Taylor Bradley
VP Talent Strategy and Success
Turing
Episode 198
HR's AI Blindspot: Why Culture Trumps Tech in Adoption.
Current chapter: Built by People podcast features insights from world's top HR leaders
Built By PeopleMay 9, 2025 · 9:40
Thesis
“Successful AI adoption in HR is primarily a cultural challenge, not a technological one, and requires involving employees and focusing on augmentation over full automation to overcome inertia.”
Show notes
AI-Driven HR Innovations: Taylor Bradley's Journey and Success at Turing
In this episode of the Built by People Podcast, Taylor shares his inspiring career journey from a firefighter paramedic to a seasoned HR professional. Now the VP of Talent and Strategy Success at Turing, Taylor delves into his role leading a team of HR professionals and experimenting with AI use cases.
He highlights key initiatives, such as reducing ticket processing time by 33% through a custom GPT and scaling employee onboarding by 100%.
Taylor also discusses balancing AI automation with human empathy, overcoming resistance to AI, and developing the IT support bot Alan to automate 60% of the annual support tickets by 2025.
He concludes with a piece of advice emphasizing the importance of culture in AI adoption within organizations.
00:00 Welcome and Introduction to Taylor
00:53 Taylor's Career Journey
01:33 Overview of Turing's Services
02:13 Scaling Employee Onboarding with AI
04:01 Balancing AI Automation with Human Empathy
05:16 Overcoming Skepticism in AI Implementation
07:16 Developing the IT Support Bot
08:57 Parting Advice on AI Adoption
09:32 Closing Remarks
Previ is a private pricing network that is free for companies to launch and maintain. It saves employees $2,200/year on essential services like their cell phone and auto insurance bill. Visit here to learn more.
What you'll take away
- 1Prioritize AI augmentation over full automation initially to build workforce engagement and adoption.
- 2Involve employees in refining AI outputs through prompting to ensure a 'human-like' tone and address skepticism.
- 3Custom GPTs can be rapidly developed (e.g., in 2 days) to significantly reduce manual HR support tickets and improve productivity.
- 4The biggest barrier to AI adoption is cultural inertia and resistance to change, not the technology itself.
- 5Scale AI solutions across the organization to create an 'AI team member' that provides coaching and support beyond policy issues.
What most organizations get wrong
- •The biggest barrier to AI adoption today is not the technology, it's the inertia of the status quo within the business.
In Taylor's words
“We're going to AI our way out of this.”
This quote highlights a proactive and ambitious approach to leveraging AI for significant HR challenges.
“Just in 2 days of developing that custom GPT, we reduced our per-ticket processing time by 33%, which if you times that over by 52,000, had a huge productivity gain.”
This demonstrates the rapid and substantial impact AI can have on operational efficiency in HR.
“Workforce engagement is one of the key barriers to AI adoption, not the technology itself.”
This is a core thesis of the guest, emphasizing the human element in successful tech implementation.
“It's a simple matter of prompting. We just need to change the linguistics prompts that go into Allen's knowledge base so that when it writes responses, it starts to embrace more of a human-type tone.”
This provides a practical solution to overcoming skepticism about AI's 'robotic' output by refining prompt engineering.
“Code alone doesn't drive change. It's culture.”
This powerful statement summarizes the guest's overarching message about the importance of cultural buy-in for any technological transformation.
The problems this episode addresses
- •Dealing with 52,000 manual HR support tickets annually, leading to significant time consumption and inefficiency.
- •Scaling employee onboarding by 100% for thousands of new team members, overwhelming traditional support structures.
- •Overcoming employee skepticism and resistance to AI tools due to perceived 'robotic' communication styles.
- •Driving workforce engagement and adoption of new AI technologies within the organization.
In this episode
Built by People podcast features insights from world's top HR leaders
Built by People
Taylor Miller is the VP of Talent and Strategy Success at Turing
In the Elevator With Taylor Farrell
Turing successfully implemented AI to solve a major HR challenge last year
How AI Automated Employee onboarding by 100%
Taylor: We wanted to turn Allen into an AI team member
Employee Engagement with AI
By 2025, we're on track to automate 60% of IT support tickets
How IT Support Bots Are Affecting Team Efficiency
The biggest barrier to AI adoption today is not the technology, it's inertia
A Day in the Life of AI
Topics covered
Organizations and entities mentioned
Full transcript
Expand transcript (0 words)
Transcript is not available yet.