Twenty-five years ago, Nickle LaMoreaux landed an HR internship position at IBM while studying industrial relations at Cornell University; the following year, she was offered a role as a recruiting and talent manager. At the time, she envisioned the gig as a “quick stop” in HR, to get her professional feet wet and make some money before starting law school.
Today, she sits in the CHRO office of the tech giant, overseeing the entire global people operations for the more than 250,000-person IBM workforce. This week, LaMoreaux was named 2024 HR Executive of the Year by leading media outlet HR Executive, which has recognized the top leader in the function annually since 1989. The award, which is judged by HR experts and former winners, recognizes an HR leader’s outstanding and strategic contributions to their organization and the HR field as a whole.
Judge Peter Fasolo, CHRO of Johnson & Johnson and the 2022 HR Executive of the Year, calls LaMoreaux a “role model for our profession.”
However, it’s not a profession she originally had in her sights.
“I did not intend to make HR a career—and I certainly did not intend to be CHRO,” laughs LaMoreaux, HR Executive’s 2024 HR Executive of the Year. “People ask, ‘Well then, what happened?’ Honestly, it’s what has kept me going for the last 25 years: There was just always one more interesting piece of work around the corner.”
That work has elevated her through nearly a dozen HR roles at IBM, as she dove into recruiting, learning, executive compensation and other areas of the function, ultimately being tapped for the top HR role in the summer of 2020.
The last four years have brought immense transformation to the field of HR. At IBM, LaMoreaux is largely credited with not only leading the change within her function but with modeling innovation for the entire enterprise—particularly when it comes to the two words that are coming to define modern HR operational excellence: artificial intelligence.
Becoming ‘Client Zero’
IBM set off on its AI in HR journey in 2017.
“I’d love to tell you that when we started, we saw where we would be sitting here in 2024 and this was a big strategic decision—but it wasn’t like that at all,” LaMoreaux says. Instead, the impetus was necessity, as a confluence of challenges was coming together to create demand for a new solution.
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HR’s compliance work was growing increasingly complex because of new laws and regulations—but the HR team was struggling to keep up with those shifts because budgetary demands prevented them from increasing headcount. Meanwhile, consumers were coming to rely on apps offering customization and convenience—from Uber to GrubHub—and employees were bringing those expectations to work.
“But in 2017, many of us entered workplaces that were very different,” says LaMoreaux, one of HR Executive‘s Top 100 HR Tech Influencers for the past three years. “We were in systems that required 17 click-throughs, and we even had some processes that still required pen and paper. Our employees were demanding more delightful experiences—but that required money and simplification, and in the environment we were in, that didn’t reconcile.”
That turned the conversation to the potential of artificial intelligence. Early on, however, LaMoreaux says, HR leadership agreed: IBM’s AI in HR journey wasn’t just going to be about tapping the tech to help free up a little investment.
“We knew it was going to require us to really do work differently in HR,” she says.
The team rolled out AskHR, an HR digital assistant, in 2017, setting off HR’s journey as IBM’s Client Zero—the function where AI innovation would germinate and grow throughout the company.
Since LaMoreaux took the reins of HR, she has catapulted IBM’s reliance on AskHR while also leading the integration of 80 automations into the HR function’s work—generating significant operational savings while boosting productivity, efficiency and engagement.
The numbers tell the story: In 2023, employees interacted with AskHR more than 10 million times, and the assistant handled 765,000 transactions, successfully fielding 94% of the questions posed to it and transferring the more complex issues to human HR professionals. The year before AskHR was rolled out, those HR professionals were tasked with handling more than 1.5 million employee questions.
Meanwhile, IBM’s AI digital assistant HiRo, which is streamlining promotion processes, saved the organization’s consulting managers 50,000 hours just last year.
“There’s a lot of narrative about how AI is reducing the value of work or taking the human element away. But what we’re finding is that AI is taking parts of the job away that are the rote, mundane pieces of the work,” LaMoreaux says. “It’s then leaving the higher-value work that people are more engaged in while allowing us to make sure we have enough human capacity to tackle the issues that require human intervention.”
Jumpstarting innovation with behavior change
While the outcomes of IBM’s integration of AI into HR have yielded significant results, those successes were hard-fought.
When AskHR debuted, “nobody used it,” LaMoreaux acknowledges. Why would they, she notes, when they could just shoot a quick email, pick up the phone or walk down the hall and ask an HR generalist or their HR partner?
“The technology is amazing, and it’s even more amazing now than it was back then—but successful adoption of AI has little to do with the technology and everything to do with behavior change,” she says.
To kickstart that change, in early 2018, IBM shifted all first-line managers from having dedicated HR partners to being supported by AskHR, with a team of human HR partners available for more complex issues. The change happened “nearly overnight,” she says, noting it was a “dramatic shift” but one that was necessary to force the start of behavior change. Last year, under LaMoreaux’s leadership, IBM made the same shift for 80% of its upline managers, with AskHR now serving as HR’s front line for 27,000 managers and leaders worldwide.
