Let’s be honest, most CHRO groups out there are bad. They are expensive, filled with vendor pitches, and loaded with “fluff” resources that are outdated by the time they are published. That’s why I put together Future of Work Leaders. A CHRO group for people leaders who are moving beyond traditional HR to focus on the future of work and employee experience. No pitches, no selling, no fluff.
The community is focused on discussions, candid Q&A sessions, and sharing of resources and insights. Members include Lego, Novartis, PwC, Saks Global, and dozens of others. I’m just in the process of planning our annual in-person forum which will be at the end of March. if you want to learn more and request an invite go to Future of Work Leaders or email me directly Jacob[at]thefutureorganization[dot]com.
Most organizations have already bought the AI licenses. They’ve sent the announcement emails and told their teams the tools are live. And then, nothing changes. Adoption stays flat, workflows stay the same, and leaders are left wondering why a multi-million dollar investment is sitting idle on a dashboard. It’s one of the most quietly frustrating problems in the enterprise AI conversation right now, and almost nobody is talking about it honestly.
That tension between access and actual change is exactly what Laura Cushing, Chief People Experience Officer at Pacific Life, has been wrestling with. And what the company built in response is a case study worth paying attention to. In this episode, Laura shares how Pacific Life is using a structured Gen AI Academy to move employees from hesitant to hands-on, and what that journey actually looks like from the inside.
Listen to the episode here on Apple Podcast & leave a review!
Access Doesn’t Equal Adoption
Pacific Life rolled out AI licenses across the organization and tracked usage. It was stagnant, but here’s what Laura noticed: employees weren’t disengaged. They were careful. They were worried about breaking rules, doing something wrong, sending data somewhere it shouldn’t go. That’s actually a healthy signal, because it means the culture has integrity. But it also meant the organization had to close the gap between having tools and knowing how to use them responsibly.
That realization led directly to the Gen AI Academy. Half of Pacific Life’s employees have now gone through the training: learning not just what AI tools exist, but how to actually integrate them into their daily work. The goal wasn’t to mandate usage. It was to remove the fear that was quietly keeping people on the sidelines.
A Three-Level Academy Built for Real Behavior Change
What makes Pacific Life’s approach distinct is the tiered structure of the Gen AI Academy. It’s not a one-and-done training module. It’s a progression.
Level 1 is about demystification, helping employees understand the tools they already have access to, what they can do, and where the guardrails are. It turns out that clarity on what’s allowed is often more freeing than any feature demo.
Level 2 moves into larger process-level challenges. Instead of individual employees tinkering on their own, teams come together to look at bigger workflows and ask: where can AI genuinely change how this gets done?
Level 3, the Innovation Lab, is where intact teams come in, get aligned on the actual problem they’re trying to solve, and then reimagine their workflow from start to finish. This sounds straightforward, but Laura notes that most teams aren’t actually aligned on the core problem before they start.
Any solution built on that shaky ground won’t stick, AI-powered or not. The Innovation Lab forces that clarity first, then brings AI in as a tool to support a better process. That sequencing is the whole point. One team in Pacific Life’s underwriting business solved in three days what would have taken three months, using no new technology and no additional budget. Just the team, the tools they already had, and a structured way to think the problem through.
Strategic Workforce Planning Is Now an AI Conversation
Alongside the Academy, Pacific Life has built a parallel process for strategic workforce planning, and it’s more rigorous than what most organizations are doing. They use a diagnostic framework to break jobs down into their component tasks, then assess which portions can be automated, which can be AI-enabled, and which require human judgment. Any role where 30% or more of the work falls into the first two categories gets a deeper look at potential redesign.
The output from those sessions feeds directly into talent strategy, surfacing skills gaps the organization didn’t even know it had, and forcing honest conversations about role shapes and org structure. As Laura put it, it’s not just about efficiency. It’s about understanding what the work actually is before deciding how to staff for it.
Listen to the episode here on Apple Podcast & leave a review!
You Can’t Buy Trust After the Fact
Laura pointed out the employee anxiety around AI. Pacific Life has a strong culture and solid engagement scores, and she still worries, not because there’s a crisis, but because she knows that if the trust foundation isn’t actively maintained through this period of change, it will break quietly. And by the time you notice, you’ve already lost the ability to have an honest conversation with your people.
Her approach has been to communicate early and directly. She started talking about AI’s impact at the beginning of last year, before most organizations were willing to. The message was simple: the world is changing fast, and Pacific Life is going to help you change with it.
Her CDIO said it plainly in a company town hall: “It’s not AI that will replace your job. It’s those who don’t learn how to use AI who will replace your job.”
To back that up, they stood up a cross-functional AI steering committee: HR tech, talent management, legal, compliance, and representatives from the CDIO’s team. They meet regularly to set guardrails on how AI tools are used, what data can go where, and how to protect employees and policyholders from well-intentioned mistakes.
Laura admits they haven’t fully figured it out. But they’ve got the framing right: the rules exist to protect people, not police them. And when that lands with employees, it changes everything about how they relate to compliance.
The Skills AI Can’t Touch
As more of the transactional and process-driven work shifts to automation, Laura sees a clear priority emerging: invest deeply in what she calls power skills, her reframe of what the industry lazily calls “soft skills.”
Coaching. Communicating across different audiences. Giving meaningful feedback. Setting a vision. Motivating people through uncertainty. These are the capabilities that AI genuinely cannot replicate. And they’re the same capabilities that most organizations have chronically underinvested in, because they’re hard to measure and easy to deprioritize when there are systems to implement and headcount to manage.
Laura argues that the AI transition makes these skills more critical, not less, especially for people managers. If a manager can’t coach, motivate, and communicate through change, no amount of AI tooling underneath them will compensate.
Conclusion
What Pacific Life is building is more than an AI program. It’s an architecture for how an organization learns, adapts, and prepares its people for a future that nobody can fully map. The Gen AI Academy is the visible piece, but underneath it is a philosophy about trust, transparency, and the responsibility that comes with asking people to change.
The question worth sitting with: does your organization have the trust foundation in place to have the honest AI conversation with your employees, or are you still buying time, hoping things become clearer before you have to?
Human nature will not adapt to technology as fast as technology advances. If your AI strategy stops at buying licenses, you are already behind. Discover the three-level blueprint Pacific Life is using to turn stagnant AI licenses into a cultural revolution of human power skills in the full episode.
Don’t let the future leave your people in the dust.
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Organizations around the world have lost their way. It’s time to get back to basics and focus on what really drives people and performance. This is why I’m so very excited to share that after 2 years of research and writing, my new book The 8 Laws of Employee Experience: How to Build a Future-Ready Organization is finally available. Grab a copy at 8exlaws.com
