How to Build a Future-Ready Talent Strategy in 2026
In this episode of our On The Road series, we sit down with Laura Mattimore and Lucia Suarez from Procter & Gamble to explore how one of the world’s most iconic companies is redesigning talent for the AI era.
Laura leads global talent across P&G’s enterprise talent systems, including hiring, learning, leadership development, workforce planning, and talent strategy. Lucia leads talent development, talent management, analytics, insights, employee experience, and transformation within that broader talent agenda.
Their message is clear: AI is not just a technology shift. It is a work, culture, skills, and employee experience shift. For P&G, the opportunity is not to replace the human, but to build around human plus AI, with HR playing a central role in redesigning how work gets done.
🎓 In this episode, we get into:
How P&G is redesigning talent strategy around human plus AI
Why HR must become the architect of future jobs and work design
Why frontline plant technicians must be designed for from the beginning
How P&G is building its own talent hub to support a build-from-within culture
How AI can personalize upskilling, career paths, and employee experience at scale
What if recognition was not just a moment of appreciation?
What if it was also one of the clearest signals of trust, performance, leadership, and culture inside your organization?
Workhuman helps companies turn recognition into something much bigger than a thank you. It becomes a source of real-time human intelligence, helping leaders understand who is influencing others, who is strengthening culture, and where meaningful work is happening across the business.
Because the future of work will not be built by technology alone. It will be built by organizations that know how to make people feel seen, valued, connected, and motivated to do their best work.
With Workhuman, recognition becomes more than a program. It becomes a way to improve retention, strengthen engagement, uncover leadership potential, and connect culture directly to business outcomes.
00:11
Laura, Lucia, how are you doing? Welcome. Excellent. Very good. Thank you for having us. How was your day? It's been great so far. We're one day in almost. What's like the best swag that you've got so far? Oh, I haven't collected swag. Have you not done that yet? No. No. You need to tell us where to get the swag. What I'll do, I'll just grab it all for you. I've got the connections. I know where the storage room is. I'm like fully in there. One there for the insights. But I guess there is swag. I see these tiny bags everywhere. You know what? I don't know where they are. I've been seeing them around. You can't miss them as well. Before we jump in, firstly, I love the fact that we're doing this as a conversation, so we're super excited about it. But tell everyone quickly a little bit about your roles, and then we'll jump in. Start with yourself first. Okay, so I'm the global talent leader for Archer & Gamble. So that means I'm responsible for all of our, what I would call enterprise talent systems. So regardless of what business unit you work in or what function in the company you work in, everything from hiring to learning and leadership development and workforce planning and things like that.
01:11
Just a few things. Just a few things. Right. All my favorite things about HR, though, by the way.
01:17
All your favorite things. All my favorite things about HR. Nice. And you've been super intentional then about making sure. Absolutely. Yes. I scout out the next thing that would be fun to lead.
01:27
But it's also good that you've got all those things on the one roll. Yes. Because I think in so many organizations, they sit separately in silos, which causes a whole wonderful load of issues. So the ability to integrate those things is a big part of my job. Yeah. Lucia? So within that talent umbrella, I lead talent development, talent management, analytics, and insights. Nice. And we work very closely around employee experience and transformation and organization transformation projects, yes. Yeah, so your partner's in crime. We are. We are totally. Yes.
01:58
Who normally wins the most arguments?
02:01
Laura does, of course. She's my boss.
02:05
We don't argue, though. Lou brings great ideas and we align quickly.
02:11
But tell me a bit more about both of you. What are you most excited about right now? What's top of mind for you both?
02:17
I mean, everything's AI these days, right? Can't go anywhere without seeing AI. What I find to be super fun is having been, you know, now I'm towards the latter stage of my career, but when I first started working, there were no computers on the job. Yes. And so I experienced that massive transformation. Now to see AI come in and what that's going to do and disrupt the, we call it constructive disruption, is just, I think, amazing to kind of see those two extremes. Yeah. I'm with you. I think maybe I was on the cut off of it. Like when I first came to the workplace, there was no computers. I had my little, what do you call it? Filofax?
