Good Morning, HR

In episode 266, Coffey talks with Brandon Sammut about how Zapier built its AI transformation from the inside out — and what HR leaders can learn from a fully remote, AI-native company that decided people and AI strategy belong in the same hands. 
 
They discuss the evolution of the Chief People Officer role into a Chief People and AI Transformation Officer and why HR is uniquely positioned to lead organizational transformation; AI transformation as one instance of organizational transformation, and why culture health and clarity of mission matter more than tool selection; Zapier's March 2023 "AI code red" as a high-contrast leadership communication strategy that didn't wait for perfect clarity before naming urgency; the importance of keeping accountability for business outcomes where it belongs while using a cross-functional Center of Excellence to provide enablement and remove friction; individual contributor identity and energy management challenges when AI eliminates tasks that provided meaning or cognitive reprieve; Zapier's customer support transformation — 50% faster resolution, higher satisfaction scores, 30-point employee engagement gains, and two entirely new types of work created from recovered human time; why AI-inflated application volume and homogenized resumes are making recruiting harder even as AI automates more of the process; Zapier's reference-heavy hiring model, which targets 50% of candidate signal from references including back-channel outreach, to counter AI-generated application fraud; the AI Fluency Framework — four competencies including strategy, growth mindset, builder skills, and accountability — used for both hiring and internal development; and why cross-person coordination is declining as individuals become more empowered, while human skills like psychological safety, feedback, and clarity become more important, not less. 
 
More information about Zapier’s AI fluency framework is available at: https://zapier.com/blog/raising-ai-fluency-bar-in-hiring/ 
 
For HR teams who discuss this podcast in their team meetings, we've created a discussion starter PDF to help guide your conversation. Download it here https://goodmorninghr.com/EP266 
 
Good Morning, HR is brought to you by Imperative—Bulletproof Background Checks. For more information about our commitment to quality and excellent customer service, visit us at https://imperativeinfo.com.  
 
If you are an HRCI or SHRM-certified professional, this episode of Good Morning, HR has been pre-approved for half a recertification credit. To obtain the recertification information for this episode, visit https://goodmorninghr.com.  
 
About our Guest: 
 
brandon is the Chief People & AI Transformation Officer at Zapier—an AI orchestration platform powered by a fully-remote team across 40+ countries. Brandon specializes in building high-performing teams through talent and technology. He brings a diverse background spanning business development, finance, talent acquisition, talent development, education, and venture capital. 
Brandon Sammut is the Chief People & AI Transformation Officer at Zapier—an AI orchestration platform powered by a fully-remote team across 40+ countries. Brandon specializes in building high-performing teams through talent and technology. He brings a diverse background spanning business development, finance, talent acquisition, talent development, education, and venture capital. 
 
Brandon can be reached at  
 
LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/brandon-sammut-8147b76/  
Website https://zapier.com/blog/author/brandon-sammut/  
 
About Mike Coffey: 
 
Mike Coffey is an entrepreneur, licensed private investigator, business strategist, HR consultant, and registered yoga teacher. 
In 1999, he founded Imperative, a background investigations and due diligence firm helping risk-averse clients make well-informed decisions about the people they involve in their business. 
Imperative delivers in-depth employment background investigations, know-your-customer and anti-money laundering compliance, and due diligence investigations to more than 300 risk-averse corporate clients across the US, and, through its PFC Caregiver & Household Screening brand, many more private estates, family offices, and personal service agencies. 
Imperative has been named a Best Places to Work, the Texas Association of Business’ small business of the year, and is accredited by the Professional Background Screening Association.  
Mike shares his insight from 25+ years of HR-entrepreneurship on the Good Morning, HR podcast, where each week he talks to business leaders about bringing people together to create value for customers, shareholders, and community. 
Mike has been recognized as an Entrepreneur of Excellence by FW, Inc. and has twice been recognized as the North Texas HR Professional of the Year.  
Mike serves as a board member of a number of organizations, including the Texas State Council, where he serves Texas’ 31 SHRM chapters as State Director-Elect; Workforce Solutions for Tarrant County; the Texas Association of Business; and the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce, where he is chair of the Talent Committee. 
Mike is a certified Senior Professional in Human Resources (SPHR) through the HR Certification Institute and a SHRM Senior Certified Professional (SHRM-SCP). He is also a Yoga Alliance registered yoga teacher (RYT-200) and teaches multiple times each week. 
Mike and his very patient wife of 29 years are empty nesters in Fort Worth.  
 
