Jeff Wellstead on The AI Wake-Up Call for HR

Speaker A: In today's episode of Age of Visionaries, we talk to Jeff Wellstedt. Jeff is a longstanding HR leader with more than 30 years of experience and the true visionary when it comes to AI in hr. Stay tuned. Welcome to Age of Visionaries, the show where we discover the truth behind contemporary hr. I'm your host, Benjamin. Join me as I unfold today's talent ecosystem with HR innovators from around the globe. Uh, welcome to the latest episode of HR Visionaries. I'm very much looking forward to my guest today. Jeff. It's great to have you.

Speaker B: Really good to be here, Ben. Uh, I can't wait to get into this. It's been a lot of fun getting to know you guys.

Speaker A: Indeed. And it's actually, um, quite hilarious. So we actually tried to record the podcast several times already. However, we then talked for an hour and forgot to record. But today is the day when we record.

Speaker B: It really is. It says, this is, I guess, testament to how interesting Paul's job is and how amazing both, uh, and generous both you and Dominic have been in sharing with me, uh, the very cool trajectory you guys are on from, uh, an innovation perspective. And it's hysterical to me. I mean, we both have such passion for this kind of technology. And every time we got together, like an hour just flew, flew past like it was no time at all. And we're like, oh, I forgot to record that. Anyway, we're here.

Speaker A: That's cool. Jeff. Ken, tell us a bit about yourself. Who are you?

Speaker B: Yeah, so, uh, my name is Jeff Wellsted. I am the CEO of a small consultancy that focuses on AI and hr. Um, I am based here, just outside London, been here for the last 20 years. Originally from New York, New York City area, and, uh, worked in and around big multinational investment banks and consultancies, pharma, uh, some tech companies, um, and ultimately made the move back in 2004 to come help a former colleague basically prepare a really interesting, uh, cloud based, uh, antivirus anti spam company, um, for acquisition, which ultimately it was acquired by Symantec. Having said that, I fell in love with the, uh, ability to kind of walk into a startup, slash scale up kind of tech or biotech company and basically help recast and reshape the HR function, um, to be much more around, obviously all the basics critical to have, but much more around attraction, much more around, uh, engagement, retention, employee experience, um, and uh, performance development and all those sorts of things. So I did that several times with, I don't know, as many as about 16 different organizations. Since I've been over here. Um, and a big part of that. Excuse me, a big part of that has always ever been around. Um, hold on two seconds. I get all choked up when I think about you guys. Um, the big part of that has always ever been around HR technology. Um, because a big focus of what it is I've needed to do is to figure out how to create a relatively small human presence in the HR space. There wasn't a lot of available budget for that stuff and automate, delegate, democratize as much of the sort of central, uh, HR information as I could. But it was always ever frustrating, right? It was always just systems of record and things of that nature. So relatively static information. And it wasn't really until the advent of where we are now with large language models and AI, um, the past two and a half years that that world just exploded. And um, the possibilities became seemingly endless in terms of what the power of AI could bring to a function like hr, which deals with just millions of data points. They're scattered all over the place and lie dormant on flat pieces of paper in a, in a one or two dimensional format. And what AI is able to do is just take all of that information and create these incredible holographic images of individual and you start to see them as a totality. Um, and so now I'm into helping out companies, just like Paul's job, but also working with HR teams and kind of explaining, you know, the power of AI in their roles and what it can bring. And then sort of the, the third component is just basically, um, you know, kind of me bringing whatever thought leadership and, and really interesting innovations to um, to share with people and really kind of advocating, you know, the, the intelligent and um, and positive use of these tools. So that's me in a nutshell.

Speaker A: Why do you find technology in the uh, space interesting?

Speaker B: Well, dating back, you know, God, I started, started as an HR person, believe it or not, in 1987. Um, yeah, you probably weren't even born yet, were you?

Speaker A: Well, I was, but it was a toddler indeed.

