Top 10: HR Leaders in AI

As AI plays more of a significant role in modern workforces, many companies are having to rethink their people strategies – from talent acquisition to company culture. 

For the companies leading in AI development, people leaders are having to navigate the challenge of preparing their workforce for this future, while often seeing rapid scaling. 

These HR executives are pioneering some of the most innovative people strategies across the technology sector, launching massive reskilling programmes and leading cultural transformation to ensure their workforces are prepared. 

10. Avani Solanki Prabhakar

Company: Atlassian

Revenue: US$5.21bn

Location: Sydney, Australia

Avani Solanki Prabhakar first joined Atlassian in 2019, as its Head of HR for the company’s Asia Pacific region. She progressed to the Chief People Officer in May 2024 and, in April 2026, became the company’s first Chief People and AI Enablement Officer. 

The decision to expand the Chief People Officer role at Atlassian was made because the company was approaching AI as a cultural transformation – meaning that Avani leads a newly integrated People and Transformations team, bringing together its existing people team with customer engineering. 

9. Hannah Pritchett

Company: Anthropic

Revenue: US$10bn

Location: California, US

Hannah Pritchett is Anthropic’s Chief People Officer, where she plays an instrumental role in shaping the company’s talent strategy as it scales. 

Anthropic has placed significant value on building a strong company culture – with CEO Dario Amodei sharing on the Dwarkesh podcast that he likes to spend a third of his time on “making sure the culture of Anthropic is good”.

In her role Hannah oversees this culture, focusing on creating an environment that can balance innovation with the company’s core commitment to safe and ethical AI development.

8. Jacqui Canney

Company: ServiceNow

Revenue: US$13.28bn

Location: California, US

As Chief People and AI Enablement Officer for ServiceNow, Jacqui Canney leads the global talent strategy for its rapidly evolving workforce.

In this role, she focuses on improving the employee experience at ServiceNow while preparing staff for the changing workplace – using continuous and personalised learning to build AI skills. 

She first joined ServiceNow as Chief People Officer in 2021, before her role was updated to include AI Enablement in January 2025. 

Before that, she held various senior HR roles at Accenture – where she worked for 25 years, playing a pivotal role in the company’s growth.

7. Arvind KC

Company: OpenAI

Revenue: US$25bn

Location: California, US

Arvind KC was appointed Chief People Officer of OpenAI in February, joining the company from a role as Chief People and Systems Officer at Roblox. 

He was appointed to ensure the company’s culture and operating principles are preserved, while also ensuring it has systems in place to look after its people as it scales. 

Upon his appointment, OpenAI said that Arvind’s technical background – with a history of senior leadership roles across Google, Meta and Palantir in both HR and IT – provides him with the context to understand how high performing technical teams operate. 

This, the company explained, allows him to develop a people strategy that can protect its mission-focused culture. 

6. Nathalie Scardino

Company: Salesforce

Revenue: US$41.53bn

Location: California, US

Nathalie Scardino is the President and Chief People Officer of Salesforce, where she leads the company’s values-led culture through AI implementation, employee engagement initiatives and hiring and workforce planning. 

She has spent more than a decade at Salesforce, and is accelerating the adoption of AI agents in the workplace to lead what the company describes as the ‘digital labour revolution.’

By leading reskilling programmes to help employees learn critical skills, she is striving to make Salesforce a great place to work for employees who are looking to grow their careers and build AI skills.

5. Joyce Westerdahl

Company: Oracle

Revenue: US$57.4bn

Location: Tennessee

Joyce Westerdahl has led HR for Oracle since 2000 – implementing a series of continuous HR modernisation initiatives that have helped keep the company at the forefront of technology. 

She is leveraging the company’s cloud technology and AI innovations to better optimise talent strategy, drive insights faster through advanced analytics, improve the impact of the company’s compensation models and more effectively recruit and onboard the right talent. 

4. Kristin Major

Company: NVIDIA

Revenue: US$130.5bn

Location: California, US

Kristin Major is the Senior Vice President of Human Resources at NVIDIA, where she oversees the company’s people strategy and leads its efforts to scale and cultivate its culture of innovation as the company sees significant growth. 

In her role, she is responsible for driving HR initiatives that support the company’s accelerated computing and AI focus. This includes developing strategies for recruiting top-tier AI talent, creating continuous learning programmes to upskill the existing workforce in emerging technologies and ensuring a culture of high performance and agility across the global organisation.

3. Janelle Gale

Company: Meta

Revenue: US$200.97bn

Location: California, US

As Meta’s Chief People Officer, Janelle Gale leads all aspects of the company’s people strategy and operations – including organisational effectiveness, people development and compensation and benefits. 

She first joined Meta in 2012 as Director of Human Resources, and progressed to the Chief People Officer in January 2025. 

Meta has been making significant investments in AI in recent years, with the company launching Meta Compute, a new division dedicated to building and managing AI infrastructure in January 2026. 

The company is also planning to spend US$135bn on AI data centres over the course of the year. 

2. Amy Coleman

Company: Microsoft

Revenue: US$281.7bn

Location: Washington, US

Amy Coleman, Chief People Officer of Microsoft, has been transforming the way the company approaches hiring as it transitions towards a more AI-enabled model.

Rather than looking at specialisms, the company is assessing for adaptability and a drive to learn in potential candidates – with interviewers asked to look for traits such as collaboration in the hiring process. 

The company is also using AI to help recruiters identify specific skills and attributes from candidates’ CVs to take a more skills-first approach when finding the right talent.

1. Fiona Cicconi

Company: Alphabet

Revenue: US$402.8bn

Location: California, US

Since taking the helm as Alphabet’s Chief People Officer, Fiona Cicconi has led the company’s people strategy towards a culture of high-performance and innovation – particularly as it scales out its AI capabilities. 

She is focused on ensuring that Google’s workforce possesses the necessary skills for the AI-first era – encouraging employees to develop new skills through internal and external programmes. 

In particular, she has encouraged the development of the company’s education reimbursement programme, in which employees can choose a training programme that they are interested in, and the company will pay for a portion of the tuition – helping staff upskill.