Ep 801: What Does AI-First Really Mean?

Talent acquisition teams everywhere are rushing to put AI to work, often before working out what that actually means in practice. The problem is that technology just amplifies whatever's already there. And what's already there is often a bit of a mess. So where do you actually start? Keep listening to find out. Support for this podcast comes from Fountain, the AI native platform for managing the global frontline workforce. Fountain has recently announced Q, the first autonomous frontline intelligence designed to run workforce operations. Q runs the work inside hiring workflows such as sourcing, screening and scheduling candidates, all without manual intervention. This reduces operational bottlenecks and time to hire, while delivering consistent staffing across locations. With Q, you don't start the day with dashboards. You begin with outcomes. For example, 12,000 processed applications and 800 filled roles in less than a day. Q doesn't talk about what it could do. It reports on what it already did. Trusted by hundreds of top frontline employers, including ups, sweetgreen, Subway and more. Companies are turning to queue by Fountain to autonomously execute frontline workforce management. Learn more@fortun.com there's been more of scientific discovery, more of technical advancement and material progress in your lifetime and mine than in all the ages of history. Hi there. Welcome to episode 801, a recruiting feature with me, Matt Alder. A growing number of organizations are rushing to implement AI on an industrial scale, often announcing themselves as AI first before working out what that actually means. What many are finding is that AI tends to surface whatever was already underneath, where the data is patchy, the content conflicting, and no one quite owns the end to end processes. The technology exposes all of it, but rather than fixing any of it, at the same time, AI is starting to change the shape of work itself, raising hard questions about which tasks remain genuinely human and what HR&TA roles look like on the other side. So what does it take to build foundations solid enough to make these tools deliver? My guest this week is Mark Stelzner, founder and managing principal at ia. In our conversation, Mark explains what it really takes to make AI work in the people function. I'm Mark and welcome to the podcast. Thank you Matt. Pleased to be with you today. Thank you. An absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Please, could you introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do? Absolutely. So I am the founder and co leader of a firm called IA. I founded IA over 20 years ago. As I like to say, it's why I look so young and fresh. The business and transformation is not for the faint of heart, but about three decades of transformation work for organizations of all shapes and sizes, we primarily support large scale people transformation projects on behalf of the Global 1000. Obviously transformation is a word that seems to be on everyone's lips at the moment, particularly in HR and talent acquisition. There's obviously a huge amount of pressure around people leaders to transform from what you're seeing with the global enterprises that you work with. What's actually driving that pressure and also how well prepared are organizations to respond to it? No, great question. And part of this we refer to as sort of the catalyst for change or catalyst for transformation. And many of these have always been true. I think what's new, Matt, is they're all hitting people leaders at exactly the same moment. So one is certainly turnover, the arrival of new senior leaders. You know, anytime someone comes into the C suite, that's obviously a, you know, fostering some level of change, some level of transformation and that will drive a modification to the organization's vision, to outcome, to market strategy, et cetera. Second is for a lot of the organizations that we work with, they're holding companies and they're sort of struggling with the tension between operating as a holding company versus an operating company. And so as they acquire or divest new entities, of course that's going to change the fabric of the organization as well. Technology and digital innovation, at the risk of stating the obvious, is certainly disrupting the entire world right now. So that's certainly driving change. And then of course, just vision and mission, you know, a change to the ethos, the outcomes, to what we believe in, to what we care about. New market entry, right? We're bringing new products or services to market or we're entering new countries. And what's difficult, I think right now, Matt, for people and talent leaders is the fact that they are also wearing three hats concurrently, particularly CPOs and CHROs. One is I'm the P&L owner for HR and HR, of course, is being asked to do more and more with less and less. Second is I'm a bit of the FL flag bearer for what it means for our culture and vision personification of what we believe in. And therefore I'm going to stand in front of our audiences virtually and in person and claim to represent and amplify what our key care abouts are. And third is I'm the strategic advisor to the CEO and the President. So I'm that confidant that's also supposed to have those quiet backroom conversations to advise those same leaders through this moment of sort of unprecedented change. And as I said earlier, Matt, I Think what's difficult. Everything is happening everywhere all at once. So much we