What does it really take to lead a massive talent transformation at an established organization like Deloitte? According to Seán Morris, Deloitte Principal and U.S. Talent Transformation leader, it is equal parts frameworks, curiosity, trust, and a bold willingness to rethink business practices.
Morris recently joined Eightfold Chief Customer Officer Rimple Patel on stage at Cultivate ’25 to share these transformation takeaways.
In this recap, Morris shares how Deloitte is embracing agentic AI and skills-based transformation, from piloting new technologies to giving talent professionals hands-on experience and agency in their development.
Whether it’s improving deployment decisions, simplifying learning pathways, or staying ahead of the curve on emerging skills, this conversation makes it clear: transformation isn’t just about tech — it’s about people.
[Ed note: Quotes have been edited for clarity and length.]
Related content: From automation to autonomy, learn more about how agentic AI is reshaping recruiting — and how Deloitte believes it will impact the economy before 2027.
Rimple Patel: Seán, thank you so much for being here sharing your perspectives. Let’s start with you sharing a little bit about your role and how it connects to the people side of the business.
Seán Morris: I’ve been very blessed at Deloitte. I’ve had a whole bunch of different roles, both client-facing as well as operational. My current role is to lead talent transformation for the firm. I’ve been doing this for about two years now. It’s a four- to five-year journey for us.
Talent is our key asset at the end of the day, and so we’re completely rethinking what it means to serve that talent from a functional perspective all the way through to the core technologies and challenging the orthodoxies for the last 175 years that Deloitte has been around.
R.P.: We’re talking a lot about agentic AI at Cultivate. I’m curious how it’s coming up in client conversations and internally at Deloitte.
S.M.: I’d say 75% of the time we’re having those conversations with clients. There is still about a third of our client base that have taken a step back and they are contemplating this, either at the board level or on the ground, but the vast majority are in some form of a conversation around [agentic AI] — either piloting different aspects of AI, primarily generative or building off of their journeys around automation in general over the last couple of years. They are, with our help in many instances, starting to think about where they want to be on the maturity curve.
We are consultants at the end of the day in Deloitte, so we have frameworks that help us and our clients think through lots of different problems. Our framework around maturity for AI goes from one, which is “I’m not really in that space,” to five, which is “I am on the cutting-edge, the bleeding edge of the curve.”
Then we think through, how do you take bite-sized pilots to start transforming key aspects, typically large pieces of human intervention, in a particular process? We run a pilot and see what results they get, then move forward. We recommend that approach because you can build trust, which I think is really important in the system with the clients. Most importantly, they can build trust with the humans in their organization to recognize that this is actually the future, and it’s going to lead us in a positive direction.
R.P.: Especially when you’re thinking about an HR and a people function, it gets to a next level. How are you seeing agentic AI play a role in the HR and people function today?
S.M.: I see it in lots of different places across the talent life cycle.
We created a community within our own talent organization, and we encouraged our talent professionals that run the entire life cycle of our talent to actually be hands-on with the tools, see what they can do, and share those results with each other and beyond. That has created a level of trust that I think we can build off of from a foundational perspective.
Then we’re taking on the real meaty topics around recruiting or deployments. It’s important to make sure that we don’t just move people quickly from one client engagement to another, but that we get it right on a more common basis. When humans are the only aspect that are involved in making those decisions, you don’t always get it right, which causes some friction in the system.
We see this running all the way down the talent life cycle. I think it’s an incredibly exciting time to be in the business because the speed with which we’re seeing this evolve is both scary and exciting at the same time. Hence the need for a framework or two here and there.
Related content: Hear more on how Deloitte sees AI reimaging work and shaping the future in this episode of The New Talent Code.
R.P.: I love that. Now every organization is trying to make this jump — what do you see as the key consideration factors in terms of driving adoption and value? You mentioned piloting and getting the buy in. Are there other areas that you would share?
S.M.: Many of us want to measure in terms of quantum quantitative factors, right? It’s easy. We all like math. Many of us are very analytical. Everybody loves the cost saving. I strongly recommend that we look at the balance of qualitative and qualitative factors.
Talent experience is super important, right? Do you have an engaged workforce that trusts in the system? There are different aspects that you can measure on from that.
The other piece we are pushing on is how do you actually provide agency to your workforce? We may nudge occasionally, but that agency becomes a really important piece of how you measure success as well.
R.P.: Deloitte has their annual Human Capital Trends report. What’s coming up now in that report that is specifically related to AI and skills?
S.M.: It is the absorption of AI at the end of the day and so are skills. [Those are] two really meaty topics that I actually think feed off of each other, which means you got to get both sides of that equation right.
