What HR Leaders Agree On About Recognition, AI, and the Future of Work
by Lou Evan
Last updated
5 min read
Table of contents
- AI Can’t Replace Human Leadership.
- Trust Is What Makes Change Possible.
- Recognition Is Business Intelligence.
Share this article
I spent several hours listening to conversations recorded at Workhuman Live 2026 with HR leaders on the aptly named, HR Leaders podcastOpens in a new tab. With such a variety of industries represented, I expected to hear very different perspectiveson the state of HR. Instead, the same ideas kept resurfacing.
Conversations about culture inevitably became conversations about trust. Discussions about succession planning circled back to understanding. Most episodes came to the same conclusion: the future of work isn't just about AI. It'sabout understanding people better.
Equipped with a bevy of newfound data insights, organizations aren't just trying to manage work more efficiently but understand it more completely. Below are some of the biggest themes I heard across these podcasts.
AI Can’t Replace Human Leadership.
One of the biggest surprises, and reliefs, from these conversations was how little time people actually spent talking about AI itself.
Leaders talked about copilots, large language models, automation, and the opportunities AI creates across the employee experience, but whenever the conversation drifted toward implementation, it inevitably pulled back to people.
Cloud computing changed how we worked, mobile technology changed where we worked, and hybrid work changed when and with whom we worked. Organizations have been through transformations before and while AI may be changing the pace more dramatically, underneath it all, the challenge is remarkably familiar.
How do you help people navigate uncertainty?
Julie Stone, Chief People Officer at TTEC, made that point almost immediatelyOpens in a new tab.
"It really doesn't matter what the challenge is, what the transformation of the day is, whether it's AI today or something else tomorrow. What it requires for people in a company is their leaders to apply the same principles that they always have."
People still want honesty, context, and someone who can explain why change is happening, not just what they're expected to do differently come Monday morning. Throughout the conversation, Julie returned to recognition again and again, not because it's separate from transformation, but because it's one of the things that makes transformation possible.
"People need to know they're seen. They need to know they're valued. Recognition becomes even more important during periods of change because it creates confidence."
She put it even more simply later in the conversation, "You can't over-recognize."
When people are learning something new, uncertainty tends to fill the gaps where communication doesn't exist, but recognition interrupts that uncertainty and tells people someone noticed the effort they’re making before the outcome is perfect.
Ken Wechsler, Vice President of Total Rewards at Akamai, approached the same issue from a different angleOpens in a new tab. Rather than focusing on leadership behaviors, he talked about what employees are actually experiencing as organizations race to adopt AI.
“Two-thirds of employees are still not being told something specific and meaningful to do with AI. It’s, ‘Here’s Copilot. Now what?’”
It seems the general impetus has been to make AI quickly available, while devoting far less resources in cultivating how employees will see where it fits into their own work. Access and adoption aren't the same thing. Giving someone a new tool isn't the same as giving them confidence to use it well.
And Ken wasn't arguing that organizations should slow down. He was saying that leaders need to become more intentional. Measuring logins or prompt counts tells us very little. Leaders who can measure if AI is helping to speed decision making up, bring collaboration to new heights, or measure time returned to more meaningful work tell us much more about whether AI is actually creating value.
Trust Is What Makes Change Possible.
Across all conversations, trust became the starting point, and ultimately, the antidote to the challenges of the modern workplace.
It came up during conversations about AI transformation. It came up when people were talking about recognition, leadership development, psychological safety, and culture. No one treated it as a standalone initiative or something HR could solve through a single program, but instead, trust emerged as the condition that made all of those other things possible.
Khalil Smith, Vice President of Inclusion, Diversity & Engagement at Akamai, captured that feeling while discussing the relationship between recognition and high-performing teamsOpens in a new tab.
"In an environment of high trust, when someone says, 'Hey, thank you for doing that,' or 'Here's something I think you could do differently,' I'm willing to take that in and do something different. That's the essence of a high-performance organization."
