Episode Transcript
[00:00:03] Speaker A: I think the skill of the future, at least from my perspective, is systems thinking. We're going to have more and more people who are able to get access to all of this information.
And the real skill is going to be able to figure out how you take a business context and all that information and fit things together into a meaningful system that supports what the business is trying to do and outcome.
Hi, this is Josh Burson. Welcome to the what Works podcast where Josh Burson Co. Analysts, talk with innovative HR and business leaders about what's really working in talent, technology and the future of work.
[00:00:41] Speaker B: Hi, I'm Kathy Andrus, SVP of Research and Global Industry Analyst at the Josh Burson Company and I'm excited to speak with Brandon Roberts, Global VP of Global People's Products and AI at ServiceNow about his company's transformation of HR leveraging AI. Brandon, we're thrilled to have you. Thanks for joining.
[00:01:00] Speaker A: Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm excited as well.
[00:01:02] Speaker B: I know we're going to talk about how you are transforming the HR organization and how you're using AI in hr and I think it's such a big topic that everybody wants to hear about. But before we jump into that, tell us a little bit more about yourself, your role, your background, and then about the company as well.
[00:01:22] Speaker A: Yeah, so I'm currently the group Vice president of Global people product analytics and AI at ServiceNow. So we are thinking about how do we really drive this AI transformation across global people, but also across the enterprise. What do we need to do to build the skills that the organization is going to need for the future? How do we really transform work, not just make it about implementing technology, but really transforming what people do on a day to day basis. New roles, new skills. And so thinking about that broader transformation, I've been with ServiceNow for almost seven years, originally came there to build their people analytics function and have expanded a lot, really focused on AI and that AI transformation so far.
[00:02:01] Speaker B: I think that especially the space where your background is at people analytics and kind of HR technology and that kind of combination of that, I think it's such a huge opportunity right now for every single HR organization to leverage all of that. So very exciting time. Tell us for those of us who might not know about ServiceNow and maybe more about from the HR and people perspective, because I know everybody knows ServiceNow obviously as a product and as a customer offering, but tell us a little bit more about what is ServiceNow and the HR function.
[00:02:35] Speaker A: One thing that's a little bit unique about ServiceNow's HR organization is that we also lead learning and development for our customers and partners externally in the ecosystem.
So a big proportion of that organization is focused on learning and development for our employees, but also, like I said, for our customers and partners externally.
[00:02:53] Speaker B: Absolutely, absolutely. I think it's a great idea and a great setup that most organizations don't really leverage too much because they see this really separate, right when you're saying, oh, L and D for your employees. And then there's your customer training, which is different group, different frameworks, sometimes even different technologies, all of that. So tell us a little bit more about how you're going about all of this, because I know everybody is trying to go into this AI age with the HR organization, break into it. But then we get a lot of questions. Where do we start? How do we prioritize? What are the use cases? Tell us how you think about all of this.
[00:03:30] Speaker A: Yeah, so we've been on this journey, much like many companies, for the last three years or so. And I still remember when ChatGPT really exploded on the scene. Jackie Cani, who's the CHRO at ServiceNow, came to me and said, what is HR's role in this transformation? This is going to be big. We believe that AI is really going to transform the way that people work.
What is the role of HR in this transformation? And so I spent a lot of time thinking about that in the beginning and really saying, what should we be spending our time on within the HR function? And we landed on kind of three key areas that we're focused on. The first is reimagining an AI powered HR function. So this is really everything we need to do internally within HR to create more efficiency, to use AI to make our people operations more productive and more effective, to make HRVPs more effective. We'll talk a little bit about that in a minute. There's AI everywhere, right? How do we make HR really efficient and effective? So that was pillar one. The second pillar was we know that this is completely transforming the skills that an organization is going to need. And we know that this is going to be a massive reskilling effort. I really believe people worry about jobs. I worry about do we have skills? Mapped the jobs we're going to have of the future versus are we going to have jobs? There's going to be work. It's a matter of if we have the right skills. So how do we really build those skills in our organization? And like I mentioned, for customers and partners as well. And then the third piece, and we talked a little bit about this, but really, how do you transform the workforce so you implement a technology, it saves five minutes for an employee every time they use it. How do you capture that five minutes and ultimately create value for the business out of it instead of just letting it go into the ether? How do we really rethink roles, consolidate teams, change the way we operate to really get the most value out of AI beyond just implementing the technology and being excited about an AI use case, that's, to me, where success is really rethinking, where we spend our time on what the roles in our organization are. So those three pillars we've used for basically since we started three years ago, and we use those to organize the
[00:05:37] Speaker B: work we did, those three priorities are really powerful. And I think what I'd like to get into is maybe tell us a little bit about specific use cases in each three of these areas. Some examples are some specifics on how you're working on those.
