Synthetic Consumers, Real Culture
Michaela Schoberova on what Colgate-Palmolive's AI hub, digital twins, and "Super You" cohorts say about HR's next decade
Guest: Michaela Schoberova, SVP HR, Global Commercial Transformation, Colgate-Palmolive Host: Stela Lupushor
About this episode
Colgate-Palmolive is not the first name people drop when they talk about AI at the frontier. After this conversation, it might be.
Michaela Schoberova has spent two decades inside the company across leadership development, talent management, OD, and HR business partnering. She now sits on the HR leadership team with a portfolio that explicitly includes commercial transformation, which is a clue about where the function is heading.
In this episode she walks Stela through three things most companies are still circling: a proprietary system of digital consumer twins that compresses the early stages of product innovation, an AI hub that mandates short training and then gets out of the way, and a peer-learning cohort called "Super You" that quietly drives adoption better than any top-down rollout.
We also get the part most AI conversations skip. Michaela is trained in applied positive psychology at Penn, and she argues that human relationships are the super-variable for wellbeing. Synthetic consumers are great. Synthetic colleagues are a different question entirely.
Three takeaways
- Synthetic consumers compress early innovation, but Colgate still validates with real people. The digital twins blend purchase history, search behavior, physiological response, and proprietary research into virtual personas. They cut prototyping cost and time at the top of the funnel. Real consumers still test what ships.
- Adoption is peer-driven, not policy-driven. The "Super You" cohorts work because they are voluntary, role-specific, and built around concrete applications, not generic prompt training.
- The leadership stack for a BANI world is empathy, clarity, agency. Michaela borrows from Bob Johansen and the positive psychology playbook. Each one has an obvious enemy: ambient anxiety, false confidence, paralysis.
One quote that stuck
"AI is always positive, so it kind of reinforces what you already believe. So critical thinking and relationship building with actual humans, those are the skills we have to develop." Michaela Schoberova
Listen
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About the guest
Michaela Schoberova is SVP, HR for Global Commercial Transformation at Colgate-Palmolive, where she has held leadership roles since 2003. She holds a Master's in Applied Positive Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania and an MS in Human Resource Studies from Cornell. LinkedIn.
About Workestration
Workestration is a podcast for the doers, builders, and shapers of the world of work. Practitioner-first, jargon-light, allergic to AI hype. Hosted by Stela Lupushor and Donna Scarola.