METHODOLOGY
Three stages. Four to six weeks.
One clear mandate.
01
Signal Capture
Week 1-2
Direct interviews with the HR organization, cross-functional executives, and a targeted set of managers and operators close to actual AI usage.
Document review covering existing AI strategy, training programs, adoption metrics, and policy frameworks.
Selective workflow sampling to surface where AI use is real, where it is performative, and where it is absent. An evidence-based picture of what’s actually happening (not what the internal narrative says is happening).
02
Friction
Analysis
Week 2-4
Every adoption barrier mapped and scored across six dimensions: leadership clarity, manager enablement, workflow integration, tool access and capability, employee trust, and incentive alignment.
Each dimension is rated, attributed to root causes, and connected to its impact on AI value realization.
The output is the Workforce Friction Map - a scored, visual diagnostic the CHRO can present with confidence because it’s built on evidence, not anecdote.
03
Mandate Design
Week 4-6
A working session with HR leaders and key stakeholders to translate the diagnostic findings into three things:
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a CHRO mandate that defines where HR leads, partners, and pushes in the AI agenda;
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a set of manager activation priorities; and
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a 90-day plan anchored by one flagship initiative visible enough to change the CHRO’s position in the enterprise conversation.
You leave with a strategic platform, not just a diagnosis.
WHAT YOU GET
Evidence leadership can’t ignore.
You don’t get another change management memo.
You get a data-backed diagnosis of where AI is breaking down in the workforce, a clear mandate for HR’s role in fixing it, and a 90-day plan that produces a visible win.
Workforce Friction Map
A scored, visual assessment of where AI adoption is being lost between executive intent and day-to-day work. Covers six dimensions: leadership clarity, manager enablement, workflow integration, tool access and expertise, employee trust, and incentive alignment. A diagnostic built from direct stakeholder evidence, scored and benchmarkable.
HR Mandate Brief
A concise executive document showing why AI performance is a workforce design problem, where HR should lead, where it should partner, and where it should push. Written for the CEO and the executive committee. This is the artifact that gets the HR team into the room where key AI investment decisions are being made.
Manager Activation Priorities
Specific, practical interventions for the manager layer (the point where most AI strategies either translate into real work or die in theory). What managers should be doing differently, what they need to stop doing, and what support they need to close the gap between AI ambition and team-level execution.
90-Day Catalyst Plan
A prioritized set of quick wins, governance decisions, and one visible flagship initiative that gives HR immediate traction. Includes named owners, milestones, and decision triggers. It's not a vague multi-year roadmap.It's designed to produce a measurable result within one quarter.
IMPACT
What changes afterward.
We replace vague concern about “AI adoption” with a scored diagnosis of where the workforce is actually stuck, and give HR the evidence and the platform to change the trajectory.
Leadership sees where people-side friction is suppressing the return on AI investments they’ve already made.
HR has a more significant, evidence-backed role in designing and driving the enterprise AI agenda.
Managers have clear expectations for what disciplined AI adoption should look like in their teams.
The organization has a 90-day path to visible progress, anchored by a flagship initiative HR sponsors.
BEFORE TALENT CATALYST
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AI adoption is discussed in executive meetings, but no one can say with precision where the people barriers are, how severe they are, or what they’re costing.
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HR can sense the friction (employee hesitation, manager confusion, inconsistent usage) but lacks the structured evidence to shape the strategic response.
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AI decisions about tools, vendors, and deployment are being made by technology functions. The people consequences are handed to HR after the fact.
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Training, policy, and technology decisions are happening in parallel tracks that nobody is connecting into a coherent operating system.
AFTER TALENT CATALYST
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Leadership has a shared, quantified view of the human bottlenecks limiting AI value (scored across six dimensions, not described in generalities).
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The CHRO has a mandate document they can present to the CEO and board: where HR should lead, where it should partner, and what it needs to make AI adoption a workforce capability, not a technology experiment.
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Managers know what they’re expected to do differently and have the practical guidance to do it.
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One flagship initiative is named, scoped, and sponsor-owned. Initiative is designed to produce a visible result within 90 days that changes the CHRO’s position in the enterprise conversation.
DIFFERENTIATED APPROACH
Independent perspective for the people side of AI.
Evidence, Not Anecdote
The diagnostic is scored, structured, and built from direct evidence.
Extreme Independence
We don't sell implementation services or software. Our only bias is your business performance.
Strategic Positioning
We don't stop at diagnosis. We help HR build the mandate, the executive narrative, and the 90-day plan that puts HR at the center of enterprise AI strategy.
NOT THIS
Large Firm Approach
Months of culture surveys, change-management workshops, oversized training rollouts, and broad messaging campaigns that never isolate the specific barriers suppressing AI value.
INSTEAD THIS
Talent
Catalyst
Focused, evidence-led strategic work that shows exactly where AI is getting lost between ambition and workforce reality to deliver HR the mandate it needs to plan to change it.
