#233 - Winning Healthcare - Workforce Leaders Embrace Smart AI

Advocate Health's Nakesha Lopez on Work Forward: AI Transformation for 175,000 Teammates

Featuring Nakesha Lopez, Chief People and Culture Officer, Advocate Health

Recorded in her office at The Pearl, Advocate Health's innovation quarter in Charlotte. Nakesha Lopez runs people and culture for 175,000 teammates across six states at the third largest not-for-profit health system in the country. She got there by way of Trinidad, Brooklyn, a pre-med track she abandoned, and ten years in investment banking that included the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy.

🧭 HR Strategy Is Business Strategy or It Is Nothing

A people and culture strategy separate from the organizational strategy signals a traditional HR model and a culture treated as second fiddle. Nakesha's standard: we are business leaders, and our financial acumen matches the CFO's. Key Takeaway: the job is interpretation, translating operational, clinical, and finance language into something teammates can act on.

🧪 The Mistake That Still Triggers Her

Her first time as a CHRO, she rolled out something good without connecting operational leaders to the execution. It went sideways fast. She points to Chasing Failure by Ryan Leak: high performers chase success, but failure is where the learning compounds. Action: co-create before you roll out, every time.

🤖 People-Led, AI-Enabled

Advocate calls it workforce transformation, not AI transformation, and that word choice is deliberate. Nakesha co-sponsors the work with the chief AI officer. This year's focus is AI literacy, helping teammates assess their own AI maturity and build from there. She runs personal AI agents that scan her inbox every morning and prep her for the day, because leaders cannot ask for curiosity they do not model.

🔀 Work Forward

Cross-functional teams of leaders and frontline teammates identify workflows worth redesigning, enabled by AI. The discipline is planning what replaces the work that goes away. HR Risk: optimizing inside functional silos misses the teammate journey end to end, where the real gains sit.

Embrace the future together, and unlearn a few things on the way.