Medley Co-Founders Jordan Taylor and Edith Cooper sit down with PwC's US Chief People and Inclusion Officer Yolanda Seals-Coffield to discuss the fastest workforce transformation of her career.
This spring, Yolanda Seals-Coffield spent an afternoon vibe coding with her human capital leadership team in Atlanta. They had planned to commission a workforce planning model, but instead they built a prototype themselves.
That detail tells you something about how the US Chief People and Inclusion Officer of PwC is approaching her job right now. PwC was one of the first large professional services firms to put generative AI in the hands of its people, building ChatPwC with OpenAI and committing to a baseline of AI fluency across 75,000 employees.
Yolanda, shaped by 25 years as an employment lawyer before moving into human capital management, is investing heavily in how those 75,000 people learn to work alongside AI. And she is doing the same work herself.
In this Medley Moments conversation, Yolanda, Edith, and Jordan covered the science of how people learn, the cultural commitments that hold an organization together through change, and what the next generation of leaders will need to grow into to succeed in this AI Era.
Integrating new technology into PwC is only part of building an AI-enabled organization. What's harder, and what Yolanda kept returning to, is the human work of ensuring thousands of team members work effectively alongside it.
“This could not just be a tech transformation. This is truly a talent transformation. And if you are talking about talent, then you are inherently talking about human beings and you're talking about human skills.” - Yolanda Seals-Coffield
The work of orchestrating an AI transformation is deeply collaborative: human capital teams enable the transformation, the technologists and engineers build the tools, the consultants and strategists reimagine how work gets done, and financial professionals determine how it gets paid for. The rollout of AI tools is the beginning of a long integration, and human skills like empathy, critical thinking, judgment, and what Yolanda calls the pause, are central to a successful integration.
Edith observed what makes Yolanda's approach distinct in how the firm has done the work to understand the science of how people learn and what produces high-performing team members.
PwC has identified 30 skills it believes will define an AI-native workforce: 15 AI skills and 15 human skills. To identify them, Yolanda and her team worked alongside the firm's internal AI experts, academics, and futurists to identify not only the skills that PwC 's teams need today, but what they will need several years from now.
Every learning program in the firm now teaches human and AI skills together. The premise is that the two are highly effective in combination. Human skills are what allow PwC's people to bring the context of their experience and their ingenuity to the technology. The AI skills are what allow them to use the tools well.
A few of the skills Yolanda described are:
Jordan asked what measurement looks like for a transformation at this scale. Yolanda's answer was specific. PwC is measuring AI fluency including whether people are in the tools every single day, and it is quantifying and cataloging the skills its people may stop developing as AI takes over repeatable tasks.
So many skills, Yolanda said, are learned through practice and repetition. You do something 10, 20, 30 or more times to become an expert. In an era when technology can do the repeatable task, those reps disappear. So PwC has delivery teams, technologists, and human capital people working together to identify the skills being lost and figure out how to teach them deliberately to teams.
If there is one area where an organization can make big bets quickly, Yolanda said, it is on the people coming in. PwC is investing heavily in their first-year associates. As such, part of the Learning Collective, PwC's firm-wide approach to learning, is a program called Associate Discovery.
New associates go through an immersive AI and human skills training from their first day. They build agents, present them, and get feedback. Then they return to their teams and teach colleagues, many of whom are more senior, what they just learned. Over the course of their first two and a half years at the firm, these associates come back together for repeated immersive learning. The goal, Yolanda said, is to graduate associates with the right blend of technical AI skills, human skills, learning agility, and intellectual curiosity to be deployed where the firm needs them most.
What makes the program work, Yolanda came to believe as PwC focused more deeply on human skills, is the connection and community underneath it. This year, PwC made the deliberate decision to hire new associates into only 13 offices so they would have the chance to grow in a cohort, in a community. The cohort design fits the firm's broader apprenticeship culture, where Yolanda is reinforcing the teacher-learner exchange in everyday practice.
But the apprenticeship Yolanda is describing does not stop at PwC's walls. The firm launched the Human Skills Project, a three-year societal commitment to completing 1 million service hours that supports 250,000 learners outside the firm.
For the past seven years, Medley has been designing spaces where leaders develop alongside other leaders.
Group coaching, coach-led workshops, individual coaching, and AI-enabled peer groups are built on the conviction that human skills are central to succeeding in today's rapidly changing environment. The work Medley and PwC have done together in this area has reinforced for Jordan how powerful group-based and cohort-based programming can be.
This conversation with Yolanda was a reminder of why that conviction matters now. Trust, empathy, collaboration, and the ability to navigate change are crucial for being successful within organizations today. The companies investing in those skills, and the leaders willing to take the pause to develop them, are the ones who will adapt to this moment skillfully and enrich those around them along the way.
To learn more about Medley's approach to group coaching and the science behind our methodology, read this piece by our CEO Jordan Taylor.
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