Episode Transcript
Speaker 1 00:00:06 HR G P T. Here we come. Today I'm gonna talk to you about all of the innovations just beginning to happen around G P T in the HR technology space. I'm gonna give you some implications on what this means for you as a technology vendor or buyer, or an HR organization. Then I want to talk a little bit about the economy and some things that I've picked up in the last couple of weeks talking to lots of clients. And then I want to update you on systemic hr. So first of all, there is no question in my mind that the G P T generative AI technology is going to revolutionize the software industry in general, but HR technology in particular. And the article I wrote a couple weeks ago was the beginning of my understanding of this. And now after talking to more than a dozen vendors and talking to their engineers and their founders, I can see how big this is going to be.
Speaker 1 00:00:58 And the reason I call it HR G P T, is because you're gonna see rebranding of all sorts of products around this technology. Now, the vast majority of the use cases that are being developed right now are in two domains, recruiting and training and learning, and in recruiting, you can imagine the things that are going to happen. And let me just give you a couple of tips here. Imagine creating a job requisition based on the profile and performance information of people in the job. Imagine allowing a job requisition to be updated dynamically as you identify new skills in the company that are needed or in the market that are needed. Imagine rewriting a job, job requisition, or a job description to be unbiased or clear or outlined based on work going on inside of the job. This goes on and on and on. All of these language or word documents that we create to define a job as we search for people to define a job as we manage people to define what people are doing in the job, to identify what people are doing in the job.
Speaker 1 00:02:06 G P T is great at this, and I have used it. And let me give you my experience with the technologies I've used, G P T 3.5 and G P T four. I've used Bing search, I've managed to get into it fairly early, and I've used Google Bard. Let me say that Bing search, which is connected to the internet, is significantly more powerful and easier to use than Google search, at least for me. Only can we get language answers to questions, but frankly, it's a lot faster than it is to go to a Google search. So for many, many of the applications that we've built in HR where we had search, including your HR tech platforms, your learning platforms, your recruiting platforms, your, you know, HR administration platforms, your payroll platforms, why wouldn't you ask the system a question and get an answer? And let me just give you this very simple example.
Speaker 1 00:03:02 I was doing a very quick analysis yesterday on the number of cars sold by Ford versus Tesla, and you didn't really know what the relationship between the two was. So I went into Google and I said, how many cars has Ford sold in the last year? How many cars has Tesla sold in the last year? You know, it kind of gives you an answer, but it points you to a webpage. You kind of have to read the webpage, you have to kind of interpret it, ask the same question to Bing search, it just gave me a narrative answer and the sources, and I could just click through and find the sources. So that's a use case on the public internet. But think about those use cases in your HR technology tools. And in the recruiting domain in particular, there's just an unlimited amount of applications where you're searching for something and then you're refining the search, and then you're qualifying the search on different criteria, and then you're going back and forth and back and forth.
Speaker 1 00:03:53 If you asked the system a question about what you wanted, the new user interfaces from these tools are gonna come back and they're gonna give you an answer, and then they're gonna give you perhaps a new screen that will give you further refinements automatically based on the question that you asked. And these systems will constantly be scanning either the CRM database or the sourcing database that you have to get smarter and smarter and smarter. And by the way, the G p T engine is a skills engine. A lot of the vendors I talked to have been using G P T three or G P T two, which is a second generation or third generation transformer, it's called to do their skills analysis. So you're already gonna know what the skills are or the words of these candidates using this kind of a tool. Now, a couple weeks ago, and maybe it was last week, I, I talked about Workday in the last podcast.
Speaker 1 00:04:48 And as much as I love for Workday, the frustration I was having at Workday was I didn't seem to sense that they understood the massive impact that the G P T chat interface was going to have on their whole system. Well, I think most of the other vendors see that. I'm not sure Workday does yet. They will. And even Bill Gates who wrote a big article about AI on the last week, believes that this is perhaps the biggest change to the way we interact with computers since the beginning of Windows. And I remember when Windows was invented, I was around doing stuff at ibm and it was pretty revolutionary, and this is way, way more revolutionary than that. So, so take a look at that. As it's comes now, there's gonna be an announcement tomorrow, and there are further announcements later this week. I'm not gonna get into what's coming until it's announced.
