Daria Rudnik (00:07.132)
Welcome to Built by People Leaders Podcast. I'm your host, Daria Rudnik, and this show is for HR and L&D leaders in scale ups and fast growing companies, those building real impact from within and shaping AI ready organizations. We're here to help you build leaders and teams that perform when everything keeps changing. And today we have a very special guest. I'm so excited to have this conversation with Greta Stahl who is the Vice President of Organizational Learning and Development at Workday, leading enterprise-wide learning that equips employees to perform, grow and adapt as workday expands AI capabilities and scales globally. She oversees design, delivery and operations for programs spending onboarding, upskilling and culture. Welcome Greta it's so great to have you here.

Greta Stahl (00:55.416)
Thank you, Daria. I am thrilled to be here. I'm really looking forward to this conversation. It is such a pivotal moment right now for HR and for L&D. And I think the more that we can make sure we're talking to each other about what we're learning and how we can help each other, the better.

Daria Rudnik (01:10.78)
Absolutely. Well, since you mentioned this change and shift, as a as leading like leading learning and development, what do you see as a major shift happening in L&D now with AI entering the world?

Greta Stahl (01:25.366)
It's such an interesting moment for L&D because I think we are trying to solve for two things at the same time. One, we've never been needed more, right? Everyone's job is changing at the moment. AI isn't just transforming some jobs, it's it's transforming all of our jobs. And that means that there's so much more need for folks who are working in learning and development to come in and think about how do we help people to learn how to do their their new jobs the way that they're changing.

How do we help them learn how to leverage AI tools as part of their core workflows? And how do we help them think about what success looks like, not just in the job they're in today, but the job they'll be in in one, two, five years from now? At the same time, the way that we're working in L&D is transforming. The nature of the tools that we're using, leveraging AI has changed so dramatically over the course of the last couple of years. And it feels like the speed of change is not slowing down. And so we're both doing

incredibly important work and we're having to work in entirely new ways at the same time, which is an interesting challenge to come into work for every day. But I also think it's one that all the people I work with are incredibly motivated by. I think we're really seeing that the way that you leverage AI really requires a tremendous amount of human readiness, that that's going to be the real differentiator for organizations that get it right.

Daria Rudnik (02:47.793)
Yeah. I mean it feels like L&D people need to learn AI first and then immediately transfer the knowledge to other people because and that's kind of being always always in front of the the change.

Greta Stahl (03:01.55)
Yeah, I think that's exactly right. And I I think it's such an interesting space to be in because it it's not like there's one AI tool that everyone's gonna use in the same way that it's gonna solve your problems, right? Like AI tools differ depending on what job you're doing, how you're integrating them into workflows, and you have to be really thoughtful about that if you're gonna maximize value, right? If you're just bolting on tools to old processes.

It's not going to help you grow your business. It's not going to help you deliver value. So you're looking at transforming workflows, thinking about how to leverage it in different job types. And so what we've found is that there are things that we have to do at an enterprise level. And we've invested a lot in what we've called our everyday AI program to help people think about how we can all work differently with a common set of tools. But then we also have groups that are really close to the business that

understand what those jobs look like, right? Like how things have to change in those organizations. And they've worked really closely with business leaders, with employees to think about here's how you can use these tools in the context of this job to get the most out of it. And it really is only with that level of investment of thinking about, you know, how are you tackling specific workflows and specific jobs that I think we're really starting to see the transformative value of these tools.

Daria Rudnik (04:16.689)
Okay, I have so many questions, but I'll hold them for now. Tell us about your professional journey.

Greta Stahl (04:18.435)
Yeah.

