Greg Shewmaker, co-founder and CEO of r.Potential, brings a unique blend of military-honed leadership and startup experience to the forefront of workforce innovation. With a career spanning seven startups and executive roles at major corporations, Greg has consistently operated at the intersection of vision and execution. His leadership is now driving r.Potential’s mission to help businesses navigate the evolving landscape of human and AI collaboration in the workplace.
Career Journey: Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started your career, especially one that shaped your leadership approach at your current company?
Many years ago, I was in the military. It is here, at a very young age, that I learned that you don’t succeed with the team you choose. You succeed with the team you have, even if it’s a random group of people thrown together from all walks of life. In this case, some were former criminals, some were well-educated, others barely had access to education. Some were from big cities and others had left the farm for the first time when they joined the Army. We were all young and scared, homesick, and found ourselves in completely foreign, high-stress situations in which we weren’t sure we could turn to or trust anyone.
Over time, a random group of strangers, with no choice to work together, learned to trust one another, rely on each other, and became a team that operated at the highest levels in which lives were on the line. The leadership lesson I learned and continue to use today is that it’s not the best, the smartest, the fastest, or the strongest that always succeed. It’s the group that comes together with a shared purpose, with a deep level of trust that everyone is going to do their part, and the confidence in knowing that everyone has each other’s back, especially when things go wrong.
Career Path: What initially brought you to this specific career path, and how did it lead to your role in this company?
There is this incredible sweet spot in business that is so rarely experienced. I’ve been so incredibly fortunate to have landed in this spot multiple times, and I find myself here again with r.Potential.
I’ve been part of seven different startups. The greatest thing about founding a company, or being there at an early stage, is the level of energy and undeniable belief that you are going to truly drive a much needed change in the world, or at least an industry. Anything is possible and there are virtually no legacy anchors to hold you back. The flipside of this is of course that as a startup, you have very little momentum, no credibility, and you have no real assets to leverage. A clear vision, something so powerful to say, yet no one is listening.
On the other end of the spectrum is corporate life. I’ve been here as well, with some of the biggest companies in the world. The greatest thing about being a senior leader at a giant company is that you have real assets and momentum to leverage. You have the ability to affect change, often on a massive scale. In this case, the flipside of this is that there is usually little desire to challenge the status quo, a complete lack of vision, and so many bureaucratic hoops to jump through, you never actually get to the starting line.
However, when these two worlds collide – the passion, vision and energy of a startup and the scale and strength of large corporations – true magic is possible. This is where we find ourselves today.
We have a real vision to help leaders transform their organizations around human and digital workforces, and we can access and leverage the assets and experience of both The Adecco Group (world’s largest staffing company) and Salesforce (the world’s largest digital labor company).
Company Differentiation: What makes your company stand out from competitors in the market? Can you share an example that highlights this?
r.Potential is no ordinary start-up. We were spun out of the Adecco Group, the world’s leading talent company, with an investment from Salesforce, the leading provider of AI Agents.
r.Potential leverages decades of proprietary employment, publicly available, and company-specific data to deliver the most up-to-date and relevant insights that help businesses plan and prepare for workforces where human and digital workers coexist and thrive.
Product Innovation: Are you working on any exciting new products or projects? How do you think this innovation will positively impact your customers?
The current generation of business leaders will be the last one to manage human-only workforces. As businesses begin to deploy AI agents across their operations, poor planning and preparation could realistically lead to millions of people mistakenly impacted by job loss or underemployment and/or the loss of billions of dollars in failed AI Investments.
If leaders can imagine potential paths for their integrated workforces before traversing them, they are more likely to automate work in a way that empowers their workers to succeed and improves efficiency. Emerging from the intersection of the world’s industry leaders in human capital and enterprise software, r.Potential is leveraging vast information not currently found in existing AI models. This includes real-time global labor data and the Adecco Group’s decades of extensive workforce insights. r.Potential is also entering into a strategic partnership with Salesforce to leverage its core platform and Agentforce, the digital labor platform designed to augment teams with trusted autonomous AI agents, to develop its solution. This enables the company to create enterprise intelligence That’s why r.Potential exists to deliver senior business leaders:
- Integrative Intelligence: Suggested configurations of human and digital potential based on the unification of market and company data.
- Adaptive Intelligence: Suggested configurations of human and digital potential based on real-time agent performance across an enterprise.
- Predictive Intelligence: Simulated configurations of human and digital potential based on market and company data, real-time performance, and proprietary intelligence trained specifically for C-suite decision-making.
Better intelligence for better decision making, that’s what we’re delivering. The decisions being made in the next 24 months will impact the next generation of work for millions of people. We have to get this right.
Success Insight: What was the tipping point for your company’s recent success? Was there a change in strategy or approach that others might learn from?
It was the realization that with the broader adoption of AI, humans and machines will increasingly compete for the same jobs. We risk creating a permanent underclass of workers—labeled “unskilled” by algorithms that fail to recognize human creativity, empathy, and contextual judgment. The actual long-term business risk is diminishing the dignity of work rather than enhancing it.
We are focused on helping companies eliminate this dynamic by addressing a critical paradox: How to automate and optimize work without disenfranchising the entire workforce.
Challenges and Lessons: Can you share a significant challenge your company faced and how you overcame it? What key lesson did that experience provide?
Businesses are at a critical juncture for the future of work, which demands new frameworks to address the risks and benefits of Agentic AI for the modern workforce.
As the Adecco Group looked at Agentic AI, we quickly realized what was missing: a well-defined framework for collaboration between humans and AI agents. Only by having a dynamic understanding of the work humans should continue to do and the work agents can do will senior business leaders be able to accelerate workforce modernization.
That’s what we set out to build at r.Potential.
Leadership Impact: In just a few words, what differentiates your leadership role from others in the company? What impact does this have on company culture or product success?
My job as the leader of this company is to build belief and everyone else’s job is to build a product.
To learn more about r.Potential and the company’s mission, visit the website here.
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