Welcome to "AI@Work." In this course, you'll unpack insights from Iris McQuillan-Grace's Transform 2025 session, where she walked through how Oliver — a 5,000-person advertising agency operating across 46 countries — built an AI-powered feedback coaching bot that generated 19,000 feedback requests with a 97% completion rate, all without a single engineer on the project. Across three units, you'll practice applying human-centered design to find where AI belongs in People programs, mapping employee journeys to surface the real problem to solve, and structuring iterative pilots that ship fast and prove impact through data.

Let's start where Iris started: with the case that you're already equipped to lead this work — and the reframe that changes how you approach it.

You'll recall that Iris opened with a direct challenge to the room: "What if I told you everyone on this call is already a designer?" Her argument wasn't motivational fluff — it was a precise mapping of HR competencies onto the capabilities that human-centered design actually requires. As she put it, designing anything, "whether it's a bot or an app or an automation of some kind," demands "deep empathy, critical thinking, and the ability to effectively work across every facet of an organization." That's not an adjacent skill set for HR — it is the job description.

Building on this foundation, Iris urged People teams to adopt a product mindset: treating employees as consumers and HR programs as products to be "shipped, tested, and iterated" rather than policies to be pushed. This reframe matters because it shifts your orientation from compliance to experience — and from one-time launches to continuous improvement. As Iris emphasized, these aren't new capabilities to acquire; they're