Influential Women: Gretchen A. Schoser, Serves as Founder & Principal Consultant of Schoser Talent & Wellness Solutions
Groton, New York — Gretchen A. Schoser spends her weeks in two places that rarely appear in the same sentence. One is inside the recruiting and performance systems of growing companies. The other is the front of a free class at a rural public library, where her neighbors are meeting artificial intelligence for the first time. To her, it has always been the same job: making sure that when technology changes, no one gets left behind.
Gretchen is a talent technology consultant, entrepreneur, workplace wellness advocate, AI educator, application creator, speaker, and author. As Founder and Principal Consultant of Schoser Talent and Wellness Solutions, she brings more than four decades in technology — including more than 18 years inside the UKG ecosystem — to organizations trying to align their systems, their people, and their culture at the same time. Based in rural Upstate New York, she is especially committed to making sure Rural America has the education, tools, and access it needs to participate fully in an AI-driven economy.
What Organizations Hire Her to Do
Clients bring Gretchen in when the technology is only half the problem. Through Schoser Talent and Wellness Solutions, she supports small and midsize organizations with UKG Recruiting and Onboarding, UKG Pro and UKG Ready implementations, talent acquisition strategy, process improvement, employee experience, human-centered change management, workplace wellness, responsible AI adoption, and team training. The outcome her clients care about is practical: less friction, stronger adoption, better candidate and employee experiences, and real value from technology they have already paid for.
Her recent work shows the range. For one national advisory firm, she built a complete competency framework — 40 competencies across nine job families — to support a company-wide performance review launch, alongside the training documentation that made it usable for managers on day one. Since founding the company in January 2025, she has served clients across five distinct industries: law firms, food service, mental health practices, manufacturing, and financial advising. That range is deliberate. The systems change from client to client; the human problem underneath them rarely does. Schoser Talent and Wellness Solutions is an accredited Better Business Bureau business.
Having worked across consulting, corporate support, and implementation leadership, Gretchen has a clear-eyed view of why transformations stall. It is rarely the software. It is the people who were never asked, never trained, or never told why the change was happening in the first place.
Rural America Is Not Behind. It Has Been Overlooked.
A defining focus of Gretchen’s work is expanding access to practical, responsible AI education throughout Rural America. Living and running a business in rural Upstate New York gives her firsthand insight into both the strengths of these communities and the barriers small businesses, nonprofits, educators, entrepreneurs, older adults, local governments, and community organizations face when they try to reach specialized training and emerging technology.
Most national conversations about AI are built around large corporations, technology companies, and major metropolitan areas. Gretchen is working to ensure that geography, age, income, and technical background do not decide who gets to participate in the future of work. Rural organizations typically operate with smaller teams, tighter budgets, and no internal IT department. Used thoughtfully, AI can help them reduce administrative burden, capture institutional knowledge, improve communication, and strengthen customer service in ways that were previously out of reach.
She is careful about how she frames that work. Gretchen does not see rural communities as behind. She sees them as resourceful, innovative, and relationship-driven — and fully capable of benefiting from technology when it is introduced in a way that respects their realities and their values.
A Year of Building: AI Education, Free Classes, and Apps
Over the past year, Gretchen’s work as an AI educator has expanded well beyond teaching people how to write a prompt. She provides approachable, beginner-friendly education for individuals, professionals, business leaders, and entire communities who may feel intimidated or excluded by emerging technology, focusing on how AI can support communication, planning, documentation, workflow improvement, decision-making, and the reduction of cognitive overload.
Since December 2025, she has taught nine free AI classes at the Groton Public Library in rural Upstate New York. The sessions are small by design — five to ten neighbors at a time — because the people who most need this education are the ones least likely to raise a hand in a crowded room. The classes remove cost as a barrier and give residents a welcoming place to ask questions, experiment with new tools, and learn responsible practices without pressure or jargon. She has also delivered AI sessions for Chambers of Commerce across Tompkins and Cortland counties, Rotary, and local business groups.