[00:05:52] Speaker A: Yeah, so the first pillar is reimagining the HR function. In ServiceNow, we use our own technology. It's called NowAssist. It's really meant to help do two things, which is if you're a people operations organization or shared services organization that's supporting how do we use AI to deflect work? So that AI is answering many of the employee questions. And then if a human does need to be involved, let's say it's not as simple as just providing an answer back to the employee or for whatever reason, it's better to have a human involved. How do we make those humans more productive when the cases get to them, make them faster, get them the right tools, the right information, ultimately allowing them to move faster. And so we implemented this technology, gosh, two years ago now, and we've seen more than doubling of the productivity of our people, operations, organization. So we used to have one human agent supporting about 400 employees at ServiceNow, and now it's more like 970.
So it's really transformed the way we can deliver and the way that employees rate. The experience has been really consistent, but we've really increased the efficiency. And then similarly, we're also trying to really transform what we're doing for HR business partners. Anybody who's been in HR for a while knows this is not new. We've been trying to make HRBPs more strategic for a long time, get them out of the tactical work. But I really believe we're at a point where the technology has caught up to the idea and where AI can really help our HR Business partners deliver better value to the business. And I'll give you a couple examples of how we're doing that. Anytime we're talking about AI use cases, we look at what are the tasks that are happening in the world? What does an HREP spend time on today they're doing lots of reporting, they're polling numbers, they're looking at external research, they're getting benchmarks, they're understanding what's happening in the market, et cetera, et cetera. And what we did was say, okay, what tasks do HRBV spend their time on? Which ones are AI likely to able to create agents that ultimately solve for that specific task? And so we actually built those two examples I just gave. We built what we call our people Data agent. It's an agent. HRVPs can interact with that agent through teams or through our portal, which we call my servicenow. They can say, how many employees do I have in this location? Who hasn't completed their performance ratings? What's our attrition rate for the last three years?
Those types of questions and be able to get that information directly in the systems where they're already sitting and working. The other part of it, the benchmarking, the external part, we partnered with Galileo that we integrated to our experience internally. So now our HRVPs in the same experience without leaving teams or my ServiceNow, which is the place that we spend a lot of our time, they can interact with this people data agent and external research. They can ask questions about what are best practices around workforce planning and get amazing answers from the research that you all have done, that to me, pretty powerful.
[00:08:45] Speaker B: It is so powerful, and I love how you describe that. But I think the question that we always got, and rightly so, for major business partners, how can I be strategic if I can't get my hands on the right data? I can't get the right information in the moment when I'm asked. And as you said when you were in this meeting, you're like, okay, let me go back, let me do this as a project. And by the time you get the answers, the business has moved on to other things and you lost the opportunity to really make a big impact as a strategic advisor, as a consultant to the business.
[00:09:14] Speaker A: So it's the speed of decision making generally in organizations is incredibly fast. If you say, I just need a few weeks to come back to you with an answer on this.
[00:09:24] Speaker B: So, yeah, the business is moving incredibly fast, of course, because the outside world is moving so fast. When you think about AI, for example, every day some New AI development comes around. Right. So it's even hard to keep tabs on that. And everything else in the business, of course, is getting faster and faster. So I love that kind of approach.
And how you're also thinking about how Galileo actually helps the HR business partners with these external perspectives. Because in the end of the day, I think that's what the business wants to do too. They want to know what are we doing and where are we going and what's our situation? And it needs to be best business understanding built into the advisory, the consulting. But then also they're asking, how does it compare? Is that span of control of 20, is that good? Is it bad? And level of this, what have other organizations done, for example, to mitigate whatever situation we have and to get these outside examples, incredibly powerful. I think it's going to amplify the role of HR as not just an order taker, but really a strategic consultant.
