The rise of technologies such as generative and agentic artificial intelligence (AI) has helped to decentralise digital transformation expertise. What was once the domain of a few IT experts is now something line-of-business executives regularly get involved with.
One such non-IT business leader helping lead his organisation into AI and automation is Adam Zaller, vice-president of global HR services at healthcare services and products company Cardinal Health.
“I’m tech-savvy to a point that probably drives my IT friends crazy,” he says, reflecting on his interest in digital and data. “HR owns the HR systems, but we also have on the IT side an HR IT organisation that does a lot of the finger-to-key work for us. It’s a grey, jagged line, and I will go over it sometimes, where I feel like we need to.”
AI is one area where Zaller is taking responsibility. “I’ve taken more of a leadership role in agents and how the business becomes more agentic from a strategy perspective,” he says. “The front door to the organisation – I’ve been more focused on that, as well as how we can utilise our tech to reduce friction for our frontline workers.”
Zaller recognises that technology is, in many ways, a good lever for HR, and HR is a good lever for tech. As the organisation’s front door, the HR department oversees staff processes from onboarding to leaving. With access to crucial personal data, the HR department also has a tight grip on worker identities and responsibilities.
“We’re responsible for payroll, timekeeping and scheduling, and those types of things are often the most important questions that people have,” he says. “IT and HR are really trying to solve the same problem. When we onboard a new professional, they’ll need a laptop and other devices. HR establishes the processes and IT procures the technology, so we share a lot of commonalities.”
Simplifying services
Zaller has been with Cardinal Health for almost a decade. Having worked for consultancy NCR and fashion retailer Express, he joined the healthcare services company in late 2016 as director of organisational development before climbing the ladder into senior learning and development (L&D) and HR roles.
He drew on his experience to establish an internal centre of excellence (COE), which provides L&D programmes for Cardinal Health’s 46,000 employees. Zaller consolidated 26 learning teams into one global COE. Having achieved his aims, he wanted a new challenge.
“I did that role for several years and optimised the team,” he says. “One of my peers was leaving the organisation. I raised my hand and said, ‘Hey, I could do some extra work here.’ And the next thing you knew, I was running two teams, and I absolutely loved it. It felt like hair on fire, but I loved it,” he says, reflecting on fulfilling the firm’s vice-president for HR services and learning role between 2022 and 2025.
As Zaller refined US services and back-end systems, he began lobbying the board to consolidate global HR from six organisations into one team. In July 2025, he received the go-ahead and became vice-president for global HR services. Since then, his team has been focused on simplification, reducing total HR services from 1,100 to under 330.
“From onboarding to offboarding, we have owners for each of the different services, so we can have a team that’s solely focused on evaluating that. Where we need to be great, we are great, and where we just need to be good enough, making sure that we’re good enough,” he says. “And so that’s been our journey, continuing to look at how we optimise the organisation, provide a better employee experience, and simplify.”
Zaller has focused on five cultural components as he’s developed the HR team: being a changemaker, being future-focused, pushing continuous improvement, developing a “get-to-yes” attitude, and having a consultant mindset with a positive bent. “Those are what I really try to drive my team around and why I think we’ve been successful,” he adds.
Removing friction
Technology sits at the heart of this cultural mindset. Zaller says Cardinal Health’s digital transformation is about continuing the business’ growth trajectory.
“We’ve had a very nice run the last couple of years,” he says. “We have a simple, clean strategy. It’s about focusing on our businesses and our back-office approach. We want to create simplicity that allows the organisation to optimise and grow. My role in that approach is taking out friction and noise so the businesses can focus on growth.”
In his role, Zaller has led an organisational redesign focused on data hygiene, process optimisation and human-in-the-loop governance. Simplicity for HR means using emerging technology to help remove transactions. Last year, his team completed 50,000 tier-two transactions, where internal HR specialists process requests escalated from help desks.