02:53
Not file effects. I had like a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, like with papers I put in it. Yeah. Okay. File effects. Is that what you call those? I don't even know. I was thinking Rolodex, but that was more. Yeah. I had a Rolodex as well. I remember my day was organized by like a folder that said Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. And like. There were folders and papers, right? Yeah. The new generation will never understand the pain of that or facts.
03:17
I was trying to explain to my daughter who's seven the other day. Imagine trying to explain to a seven-year-old what a fax machine is.
03:24
She was like, what do you mean? Like, she's sitting on a tablet and I'm talking to her about fax machines. Right, putting things in envelopes and sending it around the world. Yeah. And then crossing off your name when you've read it and sending it to the next person. That's what we did. Yeah. That's how we communicated. And in many ways, Lucia, your role didn't exist a few years ago when we talk about the analytics side. That wasn't a role. Yeah, I mean, it's evolved dramatically. So think about it this way. We're trying to transform
03:50
to become the future of the CPG industry, right? Like, what's a future company? How the company looks like in the future? And that's very transformative. And I think it's very inspiring in many ways. How do we drive agility, empowerment, accountability at scale? How we disrupt constructively? And then really all that we do in our space is in service of that. And it's in service of our business outcomes, really. How do we have an organization that is performing at their fullest
04:20
potential to deliver that. And AI just gives us another platform to be able to do those things so much better. So yeah, it's like the next wave of innovation. What would you say is the key to, I know we've got other questions that I'm not even asking you right now, but I'm really excited about just understanding more about your partnership. What would you say is the key to your partnership and success that you have? For us? Yeah. I think for us, I think continuity has been huge. I mean, I think the relationships that we've built, our team is largely comprised of people who have deep mastery and have been in the team for quite some time. And I think that allows us to sort of take on the next layer of innovation and you're, it's like building blocks, you're building on the next. And I often say if people, they're rotating assignments every couple of years, how do you even get any momentum going because you're constantly starting with a new strategy, a new leader, a new team, all of that. And so I think that,
05:06
has really enabled us in the HR team. Yeah, I'd add, I think that, I mean, we were talking about it a minute ago, but like the environment of psychological safety to learn together. Yeah.
05:17
And also we were hearing this morning from Angela around like expert practice, et cetera. I think that it's continuity, but in a way that it's still making sure that we are...
05:27
stepping up our own learning and then how we put that in service of an organization that continuously like steps up yeah the other thing i would say that i think is huge i i value a great a great bit is like we have a lot of of tailwinds and it's because our business that we're in is around consumer understanding and brand building And so that gives us new technologies, new methodologies, new ways that as the business is creating new ways to reach consumers, better understand consumers, we're able to apply that to the people space. And so we're doing some really cool things with understanding what to, how do we incent and how do we motivate and how do we inspire our employees? What drives them the same way that we do on our business? We're doing, when we think about recruiting, for example, that as a brand, we're running a brand. And so every single thing we do on tide or crest or, bounty we're doing on our brand. And I think that I just find that really inspiring to be able to walk step in step with our business and make sure that we're using all the tools and the latest that we're bringing to bear on the brands.
06:29
Yeah. That's a testament to the business though, right? For such a large, well-established organizations to still remain agile. and move quickly is tough and we see many organizations right now with ai struggling at scale to do that but it seems like that's kind of ingrained in the dna of the organization would you say yeah i believe that developed from within helps a lot in terms of to really pull from not just contacts but way of doing things learning function to function across sectors yeah etc so in building on laura's example like if you think about consumer understanding there's a lot of
07:05
transferable knowledge that we can take to employee understanding. So we can learn internally a lot through like across functions, sectors, people. It's a huge asset.
