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Nelson Spencer

AI Transformation Partner

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Work With Me

ConsultingAI transformation for People, HR, and Talent teams: strategy, analytics, internal tools, and hands-on enablement.Executive CoachingExecutive coaching for Chief People Officers and leaders in People Analytics, HR Tech, and People and Talent Operations.Product AdvisingOngoing product advising for founders building the future of work, specializing in product strategy, product design, and AI.
Nelson Spencer smiling, wearing glasses

AI FOR PEOPLE & TALENT TEAMS

Give your team more capability, not another login.

I help redesign the value your team delivers and how work gets done, then build the workflows, internal tools, and skills.

How we can work together
  • “When we first started The Plus Side Job Board, the entire process was manual. Every week we spent hours combing through different job boards, selecting roles, and copying and pasting them into our system. It was tedious and time-consuming.”

    The Plus Side Team · The talent agency

  • “Nelson helped me change my way of thinking about the different ways to leverage automation tools and AI to work more efficiently.”

    Alvin Belt · VP of Operations · AC Brands

  • “I went from knowing very little about how AI tools could be leveraged in my day to day to actively thinking about different automations that could be used to save us time.”

    Nicole Iturbe · Senior Director · AC Brands

  • “When we first started The Plus Side Job Board, the entire process was manual. Every week we spent hours combing through different job boards, selecting roles, and copying and pasting them into our system. It was tedious and time-consuming.”

    The Plus Side Team · The talent agency

  • “Nelson helped me change my way of thinking about the different ways to leverage automation tools and AI to work more efficiently.”

    Alvin Belt · VP of Operations · AC Brands

  • “I went from knowing very little about how AI tools could be leveraged in my day to day to actively thinking about different automations that could be used to save us time.”

    Nicole Iturbe · Senior Director · AC Brands

  • “When we first started The Plus Side Job Board, the entire process was manual. Every week we spent hours combing through different job boards, selecting roles, and copying and pasting them into our system. It was tedious and time-consuming.”

    The Plus Side Team · The talent agency

  • “Nelson helped me change my way of thinking about the different ways to leverage automation tools and AI to work more efficiently.”

    Alvin Belt · VP of Operations · AC Brands

  • “I went from knowing very little about how AI tools could be leveraged in my day to day to actively thinking about different automations that could be used to save us time.”

    Nicole Iturbe · Senior Director · AC Brands

Things that probably sound familiar

01
Your recruiter is copying information between systems and rebuilds the same report every week.
02
You've got AI pilots running, but they don't roll up to a cohesive strategy.
03
Your team went through AI training and still looks the way it did before.
04
A promising automation of yours stalled somewhere between the demo and the rollout.
05
Your leaders know AI will change roles, but no one can say which tasks go to AI, what stays with people, or what the team needs to learn.

AI transformation changes what your organization delivers and how work gets done.AI transformation changes what your organization delivers and how work gets done.

Where should you start?

Transformation rarely starts at the organizational level. It usually starts a few levels down, with one person using AI to save themselves time, and it spreads from there. By the time you're looking at it, parts of your organization have already changed without a plan behind them.

I developed the START framework because AI transformation is about interconnected systems, and the path through them isn't linear. There's no right place to start, and the most important thing is just to get going.

  • SStrategy: What the change should deliver for you, and for whom
  • TTechnology: Whether these tools can handle your team's actual work right now
  • AArchitecture: Your workflows, systems, data, and who owns them
  • RRisk and governance: Who is being affected, where human review stays, and how the system can be corrected or stopped
  • TTransition: Which of your work moves, what stays with people, and what they need to learn

Once you know where to start, this is the work.

People Intelligence

UnderstandingPeople Intelligence
UnderstandingPeople Intelligence

Data isn't just about numbers in your HRIS or ATS. It's the spreadsheets, the policies, the answers that only exist in someone's head.

I help you work out which questions to ask and where to find the information you need to answer them, so you can use it to guide your strategy and decisions.

My work has spanned all the way up to organizations with 20,000 employees. During that time I was responsible for doing everything from pay equity analysis and work health reporting to board presentations, the usual gamut around data analysis and the people/HR space.

DISCUSS A PROJECT

Talent Engineering

BuildingTalent EngineeringWorkflows, systems, and internal tooling.
BuildingTalent EngineeringWorkflows, systems, and internal tooling.

I come in as the technical support that People teams have historically gone without.

I build internal tools, integrate your systems, and automate the repetitive operational work, so your team's time goes to the work that actually moves things.

Comfortable getting into the weeds. That runs from APIs and writing SQL to reading the environment you're in and knowing whether self-hosting, on n8n or otherwise, is the better route.

DISCUSS A PROJECT

AI Enablement

PracticeAI EnablementSkill, judgment, and working habits.
PracticeAI EnablementSkill, judgment, and working habits.

AI enablement is when AI becomes a multiplier on the skill your team already has. It changes what the work looks like day to day: less doing the task, more directing how it gets done.

Instead of writing every offer letter and updating the tracker, you set up how that gets handled and spend your attention on the hire. We work on your own tasks until that's how the work runs.

A 40-person team has been through the workshops, and a 200-person hackathon was co-facilitated. Leaders get coaching one-on-one.

TALK ABOUT YOUR TEAM

How we can work together

01

Team workshops and hackathons

Hands-on time with your team for one or two days, working on everything from MVPs of internal tools to strategy for your transformation.

02

Focused project

When you know what you need: a workflow, an internal tool, a dashboard, a strategy.

03

Embedded partnership

Longer-term embedded leadership and partnership when the work won't fit a single project. I join your team part-time, including as an interim, and stay responsible for outcomes, without you needing to hire someone full-time.

TALK ABOUT YOUR TEAM

“Meeting Nelson was a significant turning point. He quickly understood our workflow and built an automated solution that streamlined the entire process.

What stood out most was how easy he was to work with: he took a complex situation and simply handled it. There was very little back-and-forth, the rollout was seamless, and the system was up and running faster than we expected.

And the icing on the cake: it looks fantastic. The final product is not only efficient, but beautifully designed and easy to use.”

The Plus Side, talent agency

I've done this before

For the past 15 years, I've been fortunate enough to work at the intersection of people, data, and technology. I started in sports, using data to understand performance and find advantages on the field. From there, I applied those same skills to understanding the employee experience and how organizations work. Today, that experience shapes how I help teams put AI to work.

Most of that time was spent in or around the data: reporting built from APIs, an enterprise Tableau rollout, demographic data collection that had to hold across several regulatory environments, and the data foundations under a people analytics function.

I’m also completing my MBA at Columbia Business School, where my work focuses on AI, organizational transformation, strategy, entrepreneurship, and product management.

I keynote and speak regularly on AI, data, and technology, at People Analytics World in London, the Human Capital Institute, and the International Personnel Assessment Council. You can listen here.

I've also founded a product and research studio called Augi to explore AI's impact on the future of work.

“I went from knowing very little about how AI tools could be leveraged in my day to day to actively thinking about different automations that could be used to save us time.”

Nicole IturbeSenior Director, Consumer Strategy and Operations, AC Brands

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nelson spencer

I help teams change how work gets done with AI.

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