It was a decision, she says, that was initially met with a healthy amount of skepticism. However, the operating model transformation has led to quicker, easier access to information and resources—for instance, shrinking the amount of time it takes to generate an employee verification letter from three days to less than two minutes. The shift in the HR operating model has allowed HR to successfully solve more than 40,000 complex cases for upline managers in the last year—two-thirds of them within two days.
The new model garnered an NPS of +94 and skyrocketed the customer satisfaction score from +19 to +74. Manager adoption for AskHR now stands at 97%, with executive adoption at 94%.
AI: Making HR’s work more human
While the IBM workforce has embraced the digitization of its HR experience, that shift meant HR professionals needed to embrace new ways of working as well.
Because of that, HR has leaned heavily into the development of its own staff. During LaMoreaux’s tenure as CHRO, IBM’s HR professionals have earned more than 4,500 digital badges related to AI skills, and just last year, the HR staff averaged more than double the 40 learning hours per person required by the organization.
In the last few years, IBM’s HR professionals have improved their skills by two entire salary band levels, collectively, LaMoreaux says.
While AI has been a focus of skills development for HR, the learning is also geared toward preparing HR professionals for evolving career paths at IBM.
“We’ve built career paths now knowing that our workflows have an AI element to them. [We’ve had to consider,] What are the new career paths that exist for HR? How do you learn skills? How do you rotate?” LaMoreaux says. “This has been particularly helpful for entry-level hires who, maybe in the past, would have come into HR jobs that are now being done by AI.”
That HR is now focusing on higher-level work is fueling a more attractive employee experience; LaMoreaux says HR engagement is an at “all-time high.”
“The more AI we’ve infused, it’s not making people feel disconnected about the work or disenfranchised. They’re doing higher-value work—and they’re empowered to decide where it goes.”
Eliminate, simplify, automate—a blueprint for AI integration
When IBM started its Client Zero journey with HR, strategic decisions about AI integration were largely handed down to HR team members by senior HR leadership. Now, LaMoreaux says, leadership is asking for ideas from the bottom up.
Professionals in payroll or learning, for instance, may see a gap in workflows where AI could assist and they can propose a new avenue for the tech. Those ideas are funneled into an intake channel evaluated by a small transformation team comprised of members from the CIO and HR Services teams, who represent functions including Data and AI, Workforce Science, HR Transformation and more.
“It’s helped with change fatigue because this is not being done to the organization—the organization is doing it to itself,” LaMoreaux says. “It’s getting people very excited. Those who know the work best are in control of transforming it.”
When pitching an idea, HR professionals are asked to build a business case for incorporating AI, illustrating the potential value to the HR function or organization at large: “Is it cost savings, speed, improved experience, better compliance?” LaMoreaux says.
A guiding mantra of LaMoreaux—“Eliminate, simplify, automate”—has come to define the AI integration decision-making processes. To build an effective business case for AI, team members must first illustrate why a certain policy or process needs to exist at all; with an organization the size and age of IBM, LaMoreaux says, it’s common for inefficient ways of working to “build up” over time.
“People are getting so enamored with AI and automation that they want to do it for everything,” she says. “We often say in HR, ‘If you’ve got a bad process or experience, automating it isn’t going to make it better.’ ”
Those proposing an AI use case are also asked to demonstrate the value of simplifying the process and to show how automation can improve business outcomes.
It’s a strategy that has helped IBM’s HR team effectively target AI tools for clunky, outdated processes. For instance, the organization traditionally had 26 types of leave of absence for U.S. employees—including one labeled “training for the Olympics.”
“IBMers are pretty amazing people but do we need a whole policy, documentation process and code in our HRIS that is that specific? Probably not,” LaMoreaux says. As the team automated leave workflows, it simplified those 26 categories down to one.
Similarly, salary increases often needed multiple approvals—from managers, HR, finance, for instance. Using the “eliminate, simplify, automate” approach, IBM has whittled many off-cycle salary increase processes down to just two levels of management approval, often without HR signoff.
The “eliminate, simplify, automate” strategy also has helped HR prioritize where it’s headed next with AI, LaMoreaux adds. Beyond HiRO and AskHR, recent AI rollouts have included a tool to help create job requisitions and another to facilitate the performance management process.
As far as the company has come with AI in HR, LaMoreaux believes the function has “only just scratched the surface.”
A ‘bite-sized’ approach to AI integration
Looking ahead, AskHR will become fully supported by generative AI in the coming months—it’s currently built on a mix of traditional and gen AI. As of now, IBM doesn’t use AI to prioritize or select candidates, or for career coaching—two areas LaMoreaux says her team is closely watching.
