Media Feature
Mike Sullivan and Vinay Gidwaney on the AI Talent Management Problem for Inc.
Why the Companies Winning at AI Transformation Are Solving a People Problem, Not a Technology One
Author
Article Summary
Mike Sullivan and Vinay Gidwaney, co-authors of Workforce Intelligence: The People-First Playbook for Leading Your Company Through AI Transformation, are featured in Inc. making the case that AI transformation is failing in most organizations for a simple reason: it's being run like an IT project instead of a talent strategy. The piece unpacks three mistakes senior leaders are making and introduces the WI Score as a way to measure whether AI adoption is actually changing how work gets done.
If you ask employees what actually changed their careers, they rarely point to software or strategy decks. They point to a leader who believed in them, coached them, or gave them a chance before they felt ready. That's the instinct a lot of companies are losing sight of as they rush to adopt generative AI.
AI Transformation Is a Talent Problem, Not a Tech Problem
That's the argument Mike Sullivan and Vinay Gidwaney make in a recent Inc. feature on their new book, Workforce Intelligence: The People-First Playbook for Leading Your Company Through AI Transformation. Sullivan, OneDigital Co-Founder & Chief Growth Officer, and Gidwaney, OneDigital Chief Product Officer, argue that most executives are solving the wrong problem — treating a talent challenge as a technology rollout.
Their conclusion, after two years studying the problem: the technology isn't the bottleneck. The assumption that AI should be rolled out like any other enterprise software is.
Why Most AI Adoption Stalls at 15–20 Percent
Run the standard IT playbook, and adoption tends to land between 15 and 20 percent — regardless of how capable the model is. The piece walks through two of the specific mistakes behind that ceiling. The first is organizational: when AI lives inside IT, it dies there, buried under architecture reviews and steering committees while the actual workforce keeps working the same way it always has.
The second is measurement. Most companies track usage instead of impact, which is part of why Sullivan and Gidwaney built the Workforce Intelligence Score (WI Score), a formula (Reach × Amplification × Transformation ÷ Cost) benchmarked against 100,000 employers to answer a harder question than "are people using it": is anything actually different?
"Run the standard IT playbook on AI, and the adoption rate lands somewhere between 15 and 20 percent. AI transformation is fundamentally a talent management problem."
The Humanity Test: What Leaders Do With the Time AI Gives Back
The third mistake is the one with the highest stakes. As AI takes over the routine analytical work that once filled the day, it hands leaders back time and money — and forces a real choice about what happens next. Sullivan calls it the humanity test: see headcount, and the question becomes how many roles can be cut. See faces, and the question becomes what people do with the hours AI gives back.
"We call it the humanity test, because it's the only real test of whether a company's stated values describe its operating practice — or just its wall decor."
Read the full Inc. article here: AI Transformation Experts Say Companies Are Really Facing a Talent Management Problem
Learn more about the ideas behind the book and OneDigital's approach to AI-driven workforce strategy at our AI Hub for Employers.