Why AI Literacy Is Now a Business Skill Every Leader Needs
In this episode of the HR Leaders Podcast, we sit down with David Sperl, Head of HR for Advanced Visualization Solutions at GE HealthCare, to unpack how HR earns real business credibility by shipping outcomes, not PowerPoints, inside a heavily regulated, science driven environment.
David explains why AI literacy must move from theory to hands-on practice, how microlearning and shared baseline tools help drive adoption, and why leadership advocacy is essential to scale change across technical, clinical, and commercial teams. He breaks down GE HealthCare’s four stages of AI adoption, how communities of practice create demand pull, and why unlearning outdated mental models is now harder than learning new ones.
Most importantly, he shares why user experience and friction removal are the real unlocks for AI in HR and business, and why the future of change isn’t “change management”, it’s change agility.
🎓 In this episode, David discusses:
What HR learns sitting inside a complex, regulated product lifecycle
Why HR must understand the product, customer, and clinical context
Why feedback loops beat annual talent cycles in innovation environments
How role clarity unlocks productivity across scientific and commercial teams
How to build talent systems that match the speed of innovation, not bureaucracy
What if global compliance took 5 seconds?
It does now.
atlas copilot partnered with our friends at Deel, the all-in-one Global People Platform, to bring on‑demand employment matters and compliance intelligence into your daily flow. With Atlas' GenAI agentic platform and Deel’s vetted sources, get authoritative answers across 150+ countries.
Ask anything:
“Is a 3‑month probation period compliant in Mexico?”
“What termination notice is required in Germany for 18 months’ tenure?”
“How long are the maternity and paternity leave in the UAE?”
You get clarity, that used to take hours, in seconds.
This is not a feature. It’s a new operating model. The chaos of Slack threads, scattered PDFs and expensive calls collapses into one trusted interface. Your team moves faster, escalations drop, decisions align and you see regulatory change as it happens.
If you’re still stitching notes from outside counsel, you’re already behind. AI-Smart HR leaders are shifting to always‑on intelligence. Don’t let compliance feel like navigating a minefield.
Chris Rainey 0:00
Hey, David, welcome my friend. How you doing?
David Sperl 0:14
Thank you doing very good and a busy day, very busy, but it's a great event, right? Loads of tech vendors, loads of interesting sessions, and good to be here and be here with my team even,
Chris Rainey 0:26
yeah, and I know you did a session around scaling AI learning across the enterprise. How was that?
David Sperl 0:32
It was it was good? Well, that's me talking right as the speaker, but I think the feedback clearly from my team, who are a very honest and transparent team, was good. So I tried to bridge from know the situation of the Industrial Revolution, where things were unknown, but everybody knew things would be changing, to might there be similarities to today? And that's what we talked about.
Chris Rainey 0:56
What were some of the principles across these, these different change, or these moments of change that really are the same, regardless of new technology. Or, you
David Sperl 1:06
know, yeah, if you you know, just outside of Paris, here in Versailles, the Montgomery brothers were the first ones to actually lift with their balloon, a dog, a cork and a sheep. So literally, at that time, right? It was lifting things up, and nobody would know where this would land, where the balloon would land. And I pretty much feel like today's lift is AI, and with that, you know, where does it go? We don't know, and we certainly don't know where it lands. So that's the storytelling that we did.
Chris Rainey 1:37
Yeah, I love that. I feel like we with all the complexities, is storytelling that really what people connect with. Yeah, it's super important to be good at that, like as a skill right now, we need to get better at as organizations as well. So I know GE, like everyone's been on their AI journey, but I want to talk about how is GE Healthcare, building AI literacy at scale to prepare employees, because think most people here are going through a similar journey right now.
David Sperl 2:07
Yeah, I think there's four stages or four pillars that we're driving. One is employee leadership advocacy, right? Making sure our teams understand that leadership is supporting of you using AI as a tool, because what happens if you don't feel your leadership helps you or is supportive, you either stop doing it in the first place, or you still do it. Download chatgpt on your personal phone and feed it with company confidential information. So that's not what we want. Leadership at walkers is one. The second one is around skills and upskilling. And we did build our own in house trainings to for everybody. We also do some micro learning, which essentially is an email in like in six weeks sprints every day, you would get an email with a very simple prompt, hey, help me prepare for next meeting. Hey, summarize this, Hey, you know, give me a synthesis of this document, super easy. And then third, it's about creating followership and curiosity, which we tried to do in peer groups, right? We created communities of practice in R and D, in HR, in whatever other function. And these people would do serve, you know, two purposes. One is they learn the upskill, but they also share back, and that's super valuable. That's actually where I found really good traction. And then last but not least, it's try, try, try, right? The experimentation, go, use, go, figure out what works. Which tool works for you. Where does it work best, and try,
Chris Rainey 3:42
yeah, with AI literacy training. How do you ensure that it's not just a one size fits all approach? Because if you think about like aI literacy for HR versus it versus sales, very different in terms of the application and use cases, how do you approach that at scale?