Gretchen is the creator of Learning AI With Gretchen, a free, beginner-friendly learning application built to make artificial intelligence safer and more accessible for users ages eight and older. She uses no-code and vibe-coding platforms to develop practical applications, educational resources, and human-centered tools — living proof that people without a software development background can turn a meaningful idea into a working product.
Her through-line as a teacher is consistent: AI should function as a thought partner, not a replacement for people, expertise, creativity, or human connection. Every program she teaches includes responsible-use practices covering privacy, data protection, bias, accuracy, verification, intellectual ownership, and the enduring importance of human judgment. She is especially interested in how thoughtfully designed AI can reduce overwhelm, support people experiencing burnout, and help small organizations do more without grinding down the humans doing the work.
On Stage in 2026
On August 6, 2026, Gretchen presents “Getting Comfortable and Staying Safe with A.I.,” a 90-minute program for the Tompkins Chamber. Built for business leaders, entrepreneurs, and professionals who are curious about AI but unsure where to start, the session pairs practical applications with the essentials of privacy, safety, accuracy, bias, verification, and human oversight.
She has also been selected to speak at the 2026 LWTSUMMIT in New York City, October 5–7, 2026. Her workshop, “AI as a Thought Partner: Reducing Overwhelm, Protecting Mental Health, and Working Smarter,” is designed for women and nonbinary technologists, founders, executives, managers, operators, and team builders. Participants will learn to map workflows, reduce cognitive load, improve communication, and protect their well-being while setting practical guardrails around privacy, bias, accuracy, and human oversight.
To extend the workshop past the last slide, Gretchen is building the SHIFT Thought Partner, an interactive companion application organized around her SHIFT framework: Spot the load, Halt, Instruct clearly, Filter the output, and Take the human step. Designed with accessibility, privacy, and ease of use in mind, the app lets participants apply the workshop to a real challenge in the room and keep using the framework long after the conference ends. It reflects the next phase of her work — helping leaders recognize that AI adoption is not only a technical decision, but a people, culture, leadership, and wellness decision.
Why This Work Is Personal
Gretchen’s commitment to mental health advocacy is rooted in lived experience. As a suicide attempt survivor, she understands that people can appear productive, outgoing, successful, and entirely fine while privately struggling. Her crisis in 2022 became a turning point that reshaped how she saw work, leadership, relationships, and the cost of waiting until someone reaches a breaking point before asking for help.
Rather than returning to work the way she had left it, she chose to rebuild her career around purpose, authenticity, and impact. That decision now shapes everything else she does. Gretchen believes employee well-being cannot be separated from workload, systems, communication, leadership, culture, and the tools people are handed every day — which is precisely why a technology consultant talks so openly about mental health.
She has also learned that vulnerability is not a liability. By speaking openly about her own experience, she has built stronger relationships, invited more honest conversations, and chipped away at the stigma that keeps people silent. Her story is not primarily about crisis. It is about healing, reinvention, joy, purpose, and the possibility of building a meaningful life after a moment that once felt unsurvivable.
The Memoir
Gretchen is writing a memoir about concealed depression, mental health crisis, recovery, and the work of rebuilding a life with greater purpose. The manuscript is currently in editing. The book explores what it is like to look strong, capable, and successful while privately in profound pain, and what happens after the decision to ask for help.
Her hope is to reach people who cannot yet imagine that their lives can change. Readers and listeners often describe her journey as a message of hope, because it shows that meaningful work, love, laughter, entrepreneurship, advocacy, and entirely new beginnings can exist on the other side of a mental health crisis. Surviving, she says, can eventually become living — and it is never too late to begin again.
