IBM Senior Vice President and Chief Human Resources Officer Nickle LaMoreaux is helping to steer the tech giant through the fastest change she’s seen in her two-decade career. In this interview with UC Berkeley Haas professors Jenny Chatman and Sameer Srivastava, she shares how IBM’s bold shift to AI-powered HR helped free up her human team to better support the company’s 275,000 global employees. IBM’s digital AI agent now handles 11 million interactions annually with a 94% resolution rate, and employee satisfaction has soared. LaMoreaux makes the case that this digital transformation has enabled her team to focus on high-value work like leadership coaching and complex problem-solving. She discusses how domain expertise has become more important than ever.
IBM Senior Vice President and Chief Human Resources Officer Nickle LaMoreaux is helping to steer the tech giant through the fastest change she’s seen in her two-decade career. In this interview with UC Berkeley Haas professors Jenny Chatman and Sameer Srivastava, she shares how IBM’s bold shift to AI-powered HR helped free up her human team to better support the company’s 275,000 global employees.
IBM’s digital AI agent now handles 11 million interactions annually with a 94% resolution rate, and employee satisfaction has soared. LaMoreaux makes the case that this digital transformation has enabled her team to focus on high-value work like leadership coaching and complex problem-solving. She discusses how domain expertise has become more important than ever.
The full transcript of this episode is available at haas.org/culture-kit.
(Transcripts may contain a few typographical errors due to audio quality during the podcast recording.)
[00:00:00] Sameer Srivastava: Welcome to The Culture Kit with Jenny and Sameer, where we give you the tools to build a healthy and effective workplace culture. I’m Sameer Srivastava.
[00:00:14] Jennifer Chatman: And I’m Jenny Chatman. We’re professors at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business and co-founders of the Berkeley Center for Workplace Culture and Innovation.
On today's episode, we'll hear from Nickle LaMoreaux, IBM's Senior Vice President and Chief Human Resource Officer, on how HR leaders can use AI as a tool to improve workplace culture.
[00:00:40] Nickle LaMoreaux: There's a high degree of trust in our culture around technology. That being said, we are also very clear that AI is never a decision-maker.
[00:00:53] Sameer Srivastava: Today, we're thrilled to welcome Nickle LaMoreaux, IBM's Senior Vice President and Chief Human Resources Officer, who leads people strategy, employee experience, and a global HR team that supports more than 275,000 IBM employees across 170 countries. So, not a big job at all. Welcome to the Culture Kit, Nickle.
[00:01:16] Nickle LaMoreaux: Sameer, Jenny, it's wonderful to be with you today.
[00:01:20] Jennifer Chatman: Well, Nickle, we saw you a year ago at our 2024 Culture Connect Conference, where you gave a really interesting talk — I would say you brought the house down — about the transformation of HR practices at IBM that you've been leading. I know you've been in your role as Chief Human Resources Officer since 2020, but you have more than 20 years at IBM. Have you ever experienced a period of such rapid change?
[00:01:47] Nickle LaMoreaux: Jenny, no, I have not. I think, as human resources professionals, we thought 2020, with the pandemic, maybe going into 2021, was really going to be the height of needing to be agile and nimble. But I've got to be honest, I think AI takes the cake when it comes to that now, just because of that rapid pace of change, but also because no two companies are going to be the same on this.
[00:02:19] Sameer Srivastava: So, I want to dive into what's happening today, but I also want to start by going back in time. And IBM, as we've talked about before, Nickle, has a special place in my heart because my father spent his entire 30-year career working at IBM. And I know from my own experience, talking to him, that IBM has just been a pioneer in so many different domains over the years. And you mentioned in your own talk that, back in even 2009, IBM began using neural networks for salary decisions. Could you walk us through a little bit of the history of the HR journey with AI at IBM?
[00:02:53] Nickle LaMoreaux: Sure. And so, Sameer, what we say at IBM is, once an IBMer, always an IBMer. So, you are an extended part of the IBM family, and happy to have your father as an alumni. Yeah, if I think about the AI journey that we've been on, we did start experimenting this, you know, 2008. 2009. We used neural networks at the time. So, you know, very different than where we are now with generative AI.
