Work, Rewired: Rethinking Talent, Strategy, and AI
Where AI Works: Conversations at the Intersection of AI and IndustryShow Notes
It’s a daunting task: moving AI from experimentation to transformation across a massive, global organization with more than 800,000 employees. It turns out it isn’t just about optimizing tasks — it’s about rethinking roles entirely, and managing that change effectively.
On this premiere episode of season three of Where AI Works, host Peter Cappelli is joined by Karalee Close, the Global Lead of Talent & Organization at Accenture, to explore what it truly takes to scale AI across a large enterprise — not just in isolated pilots, but as a driver of full organizational reinvention. Karalee shares her firsthand experience leading AI implementation on a global scale, underscoring that the real challenge isn’t technical, but cultural. She also explains how success depends on convincing leadership to embrace new ways of working, and keeping people at the center of every change, rather than treating AI as a tool for incremental improvements in existing workflows. Packed with insights and practical advice about Agentic AI in particular, this episode offers a clear look at what’s required to move beyond experimentation and generate real enterprise value.
Episode Highlights:
6:09 - Karalee pushes back against the notion that the relationship between AI and human employees has to be an adversarial one.
11:23 - Karalee explains how defining specific tasks and sequences is no longer necessary thanks to agentic AI — you only have to define the strategic intent.
18:26 - Karalee discusses the resistance Accenture has encountered in implementing AI — both internally and externally — and how to overcome it.
More from Where AI Works: Conversations at the Intersection of AI and Industry
What happens when AI stops being a tool and starts reshaping how decisions get made? Who has the judgment and responsibility to double-check the work that AI is doing? And what actually separates companies that are scaling AI from those that are just experimenting?
If AI removes traditional constraints on execution, what becomes the limiting factor? AI can now generate, summarize, and analyze, but it still can’t judge. And as many business leaders are learning, that can cause a new wrinkle in workflows.
How is AI transforming product development inside large-scale organizations? What does it look like when teams move from Product Requirements Documents to rapid prototyping? And how are roles, workflows, and decision-making changing in our increasingly AI-first world? On this episode of Where AI Works, host Matthew Bidwell sits down with Paul Stathacopoulos, Vice President of Product for Focus Categories and International Cross Border Trade at eBay, to find out how AI is reshaping the way products are built and delivered inside one of the world’s largest online marketplaces. Together, they explore how eBay is using AI across three key areas: improving customer-facing experiences, unlocking insights from massive datasets, and fundamentally transforming product development workflows. They also discuss the shift from traditional PRDs to rapid, AI-generated prototypes, and how “vibe coding” is enabling teams to test ideas with customers in a period of days instead of months. Finally, they unpack how AI is blurring roles across product, design, and engineering, and why adopting an AI-first mindset is critical to staying competitive in a rapidly evolving landscape.
It’s a question that looms large for any business leader these days, but the stakes are even higher for those that manage massive workforces: as AI transforms the workplace, what happens to jobs and the people doing them? On this episode of Where AI Works, host Matthew Bidwell speaks with Donna Morris, the Chief People Officer at Walmart, about what it means to introduce AI across one of the largest workforces on the planet; more than 2.1 million associates around the world. Morris explains the company’s “people-led, tech-powered” approach, where AI is used to augment employees rather than replace them. She also discusses the emergence of new roles like AI agent-builders , and explores the skills that matter most in an AI-driven workplace. While technical expertise is important, Morris argues that adaptability, communication, curiosity, and interpersonal skills will define the most successful employees in the years ahead. For leaders navigating this rapid change, the takeaway is simple: invest in people, build new skills, and be sure to bring your workers along for the ride.
The way we think about jobs is changing. As artificial intelligence reshapes how work gets done, traditional roles and titles are giving way to something more fluid: a skills-based economy. But while organizations are moving quickly to redefine what they need, workers and educators are still catching up, creating a growing gap between the skills people claim to have and the capabilities employers truly value.