Melissa Laswell

From the Sales Floor to the Talent Function

Laswell grew up in retail operations, working her way through undergraduate and graduate school and rising to general manager along the way. She led stores for Victoria's Secret Beauty, Taylor, and Juicy Couture, and it was there, early, that she noticed where her energy actually went. It was not merchandising or margin. It was the people. "I loved leading and developing my teams," she says, describing the pull toward creating an environment that was inspirational and coaching the future leaders who would go on to run other locations.

The recruiting piece hooked her fastest. She loved the hunt, and she loved that in operations she got to do the whole job: find the talent, select the talent, and then build the team around it. That realization sent her back to school for a master's degree in organization development, and that degree became the bridge out of the field and into corporate HR. She has been in recruiting ever since.

Putting On the Oxygen Mask First

At the start of 2025, Laswell diagnosed a gap she could not unsee. Artificial intelligence was not being adopted by HR so much as, in her words, thrust upon it. The function was reacting rather than owning, and much of that came down to a simple problem: people did not know where to begin. In conversations with peers and other HR professionals, the disparity became obvious. Some practitioners were fluent. Many were struggling to learn, adapt, and evolve at the pace the technology demanded.

So she went and did something about it. In January 2025 she became one of the inaugural members of a newly formed Human-Centric AI Council, and since then she has designed and co-facilitated its literacy and education pillar, building the learning pathway for HR practitioners who need one.

Her framing of the problem is characteristically blunt. HR, she says, tends to be the cobbler's kids, the ones without any shoes. "I think it's really important that we put our own oxygen mask on first." Build the learning and development pathways for yourself and your teams, upskill internally, and only then go enable the rest of the business. "We need to learn it first before we can start enabling it."

Curiosity as a Job Requirement

Laswell's advice to talent professionals is deliberately scaled to the seat you occupy. For individual contributors, it starts with curiosity: take the foundational courses, learn the differences between the use cases, see where the technology touches your day to day, and then apply it. For leaders, the assignment is broader. Enable your organization to build AI skills, map where the real opportunities sit, and understand how your enterprise is already adopting and curating internal systems so your team can plug into them rather than around them.

The bigger shift, she argues, is mental: fixed mindset to growth mindset. "AI is here, it's not coming. It's here." Her own test is consistent. Does it enhance your capability and your capacity? Does it strip out the administrative and labor-intensive tasks so you can do the work that only you can do? For her, the payoff is not efficiency for its own sake. It is time. Time with her team, time with candidates, time with hiring managers. "That's where we need to be."

And for a function long accustomed to reacting, she sees an opening she does not want the profession to waste. This, she says, is the moment talent leaders can get back in the driver's seat and become the ones enabling the rest of the organization.