Product Thinking Podcast Episode 205
Title: Revolutionizing Workforce Agility Through AI with Karthik Suri
Host: Melissa Perri
Guest: Karthik Suri, Chief Product Officer at Cornerstone OnDemand
Date: January 13, 2025
Episode Overview
This episode features Karthik Suri, CPO at Cornerstone OnDemand, exploring how workforce agility can be transformed through responsible, human-centric AI. Melissa and Karthik discuss trends in workforce management, the intersection of technology and human potential, Cornerstone’s product strategy, and the ethical considerations of implementing AI in talent development. Their conversation offers actionable insights for product leaders on scaling workforce readiness, bridging persistent skill gaps, and designing adaptable, unified enterprise solutions.
Key Discussion Points & Insights
1. Karthik Suri’s Journey and Cornerstone’s Mission
[09:21 – 10:48]
- Karthik shares his background as a "recovering engineer" with experience at GE, Yahoo, eBay, PayPal, and in health sciences.
- The unifying principle across his experiences: Harnessing human potential and responsibly leveraging technology can meaningfully improve the world.
"When human potential is harnessed and when advancements in technology is responsibly made, the world is a better place. And it is with this spirit that 4,000 of us Cornerstars, as we call it, wake up every single morning to make a dent in the world."
— Karthik Suri [10:26]
2. Defining Workforce Agility and Current Trends
[11:00 – 13:15]
- Five generations work side by side, creating new demands on employers.
- Skills are rapidly changing (e.g., rise of clean energy, gig economy, AI), presenting a $14 trillion global opportunity but also immense risk if organizations can't adapt.
- Skills turnover is high: 50% of workforce skills will change in the next five years.
- Karthik illustrates workforce evolution using personal anecdotes about his "screenager" children and customer case studies.
"World Economic Forum states that over the next five years, 50% of the skills are going to be approximately turned around on their head. So workforce agility is a real thing. It's a clear and present aspect to address right now in terms of readiness."
— Karthik Suri [12:39]
3. The Consumerization of Enterprise Tools
[13:15 – 14:42]
- Employees increasingly expect "consumer-grade experiences" at work.
- There's a cognitive dissonance when personal tech (e.g., Instagram, Fortnite) is far superior to workplace tools.
"Nobody wakes up in the morning saying, I want to open a purchase rack today. But we wake up to our Instagram, our Twitter feeds, etc. So that consumer grade experience is becoming the norm right now."
— Karthik Suri [13:50]
4. The Employee Confidence Gap and Impact on Retention
[14:42 – 17:12]
- Significant perception gap: Employers overestimate their investment in employee development versus employees’ views (persistently a 40% delta).
- 89% of employees who left companies would have stayed if offered better mobility/development tools.
- Underrepresented minorities especially seek empowering tools before formal manager conversations.
"Underrepresented minorities were disproportionately seeking more tools to interact with before having that career conversation with their manager... the opportunity that we place in front of people for either skill development, mentoring, coaching, career mobility advancement, it's progressively elevating on a day by day basis."
— Karthik Suri [15:42]
5. Bridging the Workforce Readiness Gaps: Strategy and Solutions
[17:12 – 21:21]
- Karthik details three critical gaps:
- Skills Gap: Difference between needed and current skills.
- Expectations Gap: Mismatch between what organizations provide and what employees expect.
- Visibility Gap: Employees’ evolving profiles become fragmented across disconnected systems.
- Cornerstone’s Workforce Agility Platform addresses these gaps by integrating learning, performance, mobility, and transformation components.
"We believe that the workforce agility platform will bust all of this because learning, performance, mobility, and transformation are all beautifully interconnected."
— Karthik Suri [20:38]
6. Using AI for Foresight and Skills Intelligence
[21:21 – 23:42]
- Cornerstone’s Sky Highway ingests 20-30GB of labor market data daily, using generative AI to spot trending/emerging skills by vertical and geography.
- Insight: 411% surge in global AI job postings, but human skills remain 3x more in demand than digital skills.
"In a world where knowledge is completely democratized, wisdom and intuition now becomes the differentiator. EQ becomes a value added proposition."
— Karthik Suri [23:09]
7. Detecting and Developing Soft Skills
[23:42 – 25:37]
- Skill detection blends art and science, leveraging internal performance, feedback, and training data (with consent) to assess both declared and undeclared capabilities.
- Features like succession planning, 360 feedback, and engagement surveys help organizations map full, holistic skills profiles.
8. The Role of AI-Powered Personalization
[25:37 – 28:11]
- With mountains of rich internal data, Cornerstone can provide ultra-personalized recommendations, coaching, and career journeys.
- AI “normalizes the luck” of having access to great mentors or opportunities—democratizing career mobility for all.
"With AI, we can democratize this privilege, normalize this luck of having amazing mentors and productize it such that every person in the world... has an opportunity to control their destiny."
