Every organization says it wants to innovate with AI, but the ones that succeed are the ones that bring their people along for the ride. That tension between moving fast on technology and preserving the human relationships at the core of a business is one of the defining leadership challenges of this moment. Lindsay-Rae McIntyre has spent the majority of her career at IBM and Microsoft, putting her at the cutting edge of technology. Now, McIntyre is boarding a new industry as Executive Vice President and Chief People Officer for Alaska Airlines. Throughout all her work, McIntyre has prioritized growing business through inclusive and innovative people strategies, and has developed a compelling framework for building an AI-ready workforce that merges her tech background and award-winning people management skills. On this episode, host Jenny Chatman, professor and dean of the Haas School of Business, sits down with McIntyre to discuss how Alaska Airlines is deploying AI to amplify its deep culture of safety and employee empowerment, what it actually takes to lead an AI transformation that builds trust, and why the "AI hangover" is real but avoidable. *The Culture Kit with Jenny & Sameer is a production of Haas School of Business and is produced by University FM.*
Every organization says it wants to innovate with AI, but the ones that succeed are the ones that bring their people along for the ride. That tension between moving fast on technology and preserving the human relationships at the core of a business is one of the defining leadership challenges of this moment.
Lindsay-Rae McIntyre has spent the majority of her career at IBM and Microsoft, putting her at the cutting edge of technology. Now, McIntyre is boarding a new industry as Executive Vice President and Chief People Officer for Alaska Airlines. Throughout all her work, McIntyre has prioritized growing business through inclusive and innovative people strategies, and has developed a compelling framework for building an AI-ready workforce that merges her tech background and award-winning people management skills.
On this episode, host Jenny Chatman, professor and dean of the Haas School of Business, sits down with McIntyre to discuss how Alaska Airlines is deploying AI to amplify its deep culture of safety and employee empowerment, what it actually takes to lead an AI transformation that builds trust, and why the "AI hangover" is real but avoidable.
*The Culture Kit with Jenny & Sameer is a production of Haas School of Business and is produced by University FM.*
[00:00:00] Jennifer Chatman: Your grandfather was one of Air Canada's first 747 pilots.
[00:00:05] Lindsay-Rae McIntyre: It's true. He very much believed that his responsibility, along with the rest of the flight crew, was to get people there efficiently and safely, but also to make it a great experience. And so, he taught me really early on about what it's like to be a brand ambassador and to be really accountable to the culture of the organization that you work for, and how that comes forward in every interaction you have.
[00:00:35] Jennifer Chatman: Welcome back to The Culture Kit. I'm so excited to talk with Lindsay-Rae McIntyre, Executive Vice President and Chief People Officer at Alaska Air. If you were at our Culture Connect Conference at the Haas School of Business last January, you surely remember her talk there.
Lindsay-Rae has a wonderful perspective on culture. She spent the majority of her career at IBM and Microsoft, putting her at the cutting edge of technology. She joined Alaska Air about six months ago and is passionate about growing business through inclusive and innovative people strategies, which we'll learn more about in today's discussion.
But before we get going, let me do something I don't usually do on my own and welcome you to the show. I'm Jenny Chatman, a professor and dean at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley, and this is The Culture Kit, where we give you the tools to build a healthy and effective workplace culture. My co-host, Sameer Srivastava, is away today, so I'm flying solo.
Lindsay-Rae, it's great to see you again.
[00:01:42] Lindsay-Rae McIntyre: Thanks for having me on The Culture Kit.
[00:01:44] Jennifer Chatman: So, Lindsay-Rae, I've been looking forward to this conversation after that great talk at our conference where you laid out such a compelling framework for building an AI-ready workforce. Your approach at Microsoft was to help employees at every level, from training and skill development to manager excellence, talent management, and culture and inclusion.
Now you're at Alaska Airlines, which has a different workforce profile and yet still has strong technology needs, particularly around operations and flight planning. What's the same or different about AI transformation at Alaska Airlines? Has it shifted your thinking about AI readiness?
[00:02:22] Lindsay-Rae McIntyre: You know, for me, I spent 30 years in technology. I've had the real privilege of doing AI twice, really. I did it with IBM. I don't know if you remember when Watson beat Jeopardy! in 2012, and then obviously IBM went on a journey with AI.