Greta Stahl (04:23.446)
My professional journey has been a winding one. I would never have predicted I'd I'd end up where I did, but I'm so glad that I did. I like to say that my journey really started with my love of competitive debate, which I started doing when I was in high school and continued through college and and and really took into my first big professional moment, which was going back to the university that I studied at and leading the debate team there and working with students. And it was such a great moment to learn about communication and coaching and instruction, which are really

Core skills that I've carried with me throughout my journey. From there, I went to an agency that specialized in presentations and communication. I did a lot of speech writing. I was working in Silicon Valley, really, as you know, that whole area was exploding. And I got a crash course in technology and what it was like working in that part of the world. And when I was there, we started to have an influx of work that was really focused more on training and instruction and

figuring out how to translate communication into learning. And I loved that work. It really, it allowed me to marry the things I'd done early in my career with the the things I'd loved about that job. And so when an opportunity opened up at workday to move more formally into the learning space, I jumped at it. And I've been at workday now for more than nine years and I'm so grateful that I had the chance to do that.

Daria Rudnik (05:43.486)
That's that's great. And you know, like when you said communication, and I feel like communication now is so critical. Well, first of all, like there's a lot of replacement with AI. Like we started to communicate with AI generated messages, which is not always good. And then I mean be c being very clear in your communication, how we communicate with AI so that it actually understands what is it we want from it and give us the result that we need. So it's it's a lot about communication.

But tell us about this our AI everyday AI program. How do you do that? Yeah.

Greta Stahl (06:20.108)
Yeah, so last year it it really became clear that we needed to think about how did we embed these AI tools with our broader population, help them navigate successfully and leverage these tools in a meaningful way. So we created what we called our Everyday AI program, which was the largest L&D program we've ever done in our you know 20-year history at Workday. And and our goal was really to enable every workmate to build the mindset, the skill set, and the habits, right? That habits piece is so important.

To use AI every day. And we looked at it as kind of three different parts. The first was events to activate that mindset, to get them really thinking about it, to get inspired, to hear our leaders talking about this. We even did these really fun events called prompt a thons, where teams competed and built new connections and brought that social element into it. We built a digital academy to grow skills. That was the second part, which was a single destination for AI enablement.

we reinforced that with gamification. We had what we called AI plays to help people think about like what are moments where you can embed AI into your work. and then we built activations to build habits. So, for example, we asked every employee to set a personal goal in workday to document it there and created a personal dashboard to understand their own AI usage and which tools they were using. It it was incredibly successful. We now have monthly adoption over this core of this core set of tools, over 85%

Which is more than a 40% jump from the baseline that we started with. conservatively, we like to say that we've saved more than 600,000 hours. And I'd say more importantly than the time saved is where that time got reinvested. So reinvested in higher value activity. So for example, we know that some of our high AI adopters are spending two plus hours additional time every week collaborating, you know, meeting with key stakeholders, meeting with customers, doing

high value tasks that AI can't do because they got that time back.

Daria Rudnik (08:22.079)
I love what you said about like the hackathons and I hear a lot, like organizations I speak with and some of them were here on the podcast sharing that bringing this social connection into learning helps actually people I don't maybe feel bad about AI, be less stressful, it reduce anxiety and people ready to try it and and do it together. So yeah, I I love that approach.

Greta Stahl (08:45.986)
I think human connections are going to be more important than ever going forward. We can use AI to to help us with core processes in our work, but it's not going to replace the value of people working together. But I think there's a real onus on us as learning and development professionals to be thinking about that as a core element of what we're designing. How do we enable those connections? Because they are important to help people be successful at work.

Right? People still need to learn what good looks like from their mentors, from their people leaders, from people who are experienced at doing their jobs. They still need to shadow other people to see how things are done well, what good looks like. And I I still think it's the connections between people in different parts of the business and different types of roles that spur new ideas, that cause us to come up with the creative breakthrough or to figure out how to work through an impasse. And AI can't solve that.

for us. And so I think as we're designing programs as L&D professionals, building that in as an intentional outcome is really, really important for us to be thinking about going forward.

Daria Rudnik (09:51.465)
Mm-hmm.

The general industry research tells us that I think more than eighty percent, I guess it's about ninety percent of organizations are using AI, at least at some of their functions. But like calculating the return on investment is pretty like hard and it's tricky and they don't always see that. How how do you do that? How do you measure AI effectiveness?

