When host Rebecca Taylor sat down with Girish Ganesan, Chief People Officer at S&P Global, the subject was scale. Girish is accountable for the workforce strategy and employee experience of more than 40,000 people in 41 countries. His diagnosis was blunt. “Technology, especially AI, is moving faster than most organizations can absorb.”
The hard part, he said, is not the technology itself. It is “helping people adapt to new ways of working, new expectations, and in many cases new identities in their roles.” S&P Global is answering with AI training for everyone, a shared prompt library, a skills marketplace, and change training for every people leader.
Why AI Outruns Organizational Readiness
Girish sorts the pressure into three categories that he believes reach well beyond S&P Global. The first is pace against readiness: AI is driving large-scale organizational change faster than most companies can absorb it. The second is skills against roles. Jobs were built on traditional job architectures, but the work is breaking apart into skills and tasks. Systems, structures, and even mindsets have not caught up.
The third pressure is human connection. Geopolitical tension, hybrid work, global teams, and outside uncertainty have people asking deeper questions about connectedness, trust, and purpose. For People teams, Girish argues, the job now reaches past talent management to “orchestrating that change at scale while keeping the human experience intact.”
S&P Global’s answer starts with what it calls power skills: judgment, creative thinking, systems thinking, and emotional intelligence. Its curriculum teaches these workplace soft skills alongside AI skills on purpose. If human behavior and human cognitive ability drop out of focus, he warned, AI integration will not deliver the return a company needs.
What Changes When Work Is Organized Around Skills
The debate over job displacement from AI asks which roles disappear; Girish asks how roles get rebuilt as tasks are automated, augmented, or newly created. Geopolitics, climate, and demographic shifts are reshaping work too. For that reason he weighs human skills equally.
Outside research points the same way. In Deloitte’s skills-based organization survey, only 19 percent of business executives and 23 percent of workers said work is best structured through jobs.
S&P Global is building a skills-powered internal talent marketplace to match. The company announced a collaboration with Eightfold AI in October 2025 to support skills-based career pathing and curated learning recommendations. Girish described one place for learning, gig work, mentoring, and roles. The aim is career paths that are more dynamic and transparent.
He offered a pointed comparison. “LinkedIn has more information on their employees than they might internally,” he said of many organizations. His goal is to flip that for S&P Global’s own colleagues, starting with a real understanding of the skills inside the company. That is the job of a workforce skills inventory.
What Actually Works
Make the Change Visible at the Task Level
Girish’s first move is making change tangible. S&P Global shows people what AI means for their own work, down to the task and the workflow. It spells out how AI augments “a researcher of the future, a developer of the future, a ratings analyst of the future,” not broad concepts.
Learning comes next, and he treats it as a muscle rather than a one-time initiative. S&P Global rolled out its AI academy to the whole workforce first, to create a level playing field. His reason was simple: “AI is becoming a life skill, not just a professional skill.” Role-specific upskilling follows, and task data shows which skills gaps the curriculum should close.
Give Employees a Shared Place to Build Prompts
The second rule is to “redesign work, not just roles,” instead of layering AI onto existing processes. S&P Global launched its internal generative AI platform, Spark Assist, to all 40,000 employees. Girish said staff had created close to 22,000 prompts, now shared in a Spark Store.
Sharing them makes the organization comfortable with AI. Employees are also “closest to the minutiae of the workflow,” so their prompts show where tasks can change. People teams starting a library of their own can borrow from AI prompts written for HR work.
Train Every People Leader to Lead Change
The third factor, in Girish’s view, is not talked about enough. Transformation at scale happens through people leaders at the top, in the middle, and on the front line. S&P Global is putting all 7,000 of them through a Change Leadership Academy.
His comparison is onboarding. Companies onboard every outside hire, so they owe the same investment to managers who have not been through change at this level. He added that “listening is underrated,” because no one can assume what will work for a team when the world moves this fast.
The research supports the bet. Gallup found that among employees in AI-adopting organizations, 78 percent of those who strongly agree their manager supports AI use say they use it frequently. Among those who do not strongly agree, the figure is 44 percent.
Where Employee Relations Fits
Change at this scale lands on people one manager at a time. Girish noted that employees look first to their immediate manager, who shapes their performance and career path. Across 41 countries, that manager also translates change into local and cultural context.
He was direct that change creates anxiety. The best leaders, in his view, acknowledge it, stay visible, and make space for dialogue. His test for any technology is whether it removes friction or adds it, and the goal is “making work more human and not less.”
Rebecca described AllVoices thinking about its AI assistant, Vera, the same way. The idea is coaching in the moment the work happens, such as pointing out that a policy reads as vague. Vera is an AI agent built for employee relations, trained on a company’s own policies and cases and reviewed by the HR team at every step.
Frequently Asked Questions About Scaling AI at S&P Global
All of them. Girish Ganesan described an AI academy rolled out across the roughly 40,000-person workforce to create a level playing field, followed by more role-specific capability building.
Spark Assist is S&P Global’s internal generative AI platform, launched to all employees. Girish said staff had created close to 22,000 prompts, which they share with each other through a Spark Store.
Power skills are the human capabilities S&P Global teaches alongside AI skills. Girish listed judgment, creative thinking, systems thinking, and emotional intelligence, and warned that AI will not pay off if they are lost.
Transformation at scale happens through managers. Girish argues that leaders who have not been through this level of change need training to guide their teams, just as a company onboards a hire from outside.
It puts learning, gig work, mentoring, and roles in one place. Girish expects it to make career growth more transparent and internal redeployment easier, so you see opportunities, not just roles.
The Bottom Line for HR Leaders
Girish Ganesan’s framing is the line Rebecca singled out: “learning is the currency of relevance, but humanity is the multiplier.” S&P Global is investing heavily in the first. The second decides whether any of it sticks.
His closing advice was aimed at HR itself. This is an exciting and daunting time to work in the field, and “nobody has all the answers.” Girish keeps a network of CHROs he calls. He urged HR leaders to stay connected and share practices across companies, so each does right by its people.
See how AllVoices helps People teams support managers in the moment while large-scale change is underway.
