Teams | Collaboration | Customer Service | Project Management

Your employees regularly talk about your company, for better or worse. Every social media post, every coffee chat with a friend, every LinkedIn comment shapes how the world sees your brand. The question isn’t whether your people have influence — it’s whether you’re helping them use it intentionally.

Every day, knowledge workers lose valuable time hunting for information that should be at their fingertips. Emails pile up. Slack threads multiply. Documents scatter across SharePoint, Google Drive, and other systems. Even with the promise of AI assistants, more than a third of employees still can’t find what they need.

About 70% of major change efforts fail to achieve their intended goals, and the cause comes down to people-related challenges. Our lived experience intuitively reinforces this. It’s most often not what we’re trying to implement — the new system, new program, or merger — but how we’re going about it. So let’s remember this as we tackle AI-enabled transformations and prepare our workforces for AI adoption, reskilling, and disruption.

The hype around AI in internal comms is intense and confusing right now. The comms pros I’m talking to aren’t lacking tools. They’re trying to figure out which ones actually work. And asking when it’s OK to use them. And even wondering which ones won’t kill our craft. The fears are legitimate: Will I have a place in the future? Will AI kill my critical thinking? And how do I keep up when the pace of change won’t wait?

CIOs are living through a fascinating paradox: Artificial intelligence (AI) promises to transform workplace productivity, yet early implementations often create new complexity rather than simplifying workflows for employees. The challenge isn’t AI itself — it’s how organizations deploy AI capabilities across disconnected systems, creating islands of intelligence that employees must navigate separately.

Every day, healthcare professionals battle more than just medical challenges. They struggle with communication barriers created by shift schedules and scattered locations. They miss critical updates because traditional tools like email and bulletin boards can't reach them during patient care. They feel disconnected from their organization’s mission, leading to burnout that drives talented staff away and compromises patient safety.

If you work in an office, company news lands in your inbox or Slack. You scroll through it with your morning coffee, skim what matters, ignore what doesn’t. But if you work in a warehouse, on a hospital floor, or in a manufacturing plant, staying informed takes more effort. By the time an announcement filters down through supervisors or gets posted on a bulletin board, it’s already old.

All jobs have their good days and bad days. But I challenge you to name another function when you can be a hero one minute, and the villain the next. That’s the role of a chief human resource officer. HR is all about people. They’re not only our most valuable asset — they’re the most valuable investors of their talents, energy, and commitment.