Greta Stahl (10:16.642)
I think it depends a little bit on the outcome that you're trying to solve for. But to go back to that example that I just talked about, you know, for us, for that overall program, it wasn't just time savings. It was whether or not we could talk about that translating into meaningful things that happened with that time. I think to give you some other examples, I you know, I think we talk a lot about using AI to help with recruiting and hiring, for example. I think people tend to emphasize

how quick roles are filled, which is great. But the real metric you want to look at is quality of hire, right? Are people then able to do the job that you hired to them to do in a relatively quick amount of time? In finance, you want to be focusing on forecast accuracy, not just transaction speed, right? In operations, you want to be talking about first pass yield over total output volume. Thinking of in the same way in LD, we talk about what are the outcomes we're driving.

Those are the things that we want to be focusing on when we talk about whether AI is is delivering value. And I think that we have a long way to go a lot of the time in defining what those measures are and certainly in putting the strategies in place and actually to deliver them. And and I think to your point, it it's absolutely true. We're seeing pretty universally in the research that a lot of companies are not getting the value that they want out of the AI tools that they're buying. But I think a lot of that is

One, because they're not embedding them into core workflows. We have some research that shows that only about 27% of organizations have actually embedded AI directly into their core workflows. The rest of them, they're stand-on, bolt-on tools, right? And that's never gonna deliver the value that you want out of it. And I'd say the second part of it is actually enabling people to use them effectively and think about how to build them into workflows. So one is designing for it, and then second is

helping humans, people, right, know how to use those things effectively to get the most value out of them. And I I think we still have a long way to go as an industry in in getting both of those things right.

Daria Rudnik (12:21.149)
Yeah. Like every tool now has something AI in it, like almost every tool. But how do you actually make sure that they work together? Like I do something in I don't know in Canva, I do something in Jira, I do something somewhere else. How do we make sure it like they are connected?

Greta Stahl (12:25.26)
Yes.

Greta Stahl (12:37.122)
Yes, those systems do not talk to each other. And today we are relying on people to be the glue between them. And so while people are excited to use all of their systems, they get frustrated and disengaged when they find that what a lot of their work is doing is translating stuff from one system into another system. Those are the things that we want AI to be doing. We want the systems to be the glue so that people can do the creative, thoughtful, innovative work that they should be doing and that

they enjoy going to work to do.

Daria Rudnik (13:10.025)
For sharp professionals listening to what we're talking about, how do you actually transform those work processes? How do you make sure that AI fits the new workflow? What do you do?

Greta Stahl (13:25.484)
Yeah, let me I'll give you a real concrete example just from from my own world and my own work. And so one of the things I mentioned earlier is that learning and development is one of the fields that's changing the most. And we started to see this even a couple of years back, right? The advent of Chat GPT was this, you know, shocking moment for people who all of a sudden could see systems generating content that they'd used to have to spend hours just getting a draft on paper to do something like that. And so one of the things I'm I'm proud of is that we were really

proactive and thinking about how is work going to look different and what are the right tools for us to be thinking about using. And so we actually invested pretty early in a tool called Sauna Learn, which is actually now a workday product, workday acquired sauna last year. But this was was back before that. So we purchased this tool because it had really leveraged AI tooling, not just to do general content creation, but to do L&D specific content creation.

and we found that it drastically increased both the efficiency of what we were building and the quality of what we were building, because we could use AI tools to build scenarios and simulations and to let users practice with the content, all of these things that felt like pipe dreams usually because it took so long to build something like that. But that begged the question then, if the tool was gonna do the work so much faster, what is the right thing for our people to be spending their time doing, right?

And so we really started to re-architect the roles in our organization to build these AI tools into their workflows with the expectation that this is what they were using to help them draft, to help them build, but then changing where they were spending their time so they could act more as business consultants to conduct more conversations on strategy, to think about how to drive business outcomes and focus their effort on the places where they could have value that the system couldn't create.

