AI Without Leaving People Behind with Valerie Capers Workman

What does it take to scale technology without leaving your people behind? Bill Banham sits down with Valerie Capers Workman - CHRO at Empower Pharmacy and author of Quantum Progression - to unpack the real playbook for building an AI-enabled workforce that is faster, fairer, and future-ready. Valerie makes a clear case: human AI collaboration works when employees know exactly what to use and why it matters. Vague tool choices and unspoken fears, says Valerie, stall adoption and deepen inequity. She lays out how HR can design mandatory learning that raises the floor, surfaces slow adopters, and creates a shared language around safety, compliance, and culture. From regulated pharma to fast-moving tech, the goal is the same—pair people and systems so trust, speed, and quality rise together. We also challenge conventional views of the CHRO role. Valerie argues the seat is now a tech role, not at the expense of empathy, but in service of scalable systems and competitive advantage. She explains how to partner with CIOs, teach search firms to screen for AI-capable executives, and rewrite job descriptions around AI fluency. When headcount requests come in, the first questions become: what can AI do, what can’t it do, and how do we decide that mix responsibly? Her lessons from hypergrowth translate into today’s AI-first workforce planning. On careers, Valerie champions “quantum leaps” over ladders. Identify your core strengths—communication, analytics, strategy, people—and apply them across domains, using AI to compress the time it takes to learn industry context. She spotlights two urgent skills for leaders: data fluency and prompt engineering. Build comfort with the metrics your C-suite needs, and craft rich prompts that turn AI into a true thinking partner. Use multiple models—Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok—to triangulate insights and raise decision quality. Ready to lead with clarity instead of fear? Follow along for practical tactics, candid stories, and a roadmap to make your team—and your career—10x more resilient. If this conversation helped you think differently,

You can listen to AI Without Leaving People Behind with Valerie Capers Workman online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

AI Without Leaving People Behind with Valerie Capers Workman is an episode from HRchat Podcast by The HR Gazette.

This episode is 21:14 long.

This episode was published on Mar 16, 2026.

Yes. Use the heart button on the episode page to add it to your favorite episodes list.

Yes. This page shows related episodes from HRchat Podcast when more episodes are available from the podcast feed.