The human side of AI: How H&R Block is building an AI-powered brand engine that sticks - WRITER

The human side of AI: How H&R Block is building an AI-powered brand engine that sticks

A conversation with Robyn Murphy, Chief of Staff & Director of Marketing Operations, H&R Block

Headquarters

Kansas City, MO

Industry

Professional Services
Financial Services

Department

Marketing

AI Agents

Content to Campaign Lifecycle

Impact

Brand governance
AI adoption
Change management

At a recent WRITER webinar, Robyn Murphy — Chief of Staff & Director of Marketing Operations at H&R Block — joined WRITER CMO Diego Lamonto for a conversation that started with building AI workflows that protect the brand and kept landing on the same truth: the technology only moves as fast as the people behind it.

H&R Block has been helping Americans navigate their taxes for more than 70 years — trusted by millions across DIY digital filing, in-person tax preparation, small business services, and the Spruce financial product. That breadth means H&R Block’s marketing team isn’t just producing content — it’s running a content-to-campaign operation across multiple audience segments, each with its own voice, regulatory requirements, and brand expectations.

The real obstacles to AI-powered marketing — habits, hesitation, and pace

Before Robyn Murphy ever worked in marketing, she spent more than a decade in HR and people & culture — building teams, running change management programs, and learning how organizations actually behave when asked to do something differently. When she moved into marketing at H&R Block five years ago, and then began leading AI transformation two years after that, she brought that lens with her. It changed everything about how she read the room.

Where other leaders saw a technology rollout, Robyn saw a change management problem. When she began exploring AI for H&R Block’s marketing team, the obstacles she encountered weren’t primarily technical. They were human. Her team — experienced, talented marketers who had spent a decade building expertise and intuition — had deeply ingrained ways of working. Reaching for Excel. Writing from scratch. Relying on personal judgment over shared systems. Robyn calls it plainly: “Human habits are just hard to break.”

Layered on top of that was a more emotional challenge. Creative marketers worried that AI would diminish the work they’d spent years mastering — that the tools would compress their role to execution and strip away the judgment, taste, and strategic instinct that defined their value. “A year and a half ago, the team was definitely more hesitant,” Robyn says. “Will I get to have my creative juices flow? Or are we just going to let this tool basically do the work for us?”

“No one wants to feel like they’re talking to a robot. That should never be the goal for any company — and our marketing team doesn’t want content to come across as a robot either.”
Robyn Murphy
Chief of Staff & Director, Marketing Operations, H&R Block

And then there was pace. The speed at which AI tools change doesn’t just create learning curves — it creates anxiety. Getting comfortable with one tool only to hear that something new has launched, that retraining is needed, that the landscape has shifted again. Robyn recognized this pattern immediately — not as a tech problem, but as the same thing she’d seen in every major organizational change of her career: people need time, space, and a reason to believe before they’ll commit to something new. “It’s the same whether it was 10 years ago or now,” she says. “What they’re needing. How they’re feeling.”

Start with a win, then build the system

The framework Robyn brought to  H&R Block’s Marketing AI rollout wasn’t borrowed from a technology playbook. It came from 12 years of watching how people respond to change. When H&R Block began working with WRITER about a year ago, she started with a principle she’d applied to organizational change long before “AI adoption” was a phrase anyone used: slow down before speeding up. Rather than pushing the full scope of what was possible, she focused on finding one use case that would deliver a visible, meaningful win for the people using it — and letting that win do the work of changing behavior. “Once you start showing that the new tool has a win for them,” she says, “it just starts creating the habit of trying something different.”

“This tool is here to help so you can execute faster, create content quickly. But it is not here to be the human who’s making the judgments, who’s making the strategy, who’s making the creative calls — that is still so needed.”
Robyn Murphy
Chief of Staff & Director, Marketing Operations, H&R Block

That instinct — meet people where they are, show them the benefit before asking them to change — also shaped how she built the governance infrastructure. Working with WRITER’s team, legal, IT, and the creative team that owns H&R Block’s brand guidelines, Robyn led the construction of a WRITER Voice Profile that encoded the company’s brand guidelines, tone of voice for each of its audience segments — DIY filers, small business owners, tax professionals, and Spruce customers — and legal claims and disclaimers, all in one place. The goal: AI outputs grounded in H&R Block’s brand, strategy, and context — not generic content that could have come from anywhere. The logic was direct: if the knowledge is in the platform, marketers don’t have to carry it in their heads. Content goes out compliant the first time, without a manual checklist. “When you’re creating that piece of content,” Robyn explains, “it’s just automatic. You don’t have to think about it.”

Getting cross-functional buy-in — particularly from legal — required the same people-first thinking. Rather than arriving with a mandate, Robyn went in asking what legal needed. For a compliance team already stretched by review queues, the pitch wasn’t about AI. It was about reducing their burden. WRITER’s Style Guide and Terminology Controls surface potential brand and legal issues before a draft ever reaches the review queue — which means fewer redlines, faster approvals, and a fraction of the back-and-forth that used to slow campaigns down. “Right there,” Robyn says, “just putting those pieces together — you get the support.” It’s a move straight out of change management: find the win for the person you need on your side, and bring them in as a partner rather than a gatekeeper. And in this case, the win was concrete — a faster, less painful compliance cycle for everyone involved.

H&R Block’s CEO Curtis Campbell reinforced the organizational commitment publicly: “We will be human-led, tech enabled.” That kind of visible leadership signal, Robyn argues, matters enormously. Marketers needed to hear from the top that their creativity wasn’t being automated away — that the tools existed to give them more time for the work that only humans can do.

Taking the team from apprehension to advocacy

H&R Block is candid about where they are in their journey. Robyn describes 2025 as the year of learning — introducing WRITER across the marketing team, running training programs, and beginning to shift habits. 2026 is the year of optimization: taking what the team has learned and scaling it into the full content-to-campaign workflow using Playbooks— from brief and creative development through derivative assets, compliance review, and activation — at the speed a brand like H&R Block needs to move.

The vision Robyn is building toward is one where WRITER functions as the connective tissue across that entire workflow: AI outputs grounded in H&R Block’s brand and strategy, quality and precision maintained across every user and every campaign, and compliance built in from the start rather than bolted on at the end. The metric she watches most closely, though, isn’t a content output number. It’s the cultural signal that something has genuinely shifted — team members who were apprehensive months ago now building chatbots, asking questions about knowledge graphs, sending screenshots of wins, and stepping up as internal champions. “You can’t put it on a spreadsheet,” she says. “But you can certainly feel it and see it within teams as people step up.”

The leadership work underneath the tech work

It turns out the best preparation for leading AI transformation in marketing wasn’t a background in data science, or product, or even technology. It was 12 years of sitting across from people in moments of uncertainty and figuring out how to help them move forward. What makes Robyn Murphy’s perspective distinctive is her insistence that the work underneath AI adoption is fundamentally the same as any other organizational change. You cast a vision. You find the early wins. You celebrate them loudly. You hold space for the people who are nervous. You build the systems that make the right behavior the easy behavior. You treat your colleagues — legal, IT, creative, the marketer who still reaches for Excel first — as people navigating something genuinely new, not obstacles to route around.

“You’re never at an age where you can’t learn and grow yourself and try new things,” Robyn says. “And you might surprise yourself.” It’s advice she’d have given in her HR days. It applies just as well now. For a marketing team protecting a 70-year-old brand in a moment of significant transformation, that kind of leadership isn’t a soft skill — it’s the whole job.