People Managing People

David Rice
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The People Managing People podcast equips forward-thinking leaders to thrive in the AI era—reshaping teams, systems, and strategy without losing what makes work human. Hosted by David Rice, each episode brings real-world insights from innovators, executives, and people leaders on topics like AI in practice, people-first leadership, performance systems, and workplace culture.

  1. 6 days ago

    Is AI Making Your Employees Worse At Thinking?

    Recorded live at the AI4 conference in Las Vegas, this conversation puts David Rice and Dr. Lilian Ajayi Ore—AI lead faculty and lecturer in strategic communication at Columbia University and co-author of The Power of the Learning Mindset—in the middle of one of the biggest questions surrounding workplace AI: Are companies gaining efficiency while quietly weakening their people’s ability to think? With the energy of a live conference comes some background noise, but the discussion cuts through it. David and Dr. Ore explore cognitive debt, skill decay, and why the usual AI metrics—seats, logins, prompts, adoption rates—say very little about whether workforce capability is actually improving. They discuss the risks of outsourcing judgment and critical thinking, the loss of institutional knowledge when organizations replace people rather than reskill them, and why AI transformation needs to be treated as a talent priority alongside a technology priority. Because faster work isn’t much of a win if the people doing it are slowly losing the skills that made them valuable in the first place. Related Links: Join the People Managing People CommunitySubscribe to the newsletter to get our latest articles and podcastsConnect with Lilian on LinkedInCheck out Lilian’s book — The Power of the Learning Mindset: How the Best Leaders Foster Curiosity, Develop Innovative Teams, and Achieve Exponential GrowthSupport the show

    Is AI Making Your Employees Worse At Thinking?

  2. 22 Sept

    Are Leaders Trading Future Capability For Short-Term AI Efficiency?

    AI may be changing the work, but the bigger risk is what happens when organizations optimize so aggressively for today’s efficiency that they stop building tomorrow’s capability. Recorded live at the AI4 conference in Las Vegas, host David Rice sits down with Dr. Jana Brown, Chief Human Resources Officer at eHealth, to unpack the long-term consequences of shrinking entry-level pipelines, why HR needs “transformation fluency” rather than technical expertise alone, and what separates useful AI initiatives from expensive corporate hobbies. They also explore the human and operating systems that have to move together if transformation is going to stick—and why the technology itself is rarely the thing that sinks an AI project. Listeners may hear a little more conference-floor noise than usual, but that’s the price of capturing these conversations where they’re actually happening. Related Links: Join the People Managing People CommunitySubscribe to the newsletter to get our latest articles and podcastsConnect with Jana on LinkedInCheck out eHealthSupport the show

    Are Leaders Trading Future Capability For Short-Term AI Efficiency?

  3. 17 Sept

    How Do You Automate Recognition Without Making It Feel Automated?

    AI in HR has a credibility problem: the technology is getting better at spotting patterns, summarizing data, and automating work, but none of that guarantees a better employee experience. In this conversation, Motivosity Chief Product Officer Jesse Dowdle and VP of Engineering Dano Gillette make the case for “appreciation intelligence”—using AI to remove administrative friction without automating the human moments that actually make recognition meaningful. The bigger opportunity isn’t an AI-generated thank-you note. It’s giving HR and frontline managers a richer picture of employees, surfacing signals before problems become crises, and turning data into useful action. But there’s an important line running through the conversation: AI can recommend, filter, moderate, and nudge. Humans still need to own the judgment. Related Links: Join the People Managing People CommunitySubscribe to the newsletter to get our latest articles and podcastsConnect with Jesse and Dano on LinkedInVisit MotivositySupport the show

    How Do You Automate Recognition Without Making It Feel Automated?

  4. 15 Sept

    What Happens When Employees Stop Speaking Up

    When people stay quiet at work, organizations lose more than participation. They lose ideas, warnings, customer insight, process improvements, and market intelligence that never make it into the room. Seema Bhansali calls this the silence tax—the hidden cost companies pay when their environments make self-censorship the safer option. In this episode, Seema joins David Rice to unpack why “speak up” advice misses the real problem. Employee voice isn’t simply a confidence issue; it’s shaped by systems, social risk, management behavior, and the environments leaders create. They also explore why this matters even more as companies adopt AI, and why communication needs to be treated less like a soft skill and more like an operational capability tied to performance. Related Links: Join the People Managing People CommunitySubscribe to the newsletter to get our latest articles and podcastsCheck out this episode’s sponsor: TeamPulseConnect with Seema on LinkedInCheck out evolvEQ StrategiesSupport the show

