Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Good morning, everybody. Today I'd like to bring up a profound topic for discussion, which is the topic of purpose and identity. And I mean for us as individuals, as workers, as employees, as leaders, as managers, as HR people. If you fast forward where AI is going, and it's a little hard to tell, but it's pretty clear to me we're rapidly going to a world and we're getting there much quicker than we realize where bodies of knowledge and bodies of intelligence are going to be commodities. And I don't mean commodities that they're free. I just mean that there will be lots of availability.
[00:00:43] Commodity is like electricity. It's not free. But if you're not a big major player and have a lot of infrastructure behind it, you're not going to be a competitor that comes up with a new source of electricity that anybody's going to buy. OpenAI recently announced, as did Google, a body of intelligence for healthcare. You can take your medical records, upload them to either Gemini or OpenAI, I would imagine Claude too, and it will diagnose and support and give you advice on healthcare, things that you could be doing differently, how to change your diet, your exercise, your lifestyle and so forth, that used to be hard to get. You used to have to read books or find a doctor or pay for a doctor. And it was very spiky information because depending on the doctor you went to, you would get different information and different advice. Well, you know, that's going to be a commodity of knowledge. It's not going to be zero cost, but it's going to be easy to get. And that's going to be true in many, many domains in software engineering. It's true right now because you can. I'm going to talk about this on Wednesday and next week at our webinar about how quickly you can build code and other forms of information. Financial information. It's so easy to get financial information on companies, public companies. It used to be really hard. And it goes into virtually every area, including all the functional areas of our companies, including hr. And in some sense, this is what Galileo is. Galileo is the world's most comprehensive authoritative source of information on human capital practices and human capital implementations.
[00:02:17] But given that a lot of jobs are going to change, a lot of jobs are going to be disrupted, a lot of us are going to have new jobs, and things that we hold dear are going to be ripped away from us, in a sense. I was listening to a podcast this morning, and one of the guys made a comment that the two most common names in the United States are Smith and Miller. And those names refer to the jobs that people had. And that's how important jobs are to our identity and sense of purpose. Most of us identify with the work that we do, the profession that we have. That's who we are. That's where we spend our time. That's how we self identify our purpose. And oftentimes where we spend most of our time.
[00:03:03] Let's suppose that got ripped away. Pretty scary. It's pretty threatening, it's pretty frightening. Where do we spend our time now? Do we retire? A lot of people don't want to retire. A lot of people fail at retirement, as they say. No, we're not really in a society where a lot of people retire. Retirement in our society, at least in the United States, is a unique situation, but it's not something that everybody aspires to. We want to find more purpose and more identity. And so what AI is going to do is it's going to accelerate something that's been going on for maybe thousands of years, and that is the search for purpose and identity. Now at the broader society level, there'll be lots of discussions about this and it'll impact politics. There'll be labor unions fighting on behalf of different groups of people. Some of you will probably be parts of either a government agency or another entity that is trying to protect your job, and that'll be great for you perhaps, or might be a problem. But AI is going to march ahead and this commoditization of intelligence is going to continue.
[00:04:11] And inside of our companies we want it to happen because the more intelligence that's available and the more automation that's available, the cheaper the products and services, the better customer experiences. The faster time to market, the more autonomous our businesses become.
[00:04:27] So we as business people or economists, we like this. But we are companies of people. That's our job. That's what we do in human resources. And, and so what we're dealing with in our AI transformations is in some sense an identity crisis for every single human being. And you see this in the employee engagement data. Here we are at a point in the economy where health outcomes are higher than ever, longevity is higher than ever. The economy and the statistical standpoint is doing pretty doggone well. The stock market is going up, interest rates maybe could be lower, but they're not that bad compared to where they've been. But people are very unhappy. We have political anger and debate and giant arguments about our society and how it should be run. Fighting going on in different cities, lots of concerns about Political stability around the world. And I won't mention names and a lot of angst. And you can blame your phones and you can blame Facebook and you can blame Twitter and you can blame Elon Musk or you can blame whoever you want to blame. But I think a lot of this does come down to angst. Because if you look at history and you read Harari and others that have studied the long tale of history of the human race, most of us get our happiness from our friends, our families, our relationships, our opportunities to be outdoors, to experience beauty, nature, awe, and the world around us.
[00:06:01] And those things are there, they haven't gone away. But we've gotten very, very distracted with our jobs, our careers, our technologies, our phones, our self identities. And so, you know, if you really think about what's going to power your company, your business, your team through this AI revolution and it's not going to stop, it's just going to go faster. You guys, there's no slowing this down.
[00:06:24] It's going to be purpose and identity.