And then again at Microsoft. Of course, the large language models are incredibly more powerful today than they were when we first started this work at scale. But what I would say about joining airlines, and Alaska Airlines in particular, is that Alaska, as a result of its global growth and scale, is using AI to really innovate and leapfrog. When I was with you last January, we talked about the ways in which Microsoft was using AI to completely overhaul learning and development to be able to get to skilling in the flow of work for employees, because that's where they expect it.
I would say the same is true for airlines. I had a hypothesis that finally the manager job is about to be an amazing job because all the administrative, sort of, overhead and crud that we don't really love as managers is going to get done by AI. And I would say that for sure that's also true in airlines, that on the talent management front, people join companies because they want to have, you know, not only a job, but they want to have a vision for how they can grow and learn and adapt and stay employable and really put their talents to use, but also pursue new and different things along the way.
And then we had a pretty cool conversation at your conference about the employee experience and how the human resources function is really expected to show up with a product mindset and delight end users, not just, sort of, dump a whole bunch of cool things at the foot of an employee and hope that they figure it out. That, you know, we've got to glue a bunch of those things together on the back end and really delight the employee in a way that consumer-grade companies have been delighting consumers for a long time.
And so, it turns out that, even though Microsoft is 220,000 people in 190 countries, and Alaska is 32,000 people, all of those themes prove to be real and true here.
[00:04:41] Jennifer Chatman: Can you give an example of how you've delighted your employees with an AI use case?
[00:04:49] Lindsay-Rae McIntyre: Yeah, I would give you two. So, on the operational side of our business, you know, airlines are first and foremost focused on safety and operational excellence at a rate and a pace that is unbelievably impressive, at least to me, as somebody who's new to the industry. And so, Alaska has been an early investor in AI technology and co-innovation with startups in the aviation AI space.
But internally, Alaska has been investing in an AI solution that will start to collect all of the safety reports from employees and guests across the operation. And it doesn't really matter whether it's a big thing or a small thing. But historically, we've had to be able to collect those, and then in a pretty high-intensive way, pour through all of the reports to action them, disposition them, remove duplicates. Well, AI can do all of that for us. And so, it's a really incredible use case to be able to honor the deep commitment to safety across the airline, while also freeing up capacity and time to focus on running the airline, of course, keeping human judgment and context at the center.
In my own HR team, we spent the month of August doing sprints. So, we brought in two forward-deployed engineers. We paired them with three teams and four projects, and we were able to get to three prototypes and two, sort of, shell cases, and then we're on the next four-week sprint, and we're going to be able to do in eight weeks what had been on the HR roadmap for two years and probably wouldn't have been done for the next 18 months.
And so, we were able to get that done in eight weeks around reimagining the learning and development experience. Of course, I had a head start because I had already renovated the learning and development experience at Microsoft. But as an example, we haven't had to create a skills ontology because now all of that is really available in public ecosystem data. And so, we have to legally validate it and put it in the context of airlines, but I don't have to create a skills ontology. We already have an incredible library. We've been able to create career journeys in the context of teams with learning recommendations for employees that are customized to their career stage in a fraction of the time that it took me to even get half as far at Microsoft.
[00:07:28] Jennifer Chatman: Oh, those are fantastic examples, and I can say as someone who flies a lot, I'm particularly enamored of your safety use case. So, Alaska Air is clearly in a significant growth chapter with the recent acquisition of Hawaiian Airlines, plus an expanding global footprint. And in our experience, acquisitions have this funny way of putting a company's culture under a microscope. You've talked about the importance of mutual respect across legacy organizations, and I'd imagine that becomes even more nuanced when you're bringing together not just different corporate cultures, but genuinely different geographical and cultural traditions, including the case of Hawaiian Airlines, a culture with deep roots in the spirit of Aloha.
So, I'm just wondering how you're approaching that. Is there anything core in the Alaska Air culture that will help people from very different organizations own a shared set of expectations?
