Welcome to "The Power of People and AI: Driving Performance Through Experience and Skills." This course is based on a fireside conversation at Transform 2026 between Lars Schmidt, Founder & CEO of Amplify Talent, and Jacqui Canney, Chief People & AI Enablement Officer at ServiceNow. Together, they explored why AI adoption succeeds only when leaders treat it as a people and culture transformation — not a technology deployment. Across three units, you'll practice diagnosing cultural barriers to AI adoption, applying a prioritization rubric to launch high-impact initiatives, and redesigning work around outcomes, skills, and higher-value capacity. Each unit builds on the frameworks and real examples the speakers shared.

Let's start with the conversation's foundational argument: if you treat AI as a tech rollout, you'll miss the biggest change-management moment of your career.

You'll recall that the speakers didn't mince words about where AI implementations actually break down. One put it directly: "successful AI rollouts and introductions often stall at the culture level, not at the technology level." This wasn't a soft observation — it was positioned as the central diagnostic error organizations make. As the conversation underscored, "People will pay a lot of money for tech. They won't get the value" if culture, comfort, and adoption aren't addressed first.

The implication for you as a people leader is critical: when your AI rollout is struggling, your first question shouldn't be Is the tool working? It should be Is the culture ready? The discussion described AI adoption as "the largest change management I've ever seen in my career" and argued that unless this transformation lives in the people lane, organizations will invest heavily and capture almost nothing. That diagnosis — versus versus a genuine — determines whether you need better enablement, more honest communication, or simply a different tool.