HR’s role in AI transformation: A conversation with Andrew Pek, CEO of Amiko

Welcome to the Heidrick & Struggles Leadership Podcast. Heidrick is the premier global provider of diversified solutions across senior level executive search, leadership assessment and development, team and organizational effectiveness, and culture-shaping. Every day we speak with leaders around the world about how they're meeting rising expectations and managing through volatile times, thinking about individual leaders, teams, organizations, and society. Thank you for joining the conversation.

Yahya Khan: Hello, I'm Yahya Khan, principal at Heidrick & Struggles, focused on interim solutions and a member of the Industrial and Healthcare and Life Sciences practices. Today, I'm joined by Andrew Pek, founder and CEO of Amiko, and a member of our interim talent network. Amiko is an AI-enabled leadership and workforce enablement platform.

As well as being CEO, Andrew is also an enterprise transformation executive, entrepreneur, and author with more than three decades of experience helping global organizations navigate periods of strategic, organizational, and technological disruption. Earlier in his career, he served as a partner at Accenture, Mercer, and Korn Ferry, and has held executive leadership responsibility for strategy, innovation, and organizational transformation at Pfizer Consumer Healthcare. Andrew, welcome. It's a real pleasure to have you with us. 

Andrew Pek: Great to be here, Yahya. Thank you for having me. 

Yahya Khan: So, Andrew, you've spent your career helping other leaders think differently and challenge their assumptions. Who or what has challenged your own thinking most profoundly, and how has that shaped the leader and the person you are today?

Andrew Pek: That's a great question, Yahya. The obvious answer is, of course, my parents, but I don't think I could point to just one person. I've been very fortunate throughout my career to work with extraordinary mentors, authors, colleagues, clients, and now students who have challenged the way that I think. But perhaps the biggest lesson I've learned is that being a good advisor or leader isn't about being the smartest person in the room or even having the answer.

It's about remaining curious enough to question your own assumptions and be willing to learn from people who see the world differently than you do. So, in other words, some of my greatest learning has come from people who disagreed with me or situations where something didn't work the way I expected.

That shaped me enormously, and I've become more comfortable saying, "I don't know. Let's think about it." And in many ways, that's part of what ultimately led me to the idea of the thinking partner, where the best thinking often happens in dialogue rather than alone. 

Yahya Khan: Organizations are often viewing AI, in particular, as a technology initiative, but it is clear that success fundamentally requires an enterprise transformation. Why does that distinction matter, and what role should HR play in leading it? 

Andrew Pek: The distinction matters because technology, as you know, is only one part of what AI changes. AI changes work, it changes roles. It changes how decisions get made, what capabilities organizations need, how leaders lead, and potentially how the organization itself is designed.

So, for example, think about what happens when AI enters an organization. A financial analyst spends less time gathering and manipulating data, but more time interrogating the data or interpreting that, and that changes the work. An analyst's role begins to change that, and that changes the job. Leaders now have AI generating recommendations and scenarios.

That changes decision-making. So suddenly, judgment, curiosity and critical thinking become even more important, and that of course changes capabilities. In sum, if you think of AI primarily as just technology implementation, guess what? You probably get better technology. But if you treat it as an enterprise transformation, then you can build a better organization.

Yahya Khan: Andrew, you've spent much of your career advising leaders on innovation and transformation, including our clients. As AI changes how we work and make those decisions, what do you believe is fundamentally changing about what it means to be an effective leader? 

Andrew Pek: Well, I think we're moving from a world where leaders were often, at one point, valued for what they knew to where they're increasingly going to be valued for the quality of their decision-making and their judgment.

AI is democratizing access to knowledge, expertise, and analytical capability. So, the leader doesn't necessarily differentiate themselves by having more information than everyone else, but instead it becomes important for the leader to say, "Am I asking the right questions? Can I distinguish a signal from noise? Can I challenge my own set of assumptions? And can I exercise judgment when the answer isn't obvious? Can I bring people together around meaning and direction?" That's one of the unique paradoxes of AI. The more capable the technology becomes, the more valuable, I believe, human capabilities become. So, for example, like as I mentioned before, curiosity, judgment, reflection, creativity, imagination, empathy, and courage are some of the things that become even more important.

Yahya Khan: Well, I'm sure that's reassuring to all our listeners as well who worry about AI taking their positions and careers. But to your point, fundamentally, the human element is very important in leadership. Historically, transformation initiatives were often led by technology or operations. What makes HR uniquely positioned to lead enterprise transformation today?

Andrew Pek: I really love this question, and I might slightly reframe it by saying that I'm not sure if any one function should lead enterprise transformation alone. That said, I think HR has a unique opportunity to become more central to it. Every major transformation becomes a capability question. What work needs to be done differently?

What skills do we need? What roles change? How should teams be organized, how should decisions get made, and what culture will enable that? These are deeply human and organizational questions. So, I think the opportunity for HR is to move beyond being just responsible for the people side of transformation and become the architect of organization capability.

