Engineering meets the extraordinary.
The story of one of the largest medical device companies in the world didn’t start in a lab, but in a converted garage in Minneapolis in 1949. There, electrical engineer Earl Bakken and his brother-in-law Palmer Hermundslie started a repair shop for medical equipment, a place employees affectionately called “the garage gang.” This kickstarted a legacy of life-saving innovation.
In 1957, Bakken invented the world’s first battery-operated, wearable cardiac pacemaker - a revolutionary development for the medical device industry. Today, Medtronic has come a long way from its garage beginnings. It now operates in 185 countries with approximately 100,000 employees globally. With a mission focused on alleviating pain, restoring health, and extending life, its work spans across cardiac monitors to robotic-assisted surgery platforms.
"Our mission is where engineering meets the extraordinary," says Kunal Sethi, VP, HR & Finance Digital Technologies and Enablement. And this is a mission that Sethi is determined to extend to the organization and its employees to drive continual innovation. ”When we are so advanced in creating medical products for our patients, we can't be left behind in terms of what we do for our own organization, for our own employees. We want to treat our employees with the same sort of sophistication when it comes to bringing AI into their day-to-day work lives.”
The human side of digital change.
The greatest push for this AI future started on the HR side with Workday Human Capital Management with the intent to transform the employee journey from hiring to development and departure. Medtronic set a goal to automate 80% of HR processes. “We can advance the way we provide service to our organization by embedding AI into nearly all the processes that we run for HR,” says Sethi.
Paramount to this vision is that it is human-led. For Sethi, AI is a companion, but will never be a human replacement. He believes AI governance and ethical and emotional decision-making are distinctly human strengths. Sethi knew driving AI innovation for the organization and employees required cutting edge technology. Critical to this AI journey was unlocking capabilities with Workday AI and Workday-acquired Paradox.
Automating the manual, augmenting the human.
The company streamlined two unique cases with AI-powered conversational recruiting software from Paradox. Firstly, using the conversational ‘chat to apply’ feature to allow candidates to easily submit an application into Workday without navigating the complexities of a traditional talent management system.
The Paradox platform also took over the administrative burden of coordinating interviews among candidates, recruiters, internal teams, and hiring managers, eliminating the lengthy back-and-forth and freeing up time to pursue higher-value work.
Sethi views this automation as the "magic sauce" for employee upskilling and strategic focus. “We see AI as a partner—it handles the routine tasks, freeing up our people to be more strategic,” he says.
The next wave for Medtronic will be agentic, with Sethi excited for native, data-connected Workday AI agents for recruiting, talent, and onboarding. He says this is an incredible win to have these built into the Workday platform.
Because progress starts with people.
For Sethi, Medtronic’s AI transformation is successful only if it remains human-centric. This means upskilling the workforce alongside the technology deployment. AI is not about remediating people, but about giving them new pathways for development, new skills, and new toolkits.
We can advance the way we provide service to our organization by embedding AI into nearly all the processes that we run for HR.
VP, HR & Finance Digital Technologies and Enablement