Speaker 1 00:05:37 Now, on the learning side, it's similarly disruptive. If you are in a learning function, if you're a learning designer, developer, or perhaps a trainer, you know what you do. You're always looking at a performance problem or a job or a role or a process. You're trying to decode what it is you're trying to, to determine what is missing and the gaps in people's understanding. And you're trying to build learning objectives. Then you're trying to build learning interventions and learning micro-learning, macro learning, courseware assessments, simulations are tests around those topics. Uh, telling you GT does a lot of that automatically. It can outline, it can summarize, it can identify skills. It can identify patterns. And so I, I played with a prototype tool yesterday where you type in a word, like I type in the word inflation, and it built me a course on inflation. In about a minute and a half, it took the word inflation, looked it up on the internet, figured out how it was used, and built me a pretty doggone good introductory 10 minute course on inflation, including an outline, including resources, including a test.
Speaker 1 00:06:49 It was all done by G V T. So imagine the number of applications like that that you're going to use in training, in onboarding, in new job rotations. Every time somebody gets something new to do or they have a new system or you buy something new or you change the way something works, these tools are gonna be able to show people much more quickly than a training person how to learn this new, uh, activity. Now, I don't think trainers or recruiters are going away and, and Gates talks about that in his article. My experience with these kinds of technologies having been around a long time, is that every time something like this comes, these tools become assistance or co-pilots. And we as humans add value in ever increasing new innovative ways around them. So although this may automate some of the routine work that you do in education or training or recruiting or typing or writing, this is gonna make your job better.
Speaker 1 00:07:49 And I think it was a masterful move by Microsoft to brand their entire family of G P T tools, as co-pilots, because that co-pilot idea is exactly the right idea. You're flying the plane, the co-pilot is there to help you. You can turn the plane over to the co-pilot, but he or she is not the pilot. You're still the pilot, you're responsible for what's going on. So the G B T and other generative AI technologies are gonna be there to help you. And for me, as a technologist for many, many years and born really and grew up in the early days of PCs, I I just think this is gonna be amazing. I I think this is gonna be as transformational as Excel was. For those of you remember <laugh> Excel was a pretty big deal and the word processor and mobile computing, et cetera.
Speaker 1 00:08:40 And if you're a designer and you're an HR tech vendor and you're not thinking really seriously about how you're gonna use this, somebody else is gonna build it for you. In fact, one of the conversations I had yesterday was with one of the vendors who's very good at this. And the conclusion we came to was, a lot of times the vendors who develop the original software are so steeped in the user interfaces and patterns and use cases and transactions that they built, is they don't see the G B T opportunities to what may be a third party that builds the G P T tool for Salesforce, the G P T tool for Workday, the G P T tool for HubSpot. So if you're Deloitte or Accenture or a smaller company, there's a business opportunity for you to take these existing systems and put something in front of them that's a lot easier for people to use.
Speaker 1 00:09:32 In fact, UiPath is doing that right now. UiPath does this for all sorts of applications. So I, I just think this is gonna be absolutely fascinating and you need to go to your vendors and talk to them about it and push them to take a look at this because your own IT department's gonna be able to do it too. You can buy the G B T technology through OpenAI or through Microsoft, through their APIs, and I think there're going to be thousands of people coming outta college with G P T and generative AI skills. In fact, I did a search on light cast, I did a search on LinkedIn last week. There are already more than a thousand jobs posted that request skills in G P T or open AI or generative ai. And they're not software engineering jobs. They're integration engineering jobs, they're design jobs, they're other things.
Speaker 1 00:10:24 So little by little this is going to sweep across more and more domains of business. And it's gonna be a tool that you're just gonna have to learn how to use. And by the way, go to Bing chat and start playing with it. It's free and you'll see what it can do or use the open AI interface from the chat PPT interface directly. And I, I think you'll be pretty astounded. Okay? So I'm not gonna mention vendors today, but a week from now you'll, or two weeks from now, you'll have seen a bunch of these come out and you'll start to see the opportunities. And this is gonna really be, you know, transformational. Second thing I wanna say about this whole topic is, and this is my personal opinion, I'm happy to have this debate or be corrected. I am sick of reading articles in the New York Times about AI is going to wreck the world.
Speaker 1 00:11:12 There was one just yesterday by three computer scientists. It's a very high level article about how horrible AI is. It's going to be smarter than humans. We don't know the implications of it, et cetera. Honestly, I don't get it. Every technology that's ever been invented can and is used for a nefarious purposes. The nuclear bomb was based on technology that was used for scientific research in chemistry for other things. The social networks that we all hate have been used for misinformation, but were all dependent on them. You saw the hearings on TikTok yesterday. The federal government of the United States has now decided that TikTok is an evil spirit and we're gonna throw that outta the United States because it's misused by China. So every technology that's ever been invented, I'm sure somebody has killed somebody with a rake. I mean, it just goes on and on.