Speaker B: Yeah, you were still a wee man. Um, yeah, I mean, look man, I was there before the Internet, right? It was ridiculous. I mean, so we were just starting to deal with PCs and spending our lives on Excel spreadsheets, which I don't even think it was Excel yet. Um, and I have been grappling with wanting to have a sense of legitimacy and um, credibility and importantly commercial impact at every board meeting I ever attended, right? I watched these people, these multimillionaires get around the table with very big, powerful thoughts and ideas. And whatever they said, man, the whole company just stop and turn and go that way. And there I was just reacting to everything as an HR professional, um, waiting to be told, fire this many people, hire this many people, open that office, close this, um, the whole nine yards. And it was just me running around kind of taking orders from people, um, like some kind of short order cook in a diner somewhere. And it was just a bit soul destroying. Being perfectly honest, what I wanted was to contribute powerfully, not from an ego perspective, but from a sense of credibility perspective. And I wanted to be an equal in those discussions about what direction is a company headed, where are we going, what are your dreams, aspirations, targets, goals, and how can I then shape the people strategy around that and uh, do so at speed and then at some point become much more proactive versus reactive, much more predictive. Right. Which is super powerful for everybody in the C suite. And then one day actually become prescriptive to say, here's what I'm asking you guys to do based on the recommendations I'm bringing. Here's how that basically fits into the bottom line or the top line. Here's how we're going to beat our competition and here's how we're going to do it with, with the people strategy that I pulled together for you guys. Oh mate. It's taken me a long old time to get here, but I kind of feel like now the tools that are coming online are doing exactly that. Um, it's just taking the pain away from the administration, bureaucracy, governance, um, and compliance stuff and um, kind of like automating a whole bunch of that and then really kind of taking us all to the next level to say what don't we know about our people, our organization that we need to know so that we can really start to apply these magical gems in a way that is really going to accelerate us forward. That's the headspace I'm in about this.

Speaker A: Um, well, taking away the pain, where do you think is the most pain in HR departments these days?

Speaker B: Well, I think similarly to what I was just talking about, um, I think the real pain for people is the heavy burden, um, that government regulation, um, for instance, um, requires of us in order to uh, stay away from being fined, uh, or being sued or being pulled into a tribunal somewhere. Um, it feels like we're all just running around chasing risk and try to kind of just dampen down the risk. Whatever you can do, just get rid of that risk. And uh, the risk is always There, Right. You can't control for everything. So what do you try to do? You try to be proactive, you try to train your managers, you try to kind of develop your leaders, you try to, you try to give your employees as much agency and control and insight as they need. But it just feels like everything's fragmented. I mean, there are just systems all over the place. There's recruitment, marketing, and then there's an ATS solution. And then you go from the ATS solution to an onboarding solution, and then you're into the HRIS tool. And then, oh, we got to do performance management and real time feedback and maybe some skills. Gap analysis. Oh, that's right. You're going to need a development plan. Um, so we need that. Oh, you know, be useful is a career map. So we need to kind of define all the jobs and, you know, mate, it's like this endless stream of such heavy lifting. Um, and the bigger the company gets, the more complicated it gets. Um, and it's just the weight of all that just keeps us away from being strategic. When we should be in the boardroom and we should be saying, look, all of this stuff is automated and it's running smoothly 24 7, 365 days a year. Anybody can get access to whatever they need. The agents will answer their queries, will execute on, um, whatever they need. You never have to talk to an HR person again. We're always in the loop, but it's largely taken care of. The employees love it because they never have to speak to an HR person again. There's no holdback. They get it done in a minute, um, which is awesome. We then can spend time with some really interesting and powerful analytics that will give a sort of a third dimension to how the organization is structured. Where are we relative to skills? Density, inventory, liquidity? What are the. What is the art of the possible with the people we have on board? And where are we going to kind of take this company, you know, together based on these recommendations? Let's hash this out. Give me, you know, these programmatic, you know, budgets and everything else, um, and let's go ahead and get this stuff done and shape it going forward. I mean, that to me would be nirvana, but we've not been able to do that. We've been held back by the heft and the weight, if you will, of all this activity.

Speaker A: And, well, that's where things become interesting. Right? So, um, this is the situation when you then think about, well, um, how can, uh, how can we be creative? How can we be um, well, how can we be those people who, well, talk to people, work on problems together and, uh, well, don't waste time on something that's not really meaningful?

Speaker B: Yeah, no, that's exactly right. Um, and that's what I want to get to, right? I want to get to, meaning. I want to get to purpose. I want to get to the kernel and I want to have an effect on that. I, um, want to be the person, metaphorically, who sits in the passenger seat of the front of the car as opposed to where I am or have been. And I've been in the boot, I've been in the back seat. Um, and it's always ever felt like, okay, I'm along for this ride, but there's no way I'm having an effect on this ride. I want to be in that passenger seat and, you know, with, with night vision goggles on that can basically see 5km down the road in the middle of the night, right when we've got one headlight and we're going 100 miles an hour, um, whatever that is in kilometers down the road. And I'm basically telling the CEO or whoever's driving, this is where you need to start turning. Here's how to prepare for this. Here's where we're going to be most successful. Stay away from that side. It's really going to end badly. I've got data. I'm seeing this stuff real time. I'm feeding it to you. That's the relationship I've always ever wanted to have. That gives me a sense of meaning and purpose. Um, and what a powerful thing to get up every day and be like, I'm going to have a powerful effect on the direction of our company. That's awesome. So, yeah, you're absolutely right. And the tools coming out these days, and we're going to get into, I'm sure Paul's job in a minute, um, are kind of like, you know, I can see how it's going to take us to that level, which is really, really exciting.

