The August Talent Table discussed the impact of agentic AI on workforce transformation. Rebecca Warren, Christopher McCormick, and Andy Spence explored how agentic AI can automate tasks, make decisions, and reshape job roles. They emphasized the importance of focusing on outcomes rather than tasks, breaking down silos, and engaging employees in the transition. They highlighted the need for transparency, trust, and continuous communication to mitigate fear and foster innovation. Practical advice included involving employees in AI experiments, addressing myths about AI, and encouraging risk-taking to adapt to new technologies.

Introduction

• Rebecca Warren welcomes everyone to the August Talent Table and mentions the heat of AI as a topic.
• Rebecca provides housekeeping instructions, including using the Q&A section for live questions and registering for next month’s session.
• Rebecca introduces herself, mentioning her role at Eightfold and her journey from practitioner to customer success.
• Christopher McCormick introduces himself as the owner of Visionary Consulting, focusing on leadership development and executive coaching.
• Andy Spence introduces himself as the publisher of the Work Three newsletter and shares his extensive experience with digital transformations in HR.

Challenge question of the month

• Rebecca poses a challenge question: If AI could predict your next big life decision with 95% accuracy, would you want to know the prediction?
• Christopher McCormick shares his interest in tarot readings and might consider AI predictions but not let them influence his decisions.
• Andy Spence shares his skepticism about AI’s ability to predict life decisions and prefers to make decisions based on his own judgment.
• Rebecca shares her experience of wanting to know all the details after watching a movie, reflecting on the ambiguity of life decisions.

Defining agentic AI

• Rebecca asks Christopher and Andy to define agentic AI and differentiate it from automation and Gen AI.
• Christopher McCormick explains that agentic AI gives some decision-making rights to the AI, allowing it to make decisions based on context and data.
• Andy Spence emphasizes the broad nature of AI, including statistics, algorithms, and natural language processing, and describes agentic AI as specific tasks within a workflow.
• Rebecca summarizes the differences: automation handles specific tasks, Gen AI creates new ideas, and agentic AI manages entire workflows with autonomy.

Impact of agentic AI on workforce and skills

• Rebecca discusses the impact of agentic AI on job roles, skills, and the shelf life of skills.
• Christopher McCormick notes the varying maturity levels of companies in adopting AI and the challenges of legal and compliance in regulated industries.
• Andy Spence highlights the significant changes in skills and job shifts predicted by the World Economic Forum, emphasizing the importance of predicting performance.
• Rebecca suggests focusing on employee interests and side projects to identify emerging skills and improve work processes.

Organizational disconnects and silos

• Rebecca and the guests discuss the disconnects between HR, IT, and other departments that hinder effective AI adoption.
• Andy Spence emphasizes the need for a multi-functional approach to solve problems and the importance of breaking down corporate silos.
• Christopher McCormick suggests that leaders should model the right behavior and create a psychologically safe environment for experimentation.
• Rebecca highlights the importance of transparency and trust within organizations to overcome fear and resistance to change.

Employee engagement and adoption

• Rebecca asks how to keep employees at the center of the AI transition and ensure they feel engaged and valued.
• Andy Spence reassures employees that while some tasks may be automated, new, more skilled work will emerge, as seen with the adoption of spreadsheets in the past.
• Christopher McCormick stresses the importance of communication and involving employees in the decision-making process to build trust and reduce fear.
• Rebecca and the guests agree that early adopters can serve as role models, and companies should encourage experimentation and learning.

Final thoughts and actionable advice

• Rebecca asks for final thoughts and actionable advice for the audience.
• Andy Spence advises industries to explore potential scenarios for the future and their impact on HR and the organization.
• Christopher McCormick encourages taking small steps to embrace new technologies and overcoming fear by trying new things.
• Rebecca emphasizes the importance of playing with and learning about AI to drive innovation and improve work processes.

Rebecca Warren 0:04
Hey, hi and hello. Welcome to the Talent Table. It is August. We are in the dog days of summer. We were spending some time talking about our weather, and all of us, I think, are feeling the heat, and we’re also going to be talking about the heat of AI and what’s coming and what we can plan for and what we can’t. We are so excited to be talking about agentic AI. The whole entire world is talking about agentic AI, very different from conversations we were having last year. Before we get to our topic, there’s a couple of other things we’re going to do. And the first thing is, we’re going to introduce our wonderful guests, super excited to have them here. And then we have our challenge question of the month. So I will start with Rebecca Warren.

