In the previous lesson, you explored why clarity beats false comfort during transformation and why modeling vulnerability is the leadership posture this moment demands. But even the most candid communication falls flat if the people team's own structure works against the change it's trying to lead. This lesson turns inward and unpacks what Inna Landman's team discovered about how HR's traditional silos, undefined foundational terms, and transaction-heavy legacy systems quietly undermine AI's potential before it ever reaches the workforce.

Landman described a real-time aha moment during a dinner with her team where several leaders each explained the AI solutions they were building:

Landman: "I'm going to create an AI solution for the manager to help with compensation conversations. And then I'm going to create an AI solution for managers to help with performance discussions. And I'm going to help a manager figure out how to deal with recruiting."

The group paused and recognized the trap: "we can't design a solution for a manager to go to five different places". Each Center of Excellence (COE) was solving its piece of the puzzle in isolation, replicating the very silos AI was supposed to dissolve.

This connects directly to Kyle Forrest's observation:

Forrest: "The HR function has had a history of oftentimes being accused of transforming for the sake of HR."

The fix isn't incremental — it requires putting the manager's end-to-end problem at the center of design, not the COE's ownership boundaries. Building on this, Landman described her HR team's internal AI hackathon as "one of my most proudest moments in my entire career", not because leadership directed the innovation, but because "the innovation was already in the room". Forty percent of her organization spent a week or two building real solutions with existing tools, proving that the creative energy to break silos already exists when you create the platform for it.