Episode Transcript
[00:00:07] Good morning, everyone. Today, I want to introduce you to one of the most exciting announcements we have made in my career. And that is our new generative AI solution, Galileo.
[00:00:19] As most of you know very well, we have been studying, researching, interviewing, and collecting data about all aspects of HR, human capital management, HR technology, training, recruiting, onboarding for about 25 years. And during that period of time, we have constantly attempted to find ways to produce this information, create artifacts and tools that are both educational products and useful offerings to help HR teams and HR professionals solve problems. And we do that with a very big mission. We believe our entire company, that HR professionals of all roles and experiences actually have a massive impact on their companies and of course, the employees and the experiences of those employees. And this has become even more important now. And so if we can help you as HR professionals and HR leaders dramatically improve your impact, your company and your employees see enormous benefits. Well, what we've learned over the years is this is a very complicated problem. As with every other domain of business, HR itself is complex. We just finished a project with LinkedIn, and we found out that there are more than 100 technical topics in HR, which we have in our HR capability model, more than 400 specific skills in HR. And the number of job titles has increased by 40% in the last seven years. And this goes up year after year and keeps changing. So everything that you think you knew about HR a year ago kind of becomes a little bit changed over time. Some of it never changes, but some of it changes a lot. And so, from the work that we see, this is a massive, complicated opportunity to help each one of you individually improve your impact. Now, I also know, having met so many of you, that HR professionals come from very different backgrounds. Recruiters often come from a sales and marketing background. Learning and development professionals come from an education background. HR technologists come from a technology background. Business partners and advisors come from a consulting background. Some of you come from compensation and benefits. Some of you come from rewards. Some of you from administration, compliance, labor relations. And so within this profession of roughly 30 or 40 million people, there are subdomains, or what we call tribes. And we study these tribes as part of our systemic HR research. And the real issue that we face is the way these groups are interconnected. Because historically, all of the different roles in HR were specialties. And what we did in HR departments is we brought generalists together with more and more specialists, set them up in the centers of excellence and other artifacts of how we organized ourselves, so that you could find a specialist to do the thing or address the issue that a given line manager needed. Well, today what we find is that every problem we have in companies is an interconnected problem around people. Maybe it's skills, maybe it's motivation, maybe it's work experience. Maybe it's pay, maybe it's leadership, maybe it's org design. Maybe it's this person feels disengaged because they haven't sort of understood the mission of the company. Or maybe it's diversity. Maybe it's inclusion. I mean, it goes on and on. And you've all seen this picture I have. That shows how these things are interconnected. And every time something new comes along that gets connected to everything else, mental health, resilience, hybrid work, those are topics we weren't talking about five years ago. We were talking about other things, and now we're talking about productivity. So what we've been trying to figure out to do for a long time is how do we bring to you research, information, tools, and just basically perspective that shows you what these interconnectedness areas are so that you, as an HR leader or professional or an HR organization, can build full stack skills. It's just like software engineering. If all you know how to do is reorganize a database, you're going to be able to do a fair amount of that work, but you're not going to have very interesting job, and you're not going to be that useful to the company if you don't know how that database is used and how it interacts with the rest of the system. And that's why full stack engineers make so much more money than specialists. Well, I think we've done that, and we do that with Galileo. So what we've done is we've taken all of the content that we've developed over my last 25 years of research, less the research we sold to Deloitte. And we have integrated it very carefully, including maturity models, case studies, vendor information, podcasts, articles, videos, interviews into a generative AI platform. And for the last nine months, we've been tuning it. We codename, called it our copilot. But we've now decided that it's not a copilot. It's much more than a copilot. It is an expert. And so that's why we decided to call it Galileo. And we've shown it to a lot of you, and we've learned a lot about the questions that you ask and what I call the chaining of questions. In other words, when we see a question like, what is pay equity? The next question is, how do I do pay equity, who are the vendors in pay equity? What are some examples of pay equity solutions? What are the best practices of pay equity? How do I get started? What's an implementation plan? How do I benchmark myself, et cetera? So this system is proven and designed to handle those kinds of question chains, or prompt chains to teach you what you need to know, because maybe you're already an expert on pay equity and you don't need any of that stuff, but you just want to know who are the new tools or what are the latest benchmarks or rules or laws. And so what this system does is it allows you, as a professional user, to ask any question in any domain of HR, by the way, including management. It's actually a great system for management as well. And it will come back with an answer, a series of research and references. You can