Learning Objectives:
Explain why organizational culture health and mission clarity are more predictive of AI transformation success than tool selection or governance framework design. 
Apply the lesson of Zapier's customer support transformation to identify how recovered human time from AI automation can be reinvested in higher-value work rather than defaulting to headcount reduction. 
Evaluate the four competencies of Zapier's AI Fluency Framework — strategy, growth mindset, builder skills, and accountability — and assess how each applies to building an AI-ready workforce.

In episode 265, Coffey talks with John Singleton about HR's long-standing identity crisis, the strategic skills the profession must develop to stay relevant, and how AI is reshaping both the work of HR and the way work itself gets done. 
 
They discuss HR's decades-long reputation as a bureaucratic gatekeeper — from the 1996 Fortune critique through the 2025 revisit of "Why We Hate HR" — and what it means to function instead as a strategic confidant and ethical agent; the DEI whiplash as a case study in HR failing to provide compliant, data-grounded counsel when it mattered most; using PESTEL and SWOT analysis to advise on business expansion decisions including workforce availability and market fit; financial literacy as a critical and underdeveloped skill for HR professionals, including reading P&L statements and linking people decisions to EBITDA; the dangers of AI-powered auto-application tools flooding recruiting pipelines with unvetted, uninterested candidates; why AI should not replace human judgment in interviewing, candidate evaluation, and culture-fit assessment; the growing requirement for HR practitioners to understand AI governance, prompt literacy, output verification, and state-level AI employment legislation; the individual responsibility of HR professionals to own their own continuous learning when employers won't fund it; HR's emerging role as architect of human-AI workflow integration in partnership with IT and operations; and HR's internal identity crisis as the profession's biggest obstacle to earning the strategic credibility it seeks. 
 
For HR teams who discuss this podcast in their team meetings, we've created a discussion starter PDF to help guide your conversation. Download it here https://goodmorninghr.com/EP265 
 
Good Morning, HR is brought to you by Imperative—Bulletproof Background Checks. For more information about our commitment to quality and excellent customer service, visit us at https://imperativeinfo.com.  
 
If you are an HRCI or SHRM-certified professional, this episode of Good Morning, HR has been pre-approved for half a recertification credit. To obtain the recertification information for this episode, visit https://goodmorninghr.com.  
 
About our Guest: 
 
John Singleton, SHRM-CP, is a fractional HR partner based in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, working 1-on-1 with Texas founders, business owners, and leadership teams on the people side of building and scaling. With 16+ years of HR leadership experience — including senior roles at Tata Consultancy Services, 
Coforge, and Mastek — John brings pattern recognition, strategic judgment, and a trusted vendor network to every engagement. His approach goes beyond handbooks and compliance. He serves as a confidante and strategic sounding board for the harder conversations founders face — the ones that don't fit neatly into an HR playbook. Whether it's navigating the compliance cliff at 50 employees, coaching a leadership team through a difficult hire, or being the calm voice on the phone when something unexpected lands, John's role is to be the person in the room when it matters most. Based in Waxahachie, TX, John founded Quick HR Solutions to give small and mid-sized Texas businesses access to senior-level HR partnership without the cost of a full-time hire. 
 
