Tara Blythe

Tara Blythe has spent twenty-five years inside organizations at the moment things change: a product that has to be rebuilt, a company about to be sold, a leadership team that no longer fits the business it is running. The question she brings to each of them is the same. Which parts of this still need a person?

She spent nearly a decade at Infotech as Chief People Officer and Senior Vice President of People, Strategy and Communications. The company grew profitably the whole time, rebuilt its organization and its product, and moved to private equity ownership, and she helped steer all three. Before that she held senior strategy and organizational leadership roles at the University of Florida. Her career runs through SaaS and technology, private equity-backed businesses, financial services, higher education, retail, and healthcare.

Today she is the founder of Emberline Advisory, a fractional executive, and a portfolio advisor to Diversis Capital companies. She works with CEOs, boards, and executive teams to line up structure, workforce strategy, leadership capability, and operating models with how the business performs and where it needs to grow. She also teaches, as adjunct faculty in Executive Education at the University of Florida, and before that at the University of Georgia.

What Becomes More Valuable

Most of the conversation about AI is about what it can automate, accelerate, or replace. Blythe is interested in the other side of that ledger. As machines get more capable, what becomes more valuable about being human? It is a better question than the usual one. Her Human Edge framework traces how human contribution is shifting: from knowing to learning, from solving problems to finding them, from producing to curating, from execution to agency. The skills she presses leaders to build are the ones that do not automate well: curiosity, creativity, judgment, communication, adaptability, connection, and the ability to act with purpose. In her view the future of work is organizations designed on purpose, so that human and digital capability complement each other and technology widens what people can do.

Every answer a machine can give makes the right question worth more.

Background

• Ed.S., Adult Education/HROD; graduate and undergraduate degrees in human resources, organizational development, leadership, psychology, and business
• Senior Professional in Human Resources (SPHR)
• Nearly a decade as Chief People Officer & SVP, People, Strategy & Communications, Infotech
• Senior strategy and organizational leadership roles, University of Florida
• Adjunct Faculty, Executive Education, University of Florida; formerly taught at the University of Georgia
• Portfolio advisor, Diversis Capital portfolio companies
• Founder, Emberline Advisory

At the Summit

Blythe moderates a panel of accomplished women leaders on how AI is reshaping work, leadership, and the capabilities that will define success in the years ahead. The conversation will take up which skills matter more as AI advances, how leaders can prepare their organizations and the next generation for a workforce still changing shape, and what it means to lead when human and digital workers share the work. At its center is a question for every leader, organization, and generation: as AI changes what we can do, how do we become more intentional about developing what makes us distinctly human? Panel title, format, and participants to be announced.