Brandon Sammut
Chief People Officer
Zapier
Episode 271
Personalization at Scale: AI's Surprising Power to Transform Employee Experience
Current chapter: Covering monthly expenses is the number one concern for employees in 2024
Built By PeopleMarch 19, 2025 · 14:54
Thesis
“Thoughtful application of automation and AI in HR not only drives efficiency but profoundly enhances personalization, enabling organizations to scale support and foster thriving employee experiences.”
Show notes
Brandon Sammut's first job in HR was as a Chief People Officer. No HRBP years, no generalist runway — just: start at the top of a function you've never worked in before, at a fully remote, automation-native company. The unconventional origin story shapes everything about how he thinks.
As CPO at Zapier, Brandon has made the company's own product the infrastructure for its HR function — and the results challenge a persistent assumption about AI and automation in people work. The assumption: automation depersonalizes the employee experience, makes things colder, more transactional. Zapier's data points the other direction. Their new hire onboarding — built on Zapier — delivers a six-month, just-in-time drip of relevant content and touchpoints that a small HR team could never sustain manually. The automation makes it more personal, not less, because it actually happens, consistently, for every person. His customer support team case study is similarly striking: productivity and engagement grew simultaneously during AI adoption. The key enabler wasn't the technology. It was the leadership and change management work that preceded it — management alignment, candid communication about job security, and a compelling narrative about what mastering these tools would mean for an employee's career.
His AI adoption framework is grounded rather than evangelical: AI is a tool. The same frameworks you use to understand employee needs, design elegant solutions, and build for people — they all still apply. The tool changes. The thinking doesn't.
What you'll learn:
- How Zapier built new hire onboarding on its own product — and what it revealed about automation and personalization
- Why productivity and engagement can grow together during AI adoption (with a real case study)
- The management alignment work that has to happen before AI rollout — not after
- How to frame AI adoption as career development for frontline teams, not a threat to their jobs
- Why psychological safety is the prerequisite for AI change management
- A grounded AI philosophy: what changes when you introduce the tool, and what fundamentally doesn't
This episode is in partnership with Transform. Check out their community here.
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What you'll take away
- 1Automation and AI in HR can be a catalyst for increased personalization in the employee experience, rather than depersonalizing it.
- 2Successful AI adoption hinges on clear management alignment regarding its purpose, business outcomes, and established guardrails.
- 3Candid and clear communication about the implications of new technology (e.g., job security, investment in skills) is crucial for building team confidence.
- 4Empower frontline teams to identify and implement new ways of working with AI, as they often have the best insights into practical applications.
- 5View AI as a tool to supercharge existing missions and business goals, not as an outcome in itself, integrating it into established frameworks for understanding needs and designing solutions.
What most organizations get wrong
- •Automation doesn't necessarily depersonalize the employee experience; it can enable small teams to deliver highly personalized, scalable experiences (e.g., 6-month onboarding drip).
- •Increasing productivity and employee engagement can grow in tandem during AI adoption, especially when there's a clear narrative, investment in skills, and psychological safety.
- •The initial role in HR doesn't have to be junior; one can start as a CPO, emphasizing a 'random walk' career path with purpose.
In Brandon's words
“My first job in HR was as a chief people officer.”
This highlights an unconventional career path into HR leadership, emphasizing learning and diverse experience.
“Sometimes you think about automation or AI in people work. And you say, hey, that's probably great for efficiency, but doesn't that depersonalize the experience? Doesn't that make it cold and impersonal? And when I look at what the team has done building something like new hire onboarding on tools like Zapier, what I see is exactly the opposite.”
This directly challenges a common misconception about AI and automation in HR, emphasizing its potential for personalization.
“If you want the whole team to row with you, you have to create the psychological safety and honestly just the job security conditions where folks feel like not only are they going to learn some stuff, but that there's something in it for them at the end of the day as well.”
This is a key insight into successful change management and AI adoption, linking it to psychological safety and employee benefit.
“Zapier is going to be the place if you're a customer support person where you really learn how to use automation and AI to supercharge your work. And anyone who does any of these jobs, including customer support, can look at them and be like, that's a big deal for me. Like I would like to learn those skills and my current employer is going to invest in me and help me learn those skills.”
This illustrates a powerful narrative for motivating employees to embrace new technologies by framing it as a career development opportunity.
“AI, for example, is a tool. All the same mindsets or frameworks we use to understand customer needs, whether that's employees or external-facing customers, to design like really elegant ways of solving those problems for our people and with our people. All that still applies.”
This grounds AI adoption in fundamental business principles, emphasizing that core problem-solving approaches remain relevant.
The problems this episode addresses
- •HR teams struggle to provide highly personalized employee experiences at scale with purely human effort.
- •Customer support teams face economic challenges when scaling human staffing to meet growing demand.
- •Organizations often struggle with the cultural aspects of AI adoption, including concerns about job security and depersonalization.
- •Lack of management alignment on the 'why' and 'how' of new technology integration (like AI) hinders successful adoption.
- •Teams feel uncertain about their future and job security when new technologies are introduced without clear communication and investment.
In this episode
Covering monthly expenses is the number one concern for employees in 2024
Built by People
And as a starting question, I always love to ask about your career journey
How to Start Your Career With a Purpose
Brandon Miller joined Zapier in 2021 as its first chief people officer
What Motivated Me to Join Zapier in 2021
Zapier uses automation to enhance efficiency and personalization in employee experience
How Automation Is Personalizing New Hire Onboarding
Zapier implemented AI automation while maintaining team engagement and cultural change
The Case Study of a Customer Support Team's Transformation
Many organizations struggle with the cultural aspects of AI adoption
Employee Culture and AI
Brandon: I think this is a remarkable time to be doing people work
Built by People: The Future of People
Topics covered
Organizations and entities mentioned
Full transcript
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