Why I Wrote This Playbook
After two decades building enterprise conversational AI — and a year of recording GoHire Talks with the practitioners actually doing this work — the same pattern keeps surfacing: the technology is the easy part.
I've been building the technology behind recruiting for 28 years. Job posting engines. Search. SEO. Conversational AI. Text recruiting. Automated interview scheduling. The stack has changed a dozen times. But the gap between deploying a tool and actually adopting it has never narrowed.
In enterprise settings, I led conversational AI implementations at Wells Fargo and Kaiser Permanente — two of the largest, most regulated, most operationally complex organizations in the United States. Those projects taught me something the vendor pitch deck never shows you: the technology delivers maybe 20% of the outcome. The other 80% is people, process, policy, and patience. The wins came when we treated conversational AI as a change management program that happened to involve software — not the other way around.
What the enterprise rollouts taught me
At both Wells Fargo and Kaiser, the projects that scaled were the ones where IT, Compliance, the business unit, and the frontline operator were aligned before the first user ever touched the system. The projects that stalled were the ones where someone bought a tool first and tried to retrofit the org around it. That's the lesson that became the AI COEE in this playbook.
Why a playbook, not a research report
The first edition of this playbook was a research synthesis. It compiled what Gallup, McKinsey, SHRM, Deloitte, and HBR had to say about AI adoption. It was thorough. It was correct. It was also, honestly, too dense to be useful at 9 AM on a Monday when a Director of TA is trying to figure out what to do this week.
So I rewrote it. This edition is a how-to. Every chapter answers a question you can act on inside of 72 hours. Every framework is grounded in someone who has actually done the work — most of them guests of GoHire Talks, the podcast I host. You'll meet Kristina Tsys, who led AI adoption across 10 brands at Fortive. Brian Fink, who's redesigning the entire HR tech stack. Keirsten Greggs, on the bias problem nobody wants to talk about. Bob Pulver, on governance. Jeff Pole, on vendor due diligence. Patrick Lindsley, on the day-to-day workflows. Twelve more.
Their quotes appear throughout — not as decoration, but as evidence. The patterns are remarkably consistent. The teams that succeed do the same handful of things in the same order. The teams that stall skip steps. This playbook lays out that order.
What you'll find in here
The book is structured as a phased roadmap with the AI COEE — the Center of Excellence and Execution — as the backbone. The AI COEE is the construct I've developed to solve the problem I kept watching every enterprise hit: AI governance gets buried in IT, training gets dumped on HR, vendor management lives somewhere in procurement, and nobody owns the outcome. The AI COEE consolidates all of that under one cross-functional team reporting directly to the CEO. I'll walk you through exactly what it is, who staffs it, and what it produces in Chapter 3.
From there, eight phases. Assess. Charter the AI COEE. Get executive buy-in. Pilot. Deploy. Train. Govern. Scale. Each one with the tactical detail of someone who's done it, the pull-quote from the guest who lived it, and the pitfalls I watched derail enterprise programs.
This is not a vendor pitch. GoHire is mentioned where it's directly relevant — text recruiting is one of the most mature AI-augmented workflows in TA, and we built our platform for it — but the framework is platform-agnostic. Whether you're standardizing on Microsoft Copilot like Fortive, or going stackless with Claude like Brian Fink, or running a high-volume retail program on SMS, the same eight phases apply.
You can start anywhere — but I'd start here
If you're new to AI in recruiting, read straight through. If you're already deploying, skim Chapter 2, jump to Chapter 3 for the AI COEE construct, then go to whichever phase reflects where you're stuck. The Guest Directory in Chapter 12 is the index — every guest, every episode, every link, in one place.
I wrote this for the TA leader who's tired of demos and ready to deploy. Whether you read it cover-to-cover or use it as a reference, my hope is the same: that you finish with a plan you can hand to your CEO on Monday, and a list of three things you'll have shipped by Friday.
Let's get to work.
— Jonathan Duarte
Founder & CEO, GoHire · Host, GoHire Talks · 2026