Speaker A: So, yeah, uh, well, I couldn't, Couldn't agree more. It's a super exciting time. How do you think will HR departments, um, will execute this perspective shift? So previously we worked with software, um, software, uh, well, very LIM capabilities, um, in the end, cause much more trouble, much more work than, um, well, then they solved. Now it's a different game. Right. So it's uh, very much, uh, the AI agents taking over work instead of creating work. But there needs to be a, uh, shift of mindset. Doesn't it

Speaker B: an excellent question. It's when I, when I think, and this is sort of a multifaceted element, but when I think about the people who have always ever been attracted to HR roles, um, with the, the obvious notion that these were risk reduction roles that these, these jobs were about, you know, kind of administration, compliance and governance to bring down risk issues and get those things under control whilst you uh, know absolutely, we're going to experiment into like new ways of working and we've realized that if we do a great job creating awesome employee experiences, we typically will get more productivity out of people, you know, and then, you know, it kind of feels to me like a lot of that just, it felt like a lot of idealism being thrown at what we thought was going to kind of create a really happy workforce who will then kind of in turn give us a lot of, you know, positive discretionary effort and really kind of carry us forward. And at the end of the day it was still three quarters, you know, 75%, 80%, you know, administration, compliance, governance, heavy lifting, um, basic reporting and all this other kind of stuff to your point, becoming slaves, data slaves, um, you know, to the technical debt that we racked up across what, four, five, six different systems which kind of talk to each other vaguely, I mean with really basic information and just weren't realizing, you know, the impact that we wanted to have. Do employee engagement surveys and it would come back. People are just a bit meh about hr. It's like whatever, it's like, you know, I guess we need it, don't know. Um, but nobody was blown away by it. And that's not the way forward, obviously. The way forward is in my humble opinion anyway is the fact that we should be a technologically enabled function whereby we introduce people even before they start in a pre boarding method to say, here's as an example, Paul, meet Paul, um, and Paul meet this new person. And Paul knows everything there is to know about this person. They know what the recruitment cycle is like, they know this person's entire history right from their cv. Um, they know what role they're going into, who they're going to report to, who they're going to work with, they know what um, goals, right? Um, Paul is trained to kind of understand in terms of that particular department and immediately can start to do things like just schedule out this person's entire first 90 days, set um, up meetings, right? Uh, just go through a whole bunch of information with them, set goals, go through a couple of performance assessment exercises, um, and really start to get in inundated and inculcated very quickly into the organization so that they can hit that time to productivity much more fast and feel like there's a warm wrapper around them, you know what I mean? Um, all the while Paul is doing loads of work, right? He's, you know, it's let, it's, it's like updating the HR systems, it's taking away the technical debt challenge and it's communicating with, with uh, the new hire, it's communicating with the hiring manager, it's communicating with the team members, it's doing all the scheduling. It's just taking the drudgery out of what should be a really wonderful happy experience. Somebody's excited, they're kind of, you know, they're changing their lives. They're coming to hang out with you guys. They want to know they're going to fit in. They want to know that I'm going to have a fabulous career here, that these people are really tuned up on me and I'm really wanting to be tuned up on them. And we're in this together. That's what you should be focused on, the positive psychology. Instead it's like, oh, uh, God, we've got all the scheduling to do and it's not great. This, it sounds relatively simple but you take that times 10 in terms of the exponential power of an agent, right? If you can plug it into the systems properly and if you have really good workflows and processes already or you are willing to tolerate a new kind of regime around that stuff, oh my God, agents can take over just so much rubbish. Uh, leaving us as, you know, as HR professionals to focus on the stuff that really matters. The direct one to one context, the coaching, the employee relations issues that come up, the training and development stuff that we can do, um, you know, real time, um, and importantly the strategic commercial inputs, you know, that we can give the organization. That's where I would argue all of us want to be. But a lot of us again get bogged down in the administration. That's my two cents on that indeed.

Speaker A: Jeff. One thing with regards to being locked down in admin stuff, um, it feels to me that it also kills the creativity. Um, we've been talking about so many interesting use cases and so many interesting flows and well, as a matter of fact, um, well, it requires us to think beyond, right, to think beyond um, the, to think beyond what uh, has been executed by HR so far. So we need to be more creative since a lot more is possible than we're used to.

