I’ve spent years watching the corporate machine grind talented people into the “Technician Trap.” We were taught that climbing the ladder meant waiting for a manager to “anoint” us. But the data shows this model is failing. We are losing $8.9 Trillion globally to disengagement.
In my recent conversation with Jenny Bates, we didn’t just talk about software; we talked about Preposterous Fulfillment. AI is the catalyst that allows us to reclaim our lives because, let’s be honest: Life is not a dress rehearsal.
About Jenny Bates-Heaton: Jenny isn’t guessing—she has lived this at scale. She owns Bates Leadership and was previously the Head of Organization Development for Ahold Delhaize, a Fortune 500 giant with 400,000 employees and $93B in revenue. She also led OD for Syngenta Seeds and currently serves as Board Chair for the AMI innovation learning community.
Where to find Jenny next? March 7: Speaking at TEDx Cary, NC on value resonance and decision-making. ? February: Facilitating a deep dive on the competencies required in the Agricultural industry by 2030 (details at https://batesleadership.com).
Listen Here. Or Watch the YouTube below.
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3 Ways AI Will Save You From the “Technician Trap”
1. From “Anointing” to Autonomy
Traditional talent management relies on a power dynamic where a manager decides your fate. Jenny highlights that AI democratizes this. By mapping your specific competencies directly to business strategy, the “mushy middle” of office politics is eliminated. You are no longer waiting for permission to grow.
2. The Rise of the “Personal Coaching” AI
We discussed a future where AI isn’t a “Big Brother” monitor, but a “Digital Guardian Angel.” Imagine a device on your bathroom counter that checks in on your mental state. If your engagement is dropping, the AI flags it to you first, offering coaching or a “rewiring” of your working style before you hit total burnout.
3. Killing the Annual Performance Review
The annual review is a post-mortem on a life you’ve already lived. It’s antiquated. AI allows for Continuous Feedback Loops. Instead of waiting twelve months, you get a “Golden Ticket” of insights immediately after a meeting.
Key Insights & Timestamps
- 00:00 — Introduction & The Strategic Foundation Jenny Bates Heaton is introduced. She explains that effective talent management must start with the business strategy, not just HR policy, to define the competencies required.
- 02:10 — Curiosity as a Leadership Metric Why executives now look for “curiosity” and the ability to ask the right questions as the primary trait for successors.
- 04:25 — Gen Z & The Death of Traditional L&D Jenny discusses how new generations “bypassed” corporate learning because they could find information faster on their own, forcing companies to adapt to bite-sized formats.
- 06:30 — The Convergence: Gen Z + AI The moment talent management shifts from manager-led to employee-led. Jenny explains how Gen Z’s demand for autonomy is merging with AI’s ability to process data fast.
- 08:45 — The “Internal AI” Ecosystem How companies can prevent information overwhelm by creating internal AI systems that only allow inputs relevant to the specific business strategy.
- 11:00 — The Power Dynamic Shift Jenny warns of the huge “change management” challenge: Managers are used to “anointing” people for promotion, but AI will democratize this, stripping managers of that traditional power.
- 14:15 — The Career Survival Debate (Ad Break Context) Nathaniel argues that people will still leave companies as roles disappear. Jenny counters that AI will actually increase retention by matching people to better internal roles.
- 16:30 — The “Bathroom Counter” Analogy Jenny describes the future where AI acts as a personal coach (like a device on your bathroom counter), noticing you are disengaged before your boss does and offering help.
- 18:30 — Productivity & Neuroplasticity Discussion on how AI can analyze working styles to help employees “rewire” their brains for better focus and rest.
- 23:00 — Why Annual Reviews are Antiquated The conversation shifts to feedback. Jenny argues that annual reviews are obsolete and will be replaced by AI soliciting immediate feedback after meetings (e.g., “How did that meeting go?”).
- 27:30 — The “Heart Sink” Moment: Privacy & Monitoring Nathaniel raises the issue of 100% monitoring. Jenny admits her “heart sinks” when companies hide data from employees, arguing that employees must be allowed to interrogate their own data.
- 31:50 — The “Opt-Out” Debate A heated disagreement. Nathaniel argues that if you don’t consent to AI monitoring, you don’t get the job. Jenny argues there must be an “opt-out” button to prevent a “Black Mirror” scenario.
- 37:20 — HR’s Urgent To-Do List & The 16% Stat Jenny outlines that HR must get involved in budget talks now. She notes that 16% of manager roles will disappear or change drastically as AI takes over administrative duties.
