12.5 years inside Workday’s office of the CHRO, 6,000+ customers served, and a front-row seat to every HR tech trend from social and gamification to skills-based organizations to agentic AI. What actually had staying power, and what was just noise? And why did she just walk away from all of it, at the end of June, to go figure out what’s next? What a conversation!

Welcome to another Employee Experience Labs podcast from the Munich Podcast studio. Employee Experience Labs Podcasts are about HR Tech, Employee Experience, Shared Service and other interesting topics around HR at the workplace.

We continue our most successful season so far “From the Workbook of an HR Leader” where I am talking to experienced colleagues in our field about their daily working routine and what and how they are going about the various challenges they have to face each day.

I am a tireless believer that we can all be better if we learn from each other, but there are not many opportunities to actually do that – yes, there are conferences, but how often can you attend one in a year? Yes, there are peer-to-peer connections, but how many do you manage to keep running?

I am a firm believer that we can all do a better job if we learn from each other and so I am inviting seasoned HR experts from various fields and companies to tell us about their workday and how they go about the challenges of today.

Today I am talking to Aashna Kircher. Aashna’s path into enterprise HR software wasn’t exactly obvious — she studied psychology at Duke, went on to business school, and from there was drawn to Workday, not because she set out to work in HR tech, but because of the sheer scale of impact the role could have on people’s day-to-day working lives. What followed was 12.5 years and, by her own count, more chapters than she ever expected to stay for: scaling the platform for the largest organizations in the world, launching adjacent HR products, championing and integrating acquisitions, and most recently, leading through what she calls the biggest inflection point of her career — the AI transformation of HR and finance.

Aashna and I go back a long way, through years of exchanges as customer and partner, and it made for a conversation that went refreshingly deep and refreshingly honest. We talked about which of the big 2010s HR tech trends — cloud, mobile, social, gamification, people analytics, skills-based organizations — actually stood the test of time, and which turned out to be hype. We talked candidly about the gap between great product ideas and operational reality, about why data definition is about to become the single biggest lever for CHROs navigating AI, and about what genuinely keeps her up at night when it comes to AI, trust, and the next generation entering the workforce. And of course, having just left Workday after 12.5 years, we talked about why now, and what she’s looking for next.

But why am I telling you everything already here and now — listen for yourself: Aashna Kircher.

Music by Bensound.