Principal Financial’s CDAO on Building an AI-Ready Workforce of 20,000

How do you teach nearly 20,000 employees across the globe about AI and make sure they translate those lessons into ideas for business growth?

That was the challenge confronting Rajesh Arora, Principal Financial Group’s chief data and analytics officer.

The effort was important to Principal. “The enablement of our employees to be AI native is one of the building blocks we believe we need to mature for us to get the benefits out of this new technology,” he said in an interview with The AI Innovator.

It’s no small endeavor. Founded in 1879, Principal is a major Fortune 500 financial services company with employees in 25 countries and territories, serving 83 million customers. It has $1.9 trillion in assets under administration as of June 2026.

Furthermore, AI is a consumer-led technology revolution. Unlike cloud computing and digitization, generative AI gained widespread consumer adoption before many companies had developed formal policies and training programs around it, particularly after ChatGPT’s debut in November 2022.

That meant Principal employees would have various levels of experience with AI. Arora’s job is to get everyone on the same starting page so they can pull forward together.

“The first thing we wanted to achieve as an outcome is creating a common language within the organization,” he said. “The idea was, ‘let’s have everybody speak the same language.”

To build the curriculum, Principal partnered with companies such as Deloitte, which has rolled out AI literacy programs for its thousands of employees globally. This was a deliberate choice rather than tapping AI courses taught by educational institutions.

“We didn’t want to go to the schools or the institutions or the universities as a first step. We might end up going there for advanced training,” Arora said. “But the idea was we wanted a partner who has a testimonial or a record of doing these things at scale.”

While Principal has its own internal training programs for topics such as compliance and cybersecurity, AI was a “net new space and we didn’t have resident experts … that’s why we needed outside help,” he said. “We wanted to learn from them – how they did it, what worked, what didn’t work.”

Role-specific vertical curricula

Principal began its AI literacy initiative by starting from the top: leadership first.

“We brought all the leaders together and created the pathway for leaders to understand what it means to lead an AI-native organization, what are some of the expectations that need to be reset, and how they need to lead people who are coming up to speed on this technology,” he said.

Principal crafted a half-day session of condensed coursework for the senior leadership team of 20 to 25 people. “We wanted one unified, consistent, standard message to our top leaders,” Arora said.

The next step was to open the literacy program to the broader leadership team of around 130 to 150 people. Afterward, the literacy program was rolled out to the entire company in the form of several hours of kickoff sessions across the globe and in different time zones.

“That’s where we narrated the program, set the expectations, introduced what AI means and what is expected out of them, and then led them to take four different courses in a specific period of time,” Arora explained.

For all employees, Arora organized their learning into what he calls “pathways that are role-specific or persona-specific.”

For example, someone who works in sales and marketing would get a curriculum specific to the position while another employee in operations will get a different learning pathway. Within each position, Principal provided training for relevant AI tools to help employees do their jobs better.

For technical employees, that could mean training tied to the technology stack they already used. Arora cited Microsoft as one example, with employees drawing on training provided through enterprise partners.

The progression was deliberate: broad literacy first, then function, role and tool.

Arora said more than 90% of employees have taken the literacy program. Principal began its AI education effort at the start of 2025 and it continues as AI advances and new tools are built.

“It’s a never-ending journey,” Arora said.

Getting employees excited about AI

Principal recently conducted an AI hackathon in which nearly 300 teams registered to participate. The company expected to have 50 to 60 teams join and didn’t have the capacity to handle that much interest, so it drew the line at 100 teams, Arora said. More than 1,500 employees participated and each team brought a different problem for AI to solve.

“That creates a momentum, that creates an excitement, and it’s learning on the job by experimenting,” Arora said.

Principal also rolled out its “AI Day of Learning,” a 24-hour event it has held multiple times. The event consisted of coursework and sessions. Each session attracted 2,000 to 2,500 participants. “In 24 hours, we created a learning of close to 20,000 hours,” he said.

Principal’s employees led the sessions. Arora partnered with the vice president of talent management to kickstart the program and internal subject matter experts taught the sessions. Topics included risk and governance and how to build an agent.

To test whether employees are actually learning, Principal leaned on three metrics:

• A survey to judge their understanding of AI and how it has improved
• The number of ideas being crowdsourced in the company
• Sharing of success stories

Principal now has about 500 AI use cases in various stages of development, up from roughly 150 last year, Arora said.

“So that tells us, people are thinking differently. They are applying what they have learned in their training and trying to solve problems in a different way,” he explained.

One team developed an agentic system designed to customize Principal’s website based on the type of customer who logs in.

A retirement customer, for example, could be shown retirement-related information and products rather than the same generic page shown to other users. The prototype created 13 different interfaces based on customer segments, Arora said.

Principal is now working to bring the concept into use.

Literacy within guardrails

Principal’s effort to broaden AI use across the organization is paired with controls on which tools employees can use.

New AI platforms undergo reviews covering security, compliance, data privacy, legal issues and regulatory constraints before they are approved for employees.

That matters particularly in financial services, where experimentation with AI runs alongside obligations surrounding customer data and regulated activities.

The company has also had to address concerns among employees about whether AI could eventually eliminate jobs.

Arora said Principal’s strategy is to use AI both to improve existing work and to create new capabilities. When technology frees up capacity, the company’s goal is to redeploy it toward growth and other work.

“You do have natural concerns from the employees,” Arora said. “But how you are approaching it within the organization and how you explain it to the people and also demonstrate what we are doing is the key to success.”

But a non-negotiable is getting everyone literate about AI.

“We think that AI is our core capability and has a potential to create competitive advantage for us,” he said. “For us, this is going to create transformation in the company. This is the way we’re reimagining how we do work. This is going to create the growth paradigms for us.”

“That’s why we embarked on the journey to make sure all our 20,000 employees understand the potential of AI,” Arora continued. “They should think differently. Their mindset should always be curious.”