[00:08:28] Lindsay-Rae McIntyre: You know, I'm so inspired by the fact that these two organizations actually have very, very similar origin stories. Planes operate in Alaska a lot the same way that cars do in most parts of the world. You know, we fly into 19 places, but fewer than five of them actually have road systems. And so, in Alaska, Alaska Airlines has really been connected to communities to get people to work, to get their pets to vets, to get soccer teams and basketball teams to their games. I mean, all of that happens by aircraft in so many of these small communities. That's a very similar thing that happens in the neighbor islands in Hawaii.
A deep connection to community, a deep connection to caring for people, that lives in both origin stories for Alaska Airlines and Hawaiian Airlines. But as you point out, of course, they're also very different. And so, we have shared values. There are four of them—they are: Own safety, Be caring and kind, Do the right thing, and Deliver performance.
And so, by sharing those values as a shared organization, our employees have real clarity on what matters to us as a company, the promise that we've made to our guests, and why we think we provide a differentiated experience. But as you know so well, you know, the culture of a company evolves when it gets bigger. And so, not only are we having to learn about the differences in the way that decisions get made and the way that teams work together, there's time zone differences, there's geolocation differences.
And so, you know, I think that what lives in the culture work around respecting difference, learning how to be curious about people who are different from you are really important to our embracing growth. And so, all of the muscles that we are using to learn the Alaska–Hawaiian nuances, and that skill set is the same skill set that will allow us to be successful in Italy and the UK and next year, you know, going to Greece and France. And so, the cultural agility muscle is one that will just continue to bear fruit.
[00:10:49] Jennifer Chatman: Yeah, it's an interesting case where, you know, usually we think about national culture differences, but you're talking about differences in state culture and state geography that actually impact, you know, how you decide to go to market, how you serve your guests, and so forth. It's a super interesting case. So, I understand that you grew up in an airline family, and that your grandfather was one of Air Canada's first 747 pilots.
[00:11:17] Lindsay-Rae McIntyre: It's true.
[00:11:17] Jennifer Chatman: You mentioned that he shared a great perspective with you. Can you share that with our audience?
[00:11:23] Lindsay-Rae McIntyre: So, as a little one, I remember him saying to me that everyone gets on an aircraft for a reason, and they're either there to get to an important meeting, or they're going somewhere fun with their family, or sometimes they're going somewhere that might be sad, maybe to a funeral. And so, he very much believed that his responsibility, along with the rest of the flight crew, was to get people there efficiently and safely, as on time as possible, because, of course, people have plans and they want to be able to get to where they're going on time, but also to make it a great experience.
And so, he taught me really early on about what it's like to, sort of, be a brand ambassador and to be really accountable to the culture of the organization that you work for, and how that comes forward in every interaction you have. And so, I now, of course, understand it very deeply in a different way, but I just remember him saying, like, "Everybody's there for a reason. You don't get onto an aircraft by accident." And so, really being connected to the value proposition and meeting guests in a way that not only meets their expectations, but really delights them in a way that'll have them come back.
[00:12:39] Jennifer Chatman: Oh, that's an inspiring perspective, really. So, I'm going to ask you a little bit more about safety. You've talked about it a bit already, because as you've also said, Alaska Airlines is fundamentally in the business of safety, and everything else, kind of, flows from that. So, what I find fascinating about how you've described AI's role at Alaska Airlines is that it isn't about replacing the human safety culture, it's actually about amplifying it.
And so, you've mentioned closing the feedback loop on your "See It, Own It, Change It" reporting so that the person who raised a concern can actually see what happened with it, and that using AI to help surface patterns early has been really beneficial before they become problems. So, can you walk us through how that's working in practice? And maybe more broadly, how do you hold the balance between the guest experience, the employee experience, and that North Star of safety while AI is in the mix?
[00:13:42] Lindsay-Rae McIntyre: Yeah, this is a great question. I think, first and foremost, we deeply believe that AI is a tool that will unlock human capacity and capability, and that we for sure are, you know, taking a page from the organizations that are having the most success with AI by keeping the human in the center and really making sure that we're capitalizing on irreplaceable expertise, that matters a ton. The "See It, Own It, Change It" framework, one, like, the neuroscience of how simple it is and how clear it is that, you know, it's an empowerment framework to help every employee know that we want them to be on the lookout for how we can get better every single day.