And as a result, we've been able to see more growth opportunities for the people in the team where they're getting to do more high value work that they really enjoy, but still feeling really good about the output of the work that they're doing. So I like to cite that as an example of this can be a win-win, right? Like you can get really good outcomes using these tools that then creates higher value work for people. So the outcomes are good for the business and for the people who are doing the work.

Daria Rudnik (15:46.224)
And I love this example because we we even you know there is bars that AI will take our job. Now AI is doing that so much faster. We don't need so many people. But it's actually about the clarity of roles. That's what AI can do better than people. That's what only humans can do. And let's let's be clear about what how you can bring value and let's focus on, like you said, building relationships, having meaningful conversations, being a consultant.

More than an executor.

Greta Stahl (16:16.6)
I think that's exactly right. I I think we focus so much on how AI changes how we get the work done, but we also should be talking about how AI can change the way we grow people, right? It creates time and space, it creates opportunity to do higher value work. I I think you can also use it to help enable these things, right? Like you can use these AI toolings to create learning and development opportunities.

I I think we still need to be doing a lot of hands-on experiential learning. So one of the things we do, for example, is we leverage AI to help match people to gigs or part-time assignments that they can do with other teams. Right. There's an opportunity for a manager to say, you know, we have this very distinct project that we need some extra help on. Here are the skills that we need. And then someone within Workday can say, Well, you know, I have those skills. I'm really interested in learning about this part of the business. I'll take on this project.

And it creates that level of connectivity that gives both sides exposure to something new. It gives the employee a growth opportunity to do something different while solving a business need. And because we have that system that enables that connectivity and suggests those gigs to our employees, we're leveraging technology, but to do something that gives them all the experiential learning that we know makes such a difference for people as they're trying to build skills to develop and to grow their careers.

Daria Rudnik (17:37.319)
And it feels like people actually adding information to the database so that well now I know that this person has those skills. So next time there is side of there's opportunity, I can offer this app I mean the system can offer this opportunity to people because people help build this database. So it's it's a collaboration.

Greta Stahl (17:54.351)
Absolutely. And it Yeah, absolutely. And I think it enables internal mobility too, because one of the things that we've seen is that people who complete gigs are also then more likely to take on other growth opportunities within the organization. It could be with those people that they did the gig with. It could be because they learned some new set of skills or they felt more ready for another type of opportunity. I think one of the things

we are really intentional about is trying to invest in internal mobility and making sure people feel like they can grow at workday. That's been my experience. You know, I said I've been at workday for for nine years and I've had numerous opportunities and love to see it when others have the same, where they feel like this isn't just a a job but a career where they feel like they can see themselves learning and growing and doing new things.

Daria Rudnik (18:28.894)
Yeah.

Daria Rudnik (18:43.891)
I just wanna like make sure our listeners like remember and hear that. Like when you said that there's clarity on roles, because I think it's I mean absolutely critical. When there is no clarity on roles, people will tend to do more work, more of the same work, kind of being with AI and doing more working with AI, producing I mean, more hustle than value. But when there is this clarity, that's what AI can do, that's what you can do, and you focus on

Greta Stahl (19:07.075)
Mm-hmm.

Daria Rudnik (19:12.715)
new skills and new like relationships, new core skills. That's where we'll win s I mean that's the win win approach and that helps people grow and that makes people feel bad and not just be caught in the swivel of doing more and more and more and more just because AI can do it faster.

Greta Stahl (19:29.93)
Exactly. And I think that is one of the risks with AI is that people get time back, but they don't know what to spend that time on. And so they end up doing just more work, more repeatable, low value work instead of the places where they really can be making a contribution to their own growth and to key business outcomes. And so I think one of the key things that we can get right as HR organizations looking forward is investing in doing role design, in investing in doing

workforce design and thinking about, you know, what are these workflows, what's that gonna look like? What's the part that the person's doing? What's the part that the AI is doing? And with this time saved, where are we gonna reinvest it so that person is maximizing what they get out of it and maximizing what the business gets out of it in terms of high value work. Everybody wins when people get to do more high value creative work. That's what people like to do, right? It makes it a lot more fun to go to work and it means that the business thrives too. So

When when?