But what we were trying to achieve at that point in time was decision-making support for our management population. I think we all know that managers have the hardest jobs in our companies, no matter what industry you're in or how big or small you are. And so, as an HR team, what we were trying to do, to say, given all this information that is being thrown at them, how can we help make it easier for them?
We started with compensation. Every manager gets their annual salary budget, and you have to think about, how do you allocate it? So, were there AI tools that could assist in that allocation to start giving you a recommended way to spend the budget? As a manager, you always had autonomy to tweak it, but it gave you a starting point, taking in a lot of information, from performance to skills to benchmarking of that job. And so, that's where we started.
[00:04:22] Jennifer Chatman: That's so interesting. And I'm wondering a little bit more about the process. Like, when did you launch the first HR chatbot? How did it go over? Did people resist? What did you learn?
[00:04:33] Nickle LaMoreaux: Yeah. You know, our first entry into this was what I'll call advanced predictive analytics. I'm not even sure we were really calling it AI at that time. But at the point in time that AI became very visible to the rest of the function was through our very first chatbot.
In 2017, we launched an HR chatbot. And the real intent of it was to just be a question-and-answer tool for managers and employees on some of the most basic questions that HR professionals often got. But we learned maybe a lesson in AI that was powerful then. And I still think it's powerful today. We launched the chatbot. The technology was pretty amazing, but technology aside doesn't necessarily get an organization where it needs to go. What we found was no one used the chatbot. And so, why did no one use the chatbot? Because behavior change is a really important part of every company's AI journey. At the time, we still had a telephone number for HR. We still had an email address for HR. We still had HR professionals at all of our locations where people could walk down the hall and ask them a question.
[00:06:01] Jennifer Chatman: So, maybe you could just say a little bit about how you broke through that, kind of, stalemate.
[00:06:07] Nickle LaMoreaux: Yeah. So, break through it, we did. And I will tell you, we took an approach that was pretty bold. I'm not necessarily sure it's an approach you would need to take today.
If we were really going to change behavior, we had to make a hard pivot. So, in 2018, overnight, we took away the email address to HR, we took away the telephone number to HR, and we told 21,000 first-line managers in about 90 countries at the time that we were becoming a digital-first HR function. And so, to get answers to their questions or support from HR, their only entry point was what we had then named it Ask HR, which was a digital chatbot.
That chatbot really could do two things at that time in 2018. It could answer basic questions or it could create a ticket if it couldn't answer your question. You can imagine this was a pretty bold approach to take. And maybe I should just say a minute about why, because Jenny and Sameer, I think this is where when we had talked last year, people often asked, how did you get to that point to really, kind of, take that bold leap? And it was because we were facing three things in the organization. The first thing is, like many HR departments, we were under what I'll call cost pressure. Our budget was not growing. In some years, it was shrinking or staying flat. But we were being asked to do more with less. The second thing that was happening is the complexity of the environment we were operating in was increasing. States, cities, providences, countries were all passing different laws. And typically, as an HR team, when you have that complexity, where you have to do different policies, different processes, you either put more people on it or you put technology on it. But that requires that you have money to do that, which we didn't have because of the first force that was hitting us. And the last piece I would say is, back in 2018, and, you know, if we could all go back in time a little bit, that is when we all started having these amazing consumer-grade experiences in our personal lives. One click to order something or to order a taxi, food, shopping, all on your mobile device and your handheld device.
Employees were coming into IBM and either we had no technology — and so, we were still doing things, hard copy, paper, pen, wet signatures — or even where we had technology, it didn't feel seamless, one-click. So, we took this bold approach to change behavior, but also because we saw a little bit of an unsolvable problem, this wasn't just about cutting out a little bit more and asking people to work harder. We needed a way to work smarter.
[00:09:27] Sameer Srivastava: So, I wanted to think a little bit about the relationship between technology and automation on one hand and the human culture that IBM had developed and has evolved over all these years. Could you talk a little bit about how you see the introduction and rollout of AI tools and the automation of some of these core processes as possibly affecting or changing the culture of your organization?