Speaker B: Yeah. Now you're spot on about that. Um, I mean, a lot of us are frustrated creatives, right? Um, we got into HR not because we really love compliance. There are those people and I. Trust me when I tell you we need them. Um, and God bless, I'm glad that they're there. Um, look, I got involved in this because I wanted to have a really powerful relationship for the majority of my career in life with helping people recognize and realize their own potential, um, in a workplace environment. What I discovered very quickly was early days with the big multinationals is, yeah, it was much more around sort of sweating the asset and getting as much from a quarterly earnings perspective as you could and obviously maintaining high profits and positive outlooks. It was all about whatever Wall street and the banking community wanted. Um, smaller companies realized if we're going to thrive, if we're going to grow, if we're going to expand, um, and if we're going to compete, like we need to compete to really hit our crazy targets. Whatever it is affecting 10 million people, maybe a billion, who knows? Um, we're going to have to be hyper creative about how it is we talk people out of perfectly good jobs so they go home and explain to their partners, hey, guess what, we're going to pick up and move. I'm going to go work for a relative unknown. Um, I might even get paid less. But I got this cool title and it seems like such a lovely bunch of people. Um, and this is a career move I've always ever wanted and I frankly want to escape the big house, um, and become my own creation. In order to get that across, you have to be super creative about the employee value proposition you build out. You have to be hyper aware of the power of the employee experience as being a seamless trajectory, um, with all of the tools, all the support mechanisms there to help them basically imagine an incredible future with your organization. Hopefully you're hiring the best people you possibly can, but then the trick is to keep them, right? You probably don't have loads and loads of money, you probably struggle in terms of the level of benefit you can provide. And it probably doesn't look anything like a big giant multinational company can offer. But having said that, uh, there are so many areas you can positively affect that individual. And so it's really critical you open up your creative mind and really kind of take a design first approach. Right? Work with the business, work with the employees, you know, get them to kind of share their experiences, hopes and dreams and frustrations. More importantly, um, with, with what, what, with what they've experienced and what they would rather have, um, and then use those design sessions basically to kind of formulate, you know, your quarterly goals in an agile fashion and just start to attack those things and make them better and better and better. But again, if you don't have the right tools, um, and you don't have AI at your disposal, you're going to struggle frankly. You're going to be weighted down by the sheer heft, um, of the analog aspect of those exercises. Uh, this whole AI thing has just opened my mind in terms of creativity, uh, and what the art of the possible is.

Speaker A: How do you, how do you communicate that to, to, to others? You are speaker, uh, on, uh, on, on public events, uh, and conferences. Uh, so, so you talk a lot to uh, to, to industry leaders.

Speaker B: I do. Probably not enough. Um, it strikes me that we need to do a lot more talking very quickly. Um, and I say talking, I'm talking like educating. I think that's really sort of the thing. Um, I'm going to do some of that. I've just come back from Dubai, uh, having done a session with a bunch of uh, senior level HR people down in that direction. Uh, that was fascinating. Um, talk about a region that is so experimental, willing to do anything and basically came from, well, yes, very historical lands, but from cities that just built up out of the desert out of nowhere. So there's a whole sort of newness factor. Um, it doesn't feel like they're weighted down with the legacy kind of components that have been dragging other companies back for 100 years in terms of the way that this is the way we've always ever done things. Um, and they're willing and very, very excited and competitively motivated um, to try anything new and they are embracing AI head over heels. It's really exciting. Um, I'm doing more of those kind of speaking gigs, um, you know, as we go. I'm working with employment lawyers, um, I'm working directly with intact HR teams. M& I want to start working with universities too because I think we can't get this into people's heads fast enough or soon enough, um, so they can start to understand what, what the world looks and feels like. With, with AI, you just sort of ubiquitously applied, uh, across so many aspects of our lives.

Speaker A: So yeah, um, when, um, thinking about this new world, um, of hr, why do you think there's still so many areas where AI is applied much more than in the hr, ah, field.