That same idea surfaced again a few minutes later when Khalil shared a story about a new employee who watched someone openly disagree with the CEO during a meeting. Afterwards, the employee quietly asked whether that person was going to get in trouble.
The CEO's response was simple.
"No, no. That's exactly why I hired them."
Psychological safety isn't established through mission statements or leadership principles, but in moments like these, when people see that disagreement isn't punished but welcomed.
Listening to Khalil, I found myself thinking back to Julie Stone's comments about AI transformation. On the surface, they were talking about different topics. Julie was focused on leading people through change, while Khalil was describing what makes high-performing teams possible. But the underlying idea, that people rarely embrace uncertainty simply because they're told it's necessary, remained consistent. People embrace change when they trust the people asking them to change.
That thread surfaced again when Raúl Valentin, Vice President of Human Resources at ABM Industries, described what recognition looks like across a workforceOpens in a new tab spread across airports, hospitals, manufacturing facilities, sports venues, and commercial buildings. For many frontline employees, culture isn't something experienced through town halls or company-wide emails, but shaped by day-to-day interactions with coworkers and managers, often far from corporate headquarters.
Raúl wasn't describing it as another employee perk but as one of the clearest ways employees know they matter. A simple acknowledgment tells someone that their contribution didn't go unnoticed, even if they're hundreds of miles from the nearest executive office or work a shift that rarely overlaps with senior leadership.
Recognition helps build trust, trust makes honest feedback possible, and honest feedback helps people grow. Organizations that create those conditions are ultimately the ones best equipped to adapt, whether they're navigating AI, developing new leaders, or strengthening culture.
Recognition Is Business Intelligence.
Recognition, leadership, culture, belonging, and AI aren't competing priorities. They're different ways of answering the same question: How do we better understand the people who make an organization successful?
When an employee takes the time to explain how another person made their work easier, solved a difficult problem, coached them through a challenge, or quietly stepped in when it mattered most, it creates a firsthand account of work through another person's eyes, beyond just a feel-good thank you.
Eric Mosley, Workhuman’s founder and CEO, described it in a way that captures just where the future of HR is headingOpens in a new tab.
"Whereas if you can get somebody to sit down for five minutes and write a paragraph as to why they're saying thank you, well, that paragraph is gold dust."
One recognition message might describe a colleague who stayed late to help launch a project, highlight someone who consistently mentors new hires without being asked, or celebrates the employee who quietly connects people across teams, making everyone else's work a little easier. The kind of organizational glue that rarely appears in performance reviews or reflected seamlessly in organizational charts.
And with Workhuman, all of those moments are captured and assessed through Human Intelligence.
"We're talking billions of recognition moments. So we were able to train AI models on that data and see if we could find insights. What could we learn from all of that corpus of positivity?"
What Eric is hinting at is how powerful AI’s pattern-mapping ability becomes when paired with organic, qualitive, nuanced, and omnidirectional recognition data. Companies are now able to see how work is getting done and by who at a scale previously unattainable. The signals Human Intelligence surfaces can be used to better understand who champions company values, who’s leaned upon in stressful situations, and who breaks down silos to get work across the finish line. All these can inform the kinds of business decisions, ranging as internal promotions to formalizing cross-departmental processes, that directly drive the bottom line.
With so much of the conversation around AI assumes the technology is replacing human judgment, these leaders describe a much different reality. One where AI isn’t creating new knowledge necessarily but helping organizations recognize patterns that people have been documenting all along.
The future of work isn't simply about helping people work faster or making better use of AI but becoming better at recognizing the people who are already creating value every day, often in ways that traditional systems never capture.
With the power of AI, human recognition can now surface invaluable people data. It has become business intelligence.
Every recognition moment tells a story. Human Intelligence helps organizations uncover the patterns within those stories.
See how Human Intelligence works by scheduling a demo.
Lou Evan
Lou Evan is a Senior Content Specialist at Workhuman. Having worked most of his career in the employee recognition space, he brings a firsthand perspective to the cultural, psychological, and ultimately financial impact of tailored, strategic recognition programs. Lou believes in friendship, family, and creativity.