    What Happens When Employees Stop Speaking Up

  5. 8 Sept

    Why AI Transformation Starts With Organizational Clarity

    AI transformation has a funny way of becoming an organizational X-ray. The companies getting real value from it aren’t necessarily the ones buying the most tools or burning the most tokens. They’re the ones that understand what they’re trying to accomplish, what excellence looks like, and which problems are actually worth solving. In this episode of People Managing People, David Rice speaks with Zapier’s Chief People and AI Transformation Officer, Brandon Sammut, about why AI ROI starts with organizational clarity, how to build experimentation that survives contact with actual workloads, and why adoption eventually needs to give way to impact. They also explore AI coaching, the growing value of judgment and wisdom, and why the best employers may increasingly be defined by how much more capable people become while working there. Related Links: Join the People Managing People CommunitySubscribe to the newsletter to get our latest articles and podcastsConnect with Brandon on LinkedInCheck out ZapierSupport the show

    Why AI Transformation Starts With Organizational Clarity

  6. 1 Sept

    How to Turn Employee Engagement Into a Business Case

    HR has been told for years to “speak the language of the business,” usually as code for proving it deserves to be in the room. But Dr. Shindale Seale makes a stronger case: this isn’t about self-defense. It’s about leadership. If disengagement, poor management, weak culture, and badly handled transformation all carry measurable financial costs, HR needs to connect the human consequences to the numbers executives use to make decisions. In this episode, host David Rice and Dr. Seale unpack the “disengagement tax,” why engagement metrics without business impact can become little more than dashboard theater, and what it actually means for HR to become bilingual. They also explore the impossible job organizations have created for managers, why AI tends to amplify the culture it lands in, and whether the CHRO role is big enough for the human side of the transformation ahead. Related Links: Join the People Managing People CommunitySubscribe to the newsletter to get our latest articles and podcastsConnect with Dr. Shindale on LinkedInCheck out SEADE Coaching & ConsultingSupport the show

    How to Turn Employee Engagement Into a Business Case

  7. 25 Aug

    HR Has the Skills to Lead the AI Era—But Will It?

    There are two ways the AI transformation of work can go. We can hand the keys to the efficiency obsessives and spend the next decade trying to engineer the humanity out of organizations. Or HR can recognize that understanding motivation, organizational design, and how people actually experience work is suddenly a strategic advantage—and start acting like it. Jessica Zwaan, VP of People Strategy and Operations at Leapsome and author of Built For People and Purpose In Work, joins David Rice to talk about why HR has the raw materials to lead this moment, but also some baggage to lose. They get into purpose washing, why not everyone needs a calling disguised as a job, what AI means for early-career development, and why designing better work requires considerably more than putting a mission statement on the wall and hoping everyone believes it. Related Links: Join the People Managing People CommunitySubscribe to the newsletter to get our latest articles and podcastsConnect with Jessica on LinkedInVisit LeapsomeSupport the show

    HR Has the Skills to Lead the AI Era—But Will It?

  8. 18 Aug

    What AI Surveillance Can’t Tell You About Your Employees

    Nobody sets out to build a workforce surveillance system. It usually arrives dressed up as optimization, productivity, wellness, or efficiency. But as AI makes it possible to monitor everything from keystrokes and mouse movements to emotions and physical behavior, the line between legitimate measurement and invasive surveillance gets harder to ignore. In this episode, I speak with Lynn Parramore, Director of Special Projects at the Institute for New Economic Thinking, about what gets lost when leaders assume everything valuable at work can be measured. We dig into why constant monitoring erodes trust, how algorithms strip context from human behavior, why younger workers have good reason to be skeptical of AI, and why leaders need to get philosophical—not just practical—about where this technology belongs. Related Links: Join the People Managing People CommunitySubscribe to the newsletter to get our latest articles and podcastsConnect with Lynn on LinkedInCheck out Lynn’s book — Reading the Sphinx: Ancient Egypt in Nineteenth-Century Literary CultureSupport the show

    What AI Surveillance Can’t Tell You About Your Employees
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About

The People Managing People podcast equips forward-thinking leaders to thrive in the AI era—reshaping teams, systems, and strategy without losing what makes work human. Hosted by David Rice, each episode brings real-world insights from innovators, executives, and people leaders on topics like AI in practice, people-first leadership, performance systems, and workplace culture.

Information

  • Creator
    David Rice
  • Years Active
    2020 - 2026
  • Episodes
    212
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2026 People Managing People
  • Show Website
    People Managing People

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