AI and the Future of Work

401: Theresita Richard, CHRO at Patagonia: AI Won't Fix Your Culture, It Will Expose ItSend us Fan Mail Theresita Richard is Chief People and Culture Officer at Patagonia, where she is approaching her third anniversary with the company. Before Patagonia, she built her career across some of the most recognized names in retail, including Home Depot, Target, Starbucks, and Nordstrom, after starting out as an industrial engineer leading a two-year project on how new technology was reshaping manufacturing work. At Patagonia, Theresita carries the responsibility of stewarding a culture built around a single, deceptively simple mission: to be in business to save the home planet. That means holding the tension between profit and purpose in every decision, and now, figuring out where AI fits into a company that has always insisted on doing things the harder, more human way. In this episode, Theresita draws on a career that began in manufacturing automation and has led her to guard the soul of one of the most purpose-driven companies in the world, to argue that AI will not fix a broken culture. It will only reveal it, and the responsibility to get that right has never been more real. In this conversation, we discuss: • Why Patagonia evaluates potential hires based on purpose alignment rather than culture fit, and how the company builds an environment where people stay for a reason, a season, or a lifetime. • How Patagonia's "pair clarity with choice" principle lets culture self-select who belongs, without anyone having to enforce it. • Why AI does not create new problems inside a company, and why AI will always amplify the cracks and biases already present in our foundations. • Why enlightened leadership in a rapidly shifting technological landscape requires extreme vulnerability, community building, and the courage to sit with difficult questions. • How the conversation around AI in the workplace must shift from driving pure efficiency to genuinely nourishing the human soul and promoting human flourishing. • How a grandfather with a third-grade education taught the one skill that no shift in technology has ever made irrelevant. Explore this conversation: 00:00 Introducing Theresita Richard: From Industrial Engineer to Patagonia CHRO 03:25 Inside Patagonia's Culture: Life at the Anti-Corporate Corporation 04:35 The Company Has a Soul: Stewarding Patagonia's Legacy and Its Future Stories 06:49 Made or Born Patagonian: Why Alignment Matters More Than Culture Fit 09:36 In Business to Save Our Home Planet: Why Profit and Purpose Are Not a Trade-Off 11:03 Pair Clarity With Choice: How Culture Self-Selects Without Enforcement 13:26 Beyond HR as Compliance: Nourishing the Human Soul at Work 15:48 The Ground Is Shaking: Why AI Cannot Be a Conversation About Efficiency Alone 19:52 Ally or Adversary: Honest Conversations About What Gets Automated and Augmented 22:23 Two Approaches to Leadership: Vulnerability, Community, and Sitting With the Questions 25:47 Measuring AI: Why It Reveals the Cracks in Your Foundation 28:27 Not What AI Can Do but What It Should: Bias, Guardrails, and Safe-to-Fail Experiments 33:04 The Racist Soap Dispenser: What Meredith Broussard's Work Reveals About AI Bias 36:37 Willie and Pearl: The Origin Story Behind Following the Question Resources: Subscribe to the AI & The Future of Work NewsletterConnect with Theresita on LinkedIn • Other episodes mentioned: Meredith Broussard, NYU professor, AI ethics authority, and featured expert in Coded Bias, discusses the social implications of AI Looking for a faster, more intelligent way to manage your inbox? Try Superhuman Mail and connect your favorite AI tools to email and calendar workflows—all from one place. Get started here: https://superhuman.com/mail/signup

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397: Maryjo Charbonnier, Kyndryl's Former CHRO & Executive Advisor, on Transforming Skills into Visibility with AISend us Fan Mail Maryjo Charbonnier is the former CHRO and Executive Advisor at Kyndryl, the world's largest provider of IT infrastructure services , with more than 70,000 employees across roughly 60 countries. When Kyndryl was spun out of IBM in 2021 as one of the largest public company spin-offs in history, Maryjo helped build its culture and people strategy from the ground up, which is why she and others have called it the world's largest startup. She has spent nearly two decades as a public company CHRO on both sides of the Atlantic, including Wolters Kluwer (traded on the Dutch exchange) and Broadridge Financial Solutions, after a formative run at PepsiCo where she led change management for Frito-Lay. She was named CHRO of the Year in the Netherlands and earned her MBA at Southern Methodist University. In this episode, Maryjo draws on a career spent leading messy transformations and building a 70,000-person workforce to argue that as AI automates tasks and chunks of jobs, the work that defines a career is moving from what you know to how you judge, lead, and decide, and most organizations are not teaching for it yet. In this conversation, we discuss: • Why Maryjo “seeks the heat” in messy transformations and what she learned leading HR through turnarounds, spin‑offs, and large‑scale change. • How Kyndryl defined the “Kyndryl way” with six core behaviors and uses culture as an operating plan in the world’s largest startup. • Why HR must focus on which skills are rare and most valuable, and how Kyndryl’s Make Yourself Discoverable campaign turned skills into a strategic asset. • How AI-powered career profiles, skills-based redeployment, and role-specific AI curricula were intentionally designed to show Kyndryls that AI is an asset to their career, not a threat to it. • Why Maryjo believes HR has three roles in AI, including reshaping commercial work and building an AI governance council that balances speed with risk. • How leadership “ORE” (organizational design, risk management, empathy) and human skills like change management and people leadership will define careers in an AI‑enabled workplace Explore the Conversation 00:00 Intro and AI Fun Fact: Bias in AI Hiring Tools and Your Rights as an Applicant 03:46 Meet Maryjo Charbonnier: CHRO at Kyndryl, the World's Largest IT Infrastructure Provider 05:29 Seek the Heat: Why Career Growth Lives Where the Problems Are 07:19 Building Culture at the World's Largest Startup: Why Kyndryl Doesn't Say "Employees" 09:58 The Real Function of HR: Helping Human Beings Excel at Work 12:35 The Employee-Employer Relationship When Everyone Fears an AI Replacement 15:45 The Three Roles of HR in AI and Defining the Skills That Matter Most 19:05 Make Yourself Discoverable: Operationalizing Skills Data From 1.0 to 3.0 23:15 Leadership in the Age of AI: Closing the Trust Gap With the ORE Framework 28:51 The Future Org Chart: Why Every New Technology Brings a Boom of Jobs 31:51 Advice to the Kids: Why You Get Paid for People Leadership, Not Just Smarts 35:28 Where to Connect With Maryjo Charbonnier and Kyndryl Resources: Subscribe to the AI & The Future of Work NewsletterConnect with Maryjo on LinkedInAI fun fact articleOn How Rory O'Driscoll Explains Success Modes for AI Companies and Three Essential Startup StrategiesEpisode with Keith Sonderling, then an EEOC Commissioner and now the U.S. Deputy Secretary of Labor

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