David Sperl 4:02
Yeah, so we leveled everyone on one tool that we try to lift the boat with. Right for us, that's one tool across your organization, and we encourage everybody to use it and play around with it. Obviously, there is all the AI on different solutions, but that's not what we focus on. From a people and culture HR perspective, we really focus on that one tool. And I think having one tool, I think serves the purpose of fairness and equity, right? Everybody in the organization can use it. I also think in under estimated parties, it also helps on the equity and inclusion piece, because AI can be used by people with dispairments with, you know, visual impairment, you know, hearing impairment. It's actually leveling the playing field so you can interact in much better ways, much different ways, than with your you know, computer and keyboard. Yeah. So that. It's one other aspect that I think we shouldn't underestimate.
Chris Rainey 5:02
So where? So where, where does the micro learning come in to the picture?
David Sperl 5:07
Yeah, that's across the board. And we call that our, you know, copilot journey. Again, it's an unprompted email that tells you a few notches, there's even some fun evolve involved. Right at typically, on a Friday, it's getting a bit lighter before the weekend. And say, One example was, hey, give me a summary of my week in the form of a comedy roast. So that summary actually was both great, you know, fun and interesting. And, you know, emails were floating around, hey, you know, here's
Chris Rainey 5:35
some adoption. Totally. You want to make it fun, right? Yes, I was speaking to think it was Nokia's VP of AI and people analytics, and he was saying the number one use case, or for the AI was, what's the lunch menu this week? Yeah. I mean, it was like, it sounds silly, but it's getting people using, yes, the tool, because now they're asking the chat, what's the, what's, what's your lunch in the office, and it's feeding it through the AI, and it's just like creating some sticky experiences people to come back soon at all. So the micro learning is that embedded in your communication tools, like Slack in team? Yes, exactly. Yeah. But, I mean, that's the thing, because if it's separately, it doesn't work,
David Sperl 6:18
no, and I think that's what we all find, right people, giving people yet another tool doesn't really help so embedded into your you know, where the work is done is so important,
Chris Rainey 6:31
yeah, what about in terms of you mentioned leadership, advocacy and how important that is? How? What was your approach to this?
David Sperl 6:42
Well, we, we had the CEO stand at the front of the Yeah. Well, it is a start. But, you know, as funny as it is, as serious it is, right? Because when you're, you know, peterinho, CEO stands in front of the odds and says, Look, I'm trying it. Here's what works for me. Here's what I'm struggling with. There's so much more credibility in Hey, I think actually it's totally okay to use it to fail to understand. And if you read some research around what people struggle with, 50% of the people say, hey, I really feel like using AI in my job feels like a different job. And I think there's a message there that says you actually have to do your job, get it done, and then unlearn everything you how you do your job and figure out a new way to do your job. Yeah, and that's the effort that I think many of us, myself included, are struggling with, right? How do you how do you use AI in? Where do you use AI in your daily routine, when your routines have become so ingrained in the work you do and how you do it, yeah, that you need to unlearn that stuff and learn it in a new way. Yeah?
Chris Rainey 7:48
And that that is a big challenge that most people are talking about is the unloading the biggest right, because the habits that you've built over so long to be able to like, for me, I've been using AI for a long time. So I'm, like, fully in, but that's not everyone right along along the journey as well.
David Sperl 8:05
And that's where, you know, I think that that relations back to the industrial revolution comes, you know, suing back then was all manual. Nobody could fathom that it would be done automatically. Yeah, fast forward. You know, there's all the different resolutions, industrial and digital and digital and electric or whatever it is, maybe the time is now to actually challenge ourselves and say, look the work, and how has it has been done as an organization, in our processes, but as an individual too. That has to change. Yeah.
Chris Rainey 8:34
How are you thinking about because it's not technology is never a challenge. The medium changes, right? Like, your point is more of a mindset and a culture shift. How are you approaching that challenge? Because that's really where it's all about the technology, so much it is about the transformation and the mindset.