[00:09:50] Nickle LaMoreaux: Yeah, I think, you know, in this environment we're in now, the technology's pretty amazing. And many of us are experimenting. But the first piece of advice I give any company when they're embarking on this, particularly, as you think about it in your people or talent processes, is be intentional about where you use it. And you need to be intentional to make sure that it supports your business model, how your company or organization, why it exists. You need to be intentional to ensure that it's actually solving the problem you're trying to solve, but that it also fits your culture. And so, where you get started with AI, you need to be taking all of this into account.
One of the things I worry about a little bit is, that because there are so many great use cases out there for AI right now, including the digital assistant I just spoke about, a lot of companies are in the FOMO stage. And so, they're just saying, “I don't want to be left behind. I hear that this other company is doing this with AI. Let me just quickly replicate it.” But if it doesn't support your business model, and if it doesn't solve a problem, and if it doesn't fit your culture, then you're going to find that you're not getting the lift from it as appropriate.
And so, you know, Sameer, even if I think about what we've done, because we are a technology company, one of the reasons why we can go digital-first is because that's embedded in the culture of our company, the business processes that we have. There's a high degree of trust in our culture around technology. That being said, we are also very clear that AI is never a decision-maker. And so, even in the examples where I talked about the recommendations around your salary budget, that always has a human in the loop, because in our culture, it's very important to have humans be decision-makers.
The last point on this, and this gets to the what's important for you and I to interact on, everything we're doing around AI and automation in HR is trying to make sure that the low-value work is being done as quickly as possible and as accurately as possible. If you need to update your address, I don't want you to necessarily have to talk to me to go do that. Even in a self-service model where you may log into a tool, I don't want you to have to remember your password, fill it out, and then make sure you submit it. I'd rather to have you tell a digital assistant, “I've moved, here's my new address,” and it, in an automated way, does all of that for you.
But at the point, you need leadership coaching, you have a tough performance management situation, you want to build unique learning plans, given the aspiration of your team, I want you dealing with an HR professional on that — human to human, face to face. And so, in our culture, it's thinking through, where do you want that human value? And where is it okay not to have it?
[00:13:25] Jennifer Chatman: So, this question is, kind of, a how's it going question. I'm wondering if there are cultural metrics that have improved with the use of digital labor for these lower-level repetitive tasks, if people don't have to go through a big process to change their address, is there a, kind of, cultural benefit to that?
[00:13:48] Nickle LaMoreaux: Yeah, if I take a snapshot of where we are now, because I started to tell you where we started in 2018, but if we did a fast forward to the end of 2024, our digital agent, we now call it an agent because it will answer your questions, but it will also do transactions and assist you with programmatic work, our digital agent, last year, handled 11 million interactions.
[00:14:16] Jennifer Chatman: Wow.
[00:14:19] Nickle LaMoreaux: It did almost 500,000 transactions, from updating your address, to transferring an employee, to creating a new job requisition that might need to be posted on an external job board. What we're finding is that the satisfaction net promoter score with that service is 74%.
[00:14:43] Jennifer Chatman: Okay.
[00:14:44] Nickle LaMoreaux: Okay. So, that's a pretty high satisfaction level. And what I will tell you, before we moved to this digital-first approach in 2018, we were actually at a satisfaction level of plus 19 NPS — so, a massive shift.
[00:15:02] Jennifer Chatman: Yeah.
[00:15:02] Nickle LaMoreaux: The other thing I'm proud to say is that the digital assistant itself has a 94% containment rate. What does that mean? Of those transactions coming in, the questions coming in, how many is it able to handle without having to go to a human tier? That leads to that high satisfaction rate, because when you do need an expert, Nickle isn't bogged down with looking up the vacation policy. You can get to an expert quickly. And for my HR team, HR engagement is at an all-time high and the average band or grade, we use bands at IBM, but levels, if you think about it this way, has increased by two. So, we really are moving to that higher-value work. And it's really adding a lot of benefit to the business.
