Avalara's Chief People Officer Rebuilds HR Around AI-Starting With Her Own Team
Ee Lyn Khoo wakes up each morning with a specific question: "Am I doing everything in my power to make my function more effective by 50%?" As Chief People Officer at Avalara since 2022, she's using that north star to rebuild the entire HR function around AI capabilities, not as an add-on to existing processes but as their foundation.
For most HR leaders, AI transformation is something they manage for the rest of the business. Khoo is doing it inside her own function first.
From Amazon and Redfin to an AI-native HR operation
Khoo arrived at Avalara after 13 years at Amazon, where she rose to VP of Human Resources, followed by a stint as Chief People Officer at Redfin. Her initial mandate was straightforward: sharpen hiring standards, codify processes, and anchor culture in impact rather than intention. AI became the accelerant she didn't anticipate.
She describes working with Claude AI as a collaboration that demands more from her, not less. "I cannot blindly assume Claude knows everything there is to know about the context of the problem we're solving," she said. "It requires me to be sharper in terms of talking to Claude so that Claude can help me do my job better." This approach to prompt engineering extends across her entire team.
Goal-setting and AI proficiency requirements
Avalara has embedded AI directly into its goal-setting process. The system checks whether each employee's goals are well-written, clear, deadline-driven, and tied to an owner, while also suggesting AI-related goals based on employee input.
The results shifted quickly. High-quality goals jumped from roughly 50% to 95%. About 92% of employees now have at least one well-written AI goal-not abstract learning goals, but concrete ones tied to improving specific parts of their jobs. A customer service employee, for example, set a goal to use AI to improve their quality scores.
Every employee at Avalara is now required to have at least one goal connected to AI use in their role.
A digital front door for HR questions
Avalara launched Grove Central, an AI-powered interface that centralizes employee HR questions into a single point of entry. Before it existed, employees navigated four or five different systems to find answers, often defaulting to messaging someone on Slack they trusted.
The Grove Central agent handles discoverability, surfaces documents, and helps employees interpret them in context. Complex tickets escalate to humans, but routine query volume is already falling. "We exist so that employees have a frustration-free experience so that they can focus on solving problems for the customer and for the business," Khoo said.
Hiring for the AI era
Avalara is embedding what Khoo calls an AI Persona-a minimum bar for AI proficiency-into every stage of hiring. Managers receive role-specific interview questions, guidance on strong and weak answers, and case studies designed to pressure-test how candidates think through problems in an AI-first environment.
Khoo's reasoning rests on a specific thesis about how AI is changing talent requirements. The technical floor has risen, making skills more accessible. But the ceiling is now determined by harder-to-automate traits. "The ceiling now is determined by judgment and curiosity and how well somebody can bounce back after the first attempt," she said. "Our interview process has to get at the judgment and the curiosity and the resilience."
Avalara is also embedding AI proficiency expectations into performance ratings, promotion criteria, and development plans across employees' entire careers at the company.
Managing real anxiety about job displacement
Not everyone moves at this pace comfortably. Headlines about companies eliminating entire HR teams create real anxiety, and Khoo acknowledges it directly. "Chatter like that feeds angst. People worry about 'What does this mean to me, am I losing my job?' That is the biggest challenge," she said.
Her response centers on three elements: context, connection, and confidence. Context means communicating openly and repeatedly about what Avalara is doing with AI and why. Connection means naming anxiety directly so people feel heard, creating learning pods, celebrating failures alongside wins, and maintaining human touchpoints like leader-led onboarding. Confidence means giving employees access to tools, training, and coaching.
She's also been direct about career value. "If I were you, I would really learn as much as I can about AI and show you can make an impact, because it is a resume booster whether you stay at Avalara or not," she said.
Khoo pushes back on the assumption that employee questions about AI signal resistance. More often, she argues, they signal something else. "A lot of the time their questions or their concerns is coming from a place of fear. They want to do a good job, but they don't know how. And it's their way of asking for help."
Advice for HR leaders still finding their footing
For HR leaders still building their AI strategies, Khoo's advice is direct: don't wait for the perfect plan. "Take the first step and the next step and the next step. They don't all have to be big steps. I've learned that over time these small steps actually snowball. And suddenly you're looking back and it looks completely different."
She also cautions against leading with the tool itself. "Start with what is the process you want, or the workflow you want, or the desired employee experience. Work backwards. And then figure out the best way to get there."
For HR professionals looking to develop expertise in this area, Avalara's approach offers a practical blueprint. The AI Learning Path for CHROs covers many of the same functions Khoo is redesigning: recruitment, goal-setting, performance management, and employee support.
For Khoo, who measures herself every morning against a 50% effectiveness target, speed remains the only acceptable pace.
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