Yahya Khan: To that end, Andrew, we've seen many organizations focus entirely on implementing AI tools. How can HR help leaders focus instead on building an organization that is adaptable, resilient, and ready for continuous change? 

Andrew Pek: I love that as well. The operative word that you use, Yahya, is continuous change. One of the fundamental shifts is recognizing that transformation isn't just an event.

The old model was: diagnose, design, implement, train, and then repeat that. But AI is evolving so rapidly that it's increasingly important to sense what's changing and to create a culture where you're continuously learning, experimenting, adapting, and evolving it. So HR, in some respects, if I may use this metaphor, is the ultimate sort of fitness instructor, you know, helping the organization build muscle, creating continuous learning rather than episodic training.

They're there to encourage experimentation, developing new skills, new conditions by which the organization can adapt, evolve, and get better at being better. I really see a tremendous opportunity for HR to be that ultimate coach and fitness instructor. 

Yahya Khan: You describe the importance of having a thinking partner who challenges assumptions rather than simply providing answers.

What does a great thinking partner look like, and why is that relationship particularly important for senior executives? 

Andrew Pek: A thinking partner will challenge those assumptions, introduce also new perspectives, and in doing so, will create a level of trust and openness that even includes sometimes things I don't want to hear. They're honest with me, and I think that's important for senior executives today because ironically, the more senior you become, sometimes, as you know, it's hard to find people who genuinely challenge you. People may defer to your authority or tell you what you want to hear. And so, what fascinates me about AI, and ultimately led me to write The Thinking Partner, was the possibility that AI could become another form of thinking partner, not to replace human thinking partners, but to augment the experience, to challenge how I reflect my own assumptions, my alternatives, to really sort of expand my awareness in that capacity.

So, what AI can do for us is more interested in asking what can AI help us become? 

Yahya Khan: And as we look at management teams, how should CEOs, CHROs, and people leaders partner differently to ensure transformation is driven by people and leadership, and not just the technology? 

Andrew Pek: Well, you know, I've been around the block for some time, and this has been a ultimate sort of question is how does HR and CHROs get a seat at the table?

This has been always an ongoing conversation. And so, I think the CEO, as well as the CHRO, need to move the conversation upstream, meaning too often strategy and technology decisions get made, but then HR is brought in afterwards, and the HR is tasked with, all right, how do we get people ready for these respective changes?

What I would suggest, and what I'd rather see in those organizations who are more progressive in their thinking, is they will involve the CHRO or the CEO and the senior team asking together from the beginning, and you'll hear this obviously a theme of mine, is what organization are we trying to become? What work would change? What new capabilities will help differentiate us to help us be more competitive? And then what should humans do and what should machines do, and how will leadership need to change, and how do we bring people with us? So, the AI question becomes the direct result of asking those preceding questions.

Becoming becomes part of the CHRO, CEO, and the senior team's dialogue first, and then how does AI support that? 

Yahya Khan: Can you talk to us about what leadership capabilities you believe will become most important over the next five years, and what role should HR play in both identifying and developing those capabilities?

Andrew Pek: Yeah. What's interesting about this, in this world of AI, there is some obvious concern that I want to address, the elephant in the room. People are concerned and fear that AI will replace them. I think, ironically, human qualities such as curiosity, reflection, judgment, imagination, empathy, and courage become increasingly more important.

What's interesting about those things is what's changing is their value in a world where machines are obviously increasingly adept at providing information, analysis, and even recommendations. But knowing something may become less differentiating. What's more important to, again, sort of punctuate the question you ask is, what matters in terms of competencies for the human being?

Again, imagination, judgment, the quality of the decisions that we make based on the information that AI and other machine learning can provide. So, I think the differentiation is those human qualities that I spoke about that are central to not only the leaders in the organization, but the workforce in general.

Yahya Khan: If you were advising a CEO embarking on a major enterprise transformation today, what is the one thing you would tell them not to overlook about the role of HR? 

Andrew Pek: Well, I'd say, hey, don't wait until you've designed the transformation to bring your CHRO into the conversation. In other words, Yahya, if you're fundamentally changing technology, work, operating models or strategy, you're also changing the organization.

Again, you're changing what people do, how decisions get made, what capabilities matter, and how leaders and potentially what your culture needs to become. So don't ask HR simply to manage the people side of transformation. As you know, we work together on projects where the leaders we work with understood that clearly, that bringing in CHROs and the HR team to the table early will help them design the organization they are trying to become.

Because ultimately, technology can enable transformation, but people and leaders must activate it and make it real. 

Yahya Khan: Fantastic. Andrew, thank you for making the time to speak with us today. 

Andrew Pek: Thanks for having me. I had fun.

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About the Interviewer

Yahya Khan (ykhan@heidrick.com) is a principal and member of the Industrial and Healthcare & Life Science practices; he is based in the Houston office.