[00:15:58] Sameer Srivastava: So, can you say a little bit more about that? In particular, the types of skills that are now needed in the HR professional that, perhaps, were less critical before? How is this changing the expertise you're even looking for in the function?
[00:16:11] Nickle LaMoreaux: Yeah. So, if I think about the expertise, you know, a lot of people have often asked me, in this age of AI where you can ask an agent any kind of question, is domain expertise fading? And I would actually say domain expertise is becoming more and more important, because the basic questions are being able to be answered by an agent. But when you get to the complex scenarios and you get to that expert, you need to be able to go very, very deep. So, I always say to my HR professionals, domain expertise have become more important than ever, and especially for HR professionals. I say you have to be an expert in at least one thing. It can be compensation, it could be benefits, it could be leadership development, but you've got to have a domain expertise focus.
The second thing that has become even more important is business acumen. Because again, you have to be able to overlay that domain expertise over the business problem or the business model. At IBM, we're a hardware, software, and consulting company. So, if you have a retention situation that has come into you as an expert, you have to think about it. How do I solve it in the context of those businesses? So, that's a second very important key skill.
The third thing I say is, AI itself isn't necessarily a job. It's a skill we've all got to have to have in our responsibilities. We have to know how to work with AI. And so, for my HR professionals, they have to understand, how do you update the Q's and A's coming in? How do you watch where we might be seeing hallucinations? All of that is something that we've got to be able to respond to real time. And it's not one person's job. It's all of us, as we're working with the AI.
[00:18:16] Jennifer Chatman: So, Nickle, you wrote in a LinkedIn article that, and I'll use quotes here, “agentic AI is going to be the talk of 2025.” I'm interested in, kind of, what you meant by that. And specifically, you use the term, “agentic.” So, contrasting agentic and generative AI, what does that mean to you?
[00:18:39] Nickle LaMoreaux: Yeah, absolutely. I will tell you that a lot of the advancements that we made in HR, in our assistant, were traditional AI. We spend a lot of time training, Q&A, and then using natural language. The assistant would answer the questions. We are now moving to generative AI. And the beauty of generative AI is it takes a lot less time to train. It is a lot more user-friendly. It can understand a lot more context. It also has what I call memory.
o, as we move to generative AI, the really great thing is that it is going to have a much higher, easier, better user experience around question and answer functionality. It will also, through other technology, be able to do transactions that I spoke about.
We also will have to watch for hallucinations. In IBM's terminology, what we're doing is we're using generative AI, but there are some questions where there's only one right answer. And in those, we are doing the more traditional AI with hard coded answers.
We are, though, moving to agentic. What does agentic mean? You get all of the functionality of that Q&A and that transactions but you can now run full programs. An example at IBM is, if I'm a compensation professional and I log in to Ask HR, I can ask questions. What's the vacation policy? I can then ask it to do a task for me. I can say, “Please put in for time off from February 1st to February 10th.” But then I can also say, “I'd like to initiate the promotion cycle for the software division.” And that agentic AI will come back to me and it will know I'm authorized because I'm a compensation professional to initiate the promotion process. It will say, “There are 6,000 managers in the software division. Would you like to send an email to all of them initiating the process?” I'll say, “No, please exclude these two countries because we're still in works council negotiations.” So, it will exclude those two countries. It will say, “What is the criteria for this year's promotion cycle?” I can upload a document. It will read it. And it will say, “Here's the draft email we're going to send to the specified managers,” and it will send it for you. That is agentic AI, where it's able to do not just one task, but it is able to do, kind of, these multi-programmatic steps to make your work easier.
[00:21:37] Sameer Srivastava: It's great to have a very concrete example like that, but I want to ask you now to extrapolate a bit beyond even IBM to think about the entire labor force. And in this year's Culture Connect Conference, we had a couple of really fascinating talks by some labor economists who are trying to look at the effect of AI on the overall workforce. And you yourself have estimated that, like, 95% of existing jobs are going to change in some form through AI, generative AI and agentic AI altogether. If you were to speculate a little bit about how that transformation will play out, what are some of your early thoughts?