As someone with a degree in AI
from the university that invented AI,
I can say with great confidence that
technology is the easiest part of AI.
The real challenge is understanding the workforce
(how trust is built, how incentives shape behavior,
how managers translate strategy into daily work).
AI is a workforce transformation
dressed up as a technology deployment.
My goal is to equip HR organizations
with the evidence to prove it
and the platform to lead it.
Led by Iliya Rybchin
FOUNDER & PRINCIPAL
Top 25 AI Consultants & Thought Leaders
Consulting Magazine 2025
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
Common questions, straight answers
The goal is not to redesign the organization. It’s to diagnose where workforce friction is limiting AI value and produce a clear, defensible mandate for the CHRO. That can be done in weeks when the scope is disciplined and the right stakeholders are accessible. The output is evidence and action, not a multi-year transformation plan.
Training may be one intervention that emerges from the findings, but it is rarely the core problem. Talent Catalyst goes upstream: into management behavior, incentive design, workflow integration, access, governance, and trust. The objective is not awareness. It’s adoption with strategic consequences. If your organization has already done AI training and the results are thin, that’s usually a signal that the real barriers are elsewhere.
Yes. HR is typically the buyer, but the signal lives across the business. We need direct access to the CHRO, a small set of cross-functional leaders (CIO, COO, or business unit heads), and a handful of managers or operators close to actual AI usage. The diagnostic’s credibility with the broader executive team depends on it reflecting the full picture, not just HR’s perspective.
The fee is fixed once scope is defined. The main variables are organizational complexity, the number of stakeholder groups involved, and the depth of analysis required. We scope and agree the fee before work begins. There are no billable hours and no incentive to extend the engagement beyond what’s needed.
Yes. If the immediate need is to surface the barriers quickly (e.g., before a board meeting, a planning cycle, or an executive committee review) the diagnostic phase can be delivered as a standalone 2–3 week engagement. Clients often start there and decide after seeing the findings whether they want the mandate, governance recommendations, and 90-day plan.
That is often the best time to do this work. Early adoption patterns harden fast. The managers who are improvising today will define “normal” tomorrow. The employees who are hesitant now will become quietly resistant later. Talent Catalyst helps leadership see where adoption will stall before weak habits, political workarounds, and shallow usage become the default.
Internal teams have proximity to the existing narratives, relationships, and assumptions. That proximity makes certain conversations harder to have. The value of an independent diagnostic is not that it automatically knows more. It’s that it can surface what insiders often cannot say clearly enough, soon enough, or with enough structural evidence to change the executive conversation.
Talent Catalyst is a standalone engagement. If the findings surface AI portfolio questions that require deeper analysis, that work can flow into a Strategic Intervention or Rapid Triage. If the CHRO is new to the role, Talent Catalyst pairs naturally with The First 90. But there is no pressure to extend — the deliverables are designed to be useful on their own.
Completely. The work touches sensitive questions about employee hesitation, management gaps, adoption failures, and internal politics. No information is shared outside the engagement, and no case material is used publicly without explicit permission.
You leave with a clear view of the workforce barriers limiting AI adoption, a defined CHRO mandate, manager priorities, and a 90-day bridge plan with visible next steps. Some clients execute independently. Others continue with a targeted follow-on engagement.
TALENT CATALYST
AI strategies
have a blind spot.
It's the workforce.
HR should own
the solution.
Most companies treat AI like an IT project.
Then they're surprised when adoption is shallow, managers ignore it, and employees quietly resist.
The real barriers are trust, training, incentives, and workflow design. HR can overcome the barriers.
We give you the evidence which proves the people side is where AI is getting stuck, and a concrete plan that puts you at the center of the solution.
CONDITIONS FOR INTERVENTION
You need this
when you are dealing with...
Shallow Adoption
AI tools are deployed, but meaningful usage is concentrated in a small group of enthusiasts. Most of the organization is watching from the sidelines, using AI tentatively, or not at all.
Manager Drift
Leadership has declared AI a priority, but frontline and middle managers have not translated that ambition into clear expectations, changed workflows, or new ways of evaluating their teams.
Silent Resistance
Employees are uneasy about quality, complexity, compliance exposure, visibility, or job security. So AI usage stays hidden, tentative, or performative. People are hedging or not adopting.
Training Without Transfer
AI training has happened. But people still don’t know when to use AI, how to use it well in the context of their actual work, or what “good” looks like. AI awareness went up. Capability and performance didn’t.
Misaligned Incentives
Teams are being told to move faster with AI while still being measured, rewarded, and promoted in ways that discourage experimentation, workflow redesign, and disciplined adoption.
HR on the Outside
AI is being framed as a technology initiative. HR is expected to manage the workforce consequences (anxiety, reskilling, change resistance) without having been part of designing the AI strategy.