07:18
These longstanding companies and P&G is 187 years old, I think. And so when the ones that are still here today are the ones who have this learning agility and acumen to be able to continually reinvent. Otherwise you're competing against these digital native companies and you have to figure out how do you adapt and why we're here in places like this is to be constantly learning and bringing back so that we don't you know, become this old traditional slow company that we're continuing reinventing and keeping pace with the competitors. In terms of, of course we're talking about AI, what does that mean for your talent strategy? How do you ensure that you don't lose the human and you keep the human at the center of all of this? So I think it's a critical role that HR will continue to play and it's going to evolve. I mean, we talk about for as long as I've been at P&G, which is 35 years now, when I came in and the generations before me, before that,
08:15
We are always about building the business and building the organization. You do both. You don't do one at the expense of the other. And so our role in HR... How would you describe that difference? Sorry to interrupt you. So building the business is the financials. It's delivering the sales and the profit and all of the value that we're expected to deliver. And... building the organization means that you're leaving your organization better than you found it right and so it's it's the how it's making sure that it's you deliver it the right way and that you're delivering it through people and you know we measure like many companies do employee engagement and how are people feeling about the work that they're doing and you look at attrition rates and all those things and so when we think about leaders and leaders that we think are right to step into the next level of leadership it's about did they build a business and did they build the organization what's their track record
09:05
So now when we think about AI and AI coming into the equation, it's human plus AI, right? And so as HR leaders, our role continues to evolve and transform and be less about running processes and systems and much more about the architects of the future and jobs and how are we going to redesign and rethink the way work is going to be done in the future. When Lucia was talking about the company of the future, that's what we're talking about right now is what are those roles going to look like
09:35
human and AI working together. And that's, I mean, HR is at the heart of that. We have to be in the center of those conversations. So it's a critical role for us to step into.
09:46
Related to a building organization, just to give you some examples, we put a lot of accountability in the line around things like recruiting, training. So it's not seen as an HR initiative, really. It's like we all together build that culture. and that organization together. I think that's very unique and very powerful. Even when you think about the employee experience, it's really not an HR thing. It's integrated into the company's growth strategy as a choice. I think that's very powerful. You have to do that, right? In order to be scalable of an organization, you can't be owned by HR. It needs to be owned by the business. In many places, it gets outsourced, really, or just limited to the HR organization. We train, we hire.
10:30
And at P&G you have a lot of very active involvement and also from very senior leaders actually. For example, they train a lot internally. And we think that's an asset. Even when we just recently renewed our employee experience model that basically says what are employees looking to get from the company and what is it that we need to provide to have a superior experience. And we used concept of superiority like we do on brands, like a product superiority. We applied that to our business and we had business leaders like presidents sponsoring the different vectors. And it's on the CEO's agenda as a priority area for us. And so we look at different cohorts One of the cohorts we've been focusing on most recently is our plant technician population. And are they getting what they need? And is our attrition where it needs to be? And then we kind of dissect it through our models and frameworks to say, what do we need to do? Where do we need to invest, really, to get that experience where it needs to be?
11:23
So that they're both delivering, but their engagement levels are high and we're retaining them. Yeah. So anyway, again, I think we've got a leadership that I feel grateful every day to work for because they're committed to this stuff. And it's already on their radar. We don't have to sell them on an ROI or, you know, how do we make this important to you? They want to be led, and so our job is to help lead the thinking. But I think they feel complete ownership of the work that we do in the HR space. Yeah, totally. I love the fact that you mentioned those frontline plant managers. They're often overlooked, underserved, the frontline part, right? And also not recognized, quite frankly. We're here at WorkHuman. Recognition is obviously part of the theme here. And I see for the longest time, those frontline workers haven't had that recognition, right, as well.
12:18
And now we have some of the tools and AI to help us leverage that. It's more than half our company. It's more than half our company. Every product, solution, or service we come up with, we have to ask, is this working to make our plant population better, stronger, more productive? It's more than half of our company, so it has to be top of mind for us. And every year, with the help of our amazing ANI team, we look at every segment.
12:44
employee segment at the company and then what themes we need to pay disproportionate attention to make sure that we are serving all those segments including plant technicians.
12:52
So I think it's very powerful to be intentional around like different employee segments and then how do you serve them in ways that are relevant to their experience. Yeah. What are you hearing from them right now?
13:04
from that, especially obviously a huge population of frontline, right? There's a lot of pressure facing everyone right now. I'm just wondering what kind of feedback you're hearing from them right now. So we've done huge investment in infrastructure. We've done investment in benefits. We've done, as you know, it's a population that has higher, faster rotation. So really for us, it's important to make sure that we have the fundamentals strong and right.