John Singleton can be reached at  
 
Your Website: www.quickhrtx.com  
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnsingleton720  
 
About Mike Coffey: 
 
Mike Coffey is an entrepreneur, licensed private investigator, business strategist, HR consultant, and registered yoga teacher. 
In 1999, he founded Imperative, a background investigations and due diligence firm helping risk-averse clients make well-informed decisions about the people they involve in their business. 
Imperative delivers in-depth employment background investigations, know-your-customer and anti-money laundering compliance, and due diligence investigations to more than 300 risk-averse corporate clients across the US, and, through its PFC Caregiver & Household Screening brand, many more private estates, family offices, and personal service agencies. 
Imperative has been named a Best Places to Work, the Texas Association of Business’ small business of the year, and is accredited by the Professional Background Screening Association.  
Mike shares his insight from 25+ years of HR-entrepreneurship on the Good Morning, HR podcast, where each week he talks to business leaders about bringing people together to create value for customers, shareholders, and community. 
Mike has been recognized as an Entrepreneur of Excellence by FW, Inc. and has twice been recognized as the North Texas HR Professional of the Year.  
Mike serves as a board member of a number of organizations, including the Texas State Council, where he serves Texas’ 31 SHRM chapters as State Director-Elect; Workforce Solutions for Tarrant County; the Texas Association of Business; and the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce, where he is chair of the Talent Committee. 
Mike is a certified Senior Professional in Human Resources (SPHR) through the HR Certification Institute and a SHRM Senior Certified Professional (SHRM-SCP). He is also a Yoga Alliance registered yoga teacher (RYT-200) and teaches multiple times each week. 
Mike and his very patient wife of 29 years are empty nesters in Fort Worth.  
Learning Objectives: 
Distinguish between HR as compliance gatekeeper and HR as strategic business partner, and identify the advisory behaviors — including data-driven counsel, financial fluency, and risk-option framing — that define the latter. 
Evaluate the compliance and reputational risks of AI-assisted recruiting tools, including auto-application platforms and resume-scanning systems, and articulate the human judgment elements those tools cannot replicate. 
Identify the technical, financial, and interpersonal skill sets HR practitioners must proactively develop to remain relevant as AI eliminates transactional HR work and expands the profession's strategic scope.

In episode 264, Coffey talks with Timothy State about the science of workforce wellbeing, why middle managers are the most at-risk population right now, and how AI-powered life quality companions are transforming the way organizations understand and support thriving at scale. 
 
They discuss the five core dimensions of human wellbeing — physical and mental health, relationships, security, and meaning and purpose — and why employer influence on all of them is both a business and social responsibility; EAP underutilization and the limits of traditional point-solution approaches to employee wellness investment; the predictive power of the question "does my leader care about my wellbeing?" on retention and workforce outcomes; team-level wellbeing contagion and how one individual's improvement reliably lifts the whole team over time; middle managers as the most burned-out and at-risk population in today's workforce; the perverse hiring incentives created when leaders are held accountable for individual wellbeing outcomes rather than demonstrated care behaviors; the difference between using AI to extract efficiency from existing work versus using AI to elevate the human system itself and generate human-centered value; cognitive overload as an unintended consequence of AI-driven task elimination, including the loss of low-complexity recovery work; Altius's AI life quality companion "Alti" — its nine wellbeing dimensions, 750-plus KPIs, perpetual memory, and 96% user satisfaction rate across 26 countries; and the radical privacy architecture required for employer-sponsored AI wellbeing tools to earn employee trust and avoid discriminatory misuse of health data. 
 
For HR teams who discuss this podcast in their team meetings, we've created a discussion starter PDF to help guide your conversation. Download it here https://goodmorninghr.com/EP264 
 
Good Morning, HR is brought to you by Imperative—Bulletproof Background Checks. For more information about our commitment to quality and excellent customer service, visit us at https://imperativeinfo.com.  
 
If you are an HRCI or SHRM-certified professional, this episode of Good Morning, HR has been pre-approved for half a recertification credit. To obtain the recertification information for this episode, visit https://goodmorninghr.com.  
 