see it does not go out into the Internet. It does not use any information except ours. So you can trust it, and it gives you follow up questions to ask and lots of resources to continue your chain through solving a problem. Now, you may say to yourself, sounds like a super duper search engine. That's what we thought it was in the very first couple of weeks, but we realized it was so much more than that, because what you can do with generative AI is you can ask it to build an implementation plan, you can ask it to create an RFP template, you can ask it to dig into a best practice to find a case study to understand what happened in that case study. And it is really, really smart. And it gets smarter the more you use it, because the more you use it, the more we see what people are using it for. And you can rate answers to give us feedback. Now, when we first started the implementation, we developed it on our own system using OpeNAI, and it worked exceedingly well. And about 30 companies helped us with the prototype, and we got great feedback from them. And by the way, one of the big parts of this project is organizing the content, which luckily we had our content in a very good taxonomy, but we had to get it organized so we knew what we were putting in there and why an answer would sort of come out the way that it did. But we found as we rolled it out, is there were a lot of things you guys asked for that we didn't have in the prototype. You want to add your own content, you wanted to create special versions of it, you wanted to do other generative AI features, look for images, quickly jump into podcasts, and listen to the part of the podcast that's relevant to the question. Look at the actual phrase or sentence in the document that you're looking for, et cetera, and many, many other things. So several months ago, we moved the platform to a fantastic AI system called Sana. S-A-N-A. Sauna Labs, now called Sana, has built an enterprise Class AI platform that is a perfect fit for this usage. It's a Swedish company. We'vE been very closely working with them over the last couple of months. And what you're going to see is this is not just a very highly intelligent assistant. This is a lot more than that. This is a platform. This is a platform you can use not only as an assistant, but to create assistants and other tools for your own employees and your own HR department. For example, as you'll see in the marketing material, you can load your own content into Galileo. You can load personal content that only you see. You can also load content that groups of people can see. And you can group people into teams or groups, and they can have access to their assistant, which is tuned for their needs and accesses the content that they need. So, for example, if you're creating an AI assistant for HR Business partners and you wanted to have certain information on compensation rules, you may not want to have that available to HR generalists or HR people in the call centers. So our information is all nonconfidential, but you can decide how to segment this. And we have some charts to show you how to do this and make this assistant personalized for all the different use cases in your company. And it goes beyond HR. I firmly believe that a lot of you are going to see this and you're going to want to give it to managers. Imagine if you put your leadership development program into Galileo and used it as a leadership coach for your first line managers. It would have the fundamental information from us for any question they asked about management or the economy or HR and all the information that you've been teaching them about leadership. So there's tremendous opportunity here for you. Now, there's other things as well, because we spent so much time with clients over the last nine months getting this ready. We got to know exactly the questions they would ask. And one of the things that intimidates people about Generative AI is they don't know what questions to ask. It's hard to get comfortable with it. So we built a prompt library. The Prompt library is a set of predefined HR related prompts, about almost 100 of them in all different domains, learning comp, HR, generalist information, recruiting, pay, et cetera, and you can select those prompts and they get you started on identifying a problem or understanding what's going on in a particular domain. And it's even better. You can build your own prompts. You can use the prompt library feature to create either simple or complex prompts that your users might want to use. So if you have a standard set of issues that come up in onboarding, you could create a series of prompts or cascading chains of prompts that take care of the issue of onboarding. So that anybody in HR or any manager or any new employee could go through this onboarding prompt chain and learn about the onboarding in your company and the rules and policies and systems in your company. So this system is quite extensible. Now, some of you are very interested in learning about AI, and I know that, I know from talking to you that most of you are a little bit intimidated about AI. This is a fantastically safe system to learn AI. Not only can you use it for search and retrieval and generation and questions and learning, but you can put your own content in there. It can translate anything into any language. By the way, we've had many, many questions over the years about how do we translate our content into French or German or Swedish or another language. This system can translate automatically for you. You can ask it to answer questions in detail, or simply, you can create assistants that are for generalists, assistants for specialists that give you different amounts of detail. And there's just an enormous amount of flexibility here. And when you license Galileo from us, you're essentially licensing the sauna platform so you can use it to develop these kinds of applications. Now, let's talk about where this goes. First of all, I think there are roughly four or five major use cases for an expert assistant like this. The first is just learning about something that you don't understand. And