And so, each one of us is tasked to do that. But seeing it isn't enough, right? We want you to take charge of figuring out how to fix it, and then go fix it. And I would say one of the hardest things as we're scaling and growing, and I saw this at Microsoft, too, was the "change it" part is harder than it once was, because it's almost always the case in organizations that are highly matrixed and moving fast that any one individual only owns a piece of it.
And so, being a well-intended, hard-charging, I'm-going to-get-it-done kind of person actually isn't enough to solve the problem. Making sure that you're building a culture and a leadership expectation to check in with people who are, sort of, to the left and the right of you in how the business is operating or how an employee or a guest experience is unfolding are the questions that we need to be asking ourselves so that we know, sort of, what we're getting information from and where we're giving information to.
You know, something like safety crosses a ton of teams, so the amount of accountability, responsibility, but also business acumen to know how every single piece of the operation stitches together to get an airplane in the sky safely, stay in the sky safely, and get on the ground safely, combined with this very parallel thing around delighting a guest, right? And I say it's not a new concept. I've heard people from your ecosystem say it too, thriving employees equal happy guests.
[00:16:07] Jennifer Chatman: Yeah.
[00:16:07] Lindsay-Rae McIntyre: Right? That as the CPO of Alaska Airlines, I want every single employee to feel valued, to feel like they can learn and grow, to feel like they have a sense of how well they're doing in their career, to know that they've got a management team and an ecosystem that is invested in their success and committed to them being able to stay on the leading edge of their craft. But we also have a hugely distributed workforce. We have, you know, aspects of our workforce that come and go. Not all of them spend time on devices, so actually figuring out how to communicate with them in the most effective way that we can so that they can get the snippets of information that they need, it turns out it's a pretty complicated problem to solve.
And so, as a result of best practices in tech, I continue to really believe in co-creation. You know, that I've asked all of my HR teams to make sure that we build nothing without the employees, the managers, the leaders right alongside us as a part of those agile teams, so that whatever we do is in direct response to a need that they have to solve, you know, something that will drive the business better, faster, stronger, but also be unbelievably relevant.
I think that people are craving, sort of, pragmatism in this time of overwhelm and speed. And so, as an HR function that maybe has historically, you know, been pretty excited about our nerdiness, it is increasingly the case that we've got to simplify and create snackable ways for people to learn and grow and get better.
[00:17:45] Jennifer Chatman: So, interesting. There was a recent article in Fortune on the idea that America has moved from AI FOMO, fear of missing out, to the AI hangover. Did you see that? Have you heard that?
[00:17:57] Lindsay-Rae McIntyre: Yeah, it was David Rock's article, actually. He's an incredible luminary who runs the NeuroLeadership Institute.
[00:18:03] Jennifer Chatman: Yeah. So, AI FOMO to AI hangover, again, both in terms of employee pushback and also not seeing the productivity gains that people had aspired to achieve. And we're seeing data that trust in leadership is under real pressure right now, and I can't help but thinking that those two things are somehow connected, organizations have, you know, rushed into AI transformation, understandably, without always bringing their people along, and that is an easy way to erode trust, the very trust that's needed to make it work.
So, you talked about wanting to deploy AI to build a culture of trust rather than imposing AI on a function, and you just mentioned how important it was to pair your team with leaders on the ground to make sure that you're addressing the use cases that they are prioritizing. So, what does this distinction look like in practice? What does it actually mean to lead an AI transformation in a way that strengthens trust rather than undermines it?
[00:19:06] Lindsay-Rae McIntyre: I'll tell you, in those sprints that I told you about, I had a very interesting experience where, you know, we'd brought the forward-deployed engineers on site. They were super experienced AI engineers. They knew how to look across, you know, the data and the fabric and be able to, sort of, stack the data through to the user experience. And so, they knew exactly what they were doing. But they didn't know airlines, Alaska Airlines. They didn't know HR all that well, and so they were missing context and content. But that's fine.