Speaker B: Excellent question. Look, this was very much the same trajectory that the Internet you know, kind of took over. Um, as an example, the first area that you know, that immediately embraced it, right, Aside from obviously sort of the core technical stuff, um, was sales and marketing. Right. Marketing in particular has always ever been on the chase, right, to kind of become super legitimate and become a recognized science, not just a dark art, um, that sometimes you got right, but sometimes you got horribly wrong. And geez, a lot of money was spent trying to figure that out. That was always a remarketing pain, you know, um, but you know, with the advent of technology, with the use of tools like sales and marketing, you know, had, uh, were the first to kind of get like a CRM system, you know, customer relationship management tools, um, because they realized the power of keeping active data on everybody you speak with and engage with and then have that data basically be crunched in aggregate and be able to be sliced and diced in a hundred different ways. Um, would allow you so many different paths to success if you used it right from an analytics perspective. Look, I mean hr, yeah, has always ever been a bit of a laggard, you know, you know, maybe Legal is probably now that's all changing. Um, Legal has always been, you know, that, that situation as well, because it was just again, it was an old dark art and it was a special language and only certain people underst. Everything was in paper. Um, and that's all changing now too, right? So legal is adopting AI all over the place. Because like hr, we deal with hundreds of billions of data points and they're often connected in some way, shape or form to individuals. Um, but importantly they're not nearly connected enough across um, I guess metadata elements in terms of looking down into your teams and saying, how does the organization work? How do we work divisionally, departmentally, from a team perspective, from an individual perspective and start to kind of make some fascinating analytical correlations to say, well, if we do this, does this happen? You know, what are the sort of like moving parts and how does that all work? Um, and if we can get smarter and smarter about how human behavior factors into this, how uh, various inputs, um, can relate to various outcomes, we can start getting really scientific, right? About what is largely the most expensive asset on any company's books, um, but also the most opaque and the most difficult to predict. We need to be in a place that's very different. We need to be scenario planning right on the screens of all the C level individuals and say, if we move in this direction, if we make these choices, if we do this to people versus that, if we don't pay people in the right way. Whatever, whatever the scenario is, we need the tools, you know, and AI is absolutely the power behind this sort of thing to say, well, here's what the possible outcomes, look, I'll stack rank them for you. I'll also give you recommendations. This is the direction you should go with this sort of thing. Now we're talking, man. Now that's real business. But it's, it's just, you know, we've been a little bit slow to adopt, to be perfectly honest, and we're a little bit afraid. Again, the de risking issue, right, the regulations are looming over us. What if we do it wrong? What if we get in trouble? What if we get fined? Um, what if we lose data? You know, what if we send it out to the world and we didn't mean to, um, what if somebody cracks, ah, hack hacker gets into our databases, that sort of thing. Look, I mean, turns out, uh, there's a lot out there to help us through with this now. There's a lot of AI, you know, ethics and bias management, uh, auditing, uh, tools and agencies out there. Um, there's a lot of help and guidance in terms of how to, how to migrate these things. And this is the same stuff we were worried about when the Internet first came live. Right. Possibly rightfully so. But again, a lot of that is of course corrected as well. So we need not to push back on this technology. We need to embrace it, we need to understand it and we need to be careful in how it is we set it up. But it is freeing. I mean, it is amazing what it can do. And talk about opening up your mind to possibilities. Um, that's been my experience anyway, in dealing with these things. So I think, I think it's a wonderful time to be in this profession, to be alive generally as a human being. It's a very cool time indeed.

Speaker A: It's uh, well, I think the first time in history that we can, well, do so many things that weren't possible before. And um, I would love to come back to the creativity part because that's something where I believe hr, ah, needs to do better. Um, and make sure, well, we use all the opportunities that are there now to um. Well, to, to a completely different level.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: So to not stick with what we are used to, but to upgrade to a completely different level. Um, so when you work with companies, um, how do you encourage people to be more creative and to leave behind what you thought, um, is the uh. Well, what you thought is uh, uh, the limits of reality?

Speaker B: Limits of reality. Well, the first thing I do is I walk in and hand out psychedelic drugs to everybody. So we start on that basis. Um, no slightly more tame experience. Um, I think one of the first things I always ever like to do is get everybody to open up their laptops and go to, you know, Claude or ChatGPT or Gemini, uh, or whatever, one of the large language models, and basically, you know, kind of like do a quick lesson on prompt design, right, Prompt engineering as they like to call it, which is really quite funny. Um, but just to kind of like explain to them, like this is sort of how the computer likes to, you know, ingest information and this is how you're going to get the most out of it. Anyway, we then go on a completely non hr, completely non business discovery, uh, tour and we basically ask it, you know, like the most outrageous question that we've always ever wanted to know the answers to and basically watch people's reactions as they start to play with it fully. Typically, 60% of the people in the room have had a very moderate, if any, maybe light touch experience with AI. Um, and maybe 20%, uh, you know, folks have used it a little bit more extensively. But a lot of times it's for folly, it's for life stuff. You know, it hasn't necessarily been for work. And then basically I start to take them on a journey after I explain a bit about how AI is structured and how these tools, I hate to say think, but process, uh, probability, advanced, um, probability problems, and start to kind of then cogitate and learn from their mistakes so that they can kind of get better outputs and everything else. People are always amazed by that. It's like, God, it sounds just like our brains. And I'm like, well, it is. It's a rudimentary restructuring of the human brain, is in essence what we're on about. But having said that, don't let that stuff blow you away. Um, it is a cool tool, there's no doubt about it. It takes a lot of compute power to do the things it does. It's not living, it's not human yet. Basically what I want you to do is start to rethink the piles and piles and piles of information you manage every day. But before we go there, let's talk. Put your laptops down, close your lids, let's talk about what we would ideate as being sort of the premier, most attractive, most engaging and retentive environment we possibly could do if we had no problems with budget, no problems with technology, everything at our disposal. What would we create? What kind of nirvana could we build here? And what does that look like? And that's what we spend time talking about. And then we basically go back and say, great, let's ask, you know, the chat bot, uh, or the large language model, whatever we're playing with, let's ask it how we might go about doing this in a company. And let's not put the company name out there quite yet. Can do if you want. There's nothing really private about it necessarily. And let's basically ask it, you know, how would we bring about an environment like this? What would be, give me your top 10, you know, thoughts around this and just watch people's minds go, whoa, has this thing been listening to us? Has this thing been processing in the background? And what they find is, okay, it doesn't necessarily give you perfect, uh, super accurate answers, but they're pretty darn close. And it really kind of opens people's minds. And I tell them, see, this is not going to replace you because these computers can't go out and make those programs happen, but you can. And importantly what this tool is for is for a mind expansion, right? It's, it's a, ah, midi psychedelic experience in a way for you to kind of just plug into the universe of knowledge that's out there and then have that kind of just pull apart your preconceived notions and wake you up to several new possibilities. That's the magic of this. You know, I always ever say AI is not coming for your job, it's coming to your job. Right? I think I stole that directly from Microsoft's uh, new uh, head of AI, um, innovation. And I think that's a really, I mean it's a fair point. At some point it may very well take our jobs over. You know, maybe we're not that far away, I have no idea. But, but for now it is just, man, it's like a magic, magic box that just comes out with some really mind bending, you know, thoughts around things. And so I embrace that wholeheartedly because look, life is exhausting, this job is tough and it can really take its toll. Um, so it's super important to have that endless tireless resource at your fingertips to say, I can't think anymore, help. And it just comes back with no worries, I got this, boom, here you go. And then you can continue to interrogate it. How do I go about doing that? How would I build a program like that? What are the thoughts around this? Hey, do you have any resources on this? What about some Free training. What about this? What about that? Boom. I mean, it just flows like a, like a river at you. And all of it is good. So, yeah, that's typically how I kind of engage with people around that stuff.