R.P.: How are you thinking about shaping your own workforce, especially in light of not just the macro environment and the implications to the Deloitte employees serving these clients?
S.M.: We’re interested in agility, so change is omnipresent. I believe it’s always been omnipresent. It’s the speed with which we’re having to react in particular markets, whether that’s on the regulated side of the business or the unregulated side. We are focused on getting talent architecture correct in Deloitte. It’ll be one of the key deliverables on this four- or five-year journey, and then getting the agentic AI piece of this correct is super important to us. [We want to] build trust so that people see the value in that.
For me, the special source is going to be skills — getting that correct and having our people recognize they have some agency that they can use and see, and they can drive through different aspects of their career journey into light.
R.P.: Where do you see Eightfold playing a role as part of that transformation?
S.M.: We are an integrator of Eightfold for both our commercial clients and our government clients. We went out and did our homework. We talked to our teams — we had conversations with them about their experiences with Eightfold. People were very complimentary about how you collaborate.
The agility that you all have, the speed with which you clearly could move, was very reassuring to me. You are still moving at the speed of a startup, but you have a lot more capability behind you, and we want that as a collaborator in a structure that’s like Deloitte.
R.P.: How are you measuring the value that you’re delivering to the business as part of this skills-based transformation?
S.M.: First and foremost, let’s think about it from the deployment use case. If we can position the right skilled individuals into a role, that has a meaningful impact on our bottom line. That’s a qualitative piece to it. We also want to make sure that an individual moving from one engagement to another can see their professional journey, can see the skills that they are gaining as a result of that position.
The other one that I would add is learning and development. We have a fantastic facility in Dallas called Deloitte University where we do a lot of our training. We have an incredibly extensive capability from a learning and development perspective. But I think it’s kind of complicated and when you come into Deloitte, you [may be] overwhelmed by the amount of learning that’s out there. We see this as an opportunity to nudge and direct people to the right levels of learning and reduce [the number of] learning platforms [they use].
The last use case I’ll use is that once we’re further down this journey is the competitive advantage — how far in the future can we see skills evolving, and how do we ready our workforce for those skills? This is actually one of the things we talked about when we were all getting to know each other about a year ago. One of the questions I asked was, how far ahead could you see generative AI emerging on the scene before it really hit the scene? The answer that you guys gave me was probably about six months.
If you think about where [your workforce’s] skills are today, I now know I can invest this piece of the workforce and make a bet that that’s going to be some of the things that my clients need in the future. That’s a game changer. It positions your human capital and your talent to be on the front end and informing the strategy, the sales engine, and the marketing engine of your organization. I think that’s absolutely possible with this technology and a competitive differentiator.
R.P.: What learnings are you taking from your prior life into this massive talent transformation at Deloitte? What advice would you give for folks that are maybe somewhat early in their journey?
S.M.: There’s a lot of change that’s swirling around us, and it can be very overwhelming. I think bringing people on the journey in an incredibly transparent way can be daunting for leaders.
My experience has been that this is absolutely the right way to do it. We do that in Deloitte, I have about 2,500 clients. We’re a collaboration. We’re not publicly traded. We’re not centrally organized. We’re decentrally organized by choice, which makes us powerful.
But you can imagine bringing [that many] customers on a journey requires them to be way upstream in the setting of the strategy part of the communication on a regular basis. They want to see their thumbprints on that strategy and see their perspectives on it, day in, day out. [Doing this] allows that to flow down, and you create that level of trust in an organization, and if you can get that right, you can take on a whole bunch of different transformations at once. People see what their role is and where their fingerprints are on that — that’s incredibly powerful. It’s hard to get right, but we’re doing it great.
Register now to watch this entire conversation with Deloitte from Cultivate ’25, available on demand June 12.
This presentation contains general information only and Deloitte is not, by means of this presentation, rendering accounting, business, financial, investment, legal, tax, or other professional advice or services. This presentation is not a substitute for such professional advice or services, nor should it be used as a basis for any decision or action that may affect your business. Before making any decision or taking any action that may affect your business, you should consult a qualified professional advisor.
Deloitte shall not be responsible for any loss sustained by any person who relies on this presentation.
As used in this document, “Deloitte” means Deloitte Consulting LLP, a subsidiary of Deloitte LLP. Please see www.deloitte.com/us/about for a detailed description of our legal structure. Certain services may not be available to attest clients under the rules and regulations of public accounting.
Copyright © 2025 Deloitte Development LLC. All rights reserved.