it and it's going, to be a vital service to the organisations we work in.

LP: Just sticking with that link in terms of the productivity aspects and the performance. I know when business leaders talk about productivity, there's of course this sort of economic definition that you hear governments and economists talk about in the media, in terms of the measure of that sort of average GDP per hour worked that we produce as a nation. 

The Productivity Institute puts it that macroeconomic measure doesn't capture what productivity means for business and people. 

I know that on a recent episode of the HR People Pod, one of our panellists suggested that the biggest misconception is that we talk about productivity as an economic issue, but in reality, there's a huge leadership and management issue. 

So just picking up on what you were just you were just saying, what does it take for an organisation to create that environment for people to be more productive? And I guess linking on from that, what extent do we need to look at redesigning work and jobs to help people become more productive?

NC: So you put your finger, Lisa, on something that I think is really important, which is productivity ultimately is a macroeconomic measure that governments and economic wonks like me are interested in, it doesn't actually mean very much in a company. What matters in a company is performance and we should view it as how are we performing in the best way possible? How are we taking out costs that we don't need? How are we making sure that the value of people's labour as they put it in is generating as much as it can? And when you look at the work that, for instance, campaigns like Be the Business did. The UK, we can talk it down, actually has some of the most productive companies in the world. Really effective, really productive, fascinating high-performance organisations. But we also then have that long tail of less effective performance. 

How do you address that? Well, the Be the Business work that was done a couple of years ago was pretty clear that quality of management and quality of work organisation are by far the biggest parts of that. And then when you look at the data on how productivity at macro level has fallen behind across the G7 since the great financial crisis of 2008-9, loads of it is in how the people interact with the tech. 

So there you've got an L&D challenge and a deployment challenge of how we organise new tech. And the UK has a long history of being slower to adopt, even things like CRM systems and sister markets around Europe. You've got an OD challenge in terms of the future of the operating model. And you've got a people management challenge in terms of supporting line managers to do things well. 

So if we think we need to up the performance of British workplaces to generate more productivity, it's fundamentally about what we do. But the most important thing is that is line managers doing line management. Not us as a profession getting caught out doing the things that are rightly theirs to do. We need to get up the value chain to thinking about these more strategic issues, because that's where we can have the biggest bang for our buck.

LP: Yeah, okay. And I guess in terms of when you talk about productivity, you're talking about what are we actually doing as an organisation? So it's a sort of hard wire what it is you are asking your people to do into the strategy. I guess, work to remove the unimportant stuff that just causes distractions. For me, it's about ensuring that agility with a real sort of skills focus rather than get locked into the hard boundaries of job descriptions as we used to know them. 

And I guess what you're saying is, you know, in terms of the line and the ownership, how can people professionals move from supporting productivity through the line management to help you to shape it? And what do we need to make that shift possible?

NC: So, I think we need a real understanding of the businesses we're serving because what that looks like will be different in different businesses, often even different businesses in the same sectors, the issues will be different. And I would say that, I mean, I'm an old employment relations guy. So I think basically everything's environmental. the knowledge, skills and abilities that come with being a chartered member of the CIPD, those are the tools you carry around with you. But you need to have enough confidence and experience in your own ability to know which tool to pull out-of-the-box in different organisations, even if the basic picture that you're seeing looks quite similar between the two. 

So there's something there about us having the confidence in our own abilities to read the situation. I talk a lot about insight, not commentary. That feels important. I was talking to Neil Morrison, the HRD at Seven Trent recently, and we were talking about what the offer of an HRD into the business is. And it is that, look, we think if we do this, it probably saves 10,000 hours for the business. And then we can have a discussion about what you want to do with those 10,000 hours. But if we do this really well, it saves 10,000 hours and then have that discussion with the business. 

And I think taking those big offers to the leadership and saying, look, we've thought about this problem and we think there are some options for us. What's your risk appetite? What's your willingness to try something different? Because I think increasingly we're going to have to encourage chief execs in particular to be more tolerant of risk than maybe they have been for the last few years. 

If I hazard my kind of my general take having been employment director of the CBI and chief exec of the REC for the last few years, I think employers are going to have to learn, you know, our chief execs are going to have to learn that they have to behave like employers a bit and articulate what the organisation needs to be competitive. And it's a big job for us in helping them do that.

LP: I agree. And just sort of picking around, I know you keep coming back to it often when we talk about productivity in organisations. It seems that every conversation I'm in these days includes AI. And I guess, of course, in a conversation like this, we can't ignore the impact, the importance, the implications of AI and other technology in driving productivity gains in our workplaces. 