Speaker A: Um, well, the, uh, the positivity around AI, as you said. So there are, uh, some people who, uh, are. Who are scared and who worry about, uh, their job, who worry about stuff. They, they like. How do you maintain that positivity? So since, well, when you listen to you talking, uh, there's so much positivity like, hey, there, things now possible that weren't possible only months ago, a month ago even.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, right.

Speaker A: So, um, how do you maintain that level of positivity?

Speaker B: How do I mean, to hit. Well, m. You mentioned a really important thing, right, Is the fear factor, right? And let's. Let's face it, we. Yeah, we all had that a little bit. I was sort of like, I love new tech, right? I love messing about with stuff like that. Um, but even I was like, wow, I should possibly be careful because I read, I think probably a month or two after, ah, ChatGPT launched, um, and I read about these Samsung engineers who were basically wanting to work the bugs out of their core IP code, right? Their core, the core product. And so they uploaded everything right, to Chat GPT without any API keys, without any safety walls, with nothing. And they said, boom, here, take this and give us our, you know, our bug fixes. Like, oh, my God, we've lost everything. They didn't lose it. It just became part of the trading set, right, for Chat GPT. But it's out there, man. You know what I mean? It's out there for anybody, uh, Apple, anybody, any competitor who wanted it. So that kind of stuff scared the hell out of you. Initially you were sort of like, whoa, okay, this is, this new technology, uh, it's got limitations. It's got things we need to look out for. It's like buying a flamethrower. Don't use this in the house. Possibly, yeah, that kind of thing.

Speaker A: Um, indeed.

Speaker B: But I mean, to maintain the positivity, I think, is to kind of explore the art of the seemingly impossible and realize everything actually is possible. Right? It's just a matter of articulating and really diving into the problem you're trying to solve for or the solution you're trying to create, and then kind of like deconstructing it in your head enough to write an instruction that a pretty smart computer program can pick up on and say, cool, I get what you're on about. Cool, watch this. I'm going to come back with a bunch of really neat stuff and maybe stuff you've not even considered, but let me know what your thoughts are and you can then converse with that and just get more and more interesting cognition around. God, you know, I hadn't thought about that. Yeah, I could, you know, do this. And it's non judgmental just you in this computer who's looking after you. And the more you're polite to it, by the way, the more fun it is, the more, the more it kind of feels like at least you're talking to an entity as opposed to just a computer. And um, and it's fascinating the level of ideas and concepts and so forth and also the level of execution, insight, change management issues, stakeholder, um, challenges, potential budget kind of stuff. Let it help you in as many ways as possible until you hit its limits, at which point you then say, great, awesome, you got me here. And a lot faster than I would have gotten here myself. I now feel energized. I don't feel exhausted, I feel knowledgeable, I feel credible, I feel legitimate. Right. I feel like I'm now up there with some of the other bright thinkers in this space. And, and it's all been due to the fact that I've had this personal coach, um, or you know, boss or whatever it is you want to kind of like refer to it as. They're all the time kind of looking after me. So I find that a very uplifting experience. Um, a lot of people don't even recognize they're having that kind of dopamine rush. But it is so much fun getting to a place that you were in dread of having to kind of go and explore on your own so much faster and so much more intelligently with such a positive outcome. Um, yeah, you just, I don't know, I mean, I think it's just, it's just been a lot of fun for people to kind of recognize that uh, in some cases replacing things they didn't even know were missing. Right. In terms of their fear about a particular topic. Right. Or lack of insight or whatever the case. But yeah, they get right through it.

