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Mike Sullivan, co-founder and Chief Growth Officer of OneDigital, joins Craig Dowden to unpack Workforce Intelligence: The People-First Playbook for Leading Your Company Through AI Transformation, his new book on leading AI transformation. Sullivan shares why he hires AI-like talent, how his firm built a Workforce Intelligence Score, and why seeing your people's faces matters more than headcount.
Frequently Asked Questions About Workforce Intelligence
Q: What is workforce intelligence?
A: Workforce intelligence is the discipline of managing and measuring a blended workforce made up of both human employees and AI systems working together toward the same output.
Q: What is the Workforce Intelligence Score?
A: The WI Score divides a team's output, such as revenue or completed work, by the total cost of that workforce, including salaries and AI subscription costs, to show whether a team is genuinely more productive.
Q: Should companies give AI systems human names?
A: OneDigital does, and Mike Sullivan argues it drives stronger adoption, even though some consulting firms recommend against it. The right answer depends on your culture and how your team responds to it.
Why Workforce Intelligence Matters for Every Growing Company
If you run a company today, you have probably felt the pull in two directions. One voice says AI will replace half your workforce. Another says AI is just another tool. Mike Sullivan, co-founder and Chief Growth Officer of OneDigital, thinks both voices are missing the real story.
Sullivan spent more than four decades building OneDigital into one of the country's leading insurance, benefits, and financial services firms. Three years ago, he built a disruption tool using nothing more than research pulled from fourteen economic think tanks and a conversational AI interface. He typed in his own company's data. The tool returned a radiating red dot. It estimated that roughly 1,800 people at OneDigital could be affected by AI in the years ahead.
That number changed everything about how Sullivan approached the problem. He stopped thinking about headcount and started picturing individual employees, the people behind the number. That single shift became the foundation for Workforce Intelligence: The People-First Playbook for Leading Your Company Through AI Transformation, the book he co-wrote with OneDigital's Chief Product Officer, and the operating philosophy his firm now runs on. If you are wrestling with how to introduce AI without losing your people along the way, his experience offers a genuinely practical roadmap you can start applying this week.
Treating AI Like Talent, Not Just Technology
Most companies hand AI adoption straight to the IT department. They pick a vendor, sign a contract, and call it a strategy. Sullivan says that approach misses the point entirely, because it treats AI transformation as a software purchase instead of an organizational shift that touches every team.
OneDigital flipped that thinking early on. Instead of asking IT to choose a tool, the company decided to hire AI the same way it hires people. The first AI coworker, nicknamed Ben, was built around a resume. What would the ideal employee benefits consultant look like on paper? The team wrote that job description first, then built the AI system to match it, skill by skill.
From there, Ben moved through a deliberate hiring lifecycle that mirrors how any new employee grows into a role:
- Internship. Ben started as an intern under a dedicated human manager who taught him the fundamentals of the job, one question at a time.
- Apprenticeship. After roughly 12 to 15 months of guided learning, Ben advanced to apprentice status, handling more complex questions with far less oversight.
- Full time coworker. Once Ben consistently delivered accurate, useful work, he graduated to a full time role supporting 1,600 employee benefit consultants across the firm.
Not every AI coworker makes it through that process. Sullivan mentioned that roughly 40 attempted coworkers never advanced past the intern stage. That is not a failure of the framework. It is proof the framework works the way real hiring does, with some candidates succeeding and others not making the cut, and that is a healthy sign rather than a red flag.
Sullivan is unusually transparent about this whole process, even naming and describing his AI coworkers with human characteristics like Ben having a personality and a face people recognize. Some consulting firms have advised companies against giving AI systems names and identities. Sullivan disagrees completely. He argues that treating a coworker like part of the team, rather than a faceless tool buried in a dashboard, drives real adoption and real trust. For his organization, the approach has worked well enough that he sees no reason to change course now.
Measuring What Actually Matters With the Workforce Intelligence Score
Once you accept that your workforce includes both humans and AI systems working side by side, you need a way to measure how that blended team actually performs. Sullivan and his co-author built exactly that tool, called the Workforce Intelligence Score, or WI Score for short.
