It’s been quite the couple of weeks and sory for the delay! Two 4 day weeks, a sickness bug from the kids, but one big client won 🥇, another two proposals out 🤞, and some bright sunshine down at the beach.

This week - I’m continuing in the theme of maturity, but inspired based on a few conversations I’ve been having with senior people leaders

What is maturity right now?

There is a lot of talk - I read Linkedin as much as the next person - and what’s being shared is too short on detail, too high on theoreticals, and mostly, not very helpful.

Here’s looking at you thought leaders who aren’t doing the work or say you are but just buying in a tool…

This is exacerbated by the speed of change in the space, the fundamental meaning of what it will be to ‘be an employee’ (yup, those agents are coming sooner than you think) and a lack of knowledge of where you are vs where you should be.

How do I assess it?

This is also incredibly tough - what parameters should I be using? What am I tracking against, there’s some fear, uncertainty and doubt about what great looks like - oh and if you are using it extensively I would LOVE to hear from you.

So, this week, I’m going to focus on:

• A deep dive into how to assess maturity, using a tool I built, then create a roadmap using GenAI

• Sharing my People as a Product Checklist

• Sharing more on joinfraction.com 

• Walking through the news of the week

Table of Contents

• Who Am I?

  • PeoplexAI updates this week:

• 🎯 Deep Dive of the Week

• ⚡ Start Here: Take the AI Maturity Check

• 🧠 Why This Isn’t Just an Audit — It’s a Product M …

• 📊 Interpreting Your Maturity Score

• 🤖 Use AI to Create a Roadmap That Doesn’t Suck

• 🔍 Where Most Roadmaps Fall Apart (and How to Fix …

• ⚒️ Treat Each Maturity Category Like a Product Are …

• ⚡️ What to Automate (Now), Document (Next), and Tr …

• 🔁 Rinse and Repeat Quarterly

• 💡 Wrap-Up: Your Next Steps

  • 🤯 PS - I created all of the above in under (sever …

  • 💡 Quick Win of the Week

• 🧠 Product Updates and Useful Things

• 📰 News That Matters for HR

• 👋 Let's Connect!

Who Am I?

For new subscribers, I’m Matt Bradburn. I was VP People at Peakon, built and sold the DBR community to Talentful, built and sold People Collective to Scede and now combing People Ops expertise with AI to solve my clients challenges.

PeoplexAI updates this week:

Website - updates to come next week - I had a few folks ask for all the resources in one place, which makes sense with the 30+ notion pages I have now, currently using Supabase and Make.com to get these from Notion automatically onto my site 😅

Course - April kick off today due to my sickness last week, but 7 folks in for May for the full cohort 🥳 My 4 week, highly practical AI powered HR course, now with a consistent $100 discount for subscribers 🫶

USE THIS LINK: https://maven.com/peoplexrobots/ai-powered-people-ops?promoCode=Friends 

Products - www.joinfraction.com - more on this later…

Consulting and Training - Really excited by a client I’m about to sign with, and 2 more folks looking v positive, if you would like to discuss, then get in touch here: https://peoplexai.co/ 

Community - Over 80 people joined, going to start planning regular building sessions and engaging more… Also going to add link to website.

🎯 Deep Dive of the Week

Maturity Is a Product Problem

Here’s the hard to swallow truth right now:

Most People teams experimenting with AI are stuck in a messy middleground.

They’ve tried ChatGPT to rewrite job descriptions. They’ve watched someone build a Zapier workflow to speed up onboarding. Maybe they’ve bought into an “AI-powered” LMS.

But none of it’s joined up. There’s no system. No strategy. And no clear sense of what good looks like. Nor is there any confidence in defining that!

In addition, every department needs to focus on how to use AI effectively, but for cross functional and highly skill varied teams like people (TA, Ops, HRBPs, Learning etc etc) we need to ensure that we’re building the right things for use and the other parts of the org.

That’s why this week’s deep dive is about two things:

1. Using the AI Maturity Checker at survey.peoplexai.co/maturity-check to quickly benchmark where you are today

2. Turning your results into a People-as-a-Product style roadmap you can actually act on - with help from generative AI

⚡ Start Here: Take the AI Maturity Check

Before we do anything else, go to:

👉 survey.peoplexai.co/maturity-check

You’ll answer six quick questions that cover how your People team is currently using AI across:

• Hiring

• L&D

• HR operations

• Governance

• Cross-functional alignment

• Internal skills

Then you’ll get:

• A maturity score (Ad Hoc / Emerging / Integrated)

• A visual breakdown of your strengths and gaps

• A roadmap recommendation based on your score

• A benchmark comparison to see how you stack up

Total time? Under 2 minutes.
Value? Clarity and ease in building your roadmap.

Once you’ve got your score, bookmark your results. We’re going to use that to build something real.

