About Karen Lai

Karen Lai is a talent strategist, organizational development consultant and designer of leadership experiences with more than 18 years of experience across the professional services, technology, financial services, oil and gas, and health care and waste management industries. Early in her career as a human capital consultant, Lai gained extensive exposure to the challenges of driving change in organizations and the psychological impacts these transformation efforts had on people. Lai developed a deep interest in the untapped potential of leaders to enable change in others and shifted her focus to leadership development, where she spent 10 years designing leadership experiences, succession management and high-potential programs. Lai is passionate about bringing innovation and experimentation to HR and was an early adopter of design thinking to drive an employee-centric approach to talent programs. At BetterUp, Lai leverages her breadth of experience in human capital and passion for innovation to help talent executives envision new approaches to catalyze business growth through people growth.

Lai earned a master’s in business administration degree from the London Business School in the United Kingdom and a bachelor’s in international business from Carleton University in Canada.