David Sperl 8:53
Yeah, no, it's brains, hearts and minds, right? I mean, yeah, the brain part is just killing. The mind part is really the followership, the curiosity that you want to spark, and that's where we have found good success with our communities of practice. Okay, we had a even a waiting list, if you will. We ask our HR team, Hey, are you volunteering? Do you want to commit to spend a couple of hours each week learning on AI and with some coaching from an IoT function. And there were so many people that said, I want to do that. And in six months in we did a hackathon to challenge them, to say, build us a use case. Well, identify use case and build us a an agent that addresses it. The outcome was pretty impressive. I mean, it wasn't rocket science in either way, but the fact that one group even was able to build an agentic AI that's managing another agentic AI solution was pretty that's advanced, and I think that gives us the confidence that actually aspirationally, we want to go out and say, Maybe we should scale up at least 20% of the HR function to be able to build their own AI agents.
Chris Rainey 10:00
It, yeah, yeah. But, I mean, that's where, and also that's where you kind of build that culture of curiosity by creating that safe environment, the psychological safety and and the physical sandbox for them to play, yeah? And it's through play, which is what comes to creativity and the innovation. And people feel like they're safe. They have permission to do that. I mean, that's how some of the most innovative companies that we know have come up with their products, by creating those hackathons where some of the best products that we all use today came from those moments, right?
David Sperl 10:34
Well, just yesterday, we actually released one of these products from the hackathon to the broader population, wow. You know, 50,000 people that potentially benefit from that. AI agent that is a coach to help you develop your own individual development plan. Amazing. So that's, that's a good output of a hackathon. You know, after 12 months and
Chris Rainey 10:54
you're putting it in their hands, their ownership, they're owning it as long right along. I love that. What are some of the like right now. A lot of what we're doing and you're doing is obviously building a solid foundation, right? Yeah, where do you see the biggest value add or use case for AI and HR moving forward?
David Sperl 11:15
I think clearly the user experience, the colleague experience, is what we have to live up and I think there is room for improvement, for sure, and there's also an effort that requires us to determine, what exactly does that mean? Yeah, and we spent some time as a leadership team with Adam holton's team over the summer, to spend three days on that topic, right? What are the processes we want to look at? And what we said we don't want to work on improving incrementally. Want to design for an exponential change now, with that simple change, one word, one adjective, right? Ever since covid, we all know what exponential means, right? It is a massive shift that we want and that we need to push forward, and that's uncomfortable for us as an HR leadership team, for any organization, even more so for our team. So that leadership, I think, is becoming even more important in the future.
Chris Rainey 12:10
I love that. Like that call to call to action for everyone to really think bold, be bold. And like you know, not just with the pace of change is moving so quickly we can't afford incremental. Incremental is not going to be enough.
David Sperl 12:26
No, no, that's not what the hype is. You know, if you believe the hype, right? Yeah, an incremental improvement doesn't help
Chris Rainey 12:32
anybody, yeah, but yeah. But also, even if you don't, it's not going to hurt true, you know, because, really, we've got because it's through, even if you fail, you'll learn so much right through that. And at the moment, that's just part of the process we got. We're gonna have many pilots going on, almost HR and other functions have to act as more of an innovation hubs. And that's a big shift in mindset, you know, from from HR really being everything's all the i's are dotted, all the T's are crossed. We're not in that moment anymore. No.
David Sperl 13:05
And I think, you know, disruption rarely is cozy and comfy and confident, and if it is, then maybe it isn't disruption.
Chris Rainey 13:12
No, it's not. We always talk about internally HR, leaders of we have a we always say, seek discomfort, yes. So something we all talk about in all the means, if it doesn't feel uncomfortable, if we don't feel a little bit stretched, it means we're not doing the right things right. And some things work, some things don't right, but we but we create a space where everyone feel like they can actually be bold and push and some of our best ideas and products, we have our own AI solution that we built for HR leaders to upskill reschool their teams. It's a an AI native adaptive learning platform to upskill HR executives that came from those meetings. Yeah, you know. Hey, why are we not doing this? We have the content, the data, the network, the need clearly in the community. Who's to say we shouldn't do that? Yeah, you know as well. But listen, I know you will get back to the event, but I appreciate you taking the time to join. Thanks so much for having me. I appreciate and good luck to you and team. I'm super excited. Big fan of, obviously, the work that you and the team are doing already. Thank you. Thank you.
More from the HR Leaders Podcast
David Sperl, Head of HR for Advanced Visualization Solutions at GE HealthCare.