— Karthik Suri [27:23]
9. Product Strategy: Unified Experience and Portfolio Management
[28:11 – 32:39]
- The shift from isolated products to seamless, journey-based solutions: Portfolio harmony over mere collection of tools.
- Investments in design systems, unified data structures, shared algorithms, and platform openness power an integrated experience.
- Temporary end-to-end teams focus on breaking silos and cultivating systems thinking.
"Our customers look at it as an end to end journey... From that perspective, first and foremost, that revelation was fundamental to realizing it has to be a harmony of experience towards delivering a robust outcome."
— Karthik Suri [29:00]
10. Platform Product Management Philosophy
[32:39 – 36:59]
- Platforms must be thoughtfully, intentionally product-managed—even if org structure varies.
- Focus is on supporting one-to-many use cases and avoiding costly "science projects" without clear customer value.
- Cautionary tale: Lack of strategy on the platform side led to wasted millions in one case described by Melissa.
11. Staying Ahead with AI & Emerging Tech
[36:59 – 42:58]
- Cornerstone infuses AI ("drinking our own champagne") throughout their learning and talent ecosystems.
- Threefold approach:
- Embed AI-based experiences (e.g. learning companions, personalized goal setting).
- Reimagine products before competitors do—"disrupt your business before someone else does."
- Modernize usability, adapt to new interactions (voice, touch, gaze).
- AI investments are reinforced by acquisitions and deep customer co-creation initiatives.
- Bedrock principle: Responsible AI with privacy, accountability, explainability, human-in-the-loop, and transparency.
"We also have a multi LLM strategy, a composite LLM strategy to minimize hallucinations and adjust temperature settings. And lastly transparency. We are very open in terms of explaining how we built architecturally and how our AI works."
— Karthik Suri [41:22]
12. Ethics, Safety, and Human In The Loop
[42:58 – 47:49]
- All recommendations are explainable and auditable; bias is mitigated via skills-based, objectified tracking.
- AI recommendations are always reviewable by humans; workflows accommodate manual "kickouts" and reversibility.
- Transparency and reversibility are pillars before releasing AI-driven features—a deliberate, customer-validated process.
13. Emerging Trends in Workforce Agility
[48:29 – 52:05]
- Objective skills taxonomy: Standardized, measurable, transferable skills as the “coin of the realm.”
- Experience personalization: Employees expect experiences tailored at a "unit of one" level.
- Product connectivity: Frictionless, seamless, end-to-end design—including interoperability with ecosystem partners.
- Generative AI: Powers adaptive learning, personalized coaching, and productivity for all HR/manager/employee roles.
"As I said, pen and paper, point and click, tap and touch, gaze, think we have to compete in that space. We have 140 million end users consumers. I would say we are a consumer grade company."
— Karthik Suri [50:34]
Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments
-
“If I thrive as an individual, you win as an organization. If my aspirations map to your outcomes...then we all win together here.”
— Karthik Suri [16:50] -
“Skills detection is a combination of art and science...connect all the data sources, including internal sources, in a consented manner...now you have a holistic profile of a person.”
— Karthik Suri [24:15] -
“With this kind of rich, contextual, deep data...now you have an extremely tailored solution, a coach for you that helps you all the way from making learning recommendations, career mobility choices...”
— Karthik Suri [26:09] -
“A platform mindset, a platform thinking becomes very core... this is a journey for new products that we built. This is a journey for some of the acquisitions that you make because they run independently for a period of time, but they all ultimately have to be harmonized.”
— Karthik Suri [31:19] -
“Cognitive dissonance...between enterprise software companies and their complacencies versus consumer tech companies and their advancements, that gap is beginning to close.”
— Karthik Suri [49:05]
Important Timestamps for Segment Navigation
- [09:21] Karthik’s background and Cornerstone’s mission
- [11:00] Defining workforce agility and modern challenges
- [14:42] The employee confidence gap and minority experiences
- [17:29] The three workforce readiness gaps
- [21:21] AI for skill insights and the Sky Highway product
- [23:03] Human skills value triple that of digital skills
- [25:45] Data-driven, personalized, AI-enabled growth
- [28:47] Building unified, interconnected product portfolios
- [33:00] Platform product management and organizational design
- [37:20] Keeping pace with AI, building responsible tech
- [42:58] Ethics, privacy, and explainable AI
- [48:39] Upcoming workforce agility trends & future vision
Final Thoughts
Karthik Suri offers a masterclass in scaling enterprise impact through workforce agility, blending pragmatic technology adoption with a deep empathy for human development. The conversation demonstrates how Cornerstone’s product strategy—and Karthik’s visionary leadership—sets a new bar for unifying the digital and human sides of workforce transformation. Product leaders will find a wealth of actionable frameworks, cautionary tales, and inspiration in this episode.