13:31
And then things that would make a difference in terms of experience too can include things like, for example, development. That could look a bit different in terms of how you execute it, but the intention is as important in terms of what's true for them.
13:46
Career clarity and excitement, things like, for example, all the manager capability, to have the right support, clear priorities.
13:58
Flexibility was a big one. So coming out of COVID, we, like probably every company on the planet, had higher attrition rates in the plants because they said, well... How do you get flexibility? Right. I mean, they were like, what about us? Like, we want to work in jobs. We don't want to be in the next manufacturing site. We want to be doing, you know...
14:18
customer calling or something that I can do from my home. And so we had to rethink how can we do shift scheduling different? Like, how do we, how can we give as much flexibility as we can in that environment? And again, it came back to some consumer insight. And so our numbers have really rebounded coming out of that. But that was a kind of a key moment for us to say, what do we know about their experience?
14:43
And what is it we need to do to get retention where we want it to be? I think it's also like a wake-up call for everyone. How important are frontline workers?
14:52
Like the pandemic, all of a sudden, these people are keeping the lights on, keeping us fed during those moments. All of a sudden, out of nowhere, people are like, oh wow, these are the people actually keeping the economy going during that time.
15:10
Ironically, the least supported in many ways. Totally. For us, definitely a critical segment. And it's important that we are intentional from the beginning, like in the upstream work that we do from a talent point of view to make sure that we design for them. Yeah. How about from a learning and development point of view? That's always been a challenge. Specialty.
15:33
I mean, we're constantly evolving. It always starts with what are the business needs and the capability that we need to build to make sure that people can respond to those needs. And so from a curricular point of view, it continues to evolve. We are now in the process of being intentional with some upskilling choices. That's true for techs, but it's also true, of course, for people in the offices, in the different labs, etc. Yeah.
15:57
So I think, you know, we are trying to streamline a little bit the portfolio, the learning portfolio, to make sure that we can focus people on the few or most important things. But again, in a developed from within company, the intentionality behind development makes all the difference, really, because we are preparing not just for the current job, but also for future. Yeah.
16:23
and to develop pipeline, right? And I think it's something that Procter & Gamble has always done well. Anyone I've ever spoke to has had multiple careers in the same organization.
16:32
And that's becoming less and less common that I hear that. But within Procter & Gamble, I have friends and people I've interviewed from the business that have been in the business, had multiple careers. You said you've been there, did you say 35? 35 years. Yeah, would you say the same for you? Same for you.
16:49
But you've had multiple careers in the same organization. So your learning and development program is a key part of that, right? Of upskilling and reskilling people. Yeah, so we follow a 70-20-10 approach to make sure that people learn on the job. And that's why people also will have a wide breadth of experiences rotating through different organization units, functions, types of experiences.
17:14
You have, of course, a very vast geographical footprint, so it feels to some extent to working in different companies, which is awesome. Yeah, you mentioned earlier about people switching functions, even kind of moving into the HR function as a rotation. It does give you that opportunity to do so many different things within the same four walls.
17:33
As AI becomes more embedded in HR,
17:37
it's kind of a hard question but like where do you see the biggest area of like biggest impact that we can have leveraging ai and hr because there's so many areas obviously we can jump into so i think most companies start with talent acquisition that's where we started first that's where we're the furthest that's where we'll continue to push the envelope i think um you know we're doing a lot now with coaching and with you know bots for service and all those kinds of things um I think what I'm excited about in the future is more of the conversational AI where so now we've created this data lake where we have all of our data, employee data. We can do great research. We've got beautiful dashboards where people can kind of drill in. But I'm waiting for the conversational AI to not even have to rely on an HR business partner to have those analytics skills. I want it to surface and just be able to say, what should I be worried about? And to find those pain points that are out there and the red flags and have those be served up by the machine.
18:35
We're building right now what we're calling a talent hub, which is like a talent marketplace kind of capability. Are you building it yourselves or with a partner? We're building it ourselves. Oh, yourselves. Amazing. And so... Why though? Can I ask why? That's such an interesting one, by the way, for everyone listening right now. Build, borrow, buy. Yeah. Like, why did you... So just quickly, so we can get real. Why did you decide to... We elected to build and want ourselves because what we wanted was very specific to our build from within culture. Okay. And we did not want something that was more over-engineered for what we needed it to do. Okay. And so...