The calculation is straightforward in concept, even if the details take work to nail down. You take your output, whether that is revenue, tickets closed, or client deliverables completed, and divide it by the full cost of your workforce. That cost includes salaries, benefits, and the tokens or subscription costs tied to your AI systems. The result tells you whether your blended workforce is genuinely becoming more productive, or simply staying busier without producing more value.
Sullivan is candid that the score is still evolving and far from a finished product. Researchers at Harvard, MIT, and the University of Buffalo are currently building case studies to refine the formula further, testing new variables and comparing results across industries. But the underlying framework rests on roughly a dozen best practices that Sullivan says any organization can start applying immediately, regardless of which specific AI models exist next year or the year after.
A related concept that shapes how OneDigital allocates work day to day is the split between reducible and irreducible tasks:
- Reducible work includes spreadsheets, research summaries, and repetitive analysis that AI systems handle efficiently, accurately, and consistently.
- Irreducible work covers relationship building, judgment calls, and situations that require genuine human connection, empathy, and lived experience.
Sullivan estimates that AI has eliminated close to 45 percent of the preparation work he used to do for meetings and presentations every week. That freed time gets redirected toward client relationships and new service offerings his team never had the bandwidth to pursue before.
Why HR Must Lead AI Adoption, Not Just Support It
Leadership treats AI adoption as a bottom up, IT driven initiative, then wonders why employees quietly resist it for months. His answer is blunt. This has to be a top down, HR led initiative from day one, with the C-suite fully engaged before any tool gets deployed.
He argues that HR's traditional role, managing human capital alone, no longer covers the full picture of modern work. Companies need a new discipline that manages both digital and human assets together, and HR needs a primary seat at that table alongside the C-suite. Without that seat, trust erodes quickly, and trust is the one resource you cannot rebuild overnight once employees decide it is gone.
Sullivan describes his own role inside OneDigital as "chief activation officer." He spends much of his time traveling and talking directly with teams about what the company is doing and why it matters for them personally.
That activation process shows up clearly in how employees actually use AI day to day. Sullivan describes two distinct modes of engagement:
- Transactional use. An employee asks a single question, gets an answer, and moves on without going deeper into the analysis.
- Consultative use. An employee goes forty questions deep with an AI coworker, layering comparisons, benchmarks, and follow up questions until the AI surfaces insights the employee never would have found working alone.
He tells the story of a 55-year-old senior consultant with three decades of experience who initially saw no need for AI tools at all. After a client scare forced her to dig deeper, she discovered how far a consultative conversation could take her analysis. That moment of activation, Sullivan says, has to happen for every employee individually before real transformation actually sticks.
"We can do well as a company and do good in the world at the same time." -- Mike Sullivan
Seeing the Faces Behind Workforce Intelligence
Sullivan is not naive about the stakes involved here. He openly admits that AI will eliminate some jobs, and he does not pretend otherwise or soften that reality for his audience. What he pushes back on is treating people as line items instead of individuals with families, mortgages, and futures tied directly to their work.
That is the real argument behind Workforce Intelligence. It is not a call to slow down AI adoption, and it is not blind optimism either. It is a demand that leaders combine speed with responsibility, using AI to amplify what people already do best while being honest about what is changing and why it matters.
Sullivan's closing advice is simple enough to act on this week. Look at the actual people in your organization, not the org chart sitting in a folder somewhere. Find your own moment of activation with an AI tool before asking your team to find theirs. Once you have felt what a genuinely deep, consultative AI conversation can surface, you will understand why Sullivan calls this a societal issue, not just a business one that affects only his industry.
- To get practical tools and actionable tips that will jumpstart your journey, download the Kick Starter Booklet here.
- Join the newsletter to be notified when a new episode is ready for you to listen and get every Kick Starter Booklet for all future episodes.
- And if you’re looking to elevate your entire C-Suite leadership team, learn how Craig Dowden can help your leaders perform at their highest-level visit https://www.craigdowden.com/executive-mastermind
- For a deeper dive, listen to the full-length episode of the Do Good to Lead Well podcast featuring Mike Sullivan:
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Craig Dowden
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