About our Guest: 
 
Timothy State is a people strategist, business leader, and human wellbeing innovator with 25 years’ experience leading large-scale workforce transformation. He led Humana to global recognition for improving workforce well-being. 
 
Tim is an active advisor to Harvard Human Flourishing / SHINE, a founding member of Center for Positive Organization, chaired the Wellbeing and Workforce Strategy Institute and several other leading bodies. 
 
In 2025, Tim founded Altius, an AI-native human optimization company helping businesses and healthcare systems thrive via regenerative AI technologies and advanced human advising. He institutionalizes human well-being through data, social infrastructure, and leadership transformation. 
 
Tim can be reached at: 
 
Your website: https://www.altiusco.com/  
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/altiuswellbeing/  
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/altiuswellbeing/  
Twitter/X: https://x.com/AltiusWellbeing  
  
About Mike Coffey: 
 
Mike Coffey is an entrepreneur, licensed private investigator, business strategist, HR consultant, and registered yoga teacher. 
In 1999, he founded Imperative, a background investigations and due diligence firm helping risk-averse clients make well-informed decisions about the people they involve in their business. 
Imperative delivers in-depth employment background investigations, know-your-customer and anti-money laundering compliance, and due diligence investigations to more than 300 risk-averse corporate clients across the US, and, through its PFC Caregiver & Household Screening brand, many more private estates, family offices, and personal service agencies. 
Imperative has been named a Best Places to Work, the Texas Association of Business’ small business of the year, and is accredited by the Professional Background Screening Association.  
Mike shares his insight from 25+ years of HR-entrepreneurship on the Good Morning, HR podcast, where each week he talks to business leaders about bringing people together to create value for customers, shareholders, and community. 
Mike has been recognized as an Entrepreneur of Excellence by FW, Inc. and has twice been recognized as the North Texas HR Professional of the Year.  
Mike serves as a board member of a number of organizations, including the Texas State Council, where he serves Texas’ 31 SHRM chapters as State Director-Elect; Workforce Solutions for Tarrant County; the Texas Association of Business; and the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce, where he is chair of the Talent Committee. 
Mike is a certified Senior Professional in Human Resources (SPHR) through the HR Certification Institute and a SHRM Senior Certified Professional (SHRM-SCP). He is also a Yoga Alliance registered yoga teacher (RYT-200) and teaches multiple times each week. 

Mike and his very patient wife of 29 years are empty nesters in Fort Worth.  
Learning Objectives:  

Identify the five dimensions of employee wellbeing and explain how each one is influenced by organizational culture, leadership behavior, and employer-provided resources. 
Distinguish between holding leaders accountable for demonstrating care versus for employees' actual wellbeing outcomes, and describe why that distinction protects against perverse hiring incentives. 
Evaluate the design principles — human-centered AI, radical data privacy, proactive personalization, and clinical grounding — that determine whether an AI wellbeing tool will drive adoption or be ignored like traditional EAPs.

In episode 263, Coffey talks with Jimmy Taylor about the state of return-to-office, AI's real impact on workforce participation and HR practice, and why proactive networking and skills-based hiring matter more than ever. 
 
They discuss CBRE data showing peak office utilization reaching 80% and the factors driving successful return-to-office adoption; the hidden financial costs employees bear when returning to the office and how employers should account for that in compensation and goodwill; why early-career professionals stand to benefit most from in-person work through mentorship, visibility, and relationship-building; June jobs report softness, a 50-year-low labor participation rate, and competing explanations from immigration enforcement changes and AI displacement; AI as a net job creator over time, drawing parallels to fears about the internet eliminating insurance agents, real estate agents, and recruiters in the 1990s; the organizational opportunity and challenge of assessing AI skill gaps and reskilling loyal existing employees rather than replacing them with outside talent; Gen Z's surprising gaps in desktop computing and interpersonal skills despite their reputation for tech fluency; the case for replacing traditional resumes with tailored application processes and front-end skills assessments to filter out AI-generated candidate slop; professional association involvement as a proactive career resilience and network-building strategy before a job loss forces it; and Dallas HR's hands-on AI skills day designed to move HR professionals from AI curiosity to practical daily application. 
 