- 39:30 — Why 85% of AI Projects Fail The conclusion: Technology isn’t the problem; culture is. Most AI initiatives fail because employees are scared of job loss and the culture doesn’t support the integration.
- 40:52 — End of Episode
FAQ
How is AI changing HR in 2026?
A: AI is shifting HR from a manager-led “anointing” process to an employee-led development model, focusing on real-time feedback and competency mapping.
What is the $8.9 Trillion Great Detachment?
It refers to the global economic loss caused by employee disengagement and burnout, a crisis that AI-driven talent management aims to solve.
Will AI replace human managers?
According to Jenny Bates, roughly 16% of traditional managerial duties will be automated, allowing managers to focus more on high-level strategy and mentorship.
Full Transcript
Here is the transcript based on the source provided for the video “Ai Will Destroy Traditional HR in 2026”.
Introduction
Nathaniel Schooler: Jenny Bates Heaton ran organizational development for a 93 billion Forbes 500 company with 400,000 employees. Jenny owns Bates Leadership, a consultancy focused on organizational, team, and individual development, and she says the way that we manage talent today is about to be wiped out by AI.
Jenny Bates: Thank you so much for having me.
Nathaniel Schooler: I’m not sure the audience is actually familiar with how you might work to offer individual or team development, but you’ve obviously got your own methodologies working with all these huge organizations. Can you tell us a bit about how you work at the organizational level, please?
Jenny Bates: Yeah, absolutely. The most important thing is starting with the business strategy, so all I really need to understand is what the company is trying to achieve. I typically will work with an executive team to then tease out what are the competencies required in order to meet that strategy and what are the leadership behaviors required to meet that strategy. We’ll take those components and apply it to the entire system—so the entire talent management cycle. What does that mean for the way you need to hire, what does it mean for performance management, for development talent reviews, succession planning, and even up to exiting the organization? There are symbols that you need to put into that system to make sure that the culture comes alive and that you meet what you need to achieve the strategy.
AI and Learning Competencies
Nathaniel Schooler: Right, right. So with AI within these big organizations, do you think that it’s as important to actually learn lots and lots of knowledge now, or do you think that knowledge base is just so broad that people can just sort of access knowledge and they don’t need to learn so much?
Jenny Bates: That’s an interesting one. I mean, all of that is going to come to your desire to learn it in the first place, right? I mean, one of the biggest things that I hear from executive teams when they’re looking for a new leader, they’re looking for a successor, is how curious is that person? How much do they want to dig in, what questions do they ask? You know, when they’re going to start a project, what are their kind of leading questions that are going to create the foundation and to get the team started? You know, a lot of people don’t have that sort of initial question-seeking sort of personality. It’s really important to be a good leader and to have the gumption to get the project going in the way that it needs to; you have to be able to launch with the right questions.
Nathaniel Schooler: Right, right. I mean, do you think that people are sort of a bit complacent in a lot of these enterprises—without being rude about people—complacent about their learning and development? Do you think that they think the company is responsible for their learning and development, or have they well and truly taken it upon themselves to kind of educate themselves?
Jenny Bates: I think that the latest generations have taken a huge step towards taking on development on their own actually. There was a space in time where companies were so behind on this, I think that new generations completely stopped looking to companies for development because they knew where to access it otherwise and they wanted it in a different format. I mean, this was probably, I don’t know, 12 years ago when learning development groups were still offering it in a very specific format and it took longer to get to the point and we were being bypassed. So new generations would come in, they get these bite-sized clips, they’d get exactly what they needed. I mean they were learning completely on their own and it transformed all of L&D. So I mean companies have come along now, they’re in a very much different space, teaching in a very different way that works for the new generations. So I actually attribute the newer generations to helping us out to see what was needed.
The Future of Talent Management
Nathaniel Schooler: Yeah, yeah. I’m so into continued professional development; I think it’s the future really. And I mean when you’ve got people like the CEO of Microsoft saying if you don’t want to use AI you can leave the company now, right? These are what’s kind of happening. So there’s so much that sort of needs to be learned right now in every topic and I’m fascinated by the whole sort of thing. So you describe yourself as a talent futurist. How do you think our talent management process will change now that AI is infiltrating day-to-day?
