Kelsey Kirkpatrick began her HR journey at Amazon in 2013 right after graduating from college with a degree in leadership and supply chain management. Pope Francis was just beginning to rearrange the Papal furniture, the Supreme Court was examining marriage equality, and the “Harlem Shake” was all over YouTube and aggregated by the fine people over at BuzzFeed. But Kirkpatrick, she was just beginning to understand the impact she could have in the HR field.

“I knew I wanted to be in a role where I had an impact on people,” she said of her decision to join the growing e-commerce pioneer. “And where I get the most energy is from helping others to find their true potential.”

Kirkpatrick is a senior talent leader supporting Amazon’s Worldwide Stores and “general and administrative functions” like finance, HR, and legal. Prior to this work, she directed talent management for Panos Panay, SVP for the company’s devices businesses.

From the floor of a fulfillment center to the corporate business unit, Kirkpatrick has worked all over the tech behemoth. In more than a dozen years, Kirkpatrick has worked in seven different rotations inside Amazon under different leaders in different business units.

“I’ve seen a lot of leaders at this company, and what keeps it really interesting is the org will have a different challenge. The leadership has a different challenge, and then the leader that you’re supporting more directly is usually different. I have never supported the same SVP,” she said. “Leaders are going to have completely different priorities, orgs, teams, leaders, and that’s what you get to, then, remap the talent strategy around.”

Kirkpatrick has spent the bulk of her career at Amazon in talent management roles, organizing both the employee talent management experience—like performance reviews, coaching, compensation changes—and execs and leaders.

“It’s been very, very interesting to run talent reviews, run succession planning reviews, decide on what the promotion process will be for reviewing in-depth histories and promotion stories about these executive leaders, and how do we make all of that work in a simpler and more streamlined way,” she said.

The following has been edited for length and clarity.

What’s the best change you’ve made at a place you’ve worked?

I advocate fiercely for the customer (internal employee) experience, and some of the best changes I’ve made in my career include designing better programs and mechanisms to serve employees and connect leaders to their experiences more holistically. I also like to think that I’ve been able to hire and develop amazing talent over the years, and help them acclimate as talent experts in their field (which is incredibly rewarding).

What’s the biggest misconception people might have about your job?

At Amazon, the talent management leader doesn’t have ownership on talent acquisition, or recruiting, and sometimes my friends or family will assume I also support the recruiting process. I don’t own it, and I have amazing partners I get to work with who do a 10x better job at that than me!

What’s the most fulfilling aspect of your job?

Being able to help the leaders I support to see something they may not have seen on their own by looking around corners on their behalf. With over 10 years in talent management at Amazon, I am considered a veteran in my domain, and a deep subject matter expert—I can see, share, and teach parts of our talent ecosystem and experience that others simply cannot.

What trend in HR are you most optimistic about? Why?

Using AI to supplement our human touch. We can move so much faster as talent experts if we use existing frameworks, research, expertise at scale, especially to help us write and design goals, and AI should enable us to preserve time to focus on what is unique to our business leaders that we can help them solve.

What trend in HR are you least optimistic about? Why?

I believe traditional frameworks around learning and development will need to evolve far more quickly in the age of AI, as our historical “office hours” or several months of program development no longer will keep pace with the future of work.