can dive into there and not enough time to talk about all of it. So let's dive into the technology part of this first. A lot of organizations kind of rushing to apply AI all over their business. I suppose especially relevant here is in their people processes. What tends to happen when you layer new technology onto old processes? What do you kind of see as the, as the biggest issues there? Yeah, and AI being as helpful as it is, and I'm making finger quotes as you can see me, will amplify whatever your reality truly is. So the challenges right now in some respects are foundational. Many organizations are declaring from the top, we are an AI first organization. Okay, well what does that truly mean? It means that the cascading goals and objectives for this particular fiscal year and beyond include both demonstrable tests and production level outcomes that drive some material modification to the affectation of work. And we can spend a lot of time sort of unpacking that as well. But the challenge we see is this is often positioned as a technology looking for a problem versus what you're hinting at, Matt, which is we have problems that are looking for technological enablement. The foundations that are a bit on quicksand, unfortunately today are the non sexy but required dependencies of what you need to to really bring value forward through these amazing new tools and technologies. We need data. Data that we trust, data that is accurate, data that is timely, data that is integrated. And sadly that's not the case across our federated enterprises who don't have a single system of record, as it were, for certainly everything that their employees and candidates and alumnus experience. We need authoritative content, which means that we need to have content that when queried actually represents what we want that policy or process to bring forward in the context of the individual requester. And that brings its own complexity because we may have good content, but the content really isn't written in a way that's consumable by current AI tools. We have latency issues or an ability to read certain fields or tables. But more so, what we're finding is organizations have not taken the time to pause and establish global process ownership, establish a strong global point of view relative to the HR end to end processes. And therefore what we're likely to bring in production is just the mess that we've been hiding behind the scenes and probably throwing humans at to control for so many of these complexity factors. Whenever I've been in conversations about AI, that whole process piece is always kind of front and center. In terms of really thinking about what, what this means, it's all very well to say, but I know that there are lots of people listening who are working in large organisations or complex organizations who feel that they don't have much control over reinventing processes or improving processes. So if that's the kind of starting point, how do you do that in a large, complex global organization where perhaps no one owns the end to end workflow? Yeah. And onboarding as we've discussed previously, is a good example of that. Right. Disposition to offer accepted. And then okay, well who's accountable and responsible for what happens next? Given the fact that that could be facilities and badges, it's provisioning of IT tools and technologies, it might be equipment, you know, personal protective equipment in certain instances. And it certainly means I need to, you know, provide authentication services and I need to bring someone into our processes and policies. And so it's very, very difficult to establish a single point of ownership. But I think it starts with a bit of a foren investigation and just understanding your current state, you think about what I do own and what I do have control over, which is, you know, in very, very large organizations tends to be fractional at the individual level, tends to grow of course, as we move up the people leadership stack. Part of it is just understanding your current situation and really unpacking the number of variations and the distribution of information and content that you have in your current ecosystem. And let's start even with external service providers in the TA space and recruiting space in particular, we have a litany of talent acquisition tools and technologies. When we then move someone into our core HR and payroll systems, we have similarly a litany of highly distributed and sometimes not necessarily aggregated or integrated technologies. When we look at our benefits programs, boy it gets really, really complex when we look at the statutory benefits that are in country owned region and the top up benefits that are are offered by employers of choice. And so if we don't write this down, we don't understand what information is truly resident in what systems, what the purpose of each of those tools and technologies was intended to be. What we often find is there's a collision of information and honestly typically not a duplication of information. So we need to start with understanding where information lives. And then from a content side, as I've hinted to earlier, we need to realize that there are probably conflicting rules, policies and communication initiatives that are going to perpetuate confusion when we put AI in front of it. So again, all of this is really just taking stock of the what? And then I would say the next step is establishing a little bit of the so what. All right, so we find ourselves in a very complex