Elevate Appoints Karen Bennett as Chief People and Platform Officer
- The AdvoCast Team
- Nov 27
- 2 min read
A signal shift: when “people” and “platform” become one mandate
Elevate LLC has appointed Karen Bennett as Chief People and Platform Officer (CPPO), a role that brings culture, talent, technology, and operating architecture under a single executive owner. With more than 25 years in professional services leadership, Bennett will oversee talent acquisition, leadership development, firm-wide integration, and cross-functional execution—while partnering with digital and AI teams to embed data, automation, and practical AI into workforce planning, resource management, and collaboration.
For leaders in internal communications, HR, and operations, this is more than a title change. It’s an operating thesis: culture isn’t a side stream; it’s the system. And when the same leader owns both the human experience and the connective platform, integrations get faster, accountability gets clearer, and trust has room to compound.
Why a CPPO model matters during scale and integration
Multi-firm platforms rise or stall on three friction points: role clarity, resource visibility, and signal-to-noise in daily workflows. A unified “people + platform” office can attack all three:
Aligned incentives, fewer handoffs. One leader sets the standards for how teams are recruited, developed, staffed, and integrated—using the same data spine and operating playbook.
Shared dashboards build shared truth. When utilization, skills, and pipeline data live in one system, managers make staffing decisions faster and fairer—and employees see how opportunities are assigned. Transparency is a trust accelerant.
Process as a culture carrier. Consistent rituals (1:1s, retros, talent reviews) stitched into the platform turn values into behaviors. Culture scales when the calendar and the code reinforce it.
Practical AI as a credibility engine
Bennett’s remit explicitly calls for embedding automation and AI across planning and collaboration. The win here isn’t novelty, it’s credibility:
Cleaner capacity signals. AI-assisted forecasting reduces staffing whiplash and last-minute weekend work, protecting wellbeing while improving client responsiveness.
Skills mapping at the edge. Pattern-matching across engagements surfaces adjacent talent, expanding opportunity access and reducing over-reliance on the usual few.
Integration intelligence. During acquisitions, machine-assisted mapping of roles, titles, and processes shortens the “translation period” where confusion and rumor thrive.
For communications leaders, these improvements lower ambient uncertainty. Clearer plans and predictable processes make messages believable—and that’s the bedrock of organizational trust.
Leadership implications: designing for human impact
The CPPO model aligns with our Human Impact Blueprint™:
Clarity: Define how decisions are made and how work flows—then publish those rules where everyone can see them.
Consistency: Tie rituals and reviews to shared metrics (utilization quality, skills growth, client impact), not just volume.
Care: Use the platform to create slack for learning, mentorship, and recovery—especially during integrations and peak cycles.
Call to Insight: If you’re scaling through M&A, ask a simple question: who owns the whole experience from offer letter to resource plan to retrospective? If the answer is “several people,” consider a CPPO mandate.
Final reflection
Elevate’s appointment of Karen Bennett formalizes what many firms are discovering: sustainable growth requires a single architecture that connects people, process, and technology. Done well, a CPPO doesn’t centralize control; it centralizes responsibility for trust, so teams can do their best work and clients can feel the difference.
About AdvoCast
AdvoCast is a strategic communications consultancy anchored by the Human Impact Blueprint™. We help leadership teams build trust-rich cultures, communicate with clarity, and operationalize change with empathy.
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