Recently, Paskpartnership hosted a fascinating and timely ppl Radar® [1] round-table event with 23 Chief People Officers, under Chatham House Rules, on the topic of “The AI-fluent People Leader.” We posed three questions for the group discussion:

1. How do People Leaders keep up with AI and its implications, opportunities and risks?
2. What are the right questions to be asking? Is AI all about efficiency or should we be asking what VALUE it creates – or destroys?
3. What are you doing to stay ahead of this – or at least not too far behind?

This article captures some of the key insights that were shared.

Early Days

According to the McKinsey report, “The State of AI in 2024”, adoption of AI in the last 12 months has risen from 55% of companies to 72%, largely driven by the use of Generative AI tools such as ChatGPT. But these are still early days and most business are still experimenting with this new technology. As the opportunities and threats of AI technology advance at a break-neck speed (through GenAI, robot workers, malinformation etc), we take a look at the key questions people leaders are asking and what learning and skills they need to stay on top of this.

Despite this being such a complex issue, there is no time to lose in getting to grips with the big issues. Some recent research by SurveyMonkey produced some worrying statistics:

• 54% of workers don’t feel comfortable with HR using AI
• 45% say they are worried about job security
• 41% say their company has no AI policy in place
• 70% say they haven’t received any training in AI

[1] ppl Radar® is both a learning and a networking space for CPOs and their colleagues. Sometimes virtual, sometimes in-person and supported by useful content, it is the channel where we explore the edge of uncertainty in people leadership – what is on the horizon, that no-one has the answers to, yet. The agenda and the content is driven by our community. This is not a space for lectures and declared truths, the style is to facilitate learning amongst peers, working with what is emerging in a spirit of curiosity and enquiry.

The first statistic may shock you, just as it shocked our guests. Many are already using AI in HR processes and wondered if they could be doing more to communicate the value it was adding – and how they were managing the risks.

The Challenge for Job Design and Organisation Design

What is clear from our discussions with CPOs is that AI will impact the whole business, not just the HR operating model and HR processes. And business leaders will look to CPOs and their teams to help them work out the implications on the future of work, job design, organisation design, talent development, employee experience and ethics and risk.

One key tension is already “on the table”. There is a great deal of focus right now on the potential of AI to improve efficiency and save time. But before you give away all the savings, one of the key questions CPOs can already be asking is, “How can we reinvest those savings to create additional value for the customer – either an internal customer or the end-user of our products?” This may be additional technology or more likely it will be new human-driven interventions from the employees you have freed up and reskilled.

We also discussed what value AI could destroy if used in the wrong applications. Should some roles be ring-fenced from being too AI-influenced? For example, Judges in a Court of Law, or physicians who are evaluating the patient holistically not just their individual symptoms. Even within purely HR applications, this question is a valid one and one that speaks to the fears of employees and applicants. How comfortable are you with the data-sets your AI has been trained on, so that is doesn’t have blind-spots, and built-in discrimination?

Those who grasp the full potential of AI early will quickly encounter complex challenges around job design, organisation design and employee experience – as AI disrupts traditional jobs, workflows, customer journeys and the employee journey. We are already seeing a demand for greater organisation and job design skills in new CPO hires, with CEOs looking for those who can envisage new ways to design the enterprise and new models of work in response to a tidal wave of technological, social and environmental shifts. The rapid rise of AI will only accelerate this requirement.

But when you set this against a desire amongst Generation Alpha for more human interaction, and a growing demand for training in interpersonal social skills (such as holding a casual conversation), the answer is not necessarily more automation in every aspect of working life.

The future of Generative AI technology is multi-niche rather than one that will come under the guise of a generic enterprise tool. Think ecosystems of solutions rather than one monolithic enterprise system. In every sector you will already find growing numbers of specialist applications being developed focused on very specialised Chat GPT plug-ins or proprietary LLMs (Large Language Models). Eventually, we could see every aspect of work using a different AI tool to support different tasks

At the same time, we are seeing a growth in the niche freelancer market – this Human Cloud is predicted to experience a CAGR of 14-15% over the next few years. Does this mean that we will we see a world of Task Designers and Task Doers (with some tasks allocated to AI bots) rather than employees with pre-defined roles? Will our organisations become Human Clouds themselves, with porous boundaries that deploy fractional specialists as needed? This would certainly push organisation and job design towards capabilities and skills rather than jobs.

The Challenge for Transforming HR with AI

So how do CPOs and their teams prepare for embracing AI in their own function, as an enabling tool across the whole employee lifecycle and HR operating model? The experience of those CPOs who are already experimenting with AI was clear:

• First start with clear baseline data and mapped out processes, so that you know what all the tasks are and how much time is devoted to them by your teams and employees. This way, when you begin your experiments, you can quantify the efficiency and quality implications of AI on these tasks.
• Second, create some hypotheses about the intended impact e.g. will it improve the employee experience or will it free up HRBPs and Centre of Expertise Teams from repetitive tasks?
• Third, start small to get big. Run experiments with existing products, set-up hackathons with AI start-ups, rapidly develop and test prototype applications before investing heavily in them. Use these experiments to test your hypotheses and capture the risks.
• Fourth, talk to each other – in your networks, across your sector, with employees and applicants, with your leadership team colleagues – adopt a stance of curiosity and learning so that you can keep pace with the changing technology and changing attitudes towards it. One company in our group has a regular AI Forum where business leaders come together to discuss AI issues and opportunities.
• Finally, who in your HR team can bring real-world experience of AI from other organisations or settings? Our CPOs felt that every team needed access to someone who already had experience of deploying AI in live applications, whether that is AI for customers or employees.

 

Some Final Thoughts

Employee’s experience of using AI outside work will colour how they perceive AI in work. People are fearful, and some are overly optimistic, so make sure you listen to them and their expectations and fears. Many people are still suspicious of the Cloud, never mind AI.

If everyone is using AI, how do you retain the very essence of what makes your products and services unique? Where is there room for creativity, innovation, the human experience and personalised interactions?

Here are some resources to tap into to help your learning:

• Josh Bersin has a podcast on his website about early applications of AI in HR – it is worth following.
• The IMF have just released a report on the impact of AI on jobs.
• Watch this video interview with Professor Hod Lipson, the director of Columbia University’s Creative Machines Lab, talks with CBS Professor Oded Netzer, offering reassurance on the technology’s dystopian risk and urges us to embrace its potential.
• Read this blog by Microsourcing for a broad sweep on how AI is impacting different industries and business functions.

As you can see, the discussion was wide-ranging and only just scratched the surface. Hence, this group want to keep talking and sharing. If you are a CPO and want to join in, let us know at pplradar@paskpartnership.com.