But as we see AI moving from, I guess, experimentation to everyday infrastructure, we need to consider the balance of extracting those productivity gains while protecting the conditions for good work, about ensuring the technology is deployed in a way that's ethical, transparent with that sort of proper accountability. 

So, I guess this is all about responsible and effective AI adoption, right? So what does good AI governance need to look like in practice and perhaps more controversially, who should own it?

NC: As you'd expect me to say as an ER guy, that who should own it might depend on the organisation, but there's a really interesting thing here, which is about how we play our role in AI world. You've rightly put your focus on morality and ethicality and different brands will have different risk appetite there, which we need to be really clear about with the line. But that moral and ethical responsibility is widely shared. It's not just HR's job. It's not our job to sit in the corner of the room and tell people what they can't do. It is our job to engage with what is on the table and try to make sure that we're focused on the long term, that we're focused on sustainability. 

We answer the question, as someone said at the talent gathering that I was at in Edinburgh a couple of weeks ago, what would happen if we had to turn it off? How would we be sustainable? So, there's a whole range of questions where being kind of long-term stewards of the operating model is the right place for HR to be. And I think that does mean getting closer to CTOs broadly and understanding what's possible and getting into a kind of test operate world. You know, you can build things quite quickly with things like vibe coding. Now that doesn't mean you should tie it immediately into your core production systems. But the ability to build things and think about things differently quickly and to fail fast is hugely exciting. 

Us being in that room, focused on what's possible, but always with that sustainability and ethicality thing in our back pocket, I think we end up with better outcomes for the companies we're working for there. We can't be the guys who say no. 

And then the other thing is there is a risk management piece, which is however much AI companies think they're using, they're using more because the workforce are using it to do different things. And there, I think there's a whole different slew of issues for us to address, not least if I, as a junior member of staff, can get answers that make you, my boss, happy, using an LLM of choice. Fantastic. But what about when I'm then in the client presentation, I don't actually understand what I've written. So, there's a whole resetting of the learning and development piece that we need to work through and we need to think about our attitude to employees using AI in ways where they're doing it, prospecting for themselves. 

And then there's the whole cost management piece. This is a strategic discussion that requires CPO leadership to be engaging with finance, with CTOs across the table to build a more cohesive, sustainable plan. It is the most common thing that I hear on the agenda of CPOs, albeit that is sort of coming towards the end of day 15 in the job.

LP: Yeah, I totally agree. And fundamentally, it's about that cultural change, isn't it, that's needed to ensure the right adoption of AI and tech. And I guess, there's a huge focus there on changing behaviour and skill sets, which is what HR brings to that relationship.

NC: Culture is incredibly important, especially in a context where so much of our work is now remote. How we do culture build feels to me to be a big differentiator between which boats will float with the rising tide of AI remaking workplaces and which boats will not float.

LP: You've touched a little bit on the risks involved and the courage and the ambition. If it's right to be somewhat cautious when we adopt new technology, what does fear of AI cost organisations?

NC: I think it's actually quite difficult to be an established incumbent right now across the whole economy, because you've got a business model that works pretty well and probably will continue to work pretty well for a bit. You know, the whole Michael Dell thing about having pointed out to the Dell leadership that we need to go and build a different Dell and then port the business across into it because everything is changing. I mean, that's very clear in IT world, but it's less clear in other sectors right now. 

My sense is that we've got to be willing to be bold in terms of thinking about organisational redesign. And to be willing to be wrong about the long-term outcome. So that piece around the skill for HR in leading things, but actually other parts of the business too, is with confidence being willing to set out on a path even though we don't quite know what the outcome, the end point of that path is. And that feels uncomfortable. But ultimately, I think risk and understanding risk appetite is probably the biggest single thing that has come back to corporate leadership in the last basis in 2022. 

If you think about the history since basically the fall of communism. We had a long kind of Goldilocks period in the economy where growth was really good between the early 90s and the great financial crisis. We then had a period where while growth wasn't that great, risk was low because cost of capital was low. And the way I always explain this to HR people is why was there no pay pressure in the economy in 2015? Everyone had really good 0% deals on their credit cards. So households financial management capacity was much higher than at any time in history. And then we got to 2022 and bang, we're right back to what was normal in the 80s and the 70s and the 60s and 50s and every decade before that, which is money costs money. There's always pay pressure in the economy. Inflation needs management. Energy costs are high. We grew the economy in those decades.