Daria Rudnik (20:27.645)
Yeah. And I mean if you and HR want to do more strategic work, go to your business partner and from the business and tell them, Hey, let's see how we need to redesign your work. And that's I mean that's an easy start and and a very valuable conversation for every

Greta Stahl (20:41.13)
Absolutely.

Daria Rudnik (20:42.333)
I wanna ask a question. We kind of started talking about that, but I wanna talk about the core skills and how the core skills are shifting. Because before that, what used to be a high wage high wage jobs like information, processing, data analysis, research. Yeah, I can do that. What's the core skill now?

Greta Stahl (21:02.242)
Yep. Yeah, we you know, we actually just went through an exercise of redefining what our core skills look like internally because I do think there are some things that will continue to be true and then there are some things that I think we need to emphasize more because of how we're working. So for example, I I think judgment is just a core skill now, right? And when we think about how we work with AI, knowing when AI makes recommendations that are reliable, when you should override them.

How to apply responsible AI principles. So it's judgment in how you work with people, but also critically in how you work with technology and systems, right? And those are things that we talk about a lot internally, this idea of responsible AI, how are you using it the right way? Which systems are you using? And I think that's something that that's going to be true for really any organization. I also think creativity, critical thinking,

Complex problem solving. These are real differentiators in the new job landscape. But I don't want to underplay interpersonal skills either. Like we talk about relationship building and candid communication, how you work with other people. To go back to something we were talking about earlier, those human relationships are just as important as they ever were. And in some ways, when you spend a lot of your day working with technology and working with AI agents,

Those can be skills that depreciate, right? That we're not investing as much in. And so I think we have a real onus to be very intentional about ensuring that we are investing in skills to help people work with other people, in addition to helping people work with systems and with agents and with technology, because it will make the workplace a better place to be. And I think it will help ensure that we're more engaged and more innovative, and which is ultimately good for everybody.

Daria Rudnik (22:51.131)
Yeah. And again, when it comes to relationship building, we need to be very clear. That's that's the human role, not AI. Never delegate relationship building to AI. Like there are situations when AI should not be there like firing people and hey, go to our AI bot for mental health support. Just never.

Greta Stahl (23:06.251)
gosh, yeah.

Greta Stahl (23:11.806)
Yeah, and you know, as a people leader, like there are hard conversations you have to have that you need to have as a person. You can't delegate that to a bot or an agent. Now, I will say there's great AI tools out there that can help you prepare for those conversations to help you practice, to give you feedback, which is a really valuable thing for managers to have. But the actual conversation itself.

You're gonna be the one who has to do that. And I think the success of that conversation is gonna rely a lot on the trust that you've built with your team, the the overwhelming sense of psychological safety that you've established in the broader context and you're working. And again, AI can coach you, but it can't do those things for you. You're the one who's gonna have to go out and get that right.

Daria Rudnik (23:58.248)
Yeah. Well, since you mentioned like there were three important things for people to adopt AI the mindset, skills and habits. In terms of those new core skills like critical thinking, judgment, relationship building, how do you help people train them and acquire those skills?

Greta Stahl (24:17.954)
Yeah, it it's hard because those are not the sort of things that you can just, you know, do a quick exercise in a in an online course and figure out the solution. we're actually right now in the process of going through and rebuilding some of our enablement around those core skills. But I I think it starts with that, that framework, the mindset, skill set, and the habits piece. And I think it is helping people understand what what they are, why they're important. That's the mindset piece. It's helping show

very specific examples of what those behaviors look like in practice, right? It's one thing to know what it is, it's another to know how to do it. And I think that means giving people examples of common workplace situations, what that looks like to show up in that way. And I think then it also means giving them examples of how to practice, you know, giving them specific scenarios where they may want to try out or leverage different skills in ways that are different than before.