🧠 Why This Isn’t Just an Audit — It’s a Product Mindset Shift

Here’s how most People leaders approach AI:

• Try a few tools to help with writing, or comms

• Ask the team to give it a go and share the wins in slack

• Hope others follow

Here’s how People-as-a-Product leaders approach it:

• Understand user pain (your team, candidates, managers)

• Map current state

• Define an MVP solution using the best-fit AI tools

• Ship, test, iterate

• Measure adoption, not just access

Your AI maturity level is not a vanity metric - it’s a critical one - in fact I spoke to a company this week who just made it a company OKR… 🤯

📊 Interpreting Your Maturity Score

Once you’ve taken the survey, you’ll be placed into one of three stages:

You’ll also get category-level scores, so you can see if (for example) your TA team is far ahead of Ops, or if learning is still out of the loop.

That category breakdown is the gold. It tells you where to focus first. And that’s where AI gets involved again.

🤖 Use AI to Create a Roadmap That Doesn’t Suck

Here’s where most teams stall: they see their maturity level, nod, and move on.

Not you.

You’re going to use generative AI to build an actionable roadmap in minutes—and then refine it like a product owner.

Try this prompt to get started:

You are the People Ops lead at a XXXX-person tech company. Based on the AI maturity check, your team is at the "Emerging" stage. Your top weaknesses are Talent Acquisition and Build vs Automate vs Buy.  Create a 6-month roadmap to reach "Integrated" maturity. Focus on initiatives that involve: - Tool usage consolidation - Legal + IT alignment - Building internal AI playbooks - Upskilling the People team  Output as a Notion-ready checklist with owners, timelines, and quick wins.

You can adjust this based on your actual category scores. Run this same prompt for each lagging area.

🔍 Where Most Roadmaps Fall Apart (and How to Fix It)

Even when People teams make a plan, they usually fall into one of three traps:

1. Too vague (“we’ll experiment more with AI”)

2. Too tool-focused (buying stuff ≠ embedding capability)

3. No ownership or cross-functional buy-in

Here’s how to dodge those traps:

Use this prompt to create your first AI Pod meeting:

You're a Chief People Officer hosting your first AI Governance Pod with Legal, Finance, and IT. Create a 60-minute agenda that: - Shares maturity check results - Reviews AI use across HR - Identifies risks or gaps - Aligns on shared priorities for Q3 

⚒️ Treat Each Maturity Category Like a Product Area

Now that you’ve got category-level insights, here’s how to approach each one like a mini product function:

AI is not the roadmap. It’s your co-pilot for building it.

⚡️ What to Automate (Now), Document (Next), and Train (Later)

Here’s a helpful filter for deciding what to action first based on your score:

Use AI to help here, too:

You’re designing an internal enablement plan for the People team to improve AI maturity. The biggest gaps are in skills and documentation. Create a 3-part training series that includes: - Prompt fundamentals - Real use cases - Governance guardrails 

This becomes your lightweight academy approach for your function.

🔁 Rinse and Repeat Quarterly

Your maturity score is a living signal. It’s the product health metric for your People stack.

Here’s how to embed it:

• Set a recurring reminder to retake the check each quarter

• Use the results to update your roadmap

• Bring the latest data into your leadership meeting

• Show progress with benchmark comparisons over time

I will be building this into the tool so that you can track it over time 💪

This is how you move from “we’re trying AI” to “we have an AI capability inside our team.”

💡 Wrap-Up: Your Next Steps

1. Take the AI Maturity Check → survey.peoplexai.co/maturity-check

2. Use your results to generate a roadmap with AI

3. Share your plan with Legal, Finance, and IT

4. Pick one low-risk workflow to automate per person.

5. Document it. Share it. Measure it. Then move to the next one.

This is the moment to shift from exploring AI to operating with it.
You’re not just running a team. You’re building a product.

🤯 PS - I created all of the above in under (several) hours….

I want to help as many folks in the space build their skills as much as possible over the next year, so if you want to 10x your skills, with 4x hour long live practical sessions and 4x 30 minute videos going far deeper than my newsletter, this is for you!

You can find the detailed syllabus below, sign up today as spaces limited to 20 people…

💡 Quick Win of the Week

I love the People as a Product Philosophy and wanted to share this little checklist and guide I built with you all.

It’s particularly fitting given the roadmap and maturity aspect - to ensure we are focused on still building solutions for users - and not HR for the sake of it.

📎 HERE’S THE LINK: https://peopleleaders.notion.site/People-as-a-Product-Checklist-1c31569da34480109766eea38bbdd74a?pvs=4 

🧠 Product Updates and Useful Things

Joinfraction - more is coming this week, after over 100+ signups and some interest from companies, I’ve built out the candidate side and working on the client

Premise:

1. Fractional folks want to do projects, not BD

2. Companies want to find vetted fractional folks with a great track record

Joinfraction.com will be the place for them to connect…

We vet, show their strengths and you hire. Well, thats the plan…

📰 News That Matters for HR

I’m actually just posting a couple things I find interesting this week, as none of you click my news articles 🤪

👋 Let's Connect!

Finding this valuable? There's more where this came from!

✨ Share this newsletter with your HR network

🔗 Connect with me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattbradburn/ 

💌 Have questions? Just hit reply!

Remember: AI in HR doesn't have to be complicated. Let's figure it out together, one practical step at a time.