19:09
We want a very simple skills model, for example.
19:13
A lot of the ones that we could have purchased came with very granular 50,000 skills, 20,000 skills. We wanted to use our skills model, which is on a single page, honestly. Really? This woman has... helped us get there. So it's 80, I think. I've got a million questions that I'll answer that. Yes, right. Sorry. And so we're building the marketplace sort of around that. But back to the AI question, that has a lot of embedded AI in it to then help us figure out, serve up to employees, what are some career options for you to think about? What are possibilities? Equip managers, we believe deeply in not having the AI undermine managers. We want the AI to serve managers to do their jobs better, not to have them delegated to AI. We don't want that happening. That's just a key part of our culture. So that's important to us. And then have it really be a wizard. I mean, I've been intrigued by some of the ideas about can AI help you with talent scouting?
20:09
Right. I mean, it has all of the backbone of all the data that we know about people, about the business results and all of those things. It can be of service to in that in that way, too. So so anyway, the future is really bright with new and different ways that we can use it to help us make our talent decisions. It is exciting. Another example is think about internal mobility and staffing. We do a lot of that because of how we manage our talent and how we flow them across organizations. So we can definitely leverage AI to help inform those decisions. Nothing will replace the human decision after all, but the process of
20:45
how we can connect the dots, performance, development, for performance, for upskilling, for staffing, it's really the potential, it's unlimited. I think, especially given what you've described, having that internal marketplace is so powerful as well, both to empower employees to take charge of their careers. Yeah, that's another huge use case, explore possibilities, allow employees to see options.
21:10
it drives transparency drives clarity excitement it can be super powerful yeah but also like that hidden talent that you maybe didn't even know that was there yeah and the skills right like like because it isn't just the people that are visible in the office that you see every day right you can see like it becomes like uh democratizes access to everyone right and everyone's equal opportunity and all of those rich skills that exist in the organization that aren't on the cv because it's 10 years old. Imagine if we looked at your CV when you first joined versus where you are now. We wouldn't define you based on your CV, what a credible experience you have, right? We can capture all of that information. Yes. The democratization point is a big one because when we're getting asked by our attorneys who have a governance role to make, you know, they're making sure that we're not using the AI to make decisions that humans, and we keep making the point, no, it's going to cast the net wider.
22:02
Like we're going to, we're going to have slates that are beyond what we're our minds today of who we know is going to generate. So it's going to create more options for us. Yeah. And if you think about like high potential talent, that changes that whole conversation about how you identify high potential talent now, right? Sure. And then connect that back to learning in the same. I'm assuming you're going to embed learning into the same marketplace ecosystem, right? Yes. And to your point, I feel like AI is connecting dots that you can't even see.
22:31
and pull in all of that context from across all of those different systems that we've always dreamed of being able to do. But I think step one, which is probably what you're doing now, is consolidating all of that technology, cleaning the data, making sure that's the hard part, quite frankly. Good input, good output. Yeah, exactly. But also garbage in, garbage out. So it has to work both ways. And even then, I don't think the real issue is a technology transformation, it's a cultural transformation.
23:01
It's a complete mindset shift as opposed to the technology. You mentioned the conversational piece. That's already here. The ability to build a learning pathway and just talk to the platform and it builds that or have a coaching conversation or just find any information this day is already there. But most people don't even know the question to ask.
23:25
So we have to help people along the journey with us. I think companies are going way faster than their employees can go, if that makes sense. Yeah, it does. It does. We are trying to be intentional. OK, start with the outcome and then reverse engineer what we need to do. They are the same with the systems. Ultimately, they enable
23:43
our cycle right like if you think we have for example a framework that we call impact through growth it takes a manager with their report throughout the year yeah through a cycle of conversations that they have to do with you know a moment in which you discuss career and then you align your priorities nice you have like a meteor touch point etc the system will enable that cycle it doesn't replace it on the contrary hopefully it will amplify it
24:06
in its quality.
24:08
And then it allows you to, I think, drive personalization at scale. Think about, we have 100,000 employees.
