CPO | Interested in AI, High Performing Teams, and Unlocking Human Potential | Tech Company Scaling & Transformation
Things that make me nervous in the land of AI HR tech that are here or coming soon, based on demos I’ve seen👇 ➡ AI sourcing, assessing, AND scheduling: we will have platforms that find talent on the open market, initiate outreach, respond to outreach, schedule and host a video meeting via an AI avatar, assess on the profile + first video call - then schedule them with the human interview panel ➡ AI job leveling: we will have platforms that create leveling matrices by function, tailored to the company, then do an auto first-pass leveling by function ➡ AI skill quantification & tailored AI learning plans: we will have platforms that - from those AI matrices - take a look at the talent we have and quantify their functional skill levels (eg. 120/200 in Machine Learning for SWE3) then auto curate learning plans in an LMS to build skills to where they need to be ➡ AI performance & engagement: we’ll have platforms that assess real time engagement and performance based on dialogue happening in slack, email, zoom, GitHub, etc. No more lagging structured questions? ➡ AI manager nudges: we will have platforms that not only give on-demand AI coaching to managers but also prompt them without being asked based on contextual awareness of what is going on in the team, regardless if the manager knows or not Honestly scary. This will drastically change how our systems are designed, as well as how People teams operate and where we spend our time. We may not be ready for all this 😳 🤖
I'm actually quite excited about all these changes AI is bringing. Imagine what People teams will do with all that time that used to be bogged down in these pieces. They can be even more thoughtful, more nuanced, more personalized, more scalable. AI does a lot, but still requires people at the end of the day to ensure what's delivered makes sense. Just like spreadsheets did for calculations - so amazingly useful, but you still need to set-up and double check the formulas! Figuring out trust, accountability, and credibility will be a learning curve, that I fully agree with and living through that will be hairy. However, I hope People Leaders balance the fears and anxiety that come with these change with the optimism and openness to opportunity that these changes will bring, too.
My take: the most utility will come from human + AI. Examples: Sourcing: Human uses AI to generate a job description. Human makes edits, presses a button, and 20 relevant profiles appear. Human reviews each profile and decides who to reach out to. A message is already crafted by AI, and human makes edits before sending. Applications: AI screens resume + 2 min video from the candidate and helps stack rank. Human watches the videos on 2x speed and schedules calls with the top 5. Make the human 5x more productive > replace human.
This pretty much sums it up: 😳 I just feel like already we are seeing that people don't *love* interfacing with AI - it ruins the experience. I don't know why we are forcing adoption of AI in some of the beautiful, nuanced, human parts of our work. Just feels like we could be using this tool in different, more responsible ways. Every I think about AI in our work, I actually feel 1,000 years old.
Wow, what a great thread. I have so many thoughts about every point on this post, but the last two — AI manager nudges & engagement & performance — are exactly what we do so keeping my commentary to that one since it’s the one I have knowledge about outside of my own personal feelings. (Though I believe all of these are related to each other in some way or another which makes the People teams job a lot harder to navigate.)
Are there any great AI sourcing applications out there you’d recommend?
As someone who is deeply passionate about technology, productivity and AI, I don't think that it should be used with deeply people related areas that require nuance to assess and formulate structure and strategy. People strategy is an art form, not a science, and that nuance of the work is why much AI hype products will ultimately fall short in this space. Now as far as AI tools to help with write performance reviews, build out project outline, write great job descriptions, sure! Where I don't want to see AI is reviewing linkedin profiles or making performance decisions. The most powerful use case for AI is in the trust and safety space. Given how harmful that work is on the human brain and psyche, it feels like the perfect role to be given to AI to remove and regulate content.
David Hanrahan what makes it scary? thinking about it, all of the above (except for AI performance and engagement) seems like improvements to what we have today. Finding talent and moving forward faster? Yes. Hiring is still too slow. Job leveling: Yes. Humans are error prone. Why not give them an accurate guideline to complement their skills? skill quantification and tailored learning plans: What percent of people have clear goals and paths? How many managers have the bandwidth or visibility to support that? This to me seems like going from confusion to clarity. AI manager nudges: At least in my circle of engineering, managers could use a nudge or two (assuming they are done well and accurately).
Great post David! There are so many great responses and concerns shared already that I really relate to. What is startling to me is that there is a whole community of IC's, managers, executives in the people / HR space that agree with the sentiments shared. However, with the speed at which the AI train is moving, it feels like the tech cycle is moving faster than the HR industry - so fast that our opinions and feelings feel like afterthoughts. How do we get ahead of this and proactively contribute to the end result? I don't think advising and contributing to the new breed of HR tech products is going to cut it. So what else should we be doing?
Insightful post David...I think HR will be the bottleneck in terms of adoption. All of these new AI products / tech have to be fully integrated into existing (new or old) processes. All of this puts more work on the plate of HR teams. If I am a CPO and thinking about an AI tool, it had better solve a business problem and be much better than my current process/system. Basically, is this AI tool worth putting my credibility on the line and is the juice worth the squeeze?
I've been talking to a lot of talent leaders recently about AI in recruiting (because I'm seeing more quickly adopted there vs the HR side). Overall, I see willing adoption mindset for AI as "time savings on discrete solo tasks", vs structural shifts to the human to human interactions. Think, transcriptions of interviews (Metaview), building JDs from your template (Knode.ai). I see partial willing adoption mindset for AI as teammate/assistant/delegated to. What you're keying into is what's on my mind too- at some point teams need to take a less discrete more strategic/systematic view of what they are *outcomes they are striving for on their teams* and be much more intentional about the place where AI belongs (or doesn't).