[00:10:26] Speaker A: And if you just think about these agents as Lego blocks where you're starting to just build these capabilities in real time in a single experience, you can get data internally, you can get data externally, you can already kick off workflows or use AI to actually get something done, all these things are just getting stacked on top of each other and I think are eventually going to create this agent ecosystem that underlies what HRVPs do day to day and helps them really be strategic in the way we've been hoping for a long time.
[00:10:54] Speaker B: I love how you're thinking about the agent as Lego pieces, because I think that modularization of what you can do with them, you can use it in many different situations and that usually is not the case. So it's really exciting how flexible and how agile this can all be.
[00:11:09] Speaker A: Yeah, much more dynamic, for sure.
[00:11:11] Speaker B: Much more dynamic too. No, this is fantastic. And I know Josh talked with Jackie about AI and HR, and I think she mentioned you had 400 submissions of specific use cases or something like that, and then you narrowed it down to a much smaller number, maybe 15 or 20 or something like that.
How does that work? Can you tell us a little bit more about how you engage the entire organization? Because I think that's very powerful too, that you have this energy of experimentation around it and then you have a process and governance basically to say, how do we narrow it down to those use cases that we want to roll out across the organization?
[00:11:47] Speaker A: Yeah. So ServiceNow is a workflow company. We knew there were employees out there that had ideas. We also had tons of ideas internally that were popping up. Somebody's Building this over there and somebody's building that over there. How do we wrap our arms around this and really allow everyone to participate in the process, but also allow us to manage it in an effective way? Because there's probably nothing more cross functional than AI. There's tons of teams that needed to be involved. And so we were facing this challenge around. We knew ideas were out there, we couldn't get them centralized and we wanted to create the source of truth for what AI existed and ensure we weren't duplicating efforts. And so we created this workflow and we've gotten over a thousand ideas at this point, we're getting ideas every week and we use this really basic assessment that we try to do within 24 hours of receiving the idea to say what do we do next? And then eventually, if the idea actually gets pursued, we build it into what we call our AI control tower and we have visibility to how many people are using it. We try to estimate how much value is actually coming from the tools and this gives us a source of truth that you can really start to understand. All the AI that's happening not just in HR but across the entire enterprise.
[00:12:58] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. And I think if people can also submit ideas all the time, it gets them very excited. Right. Because probably there's a lot of pent up demand that they're saying, hey, I tried this or this would really help me. Even if they haven't tried it, this would really help me really go to the problems that people have. So that's really exciting. Once you have prioritized one of these use cases, how do you think about the build versus buy decisions here?
[00:13:23] Speaker A: Yeah, we have an amazing team at ServiceNow who are building technology in the AI space in HR. So we definitely rely on our product teams to build amazing things like now assist.
They have a lot of innovation coming out in this space. We do work a lot with them and implement their technology internally at ServiceNow, but it doesn't solve everything. And we do go external and buy third party tools where that makes sense. Galileo is an example of that. Right. It's an agent that solves for something that we wouldn't do internally. So we do a little bit of both. And the other thing that we're really trying to drive more significantly is more ability for citizen development of AI to help them get their work done. Not just the enterprise use cases, the things we've been talking about so far. But hey, I spent a lot of time doing XYZ tasks. Can I create an agent that helps me get my work done. So I think that's going to be a bigger part of creating value from AI is how do you allow everybody to be a part of building it? And there's some really interesting tools out there. Now ServiceNow has what's called AI agent studio that helps you build your own agents, which is great.
[00:14:24] Speaker B: Wow. And how do you see the HR organization and the hr people at ServiceNow? How ready are they for the citizen developer kind of thing? It seems a little bit far away from what an HR person might dare to do.
[00:14:37] Speaker A: Yeah. We created ServiceNow University, which is an effort we've done internally to really build the learning and development we need. What specific skills do you need in your role around AI to be successful?
Another really interesting thing we did, which I think is really powerful, is we actually did an assessment of AI skills of every single person at ServiceNow. And so we mapped our roles to what skills we thought they needed. And we actually did an assessment to say, hey, here's where you're at. We believe we to be successful as a company, we need to be among the best in terms of AI skills.