“For the last mile, my team was taking information, punching it in, and then clicking go,” he says. “My team doesn’t need to do that. I don’t want them to do that. It’s mindless, boring, error-prone work. I’d rather have my team focus on our core 330 services, looking at what can be further optimised, and looking at what we need to do to make something great.”
“I’d rather have my team focus on our core 330 services, looking at what can be further optimised, and looking at what we need to do to make something great”
Adam Zaller, Cardinal Health
Zaller says the aim is to remove mundane tasks so that HR specialists act like consultants to the business. When professionals across the organisation call about an issue, his team has the time and space to act proactively and prevent organisational challenges from turning into employee relations concerns.
“I want to take friction out so that our managers and supervisors can spend more time on the shop floor with employees,” he says. “I want them to be there when an employee has a personal crisis or issue. That’s where I think I can help by simplifying what we do, so that we give more time back to our front line.”
Exploiting agents
Zaller recognises that agentic AI can help deliver the simplicity his business requires. While consultant PwC reports that 79% of executives say their companies are adopting AI agents broadly across business operations, adoption drops to 40% inside HR teams. Unlike slower-moving competitors, Cardinal Health is eager to exploit emerging technology.
Workday’s HR services provide the foundations for these explorations. The company went live with Workday in 2010 and has continued adding features. Under Zaller, the direction of transformation has been agentic. His organisation is using its solid foundations to create an AI-enabled approach to HR processes.
“We moved to the cloud early on,” he says. “We saw that having our data in the cloud and being able to move faster was a big part of how we were going to be a great HR organisation. That’s still the situation today. We’re close partners with Workday, so we have continued to add to the system.”
HR owns the Workday system, but the IT team helps maintain the implementation. Zaller’s team is currently exploring AI agents across key workflows, such as payroll processing and HR self-service. Cardinal Health manages high-volume recruitment of around 17,000 hires annually. Agents will help his team to manage these hires more effectively.
The first version of Workday Payroll Agent went live two months ago and helps HR professionals find anomalies in payroll data. The team is also testing Workday Self-Service Agent in a sandbox. Zaller expects this agentic service to help professionals eliminate many of the firm’s tier-one cases that are related to pay and time concerns.
“We went into our conversations with Workday with 30 or 40 use cases, and it got whittled down to only five because they’re adding so many skills into the Self-Service Agent,” he says. “I think that agent will be super popular and powerful.”
Aligning objectives
At the recent Workday Rising event in Las Vegas, the software provider discussed the 17 agents it has in production. While Zaller, who spoke to Computer Weekly at the conference, is eager to exploit these ready-made services, he’s also exploring how customised AI agents can help solve business challenges.
Cardinal Health was one of the first 40 companies to launch Developer Agent, which lets developers use natural language prompts to build custom apps and agents. The deployment went live in the summer. The HR team is using the approach to build a Comp Adjustment Agent to help manage the time-consuming process of workers’ compensation adjustments.
Zaller reflects on the agentic developments his firm has undertaken. “You’ll have a few agents that Workday provides that drive 80% of your stuff, and then there’s going to be 20% that’s custom to you, and you’ll want to use Developer Agent, and that’s perfectly fine,” he says. “I love how they’re giving us both options.”
A year or two from now, Zaller says his goal is for all Cardinal Health employees, regardless of country, to get all the information they need about people services, from onboarding to offboarding, in a very simple way on a mobile device.
“You would see a common front door for all HR services that every employee in the company can access, and HR to be a friction-free organisation that has predictable services,” he says.
What’s clear is Zaller wants his organisation to lead these technological advances. He’s committed to working closely with the IT department to meet these objectives. HR and tech teams must know their responsibilities and come together to create a common path forward.
“My peer on the HR IT side is at the conference,” says Zaller. “We are as aligned as aligned is going to get. He understands my strategy. He knows what he needs to do to help me achieve the goals. Last year, I wanted to go all in on AI, and he ended up doing a reorganisation to free up some roles to support my vision. That’s the best example of cross-functional teaming you can have.”