A Global Mental Health Platform
Gretchen is Co-Host and Business Manager of Sh!t That Goes On In Our Heads, an award-winning global mental health podcast with more than 6.5 million downloads and listeners in over 100 countries. The show won the 2024 People’s Choice Podcast Award in the Health category and the 2024 Women in Podcasting Award for Best Mental Health Podcast. Through candid conversations, humor, and real stories, it helps normalize mental health struggles and reminds listeners they are not alone.
She contributes on the microphone and behind it — running business operations, strategy, partnerships, guest development, audience growth, and brand management. She also co-hosts Paperback Confessions, a book podcast that showcases a lighter side of the same instinct: bringing people together around something they love. Together, the shows demonstrate her ability to build community, translate hard subjects into accessible conversation, and create trusted content with global reach.
Rooted & Rising
Gretchen has expanded Schoser Talent and Wellness Solutions with Rooted & Rising — Resume and Career Coaching, which helps job seekers clarify their strengths, strengthen resumes and LinkedIn profiles, build targeted application materials, and navigate transitions with strategy and confidence. The offering reflects a belief she has held since her own reinvention: career support has to address both the mechanics of finding work and the emotional weight of professional change. She has put it into practice repeatedly over the past year, coaching professionals through layoffs and industry shifts.
Purpose Over Pressure. People Over Process. Joy Over Hustle.
Those three phrases are the stated values of Schoser Talent and Wellness Solutions, and they are not decoration. Gretchen’s leadership philosophy rests on integrity, kindness, respect, self-awareness, responsibility, and the courage to define success on your own terms. She encourages women to stop measuring their lives against someone else’s timeline, to let their careers evolve, and to pursue work that reflects both their values and their strengths. Changing direction, learning something new, starting over — those are not failures. They are growth.
For Gretchen, success begins with being a good human. Titles, revenue, and recognition matter far less when they are disconnected from purpose. She believes people do their best work when they are treated with dignity, supported through change, and allowed to bring their full humanity to work. She also believes caring for yourself is not selfish; it is the prerequisite for leading, serving, creating, and showing up for the people who matter most.
What Comes Next for the Field
Looking ahead, Gretchen names the crowded marketplace as her industry’s biggest challenge. Consulting services, AI tools, and digital platforms have multiplied, giving organizations more options than ever and less clarity about which ones actually deliver value. The flood of sales-driven outreach — especially on LinkedIn — has only made buyers more skeptical, which she believes puts a premium on trust, authenticity, and genuine relationships.
She also sees real opportunity. Organizations are increasingly looking for partners who can connect technology, people, and culture rather than optimizing one at the expense of the others. Efficiency alone is no longer the goal; employee well-being, mental health, and sustainable workplace practices are moving from perks to strategy. That shift is exactly where her work lives.
Work With Gretchen
Whether she is improving a client’s recruiting technology, teaching a free AI class at a rural library, building an interactive tool for conference participants, speaking about burnout and cognitive overload, or telling her own story, Gretchen’s message stays the same: technology should support people, workplaces should protect their humanity, and no one should be made to believe their current circumstances are the end of their story.
Gretchen A. Schoser is available for talent technology and UKG consulting, responsible AI training and workshops, keynote presentations, conference panels, media and podcast interviews, community education initiatives, career coaching through Rooted & Rising, and partnerships focused on workplace wellness, Rural America, and mental health advocacy.
Learn More About Gretchen A. Schoser
Influential Women profile: influentialwomen.com/connect/gretchen-schoser
Website: schosersolutions.com
Book a conversation: calendly.com/schosersolutions/chat-with-gretchen
Email: gretchenschoser@schosersolutions.com
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/gaschoser
Learning AI With Gretchen: learningaiwithgretchen.schosersolutions.com
Rooted & Rising — Resume and Career Coaching: rootedandrising.schosersolutions.com
Sh!t That Goes On In Our Heads: goesoninourheads.net
Paperback Confessions: paperbackconfessions.com
If you or someone you know is struggling, the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline is available 24/7 by calling or texting 988 in the United States.
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