This is episode two of Decoding the C-Suite, a five part miniseries from Recruiting Future about how leadership really thinks about AI, recorded with the leadership team at SmartRecruiters seven months into their acquisition by SAP.
The headlines about AI and the workforce are relentlessly grim: surveillance, layoffs, roles disappearing. Lehua Stonebraker, who leads the people function at SmartRecruiters, starts from a different place: naming the fear rather than managing around it. In this episode she explains how to build psychological safety when employees are scared to admit they use AI, why she believes the org chart is gone, how engagement went up during an acquisition, and a vision of a connected employee lifecycle that finally uses everything an organisation learns about its people.