situation. We have a lot of different information. What can we start with that we have confidence in already? Not everything that in the ecosystem is necessarily broken. But but what can we pilot to prove that the tools in fact are functional, are factual, are operational, are bringing value? But where we have the highest level of true integration of content and data, how do we bring value first to test in fact the efficacy of what these are intending to bring forward, how do we also recognize, Matt, that due to regulatory policies that are really in some cases favorable to the employees, what do we do when the employees opt out? What's the next best modality that we're intending to move our employees to during critical, critical moments that matter or based on preferences, based on language requirements, etc? Is that live chat? Is that opening a case in your case management system? Is it walking down the hall to talk to my HR business partner? Because really understanding our Personas, our systems and our content is just foundational of everything else that comes Support for this podcast comes from Pebble. I know that many of you listening hire internationally and you'll be all too familiar with the paperwork and red tape that can really slow things down. That is what pebble is designed to fix. Pebble makes global hiring simple through embedded compliance and AI driven workflows. The pebble platform takes the delays and guesswork out of going global so founders and HR leaders can move fast without adding risk. Hiring abroad can take months when you do it on your own. With pebble, you can hire in over 185 countries in minutes and have your new hire onboarded by Monday. Most companies treat compliance as something to manage around. 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But right now there's a limited time offer on their site that makes it even easier to get started. Go to high pebble AI before it's gone. That's high pebl AI. Terms and conditions apply. I want it circle back and pick up on a couple of things you mentioned earlier in the conversation. And the first one is AI's impact on work itself. Because this is something that I know increasing amount of CHROs CPOs, people, leaders are kind of wrestling with. It's almost like where does AI fit? Where do humans fit in the organization? How do we design this? Are you seeing that kind of transformation going on? What's your perspective on it? Certainly, and I think a lot of this gets presented in the market as skills, skills taxonomy dynamic skills assembly dynamic or total workforce management. Because we're not just talking about employees in this context. We're also talking about our contractual seasonal temporary labor pools as well. Many organizations HR doesn't own, doesn't own the tools, technologies or even the provision of those capabilities. So what this is foundationally bringing into sharp relief, Matt, is what is work? And if we focus on go back to TA for a second and a requisition and the skills and competencies, the desired qualifications that we unpack when we put the this out to the market. Part of the interrogation that's going on in some of the market leading organizations is to break down at the skill level again. What skills will be displaced or amplified through agentic capabilities? What skills are truly uniquely human? Basically if we break the work apart, what work remains and what we're finding. Honestly, for those that have been relatively early adopters of these tools and technologies, the work that's left is heavy and heady and it's intense. And I don't know about you Matt, but sometimes I don't mind sending a calendar invite. I don't mind, you know, doing some simple work just to give my brain a little bit of a rest. So part of it is just the intentionality about how we think about job, job architecture, job structure and the assembly of work. And some organizations even uniquely now are saying, well, I might be a people leader, not because I don't have direct reports, but because I have a small army of agents that work for me. Now that's somewhat controversial. There's a lot of debate and probably another conversation, but really it starts with what is work? What work do we intend to provision and care for? Through what capability, be it digital or Be it human, how do we assemble those humans to provision the output of work? And then how do we disassemble and reassemble for the purposes of projects, programs and initiatives? And you know, there's theory out there that's been certainly studied by practitioners and by researchers around, you know, are we all just contingent labor when we really think about it? Because the promise of really permanency associated with work is in some cases truly false. So it's that level of sort of forensic understanding of what drives work and what skill sets, therefore we need to develop or move people into. And Matt, it's the, it's the age old, you know, HR business partners we want free you up to provide more strategic value. Well, now we're doing that. Are we prepared to take on that new mantra and truly provide the value that's intended with this new capacity that we found? Yeah, I think that's a really, really interesting and very fundamental question that lots of people need to think about very carefully, I think. And I suppose related to that and coming back to another earlier point you made about, you know, chro is also owning the, the culture of the business, the impact of transformation on people, particularly this technology driven