Media Coverage
OneDigital on Turning AI Capacity into Client Value for TechTarget
Co-Founder, Author and Keynote Speaker
Mike Sullivan
Mike has spent his career building a business that puts people first. Now he's helping companies activate AI as a workforce capability that prioritizes talent, grounded in real experience.
Bold thinking on AI and the workforce, grounded in real experience.
A sample of the topics Mike brings to the stage:
Mike's core position is simple and, to most executives, uncomfortable: AI shouldn't be managed as a technology rollout. It should be managed as talent. If you hire AI the way you'd hire a person, with a job description, a supervisor, and a performance review, it reframes what AI is for. Instead of a cost-reduction play, it becomes a way to maximize what your human employees are capable of. Mike argues this is a talent management problem before it's ever an IT problem, and that the CHRO, not the CIO, should be the one driving it.
Before OneDigital brought any of this to clients, Mike and his team built it inside their own 6,000-person firm, deploying named AI coworkers on an enterprise platform that sits above any single model provider. The result: weekly AI adoption reaching 65% company-wide, and as high as 85% in some functions, well above typical enterprise adoption rates. Mike speaks candidly about what it actually took to get there: manager-level behavior change, visible daily use, and treating adoption as a leadership problem, not a training problem.
Most organizations have it backwards: move fast on deploying AI, hope people keep up. This talk argues the reverse. Leaders must slow down on how carelessly we deploy the technology, and speed up how deliberately we develop the humans working alongside it.
The wrong question is "is this role safe from AI?" The right approach deconstructs jobs task by task: what can be handed off entirely, what should be shared, what must stay human, and what new work does AI now make possible? Done well, this creates what a growing number of researchers are calling a "capacity dividend:" AI absorbs the reducible work, and that freed capacity gets reinvested in judgment, relationships, and client impact instead of simply cut as headcount.
Mike has spent 25+ years building OneDigital from a kitchen table to a 6,000-person, 100,000-client firm, largely through growth strategy and M&A. He brings that operator's lens to AI: what it means to integrate new capability, human or digital, into a business at scale, and why the same discipline that's guided decades of company-building now applies to building a blended workforce.
Now Available
Workforce Intelligence: The People-First Playbook for Leading Your Company Through AI Transformation
Written by Mike Sullivan and Vinay Gidwaney, the book lays out how OneDigital built a blended workforce of human and AI talent, and gives leaders a framework to do the same. Every idea in it was tested inside OneDigital's own walls before it reached a single client.
Speaking Formats for In-Person or Virtual Events
Keynotes
Mike delivers a direct, story-driven take on AI as talent, built from what OneDigital has actually done, not theory. Ideal for main-stage sessions where you want the audience to leave with a new framework, not just inspiration.
Roundtables
Mike works through the hard questions with a smaller group, where the room can push back and get specific about their own AI transformation. Best for executive audiences ready for a working conversation, not a presentation.
Panels
Mike brings a clear point of view and isn't afraid to disagree, grounded in what's actually worked, and what hasn't, inside his own company. A strong fit for panels that want candor over consensus.