24:16
Yeah. So how do we provide a personalized upskilling plan, a personalized experience at scale for each and all of those employees? Yeah. With their context, right? Like meeting me where I am at. Yes. Right. Not just recommending another LinkedIn learning video, right? It's like it understands my challenges, my goals, my culture, the nuances like you mentioned earlier. The way you give feedback in one country is going to be very different the way you give feedback and have a conversation in another. So creating that personalized learning pathway is something we always dreamed of doing, but we couldn't do it. I've been waiting for this moment for over 20 years. It's the minute Amazon came out with the, oh, you purchased this. What about, what about, what about making suggestions? Yeah, we've been doing it for customers for a while. At that time, we were thinking, well, why can't...
25:03
our data systems know so much about someone. They know what level they are. They know what they work. They know what their experiences are. They know that they just, they're just, they're now a first time manager of another person. They know they want a maternity leave and now they're back. Why can't it say in your context, this is what's right for you right now is what the moment of need is. And we're just now here where we can do it. It's just a great, great to see. So your point as well, that in the moments of matter, Yes. And identify those. What's important for me at my stage of my life is very different to someone else in a different stage, right? Right. To be able to personalize that as well. Even when I think about rewards and benefits, et cetera, that's a whole other personalization now that we didn't have before. Right. That we have right now. Can I ask you a question? Yeah. Okay. You mentioned before that you've done several podcasts earlier today. Yes. Probably yesterday also. Yeah. So what are the threads that you are finding across the conversation?
25:58
We kind of like spoke on a couple already. So one of the things that's kept coming up over and over again is like technology is not the challenge here.
26:08
It's the cultural transformation. It's the mindset shift. The technology is already there. It's kind of working, but there's been so much emphasis on the technology. The other thing is, can the organization absorb this amount of change? Does that make sense? We're going too fast and not bringing employees along the journey with us. So I think that's come up in nearly every conversation that I've had today. And also, we can't just add AI onto existing processes and ways of working. We have to start by completely reevaluating work itself and then figuring out where does AI play a role. Just because you can use AI doesn't mean you should. But I'm seeing everyone right now just adding AI on top of existing processes and frameworks. It doesn't make sense. Right. To be able to do that. It's easier to do that. The hard part is what you just said. It's actually taking the time to deconstruct that.
27:04
And that takes time. We've been piloting a lot around that space. And one of the learnings we've had is there's three key interventions that beyond specific contexts across different business units, they've proven to be relevant for all. One is that one. It's transforming the work process. Yeah.
27:24
versus trying to automate or to just put technology on top of an existing process. Then the second is really to be very clear on what's the outcome that I'm trying to drive and then how I redesign around it. And the third one is around
27:39
how we make sure that roles evolve also and the talent in those roles to have the right set of skills, both in terms of mastery and in terms of the breadth of experiences to be able to deliver on those outcomes effectively. Yeah, I know it's a different skills, right? Well, now we're talking about
27:57
The knowledge piece is there. We've kind of solved that. Everyone has access to these incredible tools to capture that. So the knowing versus doing gap is different. And now people, we have to provide guidance on that, right? But now I think we're talking about curiosity. We're talking about the growth mindset. We're talking about problem solving. These are all power skills that we need to focus on. So as much as there's a conversation over here about technology, this is where we're going to have the most impact moving forward. So in an ironic way, we're becoming more human.
28:29
Everyone's thinking about the AI, but I'm kind of seeing my team now, they're actually more human than ever. We're spending more time together. We're collaborating more because we've removed a lot of that The releasing capacity of people. Yeah, but people need guidance. When I took that, when I went through resources with my team, I saw like a bit, there was fear of like, what do I do now? There were some people in my team, I freed up 80% of their work with agents. So we had to help bring them along the journey with us. Listen, I could talk to you about forever. I won't let you get back to the event, but thank you so much. Thank you for joining. And congrats on the journey so far. It's a journey, right? Yes, absolutely. It's constantly evolving and I appreciate you joining and I wish you all the best until my next video. Thank you. It's nice being here.
Laura Mattimore, Senior Vice President, Global Talent at Procter & Gamble, and Lucia Suarez, Vice President, Global Talent at Procter & Gamble.