And that was incredibly powerful because it was personalized. It was very much telling you exactly what you needed to do to be successful in your role. And I think doing things like that are really key ways that you bring HR along in this process.
[00:15:28] Speaker B: Very powerful and very supportive. And then you get probably much better adoption and much better embracing of this journey, which can be intimidating because it's new and let's face it, we all don't really know where it's going. So if anybody says they know where AI is going to be in five years, I will not believe them.
[00:15:46] Speaker A: No one knows
[00:15:49] Speaker B: exactly. We can just guess on that. I wanted to ask you another question around the HR organization of the future and how AI is impacting that. How do you see the HR roles and the HR operating model changing with agentic AI introduced into the HR organization?
[00:16:07] Speaker A: Yeah, if you think about the last probably 100 years or so, we've really been going down this route of specialization where we create specific roles who are experts in a space to be able to solve whatever. We have experts in hr, we have experts in benefits and people analytics and compensation. I think what happens, you're still going to need experts to set strategy ultimately to inform the agents about the information that they're going to need to be able to answer employees questions. But I do think we are going to get to a place where agents are solving for some of the tactical work that Coes do today. We've been calling them full stack HRVPs, just like we were talking about earlier. You have an HRVP who can go to their agent for benefits or people analytics or compensation, whatever their challenge is, can help them solve that without so many handoffs and so many interactions with other people. Think about that example we talked about earlier, right? Sitting in the meeting with a leadership team, you, you have to interact with three or four teams to get that done historically.
So I think that really changes things. I think it means that we need a larger percentage of HR that is going to be people, we call people technologists really focusing on building this agentic infrastructure, even things like data governance are going to grow significantly if we really want to deliver on the value and promise of AI. So I think people technologists get bigger, you get more of these kind of full stack roles, especially on the HRVP side where they're able to go down and answer questions about everything because they're supported by this agentic infrastructure. And then you really have the COEs focus on strategy and the really complex things that can't be solved by AI. The very complex cases that need to be solved by a human. And there are exceptions to people talk about er and things like that. There's certain things that are sensitive that need human touch as well.
[00:17:58] Speaker B: I totally agree with you because we've been talking about systemic HR for the last few years. And for us systemic really means that everything is becoming much more integrated. And I think that's what we are talking about too. What we have built up over the last hundred years or so is like as you said, specialization centers, but not intentionally. We've also made them very siloed. Right? Okay. This is a recurring problem, this is a learning problem, this is a performance management problem. But in reality, most of the business problems, you can't easily put them into one of these corners. They're always multidimensional. And so that's what we mean by systemic hr. So I think that's the direction that the HR organization is going more and more rather than these domain silos.
[00:18:42] Speaker A: I totally agree and I think the skill of the future, at least from my perspective, is systems thinking. We're going to have more and more people who are able to get access to all of this information and the real skill is going to be able to to figure out how you take a business context and all that information and fit things together into a meaningful system that supports what the business is trying to do and outcomes. So I think that's the skill we need to build.
[00:19:07] Speaker B: Absolutely. And I love how you're thinking about that, because it's exactly how we are seeing that too. And yeah, that system thinking, it was funny. When we first came up with systemic hr, people said, oh, it sounds like a disease. I have. Systemic hr. Everything is a system that connects with everything else. All the problems that we're solving in HR become much more interconnected, but they're also much more multidimensional. And to solve those multidimensional problems, you need that kind of system thinking.
[00:19:35] Speaker A: And so many of the challenges I think we face today in HR have to do with that siloed approach. You do something in this specific coe, and it's not connected to compensation or whatever it is.
I think we've created a lot of handoffs that's making everybody's life difficult. And I think AI will help so solve for some of that.
[00:19:53] Speaker B: No, absolutely. Because AI can really connect all these different pieces because you can get information and insights much quicker. And oftentimes the AI actually makes a connection that you might not even think about. Right. Because of the way that it operates. By its whole definition, it doesn't understand what words are, let alone where these silos would be. So sometimes we have all these preconceived notions, of course, and that. And AI will make those connections that might never come to us, basically. So AI can also be a great thought partner there as well, to see those kind of connections. So I know we talked a lot about the AI and HR transformation and where the HR roles go. Where are you taking this? What's next for you and ServiceNow?