Speaker A: I, uh, think that's a super interesting and important thing you just said. The things we didn't know we were missing. So the brutal honesty, clarity, transparency that AI brings, I think it's for, for many people it may also be, uh, well, scary in terms of. Well, um, sometimes we kind of create some kind of world for us where everything makes sense. However, then, um, you Then have situations, uh, with the introduction of new technology when you kind of realize, okay, well, nah, not really. Right. So that didn't make too much sense.

Speaker B: Totally true. Yeah. Sorry for the noise in the background. My printer apparently is going off. I think somebody's trying to get something going, but I just hit the camera cancellation button. So I think we're all right. Um, it does make sense and you're absolutely right. I mean what I find fascinating about this experience with this stuff is it is very much this issue of waking you up to a much broader reality and a much deeper dimension of that reality. And I'm kind of reminded over and over again every time I use GPT to solve a difficult or use um, an LLM to kind of crack a difficult problem, I'm always reminded how limited my own thinking is, which is shocking because I like to think of myself as a reasonably enlightened person, pretty open minded, um, had a lot of experience in my life and I think, you know, I got this, I can handle this, you know, kind of thing. I'm not going to be surprised by anything that uh, the language model is going to kick back to me. I always am, I always am fully like at least 25, 30% of the stuff that comes back is like, stuff I hadn't actually thought about. And I was like, why didn't I think about that? Of course, over and over and over again. And I think that's actually what is really kind of lifesaving about this technology, right? Is it exposes you to a body of knowledge that's far deeper and denser and more exotic than you have allowed your own self to think. And that's what we need nowadays. My God, the world is getting weird, man. I mean, climate stuff and geopolitical stuff and economic stuff and food stuff. I mean we need to, we need to be able to solve really powerful problems. And if we are not stretched in terms of our thinking and expanded upon in terms of our potential solutions, yeah, we're never going to solve, uh, the things we need to solve for. So yeah, you're absolutely spot on.

Speaker A: Um, well, when you think ahead, what would be crazy stuff AI could do in the, in the HR space? So not necessarily saying this is already possible, but what would be, uh, kind of dream case scenario for you?

Speaker B: Can I say something controversial?

Speaker A: Absolutely.

Speaker B: That HR in its current form wouldn't exist. And what do you mean by that? I'm not saying that, oh, great, go out and fire all the HR people. AI will take care of this. It won't um, necessarily in the same format. I think we need to be rethinking the roles that we have because we're going to hand a bunch of stuff over to agents, right? Like literally all the base of the pyramid stuff, anything having to do with any level of administration, anything that has a workflow or a process associated with it. Oh, man. Hand it over, right? Give it to the computer. Let your agent sort it out. Who's going to watch the agent? Who's going to make sure that those workflows are in place? Who's going to ensure that the quality outputs are there and problems don't arise? And when they do arise, who's going to jump in and fix them, right, and sort things out. So we need to kind of start rethinking, like every department in any organization, commercial or otherwise, we need to start rethinking how it is. We're going to embrace engagement and work with technology all around us in a very different fashion. On one hand, it's going to definitely uplift us and allow us to be much more creative, strategic, as we've already discussed. On the other hand, it's going to require, you know, people, people to have oversight, people to be able to look down into what we currently know as a black box and turn it into a glass box. Because that's kind of what the legislation is kind of requiring of us. Uh, from an audit perspective, we need to be able to see how the information is being processed and being utilized and how we've come to certain conclusions. Who's going to oversee the bias elements and the ethical elements? Um, who's going to oversee the quality of output and the tuning required to kind of continuously get these things smarter and smarter? Um, who's going to really help interpret the massive analytical power of these things that will now give us again, three and four dimensions of a problem in a situation with a bunch of recommendations, stack ranked in terms of order of, I don't know what, budget, time complexity, whatever you ask it to do, right? So who's going to do all that thinking work? It's got to be us. So we have to kind of get out of the old business of being an HR help desk, um, and reactionary force to actually being a proactive force that has all of these other reactions kind of managed automatically, autonomously with oversight, with a human in the loop, right? Inserting that out whilst we go on this journey. So I see HR becoming a strategic internal consultant. Josh Burson talks a lot about this. Um, that's the space we need to Be in, we need to be super smart about our businesses, how we make money, where we can make more money, how we compete, um, and what we're capable of as a business. And then we need to provide all the insight and all the intel around our human capacity to go deliver that and uh, work right alongside and in concert with all the different departments in a very, very cross functional way. This is going to change how we organize, it's going to change job roles, it's going to change the flow of knowledge in our organizations. Um, it's going to be a wild time and it's going to happen like in two years. This is not a 10 year problem. This is happening now. Right. So. And I think it's, I think it's exciting and fun. It is scary to people though.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Um, well, um, the uh, rapidness of the development. Well, for, for hr, it comes normally. Well, change happens in um, well over a longer period of time in the HR space. Now it could also be quicker.