[00:22:11] Nickle LaMoreaux: My early thoughts around this are that, probably, for the next several years, maybe even close to a decade, this, really, is not about new jobs being created or jobs going completely away. It is about all of our jobs that exist today, even yours and Jenny's, mine as well, it is about our jobs changing. And that's what I think we need to be focused on.
I know, early last year in the AI journeys, many people were forecasting, well, prompt engineers will be a job. Here's how I think about AI. AI is a platform. It's a platform like the internet, like email. And so, if you think about that, the internet, email has transformed how we all do our jobs, but it's not a job itself. You know, even prompt engineer, I often joked that, it’s, kind of, like, comparable to saying, “Well, you're going to be an email drafter.” We all have to be prompt engineers, just like we all have to write our own emails, right?
And so, that's what I think, again, over a much longer arc, and maybe some of those labor economists you talk about, will there be jobs that maybe completely we don't need as many of and others that we need far more of? Yes. But in this period we're in now, the biggest advice I can give people is, don't worry about, like, what job's coming, what job's going. Think about what skills you're building. How are you, or how would you recommend to your boss, to your company, of where agentic AI could be helpful in your job? If you can get ahead of that and move with it, you're going to find that you're in a much better place.
[00:24:08] Jennifer Chatman: Well, you raise a good point. I think Sameer and I are acutely aware that we're in the mix as professors, too, and potentially very replaceable, I suppose. Nickle, this has been such an interesting conversation. We always like to end with three key takeaways. And I'm wondering if you could think about how HR leaders can prepare their organizations for this scale of change.
[00:24:32] Nickle LaMoreaux: So, the first piece of advice I would give for HR leaders is lead the change yourself. You become a lot more credible in your organization if you are also doing it within the HR function. So, that would be the first thing I would say.
The second thing I would say is this point about being intentional. There's a lot of really interesting great stuff going on that is fit for purpose for other companies. It doesn't mean it's fit for purpose for you. And, you know, just as we think about this podcast, not only think about, does the technology work, and does it solve the business problem? But you need to be very intentional about, does it fit the culture of your company? So, that would be the second piece I would say.
And the third piece that I would say is, because of this point that AI is going to change every job, I feel that HR professionals are in a unique position and, maybe, the only position to really lead this effort within their company. Because if you think about it, we're all in organizations where business leaders will want to go, you know, totally without abandon, jump head, feet first, head first into AI, but you've got to be thoughtful about, how are you building skills? How are you preparing the workforce?
You may have other functions, maybe legal, that are saying, “Oh, let's be a little cautious.” You may have the IT department saying, “I'm not sure if we can afford it.” HR needs to be the one that puts all of those distinct pieces together to think about, well, where is the return on that technology, and why should we push forward? Where should we take the risk and why shouldn't we take the risk? But most importantly, how do we bring the employees along with us? So, again, lead, lead, lead. I think HR professionals are uniquely positioned for this.
[00:26:31] Jennifer Chatman: What an opportunity. Thank you so much, Nickle. This has been fantastic.
[00:26:35] Sameer Srivastava: Thank you, Nickle. That was great.
[00:26:37] Nickle LaMoreaux: Wonderful to be here, Jenny and Sameer.
[00:26:42] Jennifer Chatman: Thanks for listening to The Culture Kit with Jenny and Sameer. Do you have a question about work that you want us to answer? Go to haas.org/culture-kit to submit your fix-it ticket today.
[00:26:55] Sameer Srivastava: The Culture Kit Podcast is a production of the Berkeley Center for Workplace Culture and Innovation at the Haas School of Business, and it's produced by University FM. If you enjoyed the show, be sure to hit that Subscribe button, leave us a review, and share this episode online, so others who have workplace culture questions can find us, too.
[00:27:15] Jennifer Chatman: I'm Jenny.
[00:27:15] Sameer Srivastava: And I'm Sameer.
[00:27:17] Jennifer Chatman: We'll be back soon with more tools to help fix your work culture challenges.