Most companies are asking what AI can automate in HR. Deepti Moolya asks a better question: does it make work more human? In this episode of The Shift, we sit down with Deepti, VP of HR at Happiest Minds Technologies, who helped scale the company from about 1,000 to 7,000 employees through four acquisitions. She shares real case studies of AI in HR at the enterprise level, where her team decided not to automate, and how small HR teams can start using AI with little or no budget.

We get into:

• What breaks in HR when you scale fast: why consistency beats customization, speed beats perfection, and communication beats documentation
• Integrating four acquisitions without it feeling like a hostile takeover
• A manager coaching bot that works like a flight simulator for difficult performance conversations, with AI personas that push back
• AI-assisted employee recognition that nudges managers toward the people they'd miss, and helped double recognition in a year
• Why Happiest Minds turned down a fully automated AI onboarding agent and kept day one human
• AI on a shoestring: how startups and nonprofits can build HR workflows with free tools like Notion, Make.com, Zapier, and Google Workspace
• Why culture is what makes AI adoption work, and what happens to companies that shelved it

Because people may forget the technology you rolled out. They won't forget how you made them feel.

Connect with Deepti:

LinkedIn

Mentoring

Everyone's heard of neurodiversity by now. Almost nobody's asking what happens on a Tuesday morning when someone's just trying to get their work done.

In this episode of The Shift, we sit down with Shawn Utterback, founder of NeuroTalent Connect, to talk about why so many workplace "performance problems" are actually design problems — and why building for clarity ends up working better for everyone, not just neurodivergent employees.

We get into:

• Why "culture fit" is really just comfort and conformity in disguise — and what changes when companies hire for culture add instead
• The DEI committee conversation nobody thought to have — and why it became one of the most-attended sessions his last company ever ran
• Masking, and the hidden cost of spending your energy decoding the workplace instead of doing the work
• The curb-cut effect — why captions, ramps, and clear documentation weren't built for everyone, but end up helping everyone anyway
• AI as a two-edged sword: it can shrink cognitive friction, or just help bad workplace design move faster
• Building Workplace by Design, his in-beta "People OS" — and why he shipped a rough version instead of waiting six months for a perfect one

Because you can't hire for cognitive diversity and then manage for conformity. Fix the system. Don't fix the person.

Connect with Shawn:

LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/shawnutterback/

NeuroTalent Connect — https://www.neurotalentconnect.com/

Everyone’s talking about burnout. Almost nobody’s asking what it actually costs to keep leading through it.

In this episode of The Shift, we sit down with Christy Honeycutt, executive coach and author of The Inner Work of Leading in a Broken System, to talk about what it takes to lead with your spirit intact inside systems that were never built for it.

We get into:

• Her throughline; and how she fell into recruitment almost by accident, to two decades leading talent at IBM and Korn Ferry
• The health scare that forced her to choose between her job and her life
• Why she believes we’ve entered a "bully era" of leadership; and what real accountability actually requires
• The real reason "AI is taking jobs" has become an excuse for leaders who won’t have hard conversations
• Why HR has a seat at the table…but only if it chooses to take it
• Her deceptively simple practice for finding joy again, starting with a grocery store trip in her late 40s

Because you can’t build a healthy culture on top of leadership nobody’s holding accountable.

Connect with Christy:

LinkedIn

Website

Book: The Inner Work of Leading in a Broken System (Pre-order now on Amazon, out November 17th)