Speaker B: Right, Very quickly. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Um, yeah, look, I mean if you're still kind of hiding your head, you know, in the sand in terms of some of this stuff or you're, you're nervous or worried about it or whatever the case, totally natural. I get that, I get it. But it's not a fad, right? This stuff is not a fad. This stuff is 10x the innovation that the Internet was. It's 10x the innovation. Some people argue that electricity was. Um, I don't, I think that's possibly a bit of an overstretch, but nonetheless it is huge. It's huge because it affects literally every aspect. I mean the level of thinking and capacity in these, in these models is absolutely massive. And it'd be crazy for you to kind of ignore that, reach out instead. There are so many free resources. Oh my God. Just go on LinkedIn and type in AI education, AI development, training, whatever, you'll be inundated. Um, and just immerse yourself in this. Have fun with it. Call people like myself, um, or people like Ben. Ben's busy building up Paul. But, uh, but you know, talk to us about it. We're here to help and we don't want to see the whole function come crashing down because we did ignore it. We didn't see it coming. And then suddenly from some angle that we didn't, we didn't have visibility to, AI came in and swooped in and took things over, but not in a way that we, we would have found, you know, um, positive or effective and we wanted to have a much more powerful impact on that stuff, but instead I got sidelined because I wasn't paying attention or I pushed this off or I delayed it, or whatever the case. Get involved, get involved. It's not hard, by the way. You don't need to know all the technicalities. You just need to know how to talk to it it and let it loose in terms of its capacity and capability. You'll love it.

Speaker A: Um, can you tell us a bit about your favorite interview questions, Jeff? It's a bit of a topic now, but it's a tradition here, so I definitely need to ask you.

Speaker B: That's fascinating. Um, yeah, I mean, it's. Obviously I stay away from the things that frankly are kind of non deterministic in terms of like what, what animal would you be? Or, you know, if you had a planet you wanted to visit, what would that be and why? Um, it's nothing like that. I think for me, um, I like to, I like to ask hard life questions, um, similar to the clever questions you were asking me here in this interview. The ones that make you stop and go, huh, huh. I haven't answered that question for myself yet, actually. And so you kind of catch people off guard. Not, not that that's a thing you want to do, but you kind of want to catch people thinking in real time. I think that's the way of putting it. So I like to ask people, you know, we're money, no object, um, whether your family's situation, the ownership of a home, whatever, whatever the things are that kind of anchor you in your current thinking. In your wildest dreams, if you didn't need this job, what would you be doing? What would you go do? What would you go do? If you had all the money in the world and it didn't matter, um, and you could just go be you. What is that thing? And it's fascinating to watch people first of all, have their faces kind of melt like, oh, God. What is the intended answer here? Said I'm going to impress this person. I don't want to hear about that. I want to hear about you. I want to hear that you have a level of depth and insight into yourself, um, and a sense of purpose and a sense of direction for yourself. Um, I want to hear, hopefully that you're not broken, right? That you're, that you're so limited by, you know, this, this reality that's kind of formulated around you that, uh, that you really, really struggle to come up with something creative and interesting. I want to be wowed importantly, I'd love to be inspired. I'm um, always looking for good ideas. So it's questions like that, to be honest with you Ben, because presumably we've shaped the whole process around technical and professional and all of those sorts of experiential elements. Um, and what I want to get into is the beating heart of the individual and where they see themselves going. So that's all that would be my approach.

Speaker A: Lovely Jeff, thank you so much for your time. Was a great pleasure talking to you again, uh, with great, great fun. I enjoyed our conversation a lot.

Speaker B: I did too mate. And it's been an absolute joy getting to know you and Dominic and um, the team over at Paul's job. Um, I think you guys have a fantastic future ahead of you and uh, yeah, I look forward to uh, spending more time with you.

Speaker A: Awesome. Thank you so much Jeff. And guys, thanks a lot for listening in and your next time.