In this episode, Siobhan Savage sits down with Santosh Singh, Senior Vice President at DENSO, where he oversees human resources, legal and corporate communications. DENSO is one of the world's largest Japanese automotive technology companies, with more than 160,000 employees globally.
Santosh is an engineer by trade. He began as a design engineer on mining construction equipment, spending months on the production floor building machines from nuts and bolts, before moving through Six Sigma and process excellence and eventually being asked to lead HR. That background shapes how he approaches AI: start with the purpose and the problem, not the tool, and keep people at the center.
Santosh draws on manufacturing to explain why human judgment matters more in the age of AI, not less. He describes gemba, the practice of going to the place of work to see, sense and act, and makes the case that discernment is a skill organizations have to deliberately build. He also proposes a thought experiment for leaders: run a business continuity drill imagining your workforce five years from now, and ask how many people could still discern and problem solve if AI shut down.
On the practical side, Santosh walks through how the Six Sigma define, measure, analyze, improve and control method applies to work redesign, how DENSO validated task and subtask data with its leaders until it aligned with what people actually did around 90% of the time, and why reimagining work across functions is really value stream mapping at scale. He closes on how that same work data feeds career pathways and development, and why treating AI as a tool purchase rather than a cultural change is the biggest risk he sees.
In this episode, you'll learn:
- Why DENSO starts AI change with purpose rather than tools
- What the manufacturing principle of gemba teaches about human judgment and AI
- Why leaders should pressure test their AI plans with a business continuity drill
- How the Six Sigma DMAIC method translates to AI work redesign
- How validating task and subtask data with leaders builds business trust in the data
- How work architecture can feed career pathways, development plans and workforce planning
- Why treating AI as a budget line rather than a cultural change is the biggest risk
Santosh Singh is Senior Vice President at DENSO, overseeing human resources, legal and corporate communications in North America. An engineer by trade, he began his career as a design engineer for mining construction equipment, moved through Six Sigma and process excellence, and launched a global engineering design center in India. He has spent nearly 25 years helping large industrial companies transform, and joined DENSO in 2021.
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