Speaker 1 00:12:10 I, I don't know what these people are getting at. The people developing these AI systems are trying to make them explainable. They're trying to make them accurate, they're trying to make them understandable and tuneable and tweakable, and they're putting them in the hands of business people and entrepreneurs who are trying to build value add products. I'm sure there will be all sorts of sneaky things that go on. I know already that images have been stolen image libraries. There's lawsuits from image licensing companies that that data is showing up inside A G P T. I mean, there will be things like that. I mean, of course all of our IP that we spend millions of dollars to develop will probably get scanned by G B T and given away in some sense. So we're gonna have to work a little harder and do some new things with it.
Speaker 1 00:12:58 And you, I'm sure the Russians and other nefarious actors will use it for misinformation. But I'm sorry to say you can't stop it. I don't know how we stop the progress of technology. This has been going on for 40 years. I remember AI and Lisp, if you remember that language was a big topic in the 1980s. And so this isn't like somebody just invented something and these guys can say it's evil and we're gonna shut it down. I, I really think if you read Gates's article or you think about it, this is gonna revolutionize education, it's gonna revolutionize healthcare, it's gonna revolutionize many areas of business. It's going to make most of our lives much easier. And we will shake out what the downsides are as a society, as a political system, as companies. I know a lot of big companies are reluctant to use it because they don't want their IP and their internal information and logic leaked out into the outside world.
Speaker 1 00:13:54 I think that's an interesting problem, but maybe impossible to stop. So my suggestion is, if you wanna read those articles, that's fine. We work on this and we use it. Now, one strange thing that did happen that I think is sort of a mystery to me is open AI's original charter was to be open. And when Sam Altman and and his crew started that company, their whole mission was to open source the AI code and open source the training models so that lots and lots of people could make sure that it was safe and that it was unbiased and that it was accurate. Well, they've changed their mind. Not sure why they've suddenly decided because it's so expensive to use this compute power, or maybe somebody just wants to make a bunch of money that they're gonna make it a closed system and they're gonna sell it and you're not gonna know how it works.
Speaker 1 00:14:48 So I, I think that's just goes to show that all of these altruistic, somewhat idealistic articles are sort of falling on deaf ears. Seems to me now I'm more than happy to be educated on this. And if anybody can show me an application of chat G P t, that's likely to ruin society. I'm more than willing to talk to you. But I'm not sure where those articles are coming from. Okay, next topic I wanna talk about is the economy had a lot of conversations with a lot of companies about rolling layoffs. The over hiring that was done over the last decade. And of course the banking system and the banking system was extremely frustrating to me because you find out that Silicon Valley Bank did not have a chief risk officer. It just sickens me because this is what banks do. Banks are in the business of hedging risk and making a profit by carefully taking risk on mortgages versus deposits or other types of loans.
Speaker 1 00:15:49 And they don't even have a risk officer. They don't even know what their risk is. One of our analysts who used to work for a large bank explained to me that in many of these banks, they don't really know what their systemic risk is cuz they don't have software systems that adequately analyze all of their positions in the market. So maybe banks are more dependent on Microsoft Excel than we ever thought. And my guess is that what we're in for is what I like to think of as a slow motion car crash. We've had 15, 16, 17, 18 years of near zero interest rates. We've all enjoyed that. We watched the stock market go up, we bought our crypto, our houses went up in value and all that was wonderful and we're paying the price for that now. And we haven't fully paid the price yet. We have very high inflation.
Speaker 1 00:16:38 You know how expensive everything is. It's, it's just astounding to me how much everything costs. And the Fed is going to keep raising interest rates, which I think is a good idea and we're gonna have to suffer through this adjustment back to some form of normalcy. And I don't believe we're there yet. And the reason we're seeing rolling layoffs, another 19,000 people from Amazon and another 10,000 people from Facebook and so forth, is because CEOs, CFOs don't know yet what's gonna happen next. It's clear that spending is starting to slow. Consumers are tapped out on their loans. So most of us are working in companies where there's a fair amount of uncertainty about the future. What that means for us in HR is if you go back to the four R model and the work we've been doing on org design and you've been reading about from the Global Workforce Intelligence Project is your job has to be to help the company moderate its growth, improve the productivity of the people you have.
Speaker 1 00:17:37 So you don't have to do as as many layoffs maybe not at all. And work on reinventing the skills and capabilities of the people in the company through mobility, through development, through other tools to get the company ready for the new businesses that it's going into. I won't go through what all of those are, but every industry is becoming a new industry. Oil and gas is becoming other forms of energy. Telecommunications is going into media, retail is going into healthcare. Healthcare is going into informatics, on and on and on. And so including by the way chat GBTs, which is gonna accelerate a lot of this. So we have to help our companies make this adaptation, which gets me to systemic hr. So we've now built the methodology of the research. We've talked to dozens of you about it. We're doing lots and lots of interviews.