Rebecca Warren 1:13
I have been with Eightfold for five years. Now, I started out as a practitioner, moved over into customer success with Eightfold, and now am on the talent center transformation team, where we help folks think about work through the lens of people and talent, as opposed to jobs and org charts. Now I’m going to shoot it over to our two guests, and Christopher, I’m going to come to you first, and then we’ll move on over.

Christopher McCormick 2:09
All right, go ahead. Hi. Christopher McCormick, I run Visionary Consulting, which is an HR consulting business, and do a lot of work around leadership development and executive coaching, career coaching, strategic workforce planning. So interested in this conversation I have always been partnering with Eightfold for at least three plus years now. So glad to join and glad to have this conversation.

Rebecca Warren 2:36
Hi, Andy. You’re up.

Andy Spence 2:38
My name is Andy Spence. I published the work three newsletter, and it’s great to be here today at the Eightfold talent table, talking about AI agents. I’ve worked on over 30 digital transformation programs over the years, all involving HR. So I’ve seen lots of flavors of HR operating models, lots of different technology and versions of the business partner model. So I’m very interested in tech, and my interest in AI started a long time ago, when I was a teenager. Alan Turing said, Can computers think? And that really got me going. I ended up doing a master’s in AI and learning programming then. So really excited to work with Eightfold and other people developing AI solutions.

Rebecca Warren 3:22
Yeah, and we won’t spend a lot of time on that, but I thought it was fascinating when you first mentioned that you had a master’s in AI before it was cool. Like, people probably went like, in what? What are you talking about? So you have all kinds of depth to this conversation. So excited for that. Okay, so before we get to that, Now, normally, I have a question of the month which doesn’t tend to relate to the topic, but this one was just too good not to ask. So I’m going to ask you both a question, and would love to hear your answers. So if AI could predict your next big life decision with 95% accuracy. Would you want to know the prediction? And if not, would you want to know after you made the decision? I don’t know who wants to start.

Andy Spence 4:17
Oh, Rebecca, I’ll start making big life decisions. You know, should I move house? Should I emigrate? Should I accept that job offer? No, I think these big life decisions operate in a swirling world of complexity, and there’s no chance an AI bot can process the information better than me. So I don’t think I’ll be chatting to chat bots, really. I think it’d be better off learning a little bit more about how we make decisions as a whole body of work around that, rather than ask an AI chat bot. But that’s my gut reaction.

Rebecca Warren 4:52
Oh, fair. Now we are going to assume that this AI that is predicting is really smart, but I hear what you’re saying. So you. Want to make your life decisions based on you and not on additional information from a chat box. Got it.

Andy Spence 5:06
I think they’ll help us avoid the worst decisions, probably, which is a good thing. We could all do that.

Unknown Speaker 5:13
All right, Christopher, what do you think?

Christopher McCormick 5:15
If you know what I love, like tarot card readings and you know that kind of world of things. So I might, I might let it weigh in. I don’t know that that’ll necessarily let it influence the total outcome, but I might look at it to see, given I’ve worked with this certain AI for a while, it knows my voice, it knows sort of how my thinking patterns work. So it will be interesting to see. So I give it a whirl. Oh, okay, I’m an early adopter. I’m an early adopter.

Rebecca Warren 5:48
I love it, which is why you’re here. And so before I answer mine, have you when you use Chat GPT, have you named your bot?

Andy Spence 5:59
I haven’t, I haven’t, but it’s a good idea. “Andy bots” is a good one, isn’t it?

Unknown Speaker 6:06
Yes.

Christopher McCormick 6:08
I’ve changed it a few times, but yes, right now it’s currently Watson.

Rebecca Warren 6:18
I have named mine. His name is Chaos Goblin, so I call him CG. So thinking about this question, you know, I had my answer before asking it, where my answer was going to be, yeah, I do think I want to know now I’m gonna, I’m not gonna give any spoilers, but we went to go see a movie last night called Weapons, and it’s about kids who disappear, and this whole storyline. And at the end of the movie, I’m the one who always goes and looks it up online. I’m like, explain it to me. I want to know all the things. I want to know why the director did that, why the producer did that, why the writer wrote what he wrote. And so I was going through that whole, like, online answers, and the director and the writer were like, I didn’t really know. I gave the actor a couple of options, and she could choose to do it however she wanted to. And I told her not to tell me. And I was like, what? And then he was like, and I don’t really know how it ends, you know, the movie stopped, but I don’t really have all the answers. And at first I was kind of mad. I’m like, Come on, dude, like you seriously, you wrote this whole thing and produced this whole thing and you didn’t have answers on how it ends. And then as I sat in it a little bit more, I’m like, Oh, welcome to today’s world where we don’t have all the answers and we have to be okay with that, right? Like, I’m never going to get more answers by yelling at my phone, because the dude didn’t tell me what he was thinking when he wrote the end of it. So it really felt like, when I thought about this question again, it really did change my answer, because I was like, well, maybe that’s just the new normal. We’re just going to live in ambiguity, right? We’re going to figure out what we’re doing at the moment, make our decisions, and then we’re just going to move on, because they are what they are, right? And so that movie actually changed how I thought about it after I got done being mad at the writer. So kind of interesting, living in a little bit more of a world of uncertainty, and we just have to get comfortable with being uncomfortable, right? This life, isn’t it?