Jenny Bates: Well it’s interesting. You know, for the past 10 years honestly I’ve been trying to work with companies to have talent management processes be more employee-led. But my basis was more about self-determination theory; you know there is a ton of proof out there that if someone is more involved with their own process, their own career development, they’re going to be more engaged, they’re less likely to leave the company. But in the past, there’s a lot of technology changes that would have to be made, there’s a lot of change management required. I mean there are a lot of reasons where it would be hard to give employees as much access as they needed to be fully engaged the way that you would want them to. But now two things are converging at the same time: one is Gen Z is demanding a lot more autonomy and involvement in their career, and AI is giving us the opportunity to really think about how this process can be different and how decisions need to be made much, much faster in the process itself. And so I think executives are probably a little bit more open to the idea of how do we transfer this process to the employee because they have all the information that we need. They have the inputs that are required in order to make our business strategy kind of meld with employee input to be able to figure this all out.
Nathaniel Schooler: Right, right. So it’s an interesting one isn’t it because we’ve kind of got all this information but actually we’ve also got a lot of risk because that information may not really go into the details that are actually necessary. I mean there’s just so much information, there’s a sort of big overwhelm. Do you think that’s happening in many cases or has it always been like that?
Jenny Bates: Well I think companies are well positioned to deal with the overwhelm and to decide what is important to have as inputs. So I mean there’s the big AI but then there’s also how are companies creating their own internal AI system for utilization, and so it creates a much smaller kind of field to be able to work within. So getting back to the business strategy and having executives needing to be crystal clear about what is the business strategy, what are they trying to achieve—they put that into their own company system and it’s got the exact words that they want in their strategy popping out on a regular basis for people to see. Those statements, those priorities, those measures, everything is in there and it’s constantly in front of employees. So on one hand you’re narrowing that information base, you’re making it a much smaller world within your own realm of your company AI, and then employees have a bigger onus to put the right inputs into the system as well. Something like what you might see on a LinkedIn page today; they have to be able to put in those details about past experiences and skills and strengths. All the things that you would typically see in your own profile has to be matched up with that business strategy. But those are the inputs and you can control those.
Nathaniel Schooler: Right, yeah that makes a lot of sense. And it’s much safer as well isn’t it because we’ve obviously got the risk of data being released that is private to the business, and that’s a big risk. I’ve been talking to a lot of cyber security people in the past few years and it’s massive. But a lot of businesses are not moving quickly enough to kind of make these changes happen. Have you sort of seen much evidence of that?
Jenny Bates: Absolutely. I mean I don’t blame them, I’ll start with that, because if you think about what would be required to make these changes it feels huge. I mean the privacy law alone is going to be a big one… there’s federal law involved that will be in play here. But outside of that there’s also a huge power dynamic change that would need to come into play. You know typically managers are used to anointing people in the talent management process; they’re used to saying “Yes you may have this development” and “Yes you may consider these roles as your next steps” and managing the process fully for the employee. And that will look very different. So the change management is another big piece that HR needs to be aware of, and then the technology changes.
Retention and Career Mobility
Jenny Bates: …And actually it’s quite exciting because it’s going to save businesses billions and billions of dollars once they get this right because they’re not going to need to recruit people from outside the organizations. People are going to be moving into roles that they really want to do versus leaving the company because they can’t get the job they really could actually do.
Nathaniel Schooler: That’s a really interesting way to look at it. I don’t think I agree; I think people will still jump around into other organizations…
Jenny Bates: I don’t think it’s going to happen as much.
Nathaniel Schooler: I’ve been thinking about this a lot. If you look five years ahead at someone’s career trajectory… and you look at them and you’re like “Well in five years time that role is not going to exist”…
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Nathaniel Schooler: …Okay I’m gonna do an AI data analysis course and I’m going to spend the next two years… I really think this is actually the future of the way things are going to happen if organizations get behind it.
Jenny Bates: You make a great point that retention rates will certainly increase. One of the things I think about is AI has access to so much data about the employee. Again, if privacy laws allow, they will be able to see at a much better detail than any manager or peer where you are working at a stronger pace, where you are collaborating with more people, where you are meeting your deadlines. In the future, not today, I think about AI as sitting with me on my bathroom counter when I’m brushing my teeth… talking to me. It’s asking me questions about my day… “Hey Jenny I noticed that you’re not as engaged lately… what is it that you do that your AI is recognizing you’re just not in it as much as you used to be.” So retention levels will increase for companies because AI will say “Hey let me ask you a few questions”. Those engagement surveys, AI is going to do that at a very custom level for every single individual employee when its time is right. It might even pop me right into a coaching engagement right then and there.