But that risk awareness in our leadership, if you think about what we need to support our leaders to understand in businesses, that risk awareness, understanding the corporate risk appetite and taking sensible bets on the future, those are leadership skills, which, well, let's call them leadership muscles that we didn't have to exercise quite as much for a little while. And they're now back. They should actually lead our business leaders down a path of thinking, well, how do I work with my people professionals to build different organisations? And I think we need to encourage leaders to think in that way.

LP: Yeah. And there's a slightly different angle to AI related risk that I've certainly been alert to recently, the sort of human risk. And I think many, as AI takes on more tasks, many people are sort of quietly asking what their value is now. How do we help people see and keep building the value they bring as AI starts to reshape the roles? And what role can people professionals play in that?

NC: So, I think this is a really interesting point. And the bit that there's sort of two bits that the West Coast US narrative missed on AI's impact on jobs. 

One is it's just not going to get rid of, it's not the end of work because we've seen this before. It might be faster and there will be transition challenges. We'll need to talk a lot about reskilling and redeployment. But broadly, as a good Hayakian, we find new ways to serve each other. And that creates work. And my favourite example at the moment is radiographers. Five years ago, they were saying, AI will wipe out radiographers. Actually, we've now got loads more radiographers in the United States than they use the AI to be more productive, which is fantastic. I think there'll be changes in our kind of sectoral structures. You know, healthcare will continue to grow, energy will continue to grow, creative industries will continue to grow, so people will move around between them. But the other thing that people miss is that tasks are not jobs. Fundamentally. 

So occasionally, when I'm feeling flippant, I ask audiences how many typists they have in their organisation, because they all say none. And they couldn't be more wrong. They've got more typists today than they ever had, because I do my own typing on my phone or on my laptop. And you do too. We all do. What we've done is we've taken a task. It's become easier and more automated, and therefore, we disseminated it into the organisation. Now we are gradually developing fewer typists now because of voice recognition software and all of that. 

But that piece about how tasks redetermine. So this is where I mentioned Philip O'Connor of PWC earlier on. Their example is really interesting because they're doing two things. One, they're working out what the new entry level tasks are. So if the qualifying accountants don't need to do some stuff that they used to do. Great. What should we use them to do instead? Because you can't buy an accountant in the market. You have to make them. So you're going to have to trade people. 

Then secondly, which of the tasks we could automate do we actually not want to automate? Because the process of doing it by hand teaches the human being things which are important to the human being or a really great advisor to other human beings, in three to five year’s time. And that kind of long-term thinking feels to me to be the bit that if we leave it to the CTOs, and there are plenty of great CTOs out there, but if we leave it to the CTOs and to the FDs, it'll be the equivalent of in 2020 when a load of FDs thought, actually I could get rid of my rent costs forever by just not having an office. 

Well, the truth is, you need co-working space in some shape or form to build culture and to learn and all of these other things. That's our job. Our job is to be the holders of the standard for the long-term sustainability of the way the organisation produces things. And for me, that feels fundamentally commercial and it's why we should be excited about the potential for the profession going forward.

LP: Okay. Okay, as we bring this to a close, Neil, we of course have our CIPD Annual Conference and Exhibition on the horizon.

NC: Looking forward to it.

LP: Yeah, absolutely. What are you most looking forward to at this year's event?

NC: Look it's, for a professional body like the CIPD. Yeah, some of the products in what we do for members, but actually a lot of the product is in what members learn from each other and what we learn from members about what we should do, in terms of supporting them both in their careers but also in the problems they're facing every day. 

So it's the most obvious answer but the most obvious answer is often the right answer. it's actually getting into a room with 1300 professionals and hearing their views and working out what we can do together because ultimately the CIPD is members organisation. You know you don't own it, I don't own it. It's owned by the 160,000 members around the world and our job is to, as I said earlier, stand by their side every day and be relentlessly useful to them achieving their goals.

LP: It's a good note to end on. I'd like to thank Neil for sharing his thoughts and ideas throughout this episode. 

We look forward to bringing you more episodes like this alongside our regular fortnightly dive into the latest news impact in the profession. A quick reminder that we publish new episodes of the HR People Pod every fortnight, so make sure to follow and subscribe wherever you listen or watch. 

And of course, do go back and catch up on anything you've missed on demand. 

I'm Lisa Pearl, and this has been the HR People Pod.

[Outro music fades]