Human Centric AI: Building Trust, Guardrails, & Adoption

Session Description

AI in HR has spent too long being treated as a nice-to-have, a curiosity, or something to revisit next quarter. The tools are already inside your org, your vendors are embedding them whether you planned for it or not, and the window to get ahead of it is closing. However, adoption without intention creates risk: to employee trust, to data integrity, and to the credibility HR has worked hard to build. This session equips HR leaders and practitioners with a practical, human-centered framework for integrating AI into the People function responsibly and effectively.

Drawing on real-world practitioner experience, this session moves beyond the hype to address what HR professionals at every level actually need: how to evaluate and deploy AI tools with appropriate guardrails, how to bring employees and managers along without losing the human signal in people decisions, and how to position HR as a thought leader of AI capability.

Learning Objectives

• Establish a Governance Foundation Before You Scale: Learn how to build the guardrails HR needs before expanding AI use including data privacy considerations, bias checkpoints, and decision accountability, so adoption accelerates on a stable foundation rather than outpacing your controls.
• Identify High-Value, Lower-Risk Starting Points: Understand how to evaluate the People function's workflow portfolio for AI fit, distinguishing between tasks where AI creates genuine leverage and decisions where human judgment must remain the primary input.
• Drive Adoption Without Eroding Trust: Develop a change approach tailored to the People function: One that addresses employee and manager skepticism directly, supports psychological safety, and treats transparency as a design principle rather than an afterthought.
• Measure What Matters: Move beyond activity metrics to track the business impact of HR's AI adoption, including time reclaimed, decision quality, and workforce outcomes, connecting the People function's use of AI to organizational performance in language that resonates with leadership.

Presenter: Lane McFarland

Lane is the CPO at Mattermost