AI is not like other tools that have come before it, according to Adam Holton, Chief People Officer at medtech giant, GE Healthcare – it’s way more than that.

As leader of the People & Culture team, Holton is acutely aware of the responsibility of “serving and supporting the 53,000 colleagues that we have the honor to be able to work with.”

“We have a several year history of being trailblazers in our industry for how we use [AI] externally,” he tells UNLEASH.

“Today, GE Healthcare actually has the most FDA-approved AI medical devices in our industry. Our purpose is to create a world where healthcare has no limits.

“We don’t see the ability to fulfill our purpose unless we can be as innovative as we possibly can, and it starts with not just the products that are going out to our customers and their patients, but also the processes and how we use AI internally within our organization.”

At UNLEASH America 2025, Holton will be taking to the stage to share his insights into how AI is revolutionizing the workplace, exploring the transformative power of AI as the dominant internal force driving effectiveness, innovation, efficiency, and productivity within GE HealthCare.

Ahead of this year’s International Festival of HR, the UNLEASH editorial team sat down for an exclusive interview with Holton to find out more.

The fundamental need to approach AI with curiosity

Many organizations and HR leaders will have spent considerable time and resources over the past few years learning about and feeling their way around AI solutions coming to market.

However, Holton believes that a lot of the organizations seeking to use the transformational power of AI “haven’t yet experienced or gone through the paradigm shift that I think is needed – meaning they still think about AI as a technology.”

He explains that instead organizations and business leaders would be better suited viewing Large Language Models (LLMs) similarly to having “1,000 to 10,000 PhD students in different disciplines sitting in the same room as me.”

With that mindset, Holton says people would use and think about that ‘technology’ very differently from how they are currently approaching AI.

It’s not a technology. It is a transformational capability that we’ve never come close to having access to,” he states.

Linked to this is the ongoing discourse about what skills will be needed in the new AI era of work. However, Holton says a lot of this is a wasted effort, because there is only one skill that truly matters: being curious.

“If you’re curious, if you’re open to possibilities, everything else flows from that,” he stated.

“LLMs as the tool are fantastic; we are only limited by our curiosity and our imagination about creating the right environment for experimentation. The ability to give people time to do that, creating a psychologically safe environment for our organization, for people to want to be a part of all of that really gets into the cultural pieces of it.”

HR now has its own building blocks to create the right tools

Adam Holton, CPO, GE Healthcare

For HR leaders, the importance of identifying the value of AI cannot be understated. Holton says that a common mistake is to have a narrow focus on what can be achieved or who AI-enabled tools might best serve: “The best way of killing an AI initiative is to go in with the only metric off the bat being productivity.”

GE Healthcare uses what it terms ‘Communities of Practice’ across its various product segments, geographic regions and business functions – including 60 members of the HR team focused on using AI to “solve our biggest problems at GE Healthcare.”

“Every part of our HR team has representation on that, and they are working through how we use this transformational capability to change how we do our work that is significantly increasing our learning,” Holton says.

“Thinking about use cases that we’re working on, it has opened up possibilities that, quite honestly, six months ago I’m not sure we would have thought were possible. We’re on the front end of this journey, but the momentum we’re seeing and what we’ve already been able to show is fantastic.”

Of those internal use cases, Holton highlights four in particular that are showing “real promise” early on, the first of which is how GE Healthcare employees integrate LLMs into their daily workflows – into the “very nature of how they do their work.”

Another use case is taking “all of the information of use to our 53,000 colleagues” with the aim of reaching “a point where all that information is accessible through one portal,” he says.

“Not only will our colleagues get the information faster, it will be more effective, and it will free up a lot of time for individuals who are currently spending time doing that every day.”

Holton details that the organization is also testing use cases around how it can use LLMs “right out of the box” for coaching.

There is significant potential in the idea of 53,000 colleagues having access to a PhD-level coach, any moment of any day on their schedule, on their time, for the biggest problems that they’re working through,” Holton explains. 

“The impact of that is exponential to an organization when you think about the importance of coaching.”

Finally, he highlights how the HR team are “starting to understand the barriers that don’t exist” around building customized tools based on LLMs.

“What we’re finding is people who would not necessarily call themselves technical realizing how easy it is,” he states.

“We’ve never had a technology that we actually can alter to our usage, right? It’s always been that you want any change to it, somebody else has to do all that work for you. Now those barriers are way down.”

UNLEASH America is the ‘best of both worlds’

This year’s UNLEASH America event will be Holton’s second time attending and first as a speaker. 

“I’m looking forward to learning – last year was an incredible learning event. I learned from so many different other organizations and technology partners, in terms of what’s happening. We’re in a space that is changing so rapidly that I look forward to that level of learning again this year.”

In Las Vegas, Holton will be delving deeper into how GE Healthcare is making the most of its curiosity around AI, among a host of other HR leaders gracing the stages.

“I’d not yet been to a conference like UNLEASH America, where you have the best of both worlds; incredible thought leadership, and the best partners in terms of being able to take that thought leadership and put it into practice,” he says.

Book your pass now to make sure you’re with us 6-8 May for the International Festival of HR!