I have a group of HR professionals that are experts in their craft, who know everything about our learning and development solutions, our compensation and total rewards systems, our employee help lines. And so, I thought that it would be as simple as, you know, let's, like, go off on a sprint. And in the first standup, I will tell you that I went from listening to all these stories when I was in tech of people wasting money on AI and not really getting the value out of it that they anticipated, and the penny dropped for me, because I had to spend a pretty decent amount of time doing the translation for the engineers to the HR work, and from the HR work to the engineers, because I happen to be so fortunate to know both pieces of this equation. But that is not the case for everybody.
And so, my HR team didn't know what they didn't know, because they hadn't seen the power of the AI transformation up close. They hadn't done it before. They, you know, have Claude licenses, and they're using Copilot in their daily search work, and that's completely different than reimagining how you do your work with the benefit of AI transformation. And so, it was in that moment that I thought, like, "Oh, I get it now. I totally understand how people can lose time, energy, productivity and look up and think, like, 'Wait a minute, what have I just gotten all this, you know, for?'" Because it turns out that there's a pretty predictable way forward. First and foremost, you've got to clean up your data, right? You can't vacuum your room without picking the toys up off the floor, right?
So, like, you have to be able to sort and understand your data. Then you've got to be able to get clarity on, like, what are you automating? Because the automation isn't actually AI.
And so, for me, I think it was just that moment where I went from not understanding why people were losing productivity and money to being really clear why that's happening, and having to, sort of, smash these two deep subject-matter-expert contexts together to get the outcome that I wanted, because I was talking to the engineers about how, you know, to sort the data and solve for user, you know, the end-user experience in parallel in Teams, in the flow of work, while my content team could say, "Well, what about this?" or "What about that?" But they didn't actually have deep familiarity on what was possible with AI until about two weeks into the sprint, and then they'd had enough wallowing in the technology to now see what was capable. It was way easier for them to reimagine the process flows, take out a bunch of waste, make it faster.
And so, just helping them understand which technology you must be using to solve which problem, I think, is some of what David Rock's pointing to, right? That sometimes you just get so excited, you want to jump in, and that's, of course, I think where you have to start, because without, sort of, jumping in, you're not going to get a sense of where do I use my traditional search window versus where do I use Copilot versus where do I use Cowork? What's the difference between GPT and Claude? What language model do I want to use?
So, the FOMO phase, like, and jumping in with two feet, I think is necessary to get proximity and familiarity. But you can't stay there for very long. You've got to get much smarter on, like, how you move from energy and enthusiasm to productivity and outcomes.
And so, you know, for us, I think we're not in the AI hangover, but I will say that we've, sort of, run through the curve of being really thoughtful about which technology we're using, how and when we need to put an AI use case in place, where we need to preserve good old-fashioned human experiences, because the guest wants both, right? They want an AI-enabled travel experience when it's fast and easy. They know where they're going, they know what seat they want, they know what they want to book. Sometimes they don't need a human.
But when you get to the airport, you probably want somebody to be like, "Hi, nice to see you. We're thrilled to have you. And is there anything I can do that would make your experience better?" I think humans are going to continue to crave humanity.
[00:24:22] Jennifer Chatman: Yeah. So, you raised two really important points in the context of us all being very excited to realize the benefits of innovating and this new technology that should be helping us so much. One is the fundamentals of change management, which is that you still have to connect, you know, distinct and new expertise together and figure out what it means in your particular context.
And the second is you probably have to check in along the way. You can't just lay in the change and be sure that it's going to work exactly as you intend. You have to experiment a little bit, collect data, you know, make sure that you're not missing some possibility. So, that's a beautiful example of all of those things that I think we've been thinking about for many years.
[00:25:08] Lindsay-Rae McIntyre: Well, and I think if I could just add to that, to your point, like, what's old is new again, right? And so, your point around leaders having to be players and coaches to be able to narrate for employees and for teams, like, what are we doing and why, right? But I think your point around leaders being really intentional about, like, how are you inspiring and encouraging the teams? How are you really fostering a learning environment to let people, sort of, try and fail and learn and grow? But then how are you creating a safe space for people to learn and unlearn, to share their best practices? I mean, these are not new concepts in leadership or in culture transformation change, but we need to be way more intentional about invoking these tried-and-true best practices. I think a lot of leaders are so overwhelmed by the pace of change that the speed of a day or a week, like, the week is gone, and you're like, "Wait, I need to talk to my team."
