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
Taylor Bradley didn't come from HR. He came from the fire service — where the culture runs on trust, urgency, and getting it right under pressure. He brought all three to a role where he's now leading an HR team that deployed a custom GPT in 48 hours and cut per-ticket processing time by 33% across 52,000 annual support tickets.
As VP of Talent Strategy and Success at Turing, Taylor has been at the forefront of practical AI implementation in the people function — not as a futurist exercise, but as operational reality. His most important insight isn't about the technology. It's about the people. "Workforce engagement is one of the key barriers to AI adoption, not the technology itself." The organizations that successfully implement AI don't just buy tools. They involve employees in shaping how those tools work, fix the outputs that feel robotic, and explicitly frame the shift as augmentation rather than replacement. His "Alan" IT support bot — targeted to automate 60% of annual support tickets by 2025 — was solved not through better AI but through better prompting: making the bot's responses feel human, not bureaucratic.
The cultural lesson generalizes: you can't force AI adoption through mandate. You earn it through demonstration, involvement, and the patient work of showing people that the tool makes their job better rather than threatening it. For HR leaders still in the "wait and see" phase on AI, Taylor's message is pointed: the window for being an early mover is closing.
- Building a custom GPT in 48 hours — the rapid deployment that cut per-ticket processing time by 33% across 52,000 annual interactions
- Scaling employee onboarding with AI — how Turing achieved a 100% increase in onboarding capacity without adding headcount
- Workforce engagement as the AI adoption barrier — why the technology is rarely the blocker, and how to address the human resistance instead
- The "Alan" IT support bot — prompting strategy, human-tone design, and the 60% automation target
- Augmentation over automation as the change management framing — the one positioning shift that significantly improves AI adoption rates
- Culture as the prerequisite for AI success — why the rollout strategy matters as much as the tool itself
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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
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