Speaker 1 00:18:26 And essentially what we're discovering is that the big, big thing that's happening in hr, and I think a lot of you are aware of this, but I'm just gonna point it out to you, is the chin strategy from being a service delivery function to being a business solution function. In other words, most of the designs around HR and how things were set up and how the organization was structured and what different people did was really designed around what I call the 1980s IT department where we're here to help you and you tell us what you want and we will efficiently and effectively deliver on your desires. You would like to hire somebody, we will help you hire them. You would like to promote somebody, we will help you promote them or not promote them. You would like to figure out how to improve performance. We will deliver a performance process for you.
Speaker 1 00:19:19 You need new leaders. We will figure out what your new leadership, our new leadership strategies should be and how we'll assess leaders and so forth. In some sense, we've been very reactive, consultative and very smart about it, but in a reactive way. Now the new world of HR is one where we say, Hey, there's a big turnover problem in the logistics group in this city. Let's go fix it. We can't hire enough engineers. Let's figure out where and how to hire them, whether we should use contractors, whether we should train people internally. Let's put together a solution. We have harassment going on in such and such a town. Let's identify the cause and source and let's address it. We're going through hybrid work, we have wellbeing problems. The retention rate is low amongst young workers. Let's diagnose the problem, let's fix it, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 1 00:20:13 These are what I call systemic people problems. They're things the CEO and the business leaders care about and they would like HR to either solve them or come back to the business with a solution. And every one of these problems requires virtually every domain of HR to come together. They relate to pay, they relate to equity, they relate to diversity, they relate to career skills development, alignment, engagement, recruiting, sourcing. I mean all of those individual 92 practices that we teach you about in our academy come together in these business solutions. And the reason I'm so passionate about this is because in some sense it's been my career. I started my work as an analyst in learning technology in 1998 and I didn't know anything about HR at the time. And over the last 25 years or so, I've learned all sorts of things about all these adjacent parts of HR and L and d.
Speaker 1 00:21:12 And now being the the age that I am, I see the interconnectivity of these things. And when we talk to companies about their problems, not their projects, their problems, I'm almost always aware of the different dials that need to be turned to address them. So what this means is that we're going to redesign our HR functions and we're gonna show you how to do this. It's going on right now, little by little into product offerings, solutions, consulting teams, full stack HR professionals, better real time data, more job rotation inside of hr, more job rotation into and outside of HR and stronger focus and understanding on the cultural and business and reward and equity issues that impact our company directly in line with the C E O and the business leaders. And that's what systemic HR is. And I'm not ready to give you a picture of it yet, but we're talking to companies about it constantly and it's maybe one of the most exciting projects we've done and we had more than 30 companies come together this week like to talk about it.
Speaker 1 00:22:20 And it's not a transformation, it's not an HR transformation where you push a button, hire consulting firm and then you're done. It's actually a continuous change of how HR operates. As we talk about in our org design research, structural changes in org design are not changes in the org structure, their changes in how people operate. It's not just who reports to who and what the arc chart looks like. It's the skills that people have, the way they work together, the reward systems and their ability and process to focus on solutions. And I can promise you this works cuz we've talked to companies that do this and it takes time. One of the things we've learned about this systemic approach to HR is you can't get there if you haven't professionalized the practices first. So there is a maturity model to this where you start with sort of a chaotic HR department doing all sorts of things for all sorts of people.
Speaker 1 00:23:23 You then professionalize the various functions, recruiting, training, onboarding, et cetera in a, in a systematic way. Then you optimize them with all of the tools and technologies and data and skills that you need and then you stitch them together into solutions with a new operating model. So we're gonna talk about this at the conference in June and a lot more later in the year when a lot of this stuff comes out. And the reason that I think it's important now is if we are in this slow motion car crash, strange economic period, we're all working in companies including me, that are gonna have disruptions, we're gonna have problems, unpredictable things are gonna happen. They're not gonna be easy to deal with. You know how hard it is to hire people in the labor shortage that we have. We're gonna have to continuously solve new problems around people and we're gonna have to do that in an integrated way. Okay, that was a lot of material for one podcast today, but I had a lot on my mind and I hope you enjoyed it and I will try to put together a good article that summarizes a lot of these G B T issues in the next week. Thanks a lot.