And so, the leaders who are finding ways to really be disciplined about how they spend their time, to make sure that, you know, not only are you player-coach, but you're really creating the support structure and the leadership to fuel the change you aspire to, because I think that there are a lot of people who are confronted by the ambiguity of it all. David Rock would say, like, the brain likes good news or bad news better than ambiguity. And so, to the extent that leaders can, sort of, lower the volume on ambiguity and create clarity and discipline, I think people are more willing to come along the journey.
[00:26:56] Jennifer Chatman: Yeah. You've given us so many things to think about, Lindsay-Rae, and we always like to end our podcast with three brief takeaways for our listeners that they can implement in the real world. Given that there are so many people wrestling with AI integration right now and struggling to ensure that they're keeping their people engaged and involved, and given your deep expertise and wide-ranging experience, what are three thoughts that you might share with our audience to help them?
[00:27:25] Lindsay-Rae McIntyre: So, you'll probably not be surprised by my first one, which is, like, it has always been a core belief of mine that difference in perspective makes the work better and stronger, and that for sure is the case in the era of AI. You know, we want AI to continue to not only build beautiful experiences for the diversity of the workforce, but also the diversity of the planet. And so, you know, making sure that each and every one of us is inviting in that different perspective, I think will allow us to build commercial-grade, relevant, loved experiences, no matter what industry we're in.
The second is a personal one, which is, you know, as leaders or as individuals, we have to be really honest about what's getting in our way, right? I find that in many ways it's mindsets, right? We historically have rewarded and promoted people in the workplace based on, you know, the size of their teams or the titles of the people who report to them, and none of that matters anymore. Microsoft's doing some super interesting work right now around sort of the work chart, not the org chart, and I know they're not the only ones, but, you know, being really honest about what it takes to get the work done and then, like, just get the other stuff that we've made up out of the way so that you can truly get to value and outcomes as fast as possible.
And then the third is, you know, I've often said, you know, in complex times, that we have to hold multiple things true at the same time. And so, you know, I think about functional excellence, which will continue to matter, right? Functional excellence is what gives you judgment and context and the ability to make tough calls and know, sort of, what's expected of you in whatever you're doing. But that has to be paired with an unrelenting curiosity about enterprise-wide acumen. And I think that particularly in the last 15 years, functional expertise has perhaps been rewarded more than enterprise-wide acumen.
And so, you know, if you find yourself as a deep subject-matter expert, I would say, like, hold onto that, keep your craft, but really stretch your muscles on, you know, understanding the end-to-end value proposition of your company, your role, your function, your business. One, I think you'll have a lot of fun learning, but two, I think you'll create something that's even more valuable than what we've been up to. I think that AI is going to continue, of course, to evolve. I think that we will find out when the dust settles that it's not as scary as people think it is, that it is a tool for us to integrate into our daily work, and that humans are going to continue to be a differentiated experience, that people are going to want to be with other people.
So, I thank you and the Center for continuing to drive the importance of culture. I will say, like, it continues to be the case that culture and employee mindsets and employee thriving are the unlock to any strategy and any business outcome. So, thanks for keeping it front and center for all of us.
[00:30:45] Jennifer Chatman: Well, thank you, Lindsay-Rae, for sharing your incredible wisdom and for inspiring us yet again. We really appreciate you taking the time to join us.
[00:30:57] Lindsay-Rae McIntyre: Have a great day.
[00:30:59] Jennifer Chatman: Thanks for listening to The Culture Kit with Jenny & Sameer! A podcast dedicated to helping you build a strong and effective workplace culture.
[00:31:08] Sameer Srivastava: The Culture Kit is a production of the Berkeley Center for Workplace Culture and Innovation at the Haas School of Business and is produced by University FM. If you enjoyed the show, be sure to subscribe, leave us a review, and share this episode online so others who have workplace culture questions can find us, too!
[00:31:27] Jennifer Chatman: I'm Jenny.
[00:31:28] Sameer Srivastava: And I'm Sameer.
[00:31:30] Jennifer Chatman: We'll be back soon with more tools for your culture kit.