Share with your CHRO
Macmillan Learning is betting that deep institutional knowledge beats outside hiring when it comes to leading AI-era workforce strategy, promoting Kristin Peikert to Chief People Officer after 11 years at the company. Peikert previously served as EVP of People and Culture, where she expanded HR into a broader function covering learning and development, communications, and employee equity. She also holds a People and AI Pioneer Award from Lattice, the HR performance platform, for applying AI to organizational performance and employee experience.
What this means for your business
The promotion signals something worth watching across education technology companies: the CPO seat is quietly becoming the company’s primary AI change-management role, not a secondary beneficiary of it. CHROs at organizations undergoing meaningful AI adoption face a specific question this appointment raises, which is whether their own HR leadership has enough AI fluency to shape how the workforce adapts, or whether that work defaults to the CTO and lands on people who treat headcount as a variable rather than a capability.
Peikert’s trajectory at Macmillan Learning illustrates what you might call the depth-first CHRO model, someone who accumulated enough institutional context over a decade to understand which roles AI actually disrupts versus which ones only look disrupted from the outside. That distinction matters enormously for workforce planning, because organizations that rely on vendor-supplied AI readiness assessments tend to get answers shaped by what those vendors sell. An internal leader who has watched the same workflows for eleven years can calibrate that differently. The Lattice award is a modest signal, but the underlying work, mapping AI’s effect on roles, skills, and employee experience, is exactly the analytical function most CPO offices still lack.
The CHRO who should feel pressure from this story is the one who has delegated AI workforce strategy entirely to a transformation office or an external consultant. Macmillan Learning’s move suggests the defensible position is an HR leader who owns that agenda directly, not one who translates it after the fact. If your CPO can’t independently assess which AI deployments require reskilling versus role elimination, you’ll find out the hard way when a vendor’s automation roadmap arrives before your talent strategy does.
Based on reporting from Macmillan Learning Promotes Kristin Peikert to Chief People Officer, originally published 2026-08-31 11:51:00.
