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Maryjo Charbonnier is the former CHRO and Executive Advisor at Kyndryl, the world's largest provider of IT infrastructure services , with more than 70,000 employees across roughly 60 countries. When Kyndryl was spun out of IBM in 2021 as one of the largest public company spin-offs in history, Maryjo helped build its culture and people strategy from the ground up, which is why she and others have called it the world's largest startup.
She has spent nearly two decades as a public company CHRO on both sides of the Atlantic, including Wolters Kluwer (traded on the Dutch exchange) and Broadridge Financial Solutions, after a formative run at PepsiCo where she led change management for Frito-Lay. She was named CHRO of the Year in the Netherlands and earned her MBA at Southern Methodist University.
In this episode, Maryjo draws on a career spent leading messy transformations and building a 70,000-person workforce to argue that as AI automates tasks and chunks of jobs, the work that defines a career is moving from what you know to how you judge, lead, and decide, and most organizations are not teaching for it yet.
In this conversation, we discuss:
- Why Maryjo “seeks the heat” in messy transformations and what she learned leading HR through turnarounds, spin‑offs, and large‑scale change.
- How Kyndryl defined the “Kyndryl way” with six core behaviors and uses culture as an operating plan in the world’s largest startup.
- Why HR must focus on which skills are rare and most valuable, and how Kyndryl’s Make Yourself Discoverable campaign turned skills into a strategic asset.
- How AI-powered career profiles, skills-based redeployment, and role-specific AI curricula were intentionally designed to show Kyndryls that AI is an asset to their career, not a threat to it.
- Why Maryjo believes HR has three roles in AI, including reshaping commercial work and building an AI governance council that balances speed with risk.
- How leadership “ORE” (organizational design, risk management, empathy) and human skills like change management and people leadership will define careers in an AI‑enabled workplace
Explore the Conversation
00:00 Intro and AI Fun Fact: Bias in AI Hiring Tools and Your Rights as an Applicant
03:46 Meet Maryjo Charbonnier: CHRO at Kyndryl, the World's Largest IT Infrastructure Provider
05:29 Seek the Heat: Why Career Growth Lives Where the Problems Are
07:19 Building Culture at the World's Largest Startup: Why Kyndryl Doesn't Say "Employees"
09:58 The Real Function of HR: Helping Human Beings Excel at Work
12:35 The Employee-Employer Relationship When Everyone Fears an AI Replacement
15:45 The Three Roles of HR in AI and Defining the Skills That Matter Most
19:05 Make Yourself Discoverable: Operationalizing Skills Data From 1.0 to 3.0
23:15 Leadership in the Age of AI: Closing the Trust Gap With the ORE Framework
28:51 The Future Org Chart: Why Every New Technology Brings a Boom of Jobs
31:51 Advice to the Kids: Why You Get Paid for People Leadership, Not Just Smarts
35:28 Where to Connect With Maryjo Charbonnier and Kyndryl
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