When a problem reaches Maria Black, it has already stumped her colleagues at ADP. Anything that makes it to the CEO’s desk has to be the toughest, she says, because at an organization with 67,000 employees serving over 1.1 million clients, anything solvable gets addressed before it lands with her. On the nights those problems keep her up, “spinning on what’s the right answer,” she returns to two questions: “What’s the right thing for our clients? What’s the right thing for our associates?”
It is a simple filter for a complicated moment in the history of HR and technology. Black, the seventh CEO in ADP’s 77-year history, is fielding what she calls the number one question every chief executive is trying to answer: What does a workforce that includes both AI and humans look like? Her starting point predates any model.
“Culture is the most important thing in any company,” she told HR Executive in an exclusive interview, “and it’s definitely the most important thing during periods of heightened innovation and transformation.”
A decision filter built in 1949
Black describes ADP as still anchored in what she calls its “founders’ fire,” the mission set in motion in 1949 when the company solved a real business problem, processing payroll for someone out on leave, with what she describes as a precision focus on clients and associates. That founding logic has decades of economic and innovation cycles, and Black says it shapes how she weighs her choices now.
“Just because you can do something doesn’t always mean that you should,” she says. “And sometimes the easiest path isn’t the right path because it doesn’t align with your mission and values and culture.”
This is a timely message for HR leaders dealing with the hotly anticipated (but often still not felt) benefits of AI and automation at work. Gartner’s recent HR trends research notes that AI‑driven HR transformation is among HR leaders’ top focus areas, even though many say their current HR technologies don’t fully meet business needs and about half cannot measure tech ROI.
“It’s so easy to get caught up in the moment, and it’s so easy to get caught up in whatever the hype cycle is,” she says. However, Black suggests, the companies that will thrive through this transformation are those that have “complete clarity on who they are, the value they bring and the culture to sustain this transformation.”
ADP has some external evidence for its own culture claims. Comparably named Black a No. 1 CEO in rankings built on employee feedback, recognition she says matters because “the true vote” is how a company’s associates feel about their leadership and culture.
HR’s job keeps getting bigger
Black’s read on AI runs counter to the anxiety dominating many headlines. She believes that as AI gets infused into workforces, the discipline of human capital management gains importance rather than loses it.
“What [HR does] doesn’t change. The complexity of managing a workforce doesn’t actually change,” she says. “It’s more important than ever for HR leaders to know the role that they play, which is the most important role.”
She says governments, academics, clients and other CEOs are turning to ADP for guidance on reskilling and upskilling as the jobs picture moves, and she sees the same opening for HR practitioners broadly, as the domain experts on what it takes to keep workforces engaged through sustained disruption. Her advice to her own team is to put on the “noise-cancelling headphones” and hold deep conviction about the value HR brings right now.
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Experience versus the hype
Black came on board at ADP in 1996 (this year marks her 30th anniversary), and she’s enjoyed a career that has spanned drastic technological evolution. “When I started [at ADP], we barely had MapQuest,” she says. “My first email address was three years into my job at ADP.”
Black’s tenure, layered on the company’s 77 years of being in business, gives her the perspective to skip any hype and avoid “leading a narrative that may or may not play out.”
Return-to-office is a recent example of confident predictions colliding with reality. “That has been a fascinating use case to study,” she says. “Experience is what allows you the aperture to know that what might seem obvious may not actually play out exactly as expected.”
DOS to Windows, again?
For HR practitioners, Black sees a specific historical rhyme in the current cycle. It reminds her of the shift from DOS to Windows, when workers accustomed to entering data by memorized keystrokes, without needing to watch the screen, suddenly had to learn a new visual interface. She recalls that vendors, ADP included, quietly preserved the old keystroke shortcuts inside their new Windows products, because that was still how the work actually got done. “We have to build the bridge from here to there. And that takes time.”
Still, when asked whether three decades of tech cycles make this time feel like a repeat, she says it doesn’t. “It’s coming faster. I do think this is leapfrog transformation, leapfrog innovation.”
To keep in touch with how the technology enters the workforce, ADP is running the experiment on itself. “We have our tools deployed across 100% of our workers. We’ve had it across 100% of our developers,” Black says, describing AI use in engineering, service and the product line. The adoption push started with a company goal several years ago, and she includes herself in it: “I’m proud to say I’ve actually built an agent.”
Read more: ADP, Workday top best companies for women list
After a decade of HR tech conversations about big data that never quite became usable, Black believes the backbone has finally caught up. “This is our moment,” she says. “AI is only as good as the data it sits upon.”
Black points to an example of this thinking in action. In June, ADP Research and the Stanford Digital Economy Lab launched a joint platform called the AI Economic Indicators, which draws on anonymized ADP payroll data to track how AI is affecting jobs, wages and hiring on a monthly basis. The work builds on Stanford’s Canaries in the Coal Mine research, and early findings support Black’s inclination that AI appears to be disrupting jobs at the task level rather than eliminating entire roles outright.
The CEO connects that same logic to what she calls role convergence, a future where AI carries specialized domain knowledge across HCM functions like payroll, benefits and tax, allowing employees to work across boundaries that once required separate specialists.
Showing up in the flow of work
Black says clients are turning to ADP to sort out “what’s real and what’s not” amid confusing AI headlines, and that the company’s answer is deliberately unflashy. “We’re not trying to holistically change our business model. We’re anchored in a values-based business model with our clients.”
Her product philosophy follows design principles she summarizes as easy, smart and human, and it assumes many people will never seek out AI as a destination. “It has to show up where they’re showing up.” That is the logic behind ADP’s embedded payroll strategy and its broader ecosystem bets. “To me, it’s about taking this thing and ingesting it into the workflow, changing the workflow, making it more efficient, saving time,” she says.
For all the task benchmarking and boardroom modeling, Black keeps returning to the one variable no spreadsheet captures. “The wild card is how does it actually work in the real world? How do humans respond? How do teams respond?” Black says keeping this touchstone in mind is why the work led by HR leaders endures. It still requires “judgment, complexity, context and navigating the gray.”
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