EP 344 Lisa Buckingham on Hiring for the AI Era

Jim talks with Lisa Buckingham—a veteran HR leader at Vialto Partners, US Soccer, Lincoln Financial, and Thomson—about how the LLM era is reshaping hiring and job architecture, and how companies and workers can roll with the changes.

They discuss:

Jim and Lisa's shared history in natural language processing labs thirty years ago—and the contrast with today, where "everybody can be an AI expert"

The kind of people to hire in the age of LLMs: intellectual curiosity, learning agility, and willingness to work differently

"Trust the machine, but always validate"—the principle of embracing AI while maintaining human oversight

COVID as an accelerant of technology adoption

Workforce adoption realities at Vialto—evangelists, pessimists, and the change management challenge

Shark Tank-style internal AI contests as a model for engaging employees with new tools

Why the "future of work" is dead

Programmers and product managers merging roles; job architectures flattening into skills-based, fluid inventories

AI's historical weight—"as pivotal as electricity"—and the limits of anyone's ability to predict machine learning's trajectory

Jim's "what, when" framework and the twin failure modes of AI projects