Nathaniel Schooler: Yeah and then sick days are going to go down right… because people are depressed they don’t like their job…. Productivity is a huge one… you can actually rewire your brain… you can find a working style that works for you… and AI has the capabilities to analyze all of this stuff.
Jenny Bates: …It will set me up for the right conversation with my manager or my team way earlier than I would otherwise to be able to say “Look I’ve just been flagged for not actually achieving what I’d like to achieve with the strategic mindset.”
The Role of Human Input and Feedback
Nathaniel Schooler: I think it’s really interesting the whole concept of research as well… we can run a report that would take a human like two or three weeks to run… in three minutes. But people need to be the skilled operators right… the AI is not going to give you what you want without you directing it.
Jenny Bates: Yeah it has to have the right inputs. It’s the same as bad information in and bad information out…. I was just thinking about the inputs for feedback and how important those are. The very end of the year is the typical time for people to consolidate all of their feedback… it already feels super antiquated right?. Companies have tried to do the continuous feedback cycle for a really long time and it hasn’t worked because people’s time isn’t there, they’re always hard conversations… but [AI feedback] will come so much more naturally. They’re going to say “You had a meeting with Nat yesterday can you give me some feedback around how that went for you?” I’ll be able to answer those questions and all of that will be synthesized on a daily basis for him.
Nathaniel Schooler: But it’s interesting isn’t it because then it goes back to employee monitoring and employee monitoring is a huge business. Say I have 10 meetings a day… all of the transcripts are recorded… and you combine all of that data together because the AI can analyze if you’re depressed…. The question is is the employee going to be allowed to interrogate their own data?
Jenny Bates: You say that and it makes my heart sink a little bit because it reminds me of so many instances where organizations say “No we don’t really want to tell the employee that… because then they might actually leave the company”. It’s just not nice, it’s not fair, it doesn’t give them their autonomy over their own life and their own careers… I will always be on the side of give them as much as you possibly can because they will feel more in control, they’ll do more… and it will save the company time and money and things will be more accurate.
Nathaniel Schooler: I think transparency in this context is hugely important right… unless you analyze what those things that you’re saying are doing… how are you going to know whether you need to improve?
Ethics and Opt-Outs
Jenny Bates: Oh yeah absolutely but you have to think too there are going to be places where you can opt out of AI. When you were talking about everything’s recorded and all of your facial recognition… I would be floored if we didn’t all have those little buttons to say this one is not on the books… we have to find ways to continue to have that opt out button because otherwise people will be machines.
Nathaniel Schooler: Why? Why? I think we can… if you’re running an organization you do what you want, you set the policy right? Do you consent for internal AI systems to assist you in your career pathway? If you do not tick that box you don’t even go into the organizational flow for your job application, finished.
Jenny Bates: Well and it is because people don’t know enough… I certainly will never ever work for a company that says I will monitor you 100%…. But what I am talking about is your consent to improve yourself… if I click that box that I consent to be able to do you know AI can contribute to every single part of my development then right you are essentially saying yes they can be a part of my conversations….
Nathaniel Schooler: Okay types of sharing okay that sounds reasonable… but there’s still going to be managers right that go “if they don’t tick that they’re not on my list”… because it’s going to hurt organizational performance.
Jenny Bates: It’s interesting it is I hope people are excited about it though because some of the things that we’ve talked about could feel very scary… we have to find a way to create a space for the transparency the authenticity the focus on development.
Preparation for the Future
Nathaniel Schooler: So let’s just see here so likely what you are describing could take a bit of time, money and new technologies… are there challenges companies should be preparing for now to realize this vision apart from what we’ve just talked about?
Jenny Bates: Yeah absolutely I mean… HR in particular needs to be a part of budget conversations now when a company’s deciding how they’re going to utilize AI. They need to be a part of figuring out how role percentages will change… right now predictions are managers roles will change by about 16% with the sort of duties that they used to do…. There’s some early work that we need to do about change management and the power change that will occur… the manager will no longer play as deep of a role in that process.
Nathaniel Schooler: Really when you think about it the AI bubble bursting due to culture just not getting on board with this whole thing…
Jenny Bates: Oh well and it’s always been the big challenge… you can have the most beautiful product around but if no one knows how to use it… it’s the same with AI. You really have to invest the time to think about what are we really aiming for with this and how do we support our employee base to fully understand it… that’s all a part of HR’s role. I’m excited about it.
Nathaniel Schooler: Thanks very much for listening to Influential Visions, please make sure you share this episode with your friends and business connections and don’t forget to drop us a review wherever you listen. Thanks.
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