[00:06:27] Because if you give each person in your team, your company, your department, a sense of purpose and the opportunity to maintain their sense of identity, they will reinvent themselves. And I guarantee that this will happen. I have seen this over and over and over with people that have called me, with people that I've met, with people in my family, others, that it is not an issue of capabilities or learning, agility or education or intelligence. We're all born with massive amounts of intelligence in our genetics. We're all born with hundreds of millions of years of intelligence in our bodies. It is where we apply it and how we apply it and our ambition and our grit and our sense of self confidence and our sense of safety that allow us to maintain our sense of purpose and identity as AI comes marching along. Now, the funny thing about AI in general, and maybe this is true of all automation over history, is it surprises you. I mean, I'm a somewhat technical person and so I've seen lots of technology over the years, but I've been shocked many times by the things that AI is doing that I didn't think it was going to be capable of. Granted, it's not perfect and it makes plenty of mistakes. That's really one of the problems we're going to deal with this year. But given that aside, it is developing code, creating, creating videos and graphics, analyzing information, talking to us, understanding our medical history, coaching us, developing us, giving us analysis, analyzing information, and it will be doing much, much more. I do believe that we will all have personal AI corpuses following us around, helping us with our lives, helping us with our jobs, helping us with our shopping and other activities. And there'll be all sorts of bad behavior along with that.
[00:08:20] So this shocking, surprising, rapidly changing technology is disruptive. And even those of you who are highly technical, particularly young people, by the way, because you're young, I remember vividly what it's like to be young. Most of us do. When you don't know where you're going with your life and you're not sure what your career could or should be, and you aspire or emulate to be something or someone, maybe your father, maybe your mother, maybe a peer, maybe a role model, it's scary because you're not sure how to get there. And what powers you through these transitions that happen in your career, in your life and your job is your sense of purpose and identity.
[00:09:03] And not all of us are going to do the same things. We're not going to go in the same directions. Some of us would like to be care providers, some of us would like to be intellectuals or analysts. Some of us would like to be salespeople or consultants or leaders or managers or entrepreneurs. I mean, there's many, many ways to frame what your purpose may be. But we're going to have to help people get back to that idea, to power through this change, because most of us are going to be surprised by the level of automation that touches our white collar work. And I as an analyst, feel threatened as well. I've been doing the kind of work that I do since 1998, so it's been 28, 27, 28 years. And I'm proud of it and have worked very, very hard at it. And I now see AI doing 50, 60, 70% of the work that I used to do by hand in seconds. Now it's not doing the really high value work because it doesn't understand the context and the history and the personalities behind the marketplace, but it will. And so I'm sort of scratching my head and thinking to myself, what am I going to do to maintain my purpose, identity and career in my next decade or two? As long as I decide to work as AI impacts me. And that affects you as a recruiter, as an HR manager, as a chro, as a technologist, as an engineer, as a scientist, as a data analyst, Whatever your job is, you can literally take a question, any question you have at work or in the business community, and you can just put it into Galileo, pick which LLM you want to use. We happen to be defaulting on cloud at the moment. But you can pick Gemini if you like that one and just ask it the question and you will be shocked at the sophistication of the answer. And we're only three years into this now. You know, there actually is a lot of history to AI.
[00:11:05] AI existed long before ChatGPT. The large AI data sources and databases and corpuses and models were around in the 1980s and the 1990s. When I worked at IBM, I actually worked with the University of California at Berkeley at the time when they were building a lot of these things, there was no way to manifest them in conversation like we have today, but they existed. So this body of science of technology that we're experiencing today didn't just start in 2022, in November. It's been going on for decades. So we are going to see, in my opinion, I think most people would agree, a rapid acceleration of this because it is now so easy to access. We couldn't talk to it, we couldn't chat with it, we couldn't type to it, but it was there and it was being used for lots of back office things like recommendations that we didn't necessarily pay attention to.
[00:12:02] So this issue of your purpose, your identity, your role, your mission is going to be central in your career. And I'm not a psychologist, I don't want to try to advise you on what to do. But I do think that for most of us, reminding ourselves as to why our company exists, what is the core business or value that we are creating in our company, in our department, in our team, and how do we go back to that value and continue to push ahead. And that value creation exercise is going to give you the purpose and identity that you want. If you're a manager, you're going to have to be a super manager. Super managers, as we describe, are people who help others reinvent themselves and identify their identity and purpose as the world and the jobs change. You can't swap people out as automation comes in. It's not that simple. I would imagine that people that worked in manufacturing, 1940s and 1950s, when machines and robots started to enter manufacturing, didn't just replace everybody with robot ready employees. Everybody just learned about how the machines worked and used them and then figured out how to fix them and tune them and readjust them and make them better. That's what's going to happen here. So this is not a problem of skills replacement or skills searching or looking for the people that know more about AI that is going to be relatively ubiquitous in the workforce very, very soon. It sort of already is becoming that way particularly amongst younger people. So, you know, so I really think the interesting dimension to the year ahead is all of the enterprise technology stuff. We talk about the imperatives in getting back to this human capital issue of purpose and identity and mission and you know how to talk about that. That's what we do in HR all the time and I think it's worth bringing that up with your leaders and your executives too. Making money is not your purpose. Making money is the outcome of your purpose. So when we focus on that, the rest of our organization will power ahead. Okay. That's my thought for today. Have a great week week and I'll talk to you guys again soon. This is the week we launch the imperatives research to our clients and next week we will publicly launch the imperative research on January 21st. I hope to see you in the webinar. Talk to you soon.