For listeners of Good Morning HR podcast, use 2026-CoffeyGMHR-100 promo code and take $100 off a HRSouthwest full conference registration at https://hrsouthwest.com.  
 
For HR teams who discuss this podcast in their team meetings, we've created a discussion starter PDF to help guide your conversation. Download it here https://goodmorninghr.com/EP263 
 
Good Morning, HR is brought to you by Imperative—Bulletproof Background Checks. For more information about our commitment to quality and excellent customer service, visit us at https://imperativeinfo.com.  
 
If you are an HRCI or SHRM-certified professional, this episode of Good Morning, HR has been pre-approved for half a recertification credit. To obtain the recertification information for this episode, visit https://goodmorninghr.com.  
 
About our Guest: 
 
Jimmy Taylor brings more than 20 years of business and HR leadership to DallasHR and the HR Southwest Conference. As Executive Director, Jimmy is responsible for leading strategic initiatives and overseeing the operations of the organization in the mission to advance and connect the regional HR community. 
 
Jimmy Taylor can be reached at  
 
Website: https://www.dallashr.org/  
Social: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jimmy-taylor-sphr-25b230/  
 
About Mike Coffey: 
 
Mike Coffey is an entrepreneur, licensed private investigator, business strategist, HR consultant, and registered yoga teacher. 
In 1999, he founded Imperative, a background investigations and due diligence firm helping risk-averse clients make well-informed decisions about the people they involve in their business. 
Imperative delivers in-depth employment background investigations, know-your-customer and anti-money laundering compliance, and due diligence investigations to more than 300 risk-averse corporate clients across the US, and, through its PFC Caregiver & Household Screening brand, many more private estates, family offices, and personal service agencies. 
Imperative has been named a Best Places to Work, the Texas Association of Business’ small business of the year, and is accredited by the Professional Background Screening Association.  
Mike shares his insight from 25+ years of HR-entrepreneurship on the Good Morning, HR podcast, where each week he talks to business leaders about bringing people together to create value for all stakeholders. 
Mike has been recognized as an Entrepreneur of Excellence by FW, Inc. and has twice been recognized as the North Texas HR Professional of the Year.  
Mike serves as a board member of a number of organizations, including the Texas State Council, where he serves Texas’ 30 SHRM chapters as State Director-Elect; Workforce Solutions for Tarrant County; the Texas Association of Business; and the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce, where he is chair of the Talent Committee. 
Mike is a certified Senior Professional in Human Resources (SPHR) through the HR Certification Institute and a SHRM Senior Certified Professional (SHRM-SCP). He is also a Yoga Alliance registered yoga teacher (RYT-200) and teaches multiple times each week. 
Mike and his very patient wife of 29 years are empty nesters in Fort Worth.  
Learning Objectives: 
Evaluate the real costs — financial, cultural, and competitive — that employees and employers each absorb when transitioning back to in-person or hybrid work arrangements. 
Assess an organization's current AI skill gaps and identify practical reskilling strategies that retain institutional knowledge while closing the gap with external market demands. 
Redesign the candidate screening process to replace resume-based review with structured application workflows and skills assessments that resist AI-generated submissions and reduce bias.

In episode 262, Coffey talks with Randy Anderson about the critical differentiators for human performers in an AI-driven workplace. 
 
They discuss AI's inevitability and its impact on task elimination versus full job replacement; the enduring human advantage in relational and interpersonal transactions that AI cannot replicate; emotional intelligence as a two-sided competency — reading others and maintaining self-awareness; nonverbal communication, microexpressions, and the limits of virtual interaction for building culture; the case for renaming "soft skills" as core skills or power skills given their foundational value; generational deficits in interpersonal development worsened by COVID, remote learning, and screen-based communication; how employers can purposefully structure learning tracks, mentoring, and stretch assignments to develop core skills alongside technical ones; top employer-identified skill gaps from a Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce talent survey — emotional intelligence, leadership, global mindset, and adaptability; AI-generated cover letters undermining candidate credibility, including a case where AI reproduced a hiring manager's own quotes; and time-windowed team skill development as a practical organizational strategy for building interpersonal competency at scale. 
 