transformation where people can perhaps sense they don't have as much control as they want or they thought they did. How should organizations deal be dealing with that? Yeah, I think there's a bit of cognitive dissonance between, you know, who we claim we are, what we say we do, the values we espouse, and the reality, unfortunately, that our employees are feeling now. In some respects we all live in the real world world that's always been true. You know, we've all been to the launch party of the new value system that becomes our background image on our zoom calls and is the, you know, the poster in the, in the cafeteria and so on. So there's always a little bit of cynicism around this, but it, but it really is causing organizations to rethink what is immovable or immutable. Like what's our actual true north? What are the things that we stand for and that we stand for for everyone. Because part of what's manifested now is organizations are recognizing under cost pressures as a people function and cost pressures as an enterprise. We can't afford to offer everything to everyone now again, Matt, oftentimes that's been true for decades. You know, we've had special dispensation for classes of executives, et cetera. But I think this is becoming more complicated in the sense that not everyone is truly being created Equal being treated equal. And when I see things like pay transparency in the eu, I love it because this is forcing us to sort of have some cup uppage with some of the things that we've done behind the scenes. So I like the accountability, but I think it's really a struggle for people leaders today with some level of credibility to stand forward and say, this is who we are. While at the same time we're seeing reductions in force, we're seeing massive shifts of population, we're seeing movements in geography due to, you know, things organizations can't control, like sadly, you know, wars or, you know, commerce impacts due to trade and tariffs. And so we're not able to hold on to the theory of what we thought we were. And I think it's forcing us to really question what does work mean and what do we really stand for as an organization? And I. And honestly, Matt, I think this is manifesting, as I hinted to earlier, some of the turnover we're seeing in senior leadership. A lot of chief people officers or human resource officers grew up in a different era and are now saying, I don't recognize what we're being asked to do anymore. And I'm not sure that I can sustain my part of this. I think that brings me nicely on to the final question, because this isn't one off transformation. This is a period of constant change that's going to run and run as far as we can see. How do you think ultimately the people function, the HR function, and these operating models are going to have to evolve over the next few years to really keep pace with this? Well, one thing that is good news for HR is this nonsense about the seat at the table is no longer being discussed, which I greatly appreciate having spent three decades in this industry. So we're squarely in the mix and we're in the mix for everything. In fact, in some organizations that we work with, HR now owns the Transformation Office. And I'm not just talking about the People Transformation Office, I'm talking about the Enterprise Transformation Office. Because, Matt, under your question is the fact that organizational development, organizational effectiveness, organizational design is continuous. We are constantly restructuring and reassembling what we mean by different business units, by different capabilities. We're divesting and acquiring assets faster than we ever have before. And so what it requires then is a confidential function that works with the Transformation Office if HR doesn't own it, which means we are the Transformation Office and executing on these visions. And we're really at the board level now and at the board level beyond just executive compensation plans and things that of course we always were, but that we are reshaping and restructuring the organization constantly. Now. The good news is there's high demand for our skill set as a people function. The bad news is that it's relentless. The days of cutting a logo cake because the transformation's over are behind us. Transformation is endless. We are in continuous improvement. However, we want to cast it continuously and forever forward. So part of this is how do we structure ourselves in order to prepare ourselves for the constant flywheel of changes in prioritization and execution? And part of it is how do we maintain a stronger cohort of skilled resources that we can provision to these changing needs on demand. This is the Navy SEALs of HR that we need to send wherever the greatest opportunity, problem or fix needs to be deployed. And it's happening like it's never happened before. So we're there. But it's incredibly demanding work and bringing a new level of speed and efficiency. Mark, thank you very much for talking to me. Thank you, Matt. Truly enjoyed the conversation. Thank you for the great questions. My thanks to Mark. You can follow this podcast on Apple Podcasts on Spotify or wherever you listen to your podcasts. You can search all the past episodes@recruitingfuture.com on that site. You can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter, Recruiting Future Feast, and get the inside track on everything that's coming up on the show. Thanks very much for listening. I'll be back next time and I hope you'll join me. This is my show, Sam.