Kesh Ladwa

Twenty-Four Years, Both Sides Of The Desk

Ladwa has spent about 24 years in the industry, beginning in agency, as most people do. The frustration came quickly. Agency work meant owning one slice of the process and then handing the rest away, and Ladwa wanted to deliver the complete service to clients rather than a fragment of it. The HR side supplied the missing half of the picture, and from there the work opened out across both public and private sector, including the NHS and a run of private organisations.

The titles tracked the widening scope: recruitment manager, then recruitment business manager, then head of talent acquisition, then transformation work that cut across sectors with very little in common except complexity. BBC News. Warwickshire and West Mercia Police, and the College of Policing. Nationwide Building Society and Weatherbys Private Bank. The civil service. For a stretch, Ladwa ran an independent recruitment company delivering transformation for businesses directly. Awards and speaking panels accumulated along the way, but the more useful throughline is the direction of travel: operational to strategic, one remit at a time.

Past The User Layer Of AI

Ladwa is candid that AI is evolving faster than the evidence base behind it. There is still no strong case study showing where AI has been implemented successfully across an organisation and, more importantly, why it worked. What exists in abundance is the user layer: talent acquisition staff using Copilot or Claude to do their own jobs better, issuing simple commands and getting useful output back. That is real value, and it is also the shallow end.

The deeper question, the one Ladwa puts to senior executives and technology directors, is how a business uses AI to help its people and its processes achieve more. That means how data is assessed, how processes are managed, and how AI gets built into the infrastructure rather than bolted on beside it. At the combined authority, that has meant working through the technology stack and asking how HR business partners can deliver a better service to the organisation: the efficiencies, the processes, the data, the strategic layer.

In practice it looks like agents built for repetitive work. Employees hunting for policies, asking onboarding questions, raising routine HR queries: AI takes the heavy lifting. Consistency is the underrated prize, because consistency strips bias out of a process, and the job evaluation build proved the point at scale. Ladwa is precise about the boundary: this is human and AI led, with human decisions made at the end. Using AI for parts of a role does not delete the role, it frees the person to do something different. What it does end, in Ladwa's view, is the era of sitting there with spreadsheets. There are better ways now.

Advice For 2026

Ladwa's counsel to talent leaders starts with the least glamorous instruction available: start. Plenty of organisations remain reluctant even to attempt AI, and familiarity only comes from use. Do not be afraid of it, and do not be paralysed by the prospect of error, because most of the time the system will tell you a mistake has been made.

Then narrow the focus. Pick one problem, one area where AI can make a team's work or a working day easier, and build an agent or workflow around it. The best candidate is usually obvious: whatever is causing the biggest headache right now. Ladwa is doing exactly this in real time rather than prescribing it from a distance.

The second half of the advice is about attention. Keep scanning the next six to 12 months for what is changing, what others are doing, what is new and what has quietly gone stale. Silence is not stability; something can be shifting without anyone talking about it yet. Look at what you do, interrogate why you do it, and treat innovation as a standing obligation rather than a project with an end date.