As American Golf’s head of people and safety, Joanna Griffin has shaped her HR expertise by tackling high-stakes initiatives head-on. Throughout her career, she has pioneered solutions—whether revamping entire HR departments from scratch or steering large-scale workforce transitions—while now focusing on how AI can streamline administrative tasks. Her goal remains clear: designing secure, tailored tools that align with retail operations while freeing HR teams to prioritize employee engagement.
Griffin’s career has been marked by a willingness to take on big assignments, sometimes without knowing exactly where they would lead. One of the most defining moments was leaving a permanent senior business partner role at a Big Four firm to take a fixed-term contract leading a large-scale redundancy and TUPE project.
Within a year, Griffin had successfully managed 250 redundancies and 42 TUPE transfers, and was offered her first head of role while still in her early twenties. She later joined a construction business where there was no UK HR function and built the department from the ground up.
Exploring AI in HR
Griffin became increasingly interested in AI as a practical tool for HR after experimenting with chatbots and using them as a thinking partner to work through cases and ideas. She quickly realized the opportunity went far beyond that, with AI able to take on time-consuming administration, support analysis and drafting, and improve workflows.
Griffin is excited about the creative potential of AI, which gives HR teams the opportunity to build tools around the way their own business works, without needing to be a traditional software developer. At American Golf, Griffin and her team turned the familiar nine-box talent grid into an interactive tool, and created a case management platform for a high-volume retail environment.
Read Also: Papa Johns executive discusses expansion strategy
The case management platform supports workflows for investigations and grievances, draws on ACAS guidance and UK employment law, and helps HR teams make sense of complex case information. Griffin notes that AI stopped feeling like a buzzword and became an unlock, giving her the tools to turn ideas into practical solutions that can genuinely improve how HR works.
Balancing Opportunities with Trust and Security
Griffin emphasizes the importance of balancing the opportunities of AI with trust, privacy, and security. For American Golf’s case management platform, security was built in from the beginning, with data encrypted in transit and at rest, and penetration testing carried out through an AI agent and with an independent third-party security company.
The platform is deliberately restricted to trusted sources such as ACAS guidance and UK government legislation, rather than searching the open internet. The human remains firmly in the loop, with AI identifying themes, flagging risks, and suggesting reasonable adjustments, but not making decisions. Griffin notes that confidence comes from clear governance, education, and transparency.
Griffin’s AI committee brings together a head of department from every function to discuss what tools are being used, what information is going into them, and what value they are adding. The goal is to give people the ability to use AI, but also to understand it and use it responsibly.
As Griffin prepares to take what she’s learned at American Golf and apply it beyond the business, she notes that retailers need practical HR technology designed around the realities of their businesses. She plans to offer retailers access to AI-enabled HR tools and support shaped around their own organization, including areas such as employee relations case management and talent mapping.
Read Also: Curl Jar Founder Preeya Ogier Expands Globally, Shares Insights
The aim is to help HR teams manage complex information more clearly, reduce administration, and give managers better guidance, while keeping every important decision with a person. Griffin emphasizes that it’s not about taking one American Golf solution and simply dropping it into another retailer, but rather about adapting the model thoughtfully to each business’s unique culture, policies, and way of working.
Griffin’s next step is to make her learning, framework, and practical experience of building something that works in retail available more widely, with the goal of giving HR professionals more time to support people, coach leaders, and make better decisions.
According to Griffin, the future of HR will not be less human, but rather, used well, AI should give HR teams more space to be human, while helping them work with greater pace, creativity, and confidence, with the human resources function becoming more efficient and effective.
Expanding AI in Retail
Griffin’s plan to offer AI-enabled HR tools and support to retailers is based on her experience at American Golf, where she built a case management platform from the ground up.
