AI at ELMO: Putting people at the heart of transformation

AI is often framed as a threat. At ELMO, we see it as an opportunity to embed people at the centre of transformation, ensuring innovation is balanced with psychological safety, fairness, and culture.

When we approach AI, we view it through multiple lenses: what is the business problem we need to solve, how it impacts teams, and what it means for the individual. These questions helped to shape our AI vision and charter, ensuring it was human focused and meaningful.

Leadership and culture

No one has created a perfect AI adoption blueprint, nor should they. It must be localised through the lens of the EVP, culture and company values.

While we’re working in unchartered territory, what I do know for sure is that for AI adoption to truly work, leadership must set the tone. Our CEO, Joseph Lyons, has been a vocal advocate, openly sharing his own use of AI within the leadership team and empowering employees to experiment.

We deliberately paired HR and technology leaders to demonstrate that one team can’t work without the other. This collaboration includes co-design workshops, shared decision-making and continuous dialogue to ensure initiatives align with our vision and charter.

Culture sits at the core of sustainable AI adoption. When updating our company values, employees resisted introducing an AI-specific value. Instead, together we created ‘Reimagine What’s Possible’, a human-centred value reflecting innovation, aspiration and integration.

Supporting our values refinement, we have also launched a Community of Practice (CoP) group connecting AI advocates across regions and teams. It’s still early days but already it’s building momentum, strong participation and confidence.

Change management is key to successfully embedding AI. We designed initiatives to reduce fear, build confidence, and make AI part of our everyday work:

• Guardrails first: Data governance and security come first, for both our customers and our people. Our information security team sets clear boundaries that protect customer data, while creating a safe, ethical environment for employees to experiment.
  
  
• ELMO AI Training Series: We kicked off with Educate Day, a dedicated day where employees stepped out of day-to-day work to explore AI, hear real-world use cases from experts, and begin building practical skills. This event sparked an ongoing series of AI training opportunities, all tracked with metrics linking learning to real-world application and upskilling outcomes.
  
  
• AI Champions: Early adopters shared their experiences, reframing AI use as positive, not as “cheating.” Every employee now has at least one AI-related goal in their FY26 performance plan, and adoption rates are measured alongside Google Workspace usage.

Together, these initiatives have fostered curiosity, reduced resistance and normalised AI across our workforce. Saying “I used AI to help draft this email,” is seen as progress (as long as employees use the correct prompts), not a weakness.

Meet Nalah, the AI “team member”

A tangible example of our human-AI partnership in action is Nalah, an AI agent developed for a lead generation pilot, through the combined efforts of ELMO’s Sales Development Representative (SDR) team, our MLOps team and the People & Culture team.

Inspired by the strong and independent lioness ‘Nala’, our team nicknamed the AI agent Nalah. They co-created a logo and this personification has fostered a 'nurture to grow' mindset, where Nalah is treated not just as a tool, but as a valued team member. The team's ongoing investment in Nalah ensures it grows into a powerful, collaborative asset, directly contributing to our collective success.

That engagement is already paying off. Nalah enriches reports with more depth and complexity, helping SDRs develop stronger business acumen and confidence leveraging AI tools. Lead quality is improving, time is being freed for higher-value tasks, and early data shows call conversations becoming more substantive without sacrificing productivity.

This early data points to AI enhancing our people's capabilities rather than replacing their expertise, aligning perfectly to the human-AI partnership approach outlined in ELMO’s AI Charter.

Measuring success beyond ROI

As the Nalah case study demonstrates, AI adoption isn't only about hours saved. We regularly check employee sentiment and engagement to ensure psychological safety and sustainable implementation. Pulse surveys capture week-to-week experiences for those most involved, while initiatives like ELMO Educate Day achieved an eNPS of +50, demonstrating the value of learning and inspiration. We use insights to adapt programs and share progress.

Looking ahead: teams and the future of HR

I believe AI will fundamentally reshape how teams work. Automation may expand span of control (SOC) ratios from 1:5 to 1:10, and roles will increasingly blend functions, freeing people to focus on career-enriching work. Compensation models may evolve to reward those who work effectively with AI, creating more varied and engaging roles.

While some apprehension is natural, I see this as an energising opportunity for richer, more meaningful careers. For me, this journey is both professional and personal. I love innovation and questioning the status quo.

When I consider the HR function, I can’t imagine a world where it is replaced by AI. Instead, AI will be a partner that elevates HR’s strategic role. At ELMO, our own HR team acts as customer zero, testing and feeding back into product development and workflows before we go to market. This gives us richer insights through retrospectives and clear success metrics. For example, internal feedback on our Performance tool helped improve features, and using AI to streamline the review process drove a 100% completion rate, contributing to a strong performance culture and increased revenue.

This illustrates a wider point: as HR becomes more data-driven, human judgment remains essential. Recruitment is a clear example: some of the best hires come from ‘wild cards,’ and AI is not there yet on spotting that kind of talent. Ultimately, AI is not just about technology. It’s about people – their creativity, their curiosity, their confidence – and their ability to build a valued connection with their AI agent. And at ELMO, we’re not only preparing for the future of work, we’re actively shaping it, putting people at the heart of AI innovation.