September 23, 2026

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Hello friends. If you’ve been waiting for fall, good news. Yesterday, it became moderately more socially acceptable to talk with your friends, colleagues, and loved ones about the (actual) best time of the year: peak fall foliage.

Both leaf peepers and HR and L&D pros training employees on AI upskilling know that full transformation takes time and occurs differently depending on context. Trees in Maine and the technofiles on your team can make the switch fastest, but your employees with more luddite tendencies or those in Florida (we mean trees, not people) may need a little longer.

In today’s edition:

💯 Outcomes only

✅ State of the industry

💼 Stay awhile

—Mikaela Cohen, Paige McGlauflin, Brianna Monsanto

HR STRATEGY

Key takeaways

Francis Scialabba

What works for one may not work for another…

…with one notable exception: a company that listens to its employees and uses those insights to inform its workforce strategies. That works every time.

Case in point: Safeguard Global. After piloting a four-day workweek in 2023, the Austin-based workforce management company used employee feedback from the program to inform its strategy going forward, Bjorn Reynolds, Safeguard Global’s CEO and founder, told HR Brew.

That pilot has since given way to a culture of “freedom and choice” for Safeguard Global’s roughly 1,000 remote employees based in 78 countries, Reynolds said.

For more on what Safeguard Global learned from its four-day workweek pilot, and how those lessons have informed its culture, keep reading here.—MC

Sponsored By Workforce Edge

No commitment issues

70% of Gen Z healthcare workers report they’ll look for a new role within the next year, which might sound like a generational problem with commitment.

New research from Workforce Edge says otherwise: 65% of Gen Z healthcare workers expect to stay with one employer for 5 years or more. This generation appears to be more motivated by career advancement and learning than older generations, with 89% of Gen Z reporting that clear opportunities for advancement are important to them in their jobs.

Education benefits and clear pathways for advancement offer a powerful solution. The catch: Many employees don’t know they have any.

Despite 77% of employers indicating their organization offers education benefits, only 58% of healthcare employees report having them.

With HRSA projecting a shortage of nearly 500k critical healthcare workers by 2038, recruiting and retaining Gen Z should be a top priority. It’s time to pay close attention to their expectations.

Read the full findings from the survey.

TECH

Where AI is king

Morning Brew Inc.

Internal communications is where HR pros are most using AI in their workflows. Around 71% of respondents said they use AI for internal comms, and 45% have folded AI tools into their HR tech systems.

HR professionals said they use chatbots and AI assistants like Google’s Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, and Anthropic’s Claude for purposes such as drafting emails and internal documents, ensuring copy matches their business’s expected tone, as well as analyzing and summarizing meeting notes and transcripts.

Talent acquisition (TA) is the second most common area where HR pros use AI, as reported by 57% of respondents. The top TA-specific use cases for AI largely target tasks at the top of the recruiting funnel like sourcing candidates (64%), conducting screenings (51%), and communicating with applicants (40%). The least-common use cases cited are tasks that fall later in the process, including conducting interviews (19%), making employment offers (8%), and making hiring decisions (5%).

However, some respondents expressed hesitation in allowing AI too much agency in the hiring process, citing ongoing lawsuits that challenge how AI tools are used to analyze and vet applications.

For more on the state of AI readiness in HR, keep reading here.—PM

Sponsored By DoorDash

The secret to get your people back in the office: food. Just ask DoorDash for Business. They tapped the minds of 1,000+ decision-makers to get their takes on workplace meal programs. Grab the white paper to read up on the role of meals at work.

work perks

A desktop computer plugged into a green couch.

Francis Scialabba

Today’s top HR reads.

Stat: Some 46% of organizations do not bring in the CHRO to help define AI strategy. (IBM)

Quote: “When I think about where we were a year ago…I don’t think we figured out how we make AI really that useful for ourselves.”—Oracle co-CEO Clay Magouyrk on the enterprise tech giant’s own struggles extracting productivity out of new AI tools (Business Insider)

Read: Workers and their unions are inserting themselves into the AI transformation conversation, as more labor leaders see the technology as “an existential danger to workers.” (the New York Times)

A communications problem: The HRSA projects a shortage of nearly 500k critical healthcare workers by 2038. New research shows publicizing workforce education could support worker retention.*

^{*A message from our sponsor.}

Wellthy acquires Cleo

Photo collage showing two images juxtaposed next to each other one, one is a close crop of a woman leaning over a young baby, her face is obscured by her long straight brown hair but her smile is visible. Next to that is a view from behind of presumably the same woman giving her mother a side hug.

Shannon May, Photos: Adobe Stock / Unsplash

Wellthy’s acquisition of Cleo is a bet on becoming the “singular platform” for family care benefits—a clear signal of where employer-sponsored caregiving support is headed.

Check it out

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Written by Mikaela Cohen, Paige McGlauflin, Brianna Monsanto, and Adam DeRose

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