HR Magazine – Exclusive interview: Spotify HR chief drives future workforce planning

With 10 years at Spotify under her belt, Lundström currently oversees all aspects of the company’s HR setup. Having worked at the firm throughout a formative period of its growth journey in the US, Lundström shone a light on how the company has powered innovative thinking, as she outlined what HR professionals should be doing to better prepare for changes ahead.

AI transformation

AI transformation plans can make or break a company right now, emphasised Lundström. At Spotify, they’ve been implementing two AI transformation plans: 2025 was all about AI adoption and ‘humanising’ AI, Lundström said, putting the workforce in a prime position to adapt to changes going forward.

One policy, called From Here to There, outlined what changes the organisation expected to go through in coming years, looking ahead to better prepare for the predicted trends to come. Then there’s the AI Momentum Programme, a governing body that brings together leaders from across the company every month to discuss big decisions regarding AI transformation.

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Communication and a human approach to AI in collaboration with leadership have been key, Lundström highlighted, along with a culture of learning. This has involved offering training and running initiatives like Hack Week, which last summer allowed all employees to spend a week hacking away with AI.

“What we did very successfully that a lot of companies missed out on was to bring everyone with you through learning by doing,” said Lundström.

Post summer, the team launched an AI Learning Festival, a month-long programme where employees could tap into different talks, mostly run by employees with expertise in AI.

Leaders must ‘walk the talk’ too, she added: “We are showing as leaders that we are leaning into it to get everyone with us. [We hope] to have that hockey stick effect: we’re going to be probably ten times faster because the adoption level is now there.”

Transparency, trust and benefits

Staying true to your people is of crucial importance for HR when preparing future-focused policies, Lundström advised, which means “walking the talk in terms of what your offering is going to look like”.

“We dare to trust our employees. We are very transparent around how we are doing as a company, where we’re going, and our strategies for the future,” she emphasised.

Frequent communication is important. It’s also crucial for HR to focus on wellbeing, Lundström highlighted, to adapt in an increasingly digitised world.

She explained: “That’s a big piece a lot of companies are missing. We have leaned into that and removed the stigma by saying: ‘Hey, we have all these resources and tools’.”

The team launched a new platform in 2025 called Modern Health, offering a more personalised experience which includes therapy, financial advice and coaching.

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The combination of transparency, trust and providing benefits is the cornerstones of how Lundström believes HR professionals should approach the digital era.

“That combination will give you the ROI to get high engagement and high productivity. Then you’re going to do well as a company,” advised Lundström.

Spotify is launching a new employee benefit this month (January 2026) called Live Mix, offering capped reimbursement for live events such as concerts and fitness classes.

Music already plays an important role in the employee experience: the company offers office listening lounges, lunchtime concerts and office rooms named after music or festivals. This latest offering helps address a need to stay connected in an increasingly digital world, suggested Lundström.

“It’s so important to stay true to the community that concerts give you in the world of digitalisation and AI and so on,” she commented.

No more manual tasks

Within Spotify’s own HR department, the team launched a 24/7 HR bot tool last November, as part of a project called No More Manual Tasks.

The bot is being trained and designed to answer queries about information that is already within its employee handbook.

It’s a win for the HR team, Lundström said: “They are getting to spend even more time with managers and employees, coaching, leading and driving this information. It’s that shift we are trying to make.”

For Lundström, this highlights the importance of using AI as an augmentative tool, as an opportunity to help with more mundane, day-to-day tasks.          

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Fostering creativity to innovate

Lundström joined the company in 2016 in New York, and stepped into the role of chief human resources officer in April 2025. She is currently based at Spotify’s headquarters in Stockholm. Prior to Spotify, Lundström worked at US stock exchange firm Nasdaq, a more mature company (Spotify launched in the US in 2011.)

“Here, it is much more [about] growing and building things, and most of it had no blueprint,” reflected Lundström.

Due to its startup nature, a culture of creative autonomy has influenced some of Spotify’s landmark people policies, Lundström said, such as the Work From Anywhere initiative introduced in 2021, a model that continues to allow employees to work full-time from home, from the office or on a hybrid basis.

The HR team was asked by the company’s senior leaders to investigate employee flexibility back in 2019. They were given the one liner: ‘can you think about how a hybrid work model can look for Spotify?’.

“Always a North Star is painted, like [for] a hybrid work strategy. But how to get there? You figure that out, you create that,” said Lundström.

“I never saw myself as a creative person before joining Spotify,” she noted.

The general thread at the company, added Lundström, is one of establishing trust to be creative, and trust to come up with ideas that can lead to bold, forward-thinking policies. It’s an ethos that has influenced Lundström’s own leadership style.

“Sometimes teams come back with a whole different take on [a problem],” she said, praising the creativity within the company. “That’s what makes it so exciting and makes us do, create and produce great work and great consumer experiences as well, because we let that creativity flow within the organisation.”