[00:20:38] Speaker A: Yeah. So a couple things I'll say. One thing that we're thinking a lot about is that third pillar, which is how do you really transform the workforce? So we talked about people, operations, and using now assist doubling the productivity of that team. Okay. If you double the productivity of the team, you now have a question about workforce planning, you have a question about roles, and you have to really think critically about, okay, we may need fewer people in this specific role in the future. How can we reallocate that capacity? How can we redesign roles so that they're more effective in this new world? And so we've been spending a lot of time doing this in specific places. So in our engineering group, we're seeing productivity from AI assisted coding. Okay, what does that mean? There's all these strategic choices that come from technology. You start to see these impacts, and then the question becomes, what do you do strategically as a business? And so we're spending A lot of time across all the different functions in our company thinking about those roles and ultimately how we transform them to create value for our business. And then the other thing I would just point out is we've been on this journey for three years. We do not have all the answers, but we're constantly trying to put our best thoughts into our AI playbook. So everything we've talked about here today, if you go and look for ServiceNow's AI playbook, Jackie and I wrote it. It's basically sharing all our best practices and we're going to release a new version of that really shortly that shares everything that we talked about today.
[00:22:01] Speaker B: And wow, what value add to the profession too. I mean, that you're just putting this out there, that AI playbook. And I saw the previous version and I loved it. It was really well done and had lots of specific details and tips and all of that in there. So kudos to you and Jackie for taking this on and adding knowledge and insights to the profession. I think it's really important.
[00:22:24] Speaker A: Yeah, I love it. And I love learning from other companies that are going through the same transformation.
[00:22:28] Speaker B: And that's so important too. So I think that collaborative learning is really important too, because as we said, nobody has figured it out really, but nobody knows exactly where this is going to go, of course. So the only way to do this is dynamically and being really agile and learn together as well. With that, any last words of wisdom or advice for our listeners as they are thinking about this AI and HR transformation? What's the one thing that people should do?
[00:22:54] Speaker A: Yeah, I talked to a lot of our ServiceNow customers and a lot of companies about the AI transformation. And so many people are beating themselves up thinking they're not far enough ahead. Everybody I talk to feels that way, so it's not unique to specific companies. I think it's really important to just take a deep breath, understand that there's a lot of complexity that we need to figure out. And then the other thing I would say is technology is only 10% of the battle. This is a people transformation. And I think there are steps all the way from how you intake use cases to how you transform the workforce later on when you actually do see the productivity increases. All of those things are are hugely important to the success of an AI transformation for the business.
My last piece of advice is just to step into that role. Make sure that the business knows that you can help you have the strategic sense for all the people. Implications of this AI transformation.
[00:23:45] Speaker B: I love these pieces of advice. Because I think it's such a great moment in time for us in hr and I think we shouldn't shortchange ourselves for what we can do and what we are already doing. I hear this a lot too. We're so far behind. If everybody's behind, probably. No, you're not behind.
[00:24:01] Speaker A: Either that or there's. I haven't met the company that is actually ahead because I don't think I've talked to anybody.
[00:24:05] Speaker B: Everybody is behind, so I guess you're not behind. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. With that. Thank you so much. This was such a pleasure talking with you. I feel we could have talked for another few hours on this, but I won't take too much more of your time. But really, thank you for all your insights and for your inspiration as well.
[00:24:22] Speaker A: Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.
[00:24:24] Speaker B: What an amazing conversation with Brandon Roberts, the Global VP of People, Product analytics and AI at ServiceNow.
Brendan and his team are using AI in HR not just to make things faster and more efficient, but to elevate the value HR brings to the company. I'm especially excited to learn how they use Galileo, our own specialized HR AI assistant, to support HR business partners in becoming trusted advisors to the business.
What a fantastic use case.
If you're looking to up level your HR team to become more consultative and value added, this is a must. Listen, thanks for tuning in to the what Works podcast. Until next time, keep pushing the boundaries of what works in your world.
