When Deanna Strable, CEO of Principal Financial, mandated a four-hour, in-person artificial intelligence training session for her executive leadership team, the initial response wasn’t entirely enthusiastic.
“I had some resistance from my team,” recalls Strable, who says the training was held in July as part of a monthly meeting at the company’s corporate headquarters in Des Moines. “Some of them said, ‘Why do we need to do this?’”
But Strable felt it was critical that if Principal Financial were to get more of the company’s employees comfortable with regularly using AI, C-suite leaders would need to be knowledgeable about how these tools work and how they would be embedded into workflows.
After the executive training, Principal Financial—which sells insurance policies, retirement savings plans, and asset management services—rolled out the company’s first-ever AI literacy program this year. All employees are encouraged to take four different courses, which take under 10 hours to complete and cover the basics of AI: how to write prompts, and the importance of utilizing the right data to train large language models that can produce the appropriate responses.
In total, Principal Financial says, 82% of the company’s 20,000 employees have completed at least one course, while around 39% have finished all four. Principal Financial has also made AI training a component of new employee onboarding, and in 2026, intends to offer more comprehensive and specialized training for different job functions.
Strable says that AI will play a critical role in supporting Principal Financial’s top three business priorities, which were unveiled at an investor day event held a year ago. The company is aiming to sell more retirement and insurance services to small and midsize U.S. Businesses, lure more global institutional clients, and drive up demand for retirement services sold to individuals. AI and other emerging technologies are expected to play a role in driving those outcomes.
“When we think about technology, it’s not a separate discipline,” says Strable.
She says AI will ultimately change both how Principal Financial attracts and retains talent, but also how employees will talk to customers. With AI agents proliferating and expected to change how individuals plan their finances and retirement, companies like Principal Financial need to evolve to compete in a world where do-it-yourself financial planning with AI increasingly becomes a reality.
Some AI tools that Principal Financial has already rolled out include a generative AI assistant that helps with basic tasks like summarization and email drafts. There were just 800 active users at the beginning of 2025, but today, more than 14,000 employees have access to it, and over 8,000 are using it regularly. The company’s AI literacy program was a key factor that led to increased usage.
Other tools include access to an enterprise version of OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot; AI coding assistant tools that are used by the information technology team; and a recently rolled out AI agent that fields human-resource-related questions.
Principal Financial also leans on 700 AI “ambassadors” who work in different departments across the company and can help their colleagues with any questions they may have about the technology.
Strable, who joined Principal Financial in 1990 as an intern and ascended to the CEO and chair roles this year, says she’s noticed a change when she asks employees about how they are using AI at the meetings she attends.
“You are starting to see more and more people not just look at you with a blank face, but have some real examples of how they’ve embedded it into their personal day-to-day work, but also how they are using it with their team,” she says.
Principal Financial’s investment in AI training is helping it outperform the regular usage of generative AI tools that’s observed at other companies. Only 14% of employees are using generative AI daily, with 45% saying they never used that form of technology in the past 12 months, according to a recent PwC survey of nearly 50,000 workers across 48 major economies. The figures were even lower for AI agents: just 6% daily usage and 57% never touching that tech.
Bringing upskilling up the corporate ladder
Daniele Grassi, CEO of technology education provider General Assembly, says that individual workers and companies have been evolving their thinking when it comes to upskilling. “They are seeing that there is a disconnect with their own employees,” says Grassi. “The employees are not embracing it.”
But companies are eager to prove a return on investment with their AI bets, so they’re ramping up training programs to get more buy-in from employees. “With the emergence of AI, the need for upskilling has impacted the broader population versus the niche tech people,” Grassi says.
General Assembly has evolved its offerings. When it launched in 2011, it focused on tech professionals or those aspiring to get a job in that field. But some of the newer AI courses have been developed for the C-suite, business consultants, and nontechnical employees who could benefit from knowing more about AI in their work.
At Principal Financial, investing in an AI literacy program has also lessened some fears that may have hampered regular usage. “Naturally, there was a lot of fear of AI,” says Strable. “I’d go into a town hall and, you know, a number of the questions were about reacting to the headlines in the paper, which is, ‘Is AI going to impact my job?’”
Her pitch to employees is that AI will allow for work to be done more productively and that while some roles may change, AI isn’t necessarily a job eliminator. “If we’re a growing company that naturally would have needed more employees to serve the needs of our customers, AI can maybe allow us to do it with the same number of people,” says Strable.
And since July, there’s already been an evolution in how the C-suite talks about AI. Each month, leaders share how they are personally using AI and how their team is using it. Those conversations have gotten more engaging throughout the fall.
“If we wouldn’t have had the foundation, I think that wouldn’t have ever happened,” says Strable.