The organization is integrating AI into HR in a “building block”-type fashion, a departure from tech projects of the past: multi-million-dollar, multiple-year tech transformations of an HRIS or talent acquisition platform, for example, she notes.
“Rather than unveiling the whole house after working on it for three years, what you’re doing now [with AI] is putting in one building block at a time,” she says.
It’s a mindset they’re encouraging among clients as well. Some are starting their AI journey solely focusing on AI-generated employment-verification letters, for instance, with plans to eventually build in an AI assistant for benefits enrollment or another for learning enrollment.
This bite-sized approach allows for faster integration of AI and encourages experimentation—if one building block isn’t getting the reception that’s anticipated, it can be easily removed.
“The idea of this all coming together in smaller pieces,” LaMoreaux says, “is going to make it easier for HR professionals to get started, to test and to make sure it’s working before you put in the next block.”
It’s also more cost-effective than large tech implementations. Most of IBM’s recent AI innovation has been self-funded by HR—which has driven a 40% reduction in its operating budget since LaMoreaux became CHRO four years ago.
In a letter supporting LaMoreaux’s nomination for HR Executive of the Year, IBM Chairman and CEO Arvind Krishna called this an “impressive feat for a non-revenue-generating business unit. That speaks to Nickle’s ingenuity, strategic insight, vision and innovation.”
Defining leadership at Big Blue, and beyond
LaMoreaux’s capacity for strategic thinking was tested from the start of her CHRO tenure, as she took over the function in the still-early days of the COVID pandemic. And within her first year in the role, she was tasked with handling the entire people strategy of the spinoff of Kyndryl, IBM’s managed infrastructure services function—which was stood up as its own company with about 100,000 employees in 2021.
“Her leadership in managing this complex transition was instrumental, demonstrating her capability to handle large-scale organizational changes with precision and care,” Krishna says. “Nickle’s efforts ensured that both IBM and Kyndryl were positioned for future success, reflecting her strategic insight and operational excellence.”
The Kyndryl spinoff provided several learnings that have gone on to shape her approach to HR leadership, LaMoreaux says.
One, it’s critical to anchor people decisions to business strategy. Questions like, “Why are we doing this in the first place?” and “How will this make the business successful going forward?” provide good grounding for decision-making, LaMoreaux says.
Prioritizing progress over perfection, she adds, can speed innovation; however, no pursuit of innovation can ignore the needs of the workforce.
“This new company was only going to be successful if the employees were successful, so we had to keep them at the center of every decision we made—from how we approached education or talent acquisition to how we structured compensation.”
These are among the best practices LaMoreaux shares with HR peers through her extensive industry experience, which lately has emphasized IBM’s AI integration work for HR. She is a frequent conference speaker and has worked directly with fellow HR executives—recently engaging with more than 300 peers through roundtables and one-on-one sessions.
Fasolo calls LaMoreaux the “consummate thought leader and collaborator,” noting she is on his “speed dial” whenever he is looking for a perspective on AI, the impact of tech on the people agenda or the future of HR.
“IBM and J&J have benchmarked several times,” he says. “This is the hallmark of advancing our profession. Everybody lifts up. Both organizations get better. We learn from each other along the way and we all have one goal in mind—to optimally support our employees’ health, wellbeing and development.”
While LaMoreaux says some of that collaborative work is driven by her commitment to being a “steward of IBM,” even more importantly, she feels a responsibility to give back to the HR profession. And today, that means using IBM’s experience to guide the profession through a defining time.
“AI is a transformative technology—as transformative as the internet—and I don’t want HR professionals to be scared of it,” she says. “I’m not a technologist by any stretch of the imagination, so if I can learn it, other people can learn it as well.”
HR, in particular, she says, is in a position to responsibly and successfully navigate the “natural tensions” of welcoming AI into a workplace. Part of an organization may want to blindly implement AI without proper attention to ethics or workflows, while the other part will want to take a more conservative approach—which, she says, could leave the organization behind competitors.
“HR sits at this unique intersection of understanding those points of view but also being able to find a path forward,” she says. “We’ve all got to step up to that challenge. That’s one of the reasons why I want to be out there talking about this as much as I can.”
That commitment to evolving through learning traces its roots to LaMoreaux’s upbringing: She was raised in a small town north of Pittsburgh, with parents who worked in social work and steel piping, as well as started their own small business.
“I was an HR professional by training and I’ve now learned so much about AI and it was because of that idea of continuous learning and hard work, which was instilled by them,” she says.
Today, her approach to HR leadership is also informed by her family: a husband and three kids.
“In this new age around employee voice and employee feedback, being a mom of teenagers,” she laughs, “has taught me how to really cope with voice and feedback.”
The post Innovation at IBM: Announcing the 2024 HR Executive of the Year appeared first on HR Executive.