And encouraging people to invest their time in focusing on those areas. It also is a really important partnership with their managers because I think helping people know where to invest relies on someone giving them feedback on where their strengths are and where they have opportunities to grow. It relies on having opportunity to translate that feedback into specific actions, setting goals for growth, having candid conversations about what's going well and what's not.

And so I think the again, the onus is on us as HR to invest in enabling our people leaders to have those really productive coaching conversations. Managers are gonna be more important than ever in helping us get this right because if they're not coaching people and and helping them get that feedback that they need to grow, they won't be able to take the step forward that we need them to take.

Daria Rudnik (26:05.595)
Yeah. And there was a research I think that by H Harvard and GitHub when they actually looked at how the role of the manager would change. And AI can do those delegation and control and project management stuff. What AI cannot do is like you said, coaching and helping people grow, give them candid feedback.

Greta Stahl (26:14.786)
Mm-hmm.

Greta Stahl (26:24.578)
Yep. And and human readiness is the real differentiator for companies. And that's just as true now as it was last year, five years ago, ten years ago. Any change that you want to make as an organization, you need people ready to adopt that change. You can't get there without effective people leaders helping people along the change curve, and you can't get there without transparent communication on how things are going to evolve.

And so I think that's really the role that HR has to play in helping the organizations get ready for that future.

Daria Rudnik (26:57.145)
Exactly. Well, it was an incredible conversation, right? I mean, I mean I'm so excited. Thank you so much for sharing your insights, the framework for mindset, skill set and habits, the the core skills that teams need to have and organizations need to build. The way it is very critical to be clear about the roles that for AI and roles for humans and how people can do more high value work. I have a final question for you. If you had a magic wand,

And could solve one challenge that HRP leaders have. What would that be?

Greta Stahl (27:32.619)
I I think sometimes people forget that HR is here to help. And I I I wish that like I could wave a magic wand and say we have the the skill sets, we have the capabilities to come in and help solve that problem. I am really appreciative that I get to work at a company where HR is valued. You know, I think because we make HR products, that's always put us in a position where we understand the value that HR brings to the organization.

But I know that there's a lot of people who aren't in a similar place, even just, you know, reading my LinkedIn feed at times, I'm like, okay, someone someone at that organization probably needs to have an opportunity to to think about the value that HR can really bring to helping solve all of these problems. So so that's the one thing I would change is is make sure that people understood that HR really can bring a lot to the table.

Daria Rudnik (28:09.063)
No.

Daria Rudnik (28:23.975)
Yeah, I'm with you on that. Absolutely. Reach out if you have a question. Go to your HR people, ask them a question, start this conversation. I mean HR people also go out, ask how can I help you? What can I do? What's your challenge? Let's figure it out together.

Greta Stahl (28:38.689)
Exactly.

Daria Rudnik (28:40.359)
Is there anything I haven't asked you but you wanna share with the audience?

Greta Stahl (28:45.66)
that's a good one. you know, I I would say I am really optimistic about the role that we as HR professionals and L&D professionals can play as we think about navigating this change, but it's on us to lean in and to do that challenging work. I think we have an opportunity to really be partners at the table with our business leaders in driving key outcomes if we lean in and start asking those questions about what the problems are we're trying to solve and how we can help them get there.

Daria Rudnik (29:15.571)
Yeah, thanks. How people can reach out to you, how people can find you.

Greta Stahl (29:22.918)
LinkedIn is the best place. I'm pretty active on there. it's a great opportunity I find to to figure out what's going on in the industry and see all the good research that's getting published. and also just, you know, find out who's got a new job and so I'm on there pretty actively and so people can reach me that way.

Daria Rudnik (29:38.367)
Cool. Well the link to Greta's email Greta's LinkedIn is in the notes to this episode. And thanks for listening till the end. If you like it, please give us five stars on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, subscribe to our YouTube channel and stay tuned for the next episodes. Bye.