When Doug McMillon, CEO of Walmart recently shared his insights on AI transformation and employee development (and the Wall Street Journal reported on it), we took notice. Not just because we’re experiencing the rapid acceleration of AI adoption and how it’s changing pretty much everything. Rather, it was what McMillon and others were saying about people:
“Until we’re serving humanoid robots and they have the ability to spend money,” McMillon asserted, “. . . We are going to put people in front of people.”
This means, as other execs at Bank of America and Blackstone observed after McMillon’s comments: “Essential human qualities, like the ability to connect with others and develop meaningful relationships, would become even more important.”
This reflects back exactly what we've already seen again and again with our clients. The more digital everything becomes, the more valuable human connection gets.
There’s an astonishing amount AI can do, but communication, teamwork, and problem solving can’t be easily replicated in the digital realm. Or, as Courtney della Cava, senior managing director and global head of portfolio talent and organizational performance at Blackstone, said at the Walmart presentation, “There’s nothing soft about soft skills.” In fact, they’re actually the hardest skills to develop — and, the most critical for business success.
We saw the same thing when we worked with AT&T on their brand voice training for 3,000+ employees. How do you get lawyers, accountants, and product managers all to communicate with the same voice? How do you make brand training feel relevant to already incredibly busy people who also don't work in marketing?
Our solution was to make it entertainment. Drawing inspiration from AT&T's recent acquisition of HBO, we created programming that felt more like watching TV than sitting through corporate modules. The "soft skill" of communication became the hard business driver of consistent customer experience. When the customer experience is the most sustainable differentiator of your brand, encouraging everyone to stay "in voice" isn't soft - it's survival.
Being ready to evolve with soft skills is still going to be essential for long-term success. Omri Yoffe, CEO of Vi (an AI company that focuses on healthcare) has said he told his own employees: “Guys, you are going to stay here, but you need to be the change agent. You need to evolve yourself. You’re smart enough to work here, but you’re not going to do the same job in two years. Embrace the moment.”
What some leaders are missing, however, is that most employees want to evolve. They're not resisting learning; they're resisting what feels irrelevant or impossible to fit into their lives. They're missing "The Why".
When we worked with Kaiser Permanente on their new HR system rollout during the pandemic, we were asking 240,000 healthcare professionals to adopt a new platform while they were literally saving lives during a pandemic. Talk about timing.
The key insight we learned? Healthcare professionals needed to feel essential and equipped with time-saving tools. So we achieved a 90% success rate by meeting people where they were in their hectic routines with fast choose-your-own-adventure training videos, consumer-grade creative, and communications targeted to the right audience at the right time, even the night shift. Our message wasn't "here's another system to learn" - it was "each of you is essential, and every second counts. So this tool gets you back to doing what you do best."
People don't resist transformation - they resist change that ignores their reality. When you market learning as opportunity rather than obligation, adoption follows naturally.
Every employee is a change agent - they just don't know it yet. This is the heart of our Change Marketing™ philosophy. Instead of treating employees as passive recipients of change, we position them as the heroes of their own transformation story. We remind them that they have agency.
At Southwest Airlines, we helped communicate massive operational investments to 70,000+ frontline employees who felt disconnected from strategic decisions being made by leadership - a very common situation. Our approach flipped the narrative from "leadership is investing in improvements," to "these investments are happening because of the incredible work you're already doing, and here's how they'll make your job better."
When every employee - from pilots to customer service agents - understands they're not just implementing change, they're creating it, that’s when 70% failure rates become 90% success stories.
At LOCAL, we've spent years perfecting our Change Marketing™ methodology - treating organizational change like a marketing campaign and employees like your first customers. Because engaged employees drive 23% more profit, 51% less turnover, and 18% more productivity. The math is simple: invest in human connection, get better business results.
Ready to turn your AI transformation challenges into competitive advantages? Let's talk about how Change Marketing™ can help your people become agents of change.
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