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Most CHROs I speak with tell me the same thing: the hardest challenges they face aren’t being solved inside traditional HR forums.
That’s why I created Future of Work Leaders—a private, invite-only community for Chief Human Resources and Chief People Officers who want to think beyond policies and programs and focus on what’s actually shaping the future of work and employee experience. Members include CHROs and CPOs from companies like Tractor Supply, Novartis, LEGO, Norfolk Southern, Saks Global, PwC, Northrop Grumman, and more. We come together monthly in small virtual sessions and once a year in person to tackle the conversations most organizations aren’t having yet.
If you want to move beyond traditional HR to focus on the future of work, then apply to join the Future of Work Leaders Group.
When you think of a freight railroad, what comes to mind? For most of us, it’s probably a legacy business—an industry of steel and grit that feels like a throwback to a different era. I’ll admit, that was my perception too. But my recent conversation with Annie Adams, the CHRO and former Chief Transformation Officer of Norfolk Southern, completely shattered that image.
I was expecting to talk about logistics and maybe some HR challenges in a unionized workforce. Instead, I discovered a nearly 200-year-old company that is at the absolute forefront of applying AI and data science to solve massive, real-world problems. They’re not just talking about transformation; they’re fundamentally redesigning the nature of work for their 20,000 employees.
This isn’t just a story about technology. It’s about how a company with deep historical roots is leveraging cutting-edge AI and a forward-thinking culture to build a future that is safer, more efficient, and surprisingly innovative. Here are some of the most fascinating takeaways from our discussion.
Listen to the episode here on Apple Podcast & leave a review!
They Put the AI in Railroad—Literally.
Norfolk Southern’s embrace of AI isn’t some recent, post-ChatGPT fad. They’ve been at this for years. In fact, back in 2019, while constructing their new headquarters, one of the massive graphics on the construction site billboard boldly declared, “We put the AI in railroad.” It turns out they weren’t kidding.
The most powerful example is their “digital train inspection portal.” Imagine a train, which can be over a mile long, speeding through a specialized portal at 60 miles per hour. As it passes, a system of ultra-high-resolution cameras—developed in partnership with the Georgia Tech Research Institute—captures 1,000 perfect, 360-degree images of every single car.
In-house algorithms then analyze these images in real-time, detecting defects with an almost magical quality, like a tiny hairline fracture or a missing pin the size of a paperclip on a vehicle moving at highway speed.
But here’s the detail that really elevates this from simply being faster to being fundamentally better: the portal can spot defects that are “only detectable when a train is in motion and certain forces are being applied.” It’s a capability a human inspection on a static train could never achieve. As Annie put it in a phrase that perfectly captures the human impact:
AI at our company turns finders into fixers.
What does that mean? It frees an employee from a brutally challenging manual task—walking a mile-long train in the snow in Chicago, trying to spot defects—and empowers them to become a high-value problem solver. They can now focus their expertise on fixing the issue and getting to the root cause, rather than just searching for it. It’s no wonder the project was recently recognized by Fast Company’s Innovation by Design Awards.
Their HQ Looks More Like a Tech Campus Than a Train Company.
When Norfolk Southern decided to consolidate its corporate headquarters in Atlanta, they knew they were entering a new battlefield for talent. In their old home of Norfolk, Virginia, they were one of only three Fortune 500 companies. In Atlanta, they were suddenly competing against iconic brands like Coca-Cola, Delta, and Home Depot. They had to step up their game.
When I looked it up during our conversation, I was stunned. The result is a new headquarters that looks more like a Silicon Valley tech campus than a traditional corporate office. Designed with the “employee experience at the heart of every design decision,” it includes amenities like an on-site daycare, a state-of-the-art gym, and a vibrant food hall.
Annie shared that a key design principle was creating spaces that foster “casual collisions,” bringing people from different departments together to spark collaboration. She also shared a humorous anecdote that in a safety-sensitive industry like theirs, the term “collisions” didn’t go over well, so they had to find a different way to phrase it!
Even so, the intent remained. In an age of remote work, this massive investment in a physical space serves a clear purpose: making in-office time intentional and supercharging the collaboration, coaching, and mentoring so crucial for newer employees.
AI Is Predicting the Future to Optimize a Billion-Dollar Investment
The sheer scale of a freight railroad is hard to comprehend. Norfolk Southern maintains nearly 20,000 miles of track, an asset that requires about a billion dollars in capital investment each year to maintain. A billion. The challenge has always been knowing precisely when and where to spend that money. Track wears down differently depending on countless variables like tonnage, grade, and curves.
This is another area where their in-house data science team is making a huge impact. By aggregating years of inspection data from specialized “geometry cars” using infrared and other technology to evaluate the health of the rail, they’ve developed sophisticated AI models that can project five years into the future. These models can predict exactly when a specific portion of track, down to the inch, will need to be replaced.
The impact is enormous. It allows the company to be “very precise” about where and when they deploy their capital, optimizing that massive annual investment and ensuring the railroad remains safe and efficient. It’s a perfect example of using predictive AI to solve a tangible, high-stakes business problem.
Listen to the episode here on Apple Podcast & leave a review!
To Transform an Organization, You Must Sell the Vision First.
For all the talk of technology, Annie was clear that true transformation is a human endeavor. When you’re leading change across an organization with 20,000 people, technology is only part of the equation. Her most critical principles are rooted in leadership and communication: start with a clear, transparent vision and always explain the “why” behind the change.
She contrasted two very different leadership approaches. Pushing for a “demanding pace of change with the wrong leadership tone,” she said, is “demoralizing and it causes burnout.” People feel exhausted and disconnected. The alternative is to get people inspired and excited about the future you’re building together. As she put it:
…if you can get people excited, they’re going to expend even more energy and help you accomplish what you want faster, if you know there really is a style to that…
This is such a critical lesson for any CHRO. If you push for change without first painting a compelling picture of where you’re going, you get resistance and burnout. But if you sell the vision first, you unlock people’s discretionary effort, and they will help you get there even faster.
True Innovation Can Mean Fishing a 5-Mile Bridge Out of a Lake.
The company’s innovative spirit isn’t just a recent phenomenon driven by data scientists; it’s deeply embedded in their DNA. Annie shared an incredible story from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
She set the scene by explaining the company’s deep sense of mission. “Our employees feel our purpose really powerfully, that we move the goods that move the economy,” she said. “And in a situation like that, it was even more important.” The storm had completely wiped out five miles of their railroad bridge over Lake Pontchartrain, severing a critical supply link to the devastated city of New Orleans.
Faced with an impossible task, the team came up with an audacious solution: the fastest way to fix the bridge was to “somehow figure out how to fish it out of the lake.” Using a fleet of barges, cranes, and divers, that’s exactly what they did. They literally picked the massive sections of track up from the floor of the lake and put them back in place. The incredible result? They restored that vital supply link in just 16 days.
This story shows that the company’s culture of innovation isn’t just about algorithms; it’s about a resilient, creative, purpose-driven approach to problem-solving that has been part of their identity for a very long time.
Rethinking “Legacy”
My conversation with Annie was a powerful reminder that the companies we might dismiss as being in “legacy” industries are often home to some of the most fascinating and impactful transformations happening today. They are using technology not for its own sake, but to solve fundamental challenges of safety, efficiency, and human potential.
It makes you wonder: what other “boring” industries are secretly building the future right under our noses?
If you want to dive deeper into how a 200-year-old company is mastering leading transformation at scale and using cutting-edge AI innovation—from machine vision train inspections to designing a truly future-ready headquarters—you absolutely need to listen to the complete Future Ready Leadership discussion with Annie Adams now.
