Future Ready Leadership With Jacob Morgan

How to Embrace Generative AI Without Automating the "Soul" of Work

Dec 15, 2025

Rebecca Hinds, Head of the Work AI Institute at Glean and a savvy organizational behavior researcher, dives deep into AI's transformative potential. She critiques the digital exhaustion trap many companies face, emphasizing that AI's success is rooted in redesigning workflows and fostering collaboration. Rebecca shares her insights on balancing centralization and decentralization in AI implementation, the importance of embedding AI into daily work, and the risks of automating the 'soul' of work. Her approach offers a valuable roadmap for leaders navigating AI integration.

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INSIGHT

Transformation Depends On People Not Just Tech

AI success depends more on organizational change than model quality, because humans must adapt their workflows and structures.
The Work Transformation 100 studied 100+ leaders to surface practical lessons from real deployments.

ANECDOTE

Train-Inspection Portals At Norfolk Southern

Norfolk Southern built portals with 4K cameras to scan trains at speed and flag defects via AI, replacing manual inspections.
This example shows how AI embedded into physical workflows yields clear operational value.

ADVICE

Embed AI In The Flow Of Work

Embed AI directly into employees' flow of work rather than forcing them to adopt separate platforms.
Design AI efforts around team and organizational outcomes, not just individual productivity gains.

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AI is failing most companies, trapping employees in digital exhaustion. The real problem isn't the technology, but the organization itself. Forget fixing your models—the path to true transformation is redesigning your workflows, structure, and human collaboration to finally work with AI. In this episode, Rebecca Hinds, Head of the Work AI Institute at Glean, unpacks insights from the Work Transformation 100 study, revealing what 100+ leaders, technologists, and researchers are doing differently to make AI actually work. You'll learn how AI needs to be embedded in the flow of work, why organizational structure eats AI for breakfast, how centralization and decentralization must coexist, and how leaders can avoid automating the soul of work by preserving ownership, creativity, and accountability. Rebecca breaks down the emerging collaboration between HR and IT, the rise of agentic workflows, the role of telemetry data in measuring AI adoption, and why flattening org charts for the sake of AI often backfires. She also shares real examples of bottom-up and top-down AI change, the impact of digital exhaustion, and the critical importance of redesigning processes and incentives before redesigning technology. This episode is every CHRO's playbook to lead AI transformation with human insight, organizational clarity, and people-first strategy, not hype.

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This Episode is sponsored by Glean:

The AI Transformation 100 is here — Glean's Work AI Institute reveals what's really working with AI at work

The AI Transformation 100, authored by Dr. Rebecca Hinds, Head of the Work AI Institute at Glean and Stanford's Bob Sutton surfaces 100 hard-won lessons from leaders actually deploying AI at scale. It's not about what AI could do — it's about what works, what fails, and what companies have to get right to make AI real. One takeaway: AI doesn't fix broken systems. It amplifies them.

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Future-ready organizations are built, not hoped for. My latest book, -The 8 Laws of Employee Experience shows how. Preorder here: 8EXLaws.com