What It Actually Looks Like to Move Beyond Traditional HR

Featuring Nakesha Lopez, Chief People & Culture Officer, Advocate Health

Recorded live at Advocate Health's The Pearl innovation quarter in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Advocate Health is one of the three largest nonprofit health systems in the country — 175,000 teammates across six states. Nakesha Lopez leads the people and culture function for all of it. She started in HR because someone mentioned a job posting at Memorial Sloan Kettering. She didn't know what HR was. Twenty-five years later, she's redefining what it can be.

📍 HR's Seat at the Table Isn't Given — It's Earned Through Business Fluency Nakesha's definition of non-traditional HR starts here: the people and culture strategy cannot be separate from the organizational strategy. HR leaders must speak CFO, speak operations, speak clinical — and translate across all of it. The interpreter who removes barriers and co-creates with operational leaders before rolling anything out. Her biggest early-career mistake taught her that lesson permanently.

🤖 People-Led, AI-Enabled — Not the Other Way Around Advocate Health's AI strategy is co-led by Nakesha and the Chief AI Officer. The frame is workforce transformation, not AI transformation — because the goal is improved teammate experience, not technology deployment for its own sake. Advocate is rolling out AI literacy organization-wide: helping 175,000 teammates assess where they are in their AI maturity and build from there. If your organization is not building AI literacy now, the new grad you hire in 2027 will notice.

⚡ Work Forward: Advocate's Workforce Transformation Strategy Work Forward is Advocate's structured approach to redesigning work alongside the teammates who do it — cross-functional teams identifying workflows to improve, enabled by AI, with clear accountability for what happens to the work that goes away and the new skills required to replace it. It is not a project. It is a culture being built over multiple years.

🔎 The Takeaway for Every Healthcare HR Leader Embrace the future — but do it together. Your peers, your vendors, your frontline teammates are your co-designers. The best outcomes come from bringing different minds into the same room and letting the debate happen.

Connect with Nakesha: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nakesha-lopez-b817821

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