In the latest episode of the Brandon Hall Group™ Excellence at Work podcast, host Michael Rochelle, Chief Strategy Officer and Principal Analyst at Brandon Hall Group™, sits down with Jeanna Shapiro, Chief People & Culture Officer at Grant Thornton Advisors LLC, to dig into new Brandon Hall Group™ research on the AI-enabled HR operating model.

Shapiro brings nearly 30 years in HR and talent leadership across Booz Allen Hamilton, Oliver Wyman and now Grant Thornton, where she has served as Chief People & Culture Officer for the past 3½ years. That mix of HR expertise and business ownership shapes how she pushes back on the idea that a successful launch is the same thing as a successful outcome.

In this episode of the Brandon Hall Group™ Excellence at Work podcast, host David Wentworth, Managing Director of Learning and Talent at Brandon Hall Group™, talks with Bernie Barbour, Chief Technology and Product Officer at Skillsoft, about why most of the skills data organizations already have cannot actually be trusted, and what it takes to build a system that turns skills into a measurable business discipline instead of a completion rate.

Barbour brings the technical and product view of what it actually takes to build that system at scale, from separating claimed skills from earned skills to using AI without letting judgment quietly erode. Together with Wentworth, Barbour digs into why proficiency is so hard to define, what changes once a skill has to show up in real work and why picking one problem to solve beats trying to fix everything at once.

In this episode of the Brandon Hall Group™ Excellence at Work podcast, host David Wentworth, Managing Director for Learning and Talent at Brandon Hall Group™, talks with Matt Paretsky, Learning and Development Project Manager at VPS Learning, about a leadership skill that rarely gets its own spotlight in development programs: the willingness to take an informed risk and move forward without every answer in hand.

Paretsky's background includes years of work in risk management and business continuity planning outside of learning and development, and that experience shapes how he approaches leadership training today. He also draws on his time working alongside successful leaders and business strategists, as well as a current client project that is extending communication and emotional intelligence training well beyond the management ranks.

In this episode of the Brandon Hall Group™ Excellence at Work series, host Heidi Grecsek, Managing Director of Human Capital Management at Brandon Hall Group™, talks with Lisa Calicchio, Chief Human Resources Officer at WCG, about how organizations can bring employees, contractors, specialists and AI agents together into a single working system. The conversation previews Calicchio's breakout session, Orchestrating Capabilities Across the Extended Enterprise, at the HCM Excellence Conference on Tuesday, January 26, at 3 p.m.

Calicchio has spent her career moving between business operations and HR at companies that include Merck, Johnson & Johnson, Covance, Wyndham Worldwide and GAF. At WCG, a clinical research services and technology company, she works where heavy regulation, scientific specialists and new AI tools meet every day. Her leadership team had watched a demonstration of a new AI-enabled product the day before the recording, which gave her a fresh example to draw on.

In this episode of the Brandon Hall Group™ Excellence at Work podcast, Mike Cooke, CEO of Brandon Hall Group™, talks with Alex Campos of Vensure Employer Solutions about the entrepreneurial philosophy behind Vensure's remarkable growth, its unconventional acquisition strategy and the opportunities artificial intelligence creates for small and midsize businesses.

Their conversation explores how organizations can expand without sacrificing customer relationships, why employee trust matters during acquisitions and how AI could reshape productivity, entrepreneurship and the future of work.

Campos shares his journey from immigrating to the United States from Cuba as a child to becoming a technology entrepreneur and helping build a global employer-services organization. He discusses Vensure's 118 acquisitions in eight years, its approach to retaining entrepreneurial ownership and its investment in AI specifically designed for human capital management.

In this episode of the Brandon Hall Group™ Excellence at Work podcast, host Dr. Marline C. Duroseau, Managing Director, HR and Leadership Development at Brandon Hall Group™, talks with Ivan Petrovic, founder and CEO of Insightful, about one of the most pressing challenges facing HR leaders today: proving that AI investment is actually translating into workforce productivity.

Petrovic leads Insightful, a platform built around the emerging discipline of work intelligence, helping organizations move beyond simply tracking AI adoption to understanding how work actually gets done. He and Duroseau unpack why so many companies get stuck measuring the wrong things, how shadow AI can double as both a risk and a signal, and what separates organizations turning AI activity into real business outcomes from those still guessing.

In this episode of the Brandon Hall Group™ Excellence at Work podcast, host David Wentworth, Managing Director of Learning and Talent at Brandon Hall Group™, talks with Luis Camacho, Director of Customer Success for North America at EdFlex, about why practice and failure rarely get built into corporate learning programs and what it actually takes to make it safe for employees to try a new skill before it counts.

Camacho brings a customer-facing view of how organizations actually roll out skill practice at scale, from assessing where employees already stand to building the kind of AI role play that gets used more than once. Together with Wentworth, he digs into why the audience matters as much as the material, what separates useful feedback from a script, and what has to change for practice to prove itself in real business results.