we all have topics and issues and words that come up in meetings, and we just want to know what they are and we want to dig in and learn a little bit. And maybe we want to go to YouTube because we're not sure what we're going to get and we're going to get a bunch of ads and it's going to take too long and we can't trust the information. So this is a highly trusted information source for that. It does not connect to the Internet. It has no Internet promotional information in it. And you know the quality of research we do, and we stand behind it. The second reason people use it is to solve a problem. I need to design something. I need to build something. I need to address an issue in the organization, and maybe somebody's done this before, and maybe I don't know how to do it because I haven't done it before. So I want to understand what the issue is. I want to know what the best practices are. I want to know what vendors support this. I want to know the differences between the vendors. I might want to look at case studies. I might want to look at the best practices. Maybe I want to reach out to some of these companies in the Bursa network that are cited, and then I want to implement this. I want to put together a change management plan and a communications program around it. And maybe I want to develop some content to teach people about it. Believe it or not, Galileo can help you with every single one of those steps. We have enough vendor information in there that you can compare almost every vendor, not everyone, but it's going to get better because the third use case is more real time information. Now, you know as well as I do, and I certainly know this extremely well, that if I write you a research report on all the features of all of the learning platforms in the world, the minute I publish, it's out of date. And so these magic quadrants and various charts that analysts put together about vendors are really not that valuable. I think they're interesting, but they get out of date almost immediately. Well, we actually talk to 30 to 40 vendors a week. We're getting briefings, we're getting updates, we're getting new information, new product releases. We're having lots of discussions with them. And most of what they tell us is not confidential. They want us to share it with you. Well, we don't have time to write 100 articles or profiles or update maturity models of vendors every single week. But we can load information into Galileo almost immediately because we, as you can load audio. So we can actually load the audio of a conversation with a vendor if they give us permission into Galileo. And Galileo will allow you to ask questions about that vendor, and it will, using generative AI, not play the replay, but it will show you what's new about that vendor. So we're going to be getting you near real time information, certainly from our perspective on what's going on on the market. And that includes other things. We read a lot. We do a lot of studies that don't get published for months. That information is going to come faster and faster and faster. And I think in some sense Galileo will become the Bloomberg terminal of HR. The last use case is learning. Let's face it, sometimes you're willing to take an hour or half a day or go through a period of time to really learn a new topic. I want to know what a large language model really is. I just don't get it. And I can't talk about it without understanding how it works or I really want to dig into DEi and I want to know the use cases of DEi and what are the latest best practices or people analytics and on and on and on. Well, most of you know, we have an academy which has trained 70 to 80,000 Hr professionals on most of these topics. We have super classes now that are simulation based classes that will take you into design, designing L and D, becoming an HR business partner, doing consulting and so forth. We are connecting that stuff to Galileo. So when you go through Galileo, it is going to give you generative information from the academy, but it will also point you to resources in the academy. So it won't just answer a question and tell you where the answer came from so you can read something, it'll point you to a resource to learn more. Now, we haven't built a course on every single topic in HR, but there's a lot in there. So that is coming too. And so this system is really a problem solving system. And I can promise you that over the next year that prompt library is going to get smarter and smarter and smarter, and we're going to build more and more solutions out of it. So that's a little bit of the overview. I cannot tell you how excited I personally am on this because I'm very close to virtually all of the research and IP we generate. We get a lot of information from our conversations with you, from our big reset groups, from our workshops, from our research, from our case studies, from our event. And now we have a way to share it with you in a highly consumable form, trusted, verified. You can go in and find the reference information at any time and really consume it at scale exactly the way you want it. Galileo meets you where you are. It will show you the power of AI. It will teach you about AI, and it will give you the resources that you need to build a world class and ever improving HR function and HR career like never before. And we are really excited to offer it. Right now we are rolling it out to our corporate members. If you would like to see it and consider implementing it, you can join our corporate membership, which is not very expensive. Later next year we will come up with a lower end version for JBA members and hopefully at some point we can offer an individual access to Galileo for end user professionals around the world. We are really excited to offer this to you. We're really excited about our partnership with Sana, and I look forward to hearing from you and showing you exactly how this exciting system works. Thank you for putting up with a little bit of an advertisement today, but I just felt like I had to put this information together so you could hear this all from my perspective. Thank you.