For HR teams who discuss this podcast in their team meetings, we've created a discussion starter PDF to help guide your conversation. Download it here https://goodmorninghr.com/EP262 
 
Good Morning, HR is brought to you by Imperative—Bulletproof Background Checks. For more information about our commitment to quality and excellent customer service, visit us at https://imperativeinfo.com.  
 
If you are an HRCI or SHRM-certified professional, this episode of Good Morning, HR has been pre-approved for half a recertification credit. To obtain the recertification information for this episode, visit https://goodmorninghr.com.  
 
About our Guest: 
 
Randy Anderson is a self-declared mercenary in the war on employee disengagement and lost productivity. He spent 20 years in sales and management before founding E3 Professional Trainers in 2005. 
 
Throughout his career, he has had the opportunity to work with virtually every type and size of business in almost every industry.Now, through keynote presentations, customized training, and personal coaching, he delivers strategies to help individuals, teams, and entire organizations become more engaged in their work, better equipped to do it, and to feel empowered to experience greater fulfillment in life, both personallyand professionally. 
 
Randy Anderson can be reached at  
 
Your Website: e3professionaltrainers.com 
 
LinkedIn: Randy Anderson (https://www.linkedin.com/in/randyandersontrainer) 
 
Facebook: E3 Professional Trainers (https://www.facebook.com/E3ProfessionalTrainers/) 
 
Twitter/X: E3ProfTrainers (https://twitter.com/e3proftrainers) 
 
YouTube: E3 Professional Trainers (https://www.youtube.com/user/e3protrainers) 
 
About Mike Coffey: 
 
Mike Coffey is an entrepreneur, licensed private investigator, business strategist, HR consultant, and registered yoga teacher. 
In 1999, he founded Imperative, a background investigations and due diligence firm helping risk-averse clients make well-informed decisions about the people they involve in their business. 
Imperative delivers in-depth employment background investigations, know-your-customer and anti-money laundering compliance, and due diligence investigations to more than 300 risk-averse corporate clients across the US, and, through its PFC Caregiver & Household Screening brand, many more private estates, family offices, and personal service agencies. 
Imperative has been named a Best Places to Work, the Texas Association of Business’ small business of the year, and is accredited by the Professional Background Screening Association.  
Mike shares his insight from 25+ years of HR-entrepreneurship on the Good Morning, HR podcast, where each week he talks to business leaders about bringing people together to create value for customers, shareholders, and community. 
Mike has been recognized as an Entrepreneur of Excellence by FW, Inc. and has twice been recognized as the North Texas HR Professional of the Year.  
Mike serves as a board member of a number of organizations, including the Texas State Council, where he serves Texas’ 31 SHRM chapters as State Director-Elect; Workforce Solutions for Tarrant County; the Texas Association of Business; and the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce, where he is chair of the Talent Committee. 
Mike is a certified Senior Professional in Human Resources (SPHR) through the HR Certification Institute and a SHRM Senior Certified Professional (SHRM-SCP). He is also a Yoga Alliance registered yoga teacher (RYT-200) and teaches multiple times each week. 

Mike and his very patient wife of 29 years are empty nesters in Fort Worth.  
 
Learning Objectives:
Distinguish between the tasks AI will replace and the human relational capabilities that will remain differentiators for high performers. 
Define emotional intelligence as a dual competency — accurately reading others and maintaining self-awareness — and explain why both sides matter in workplace interactions. 
Design intentional learning tracks, mentoring programs, and structured assignments to develop core interpersonal skills in employees who lack natural exposure or prior coaching.