Andy Spence 8:22
It’s always been the way, I’m sure, for previous generations. You know, they had encyclopedias, libraries and the wisdom of elders, but, you know, it’s still difficult to make these big life decisions.

Rebecca Warren 8:37
So let’s jump into what we’re here to talk about, which is still related, right, the uncertainty of what’s coming and how we’re going to deal with that. So agentic AI is no longer just a concept. It’s a reality. It’s here. We need to figure out what those next steps are. So it’s transforming our organizations and our lives, and similar to the emergence when Gen AI got to be really big and everybody was talking about it, we’re seeing a shift in how we’re expected to work. And we can argue about this or discuss this, but I do think that it’s more than just a shift, right? Right? This is kind of an explosion. This is going to affect every corner of every space. So today we’re going to talk about the practical side. Is there a practical side? I’m not sure. We’re going to talk about how agentic AI is reshaping our job roles, what that partnership needs to be between HR, IT and the broader business, and some approaches to AI driven personalization. How are we thinking about the employee experience strategies to build confidence for folks to be uncomfortable and still be able to move forward. So the goal is, by the time we’re done talking about this, folks will feel confident and. To at least not run away from the topic and kind of jump in a little bit. So let’s start with talking about how agentic impacts the workforce. So we’ve got roles that are evolving, that are disappearing, that are being created. We’ve got skills that are shifting. And we’ve talked about this in the past, about the shelf life of a skill is continuing to reduce, so we have to, in organizations, be ready for what’s next. What does that look like? So right now, I’m just going to throw this out here. So let’s talk about how organizations are currently identifying emerging skills, right? Not even categorizing what we have in our company. But how are we? How are companies thinking about emerging skills from the perspective of the business and also employee success? So maybe Christopher, how about I throw that to you first. What do you think about that?

Christopher McCormick 11:01
So I work with a lot of different clients from different companies and different sectors, and I think they’re all in different places, from a maturity perspective, some are still doing very manual work, and, you know, hiring consulting firms to come in and take a look at efficiencies and look through that. And some of that’s really great, and some of it’s imperfect in its own way. Some are using more AI to help keep up with the pace of things, depending on where they are in their road map of embracing technology and bringing in AI, I think the struggle has been the whole legal and compliance, and especially regulated organization or regulated industries, there’s been a lot of work around figuring out where they can dip their toe in the water and where they need to be released, really locked down. So I’d say it’s sort of all over the map. From what I’m seeing in the current ecosystem, what I would say is the ones that I think are most successful are embracing technology to look at that, and what they’re finding is, by the time you put it on, you know, once you write it down and publish it to the world, it’s changed. So it’s like, how do you continue to keep it to your point iterative and sort of living in the ambiguity and being okay with that, I don’t know that we have grown up in a world or in organizations that have allowed for, you know, yeah, a lot of ambiguity. So I think it’s, it’s an interesting it’s an interesting dance to see people trying on new things in organizations that were built to have rules, regulations, procedures, processes that were all well defined, and so kind of breaking that and or flipping the script on that is really challenging, especially for leaders who are in different generations and may not be ready to move as quickly to those things that are emergent and ambiguous. So I think it’s a bit all over the place, if you will.

Rebecca Warren 13:05
Yeah, Andy, what do you think?

Andy Spence 13:07
Well, I think skills are a really big issue, aren’t they? You know, it’s been talked about in all the HR magazines. It’s on the, you know, the agenda of the boardroom. You know, the World Economic Forum published a report on the future of jobs in 2030 and they said 39% of workers’ core skills will change in that time, loads of job shifting, and 90 million will be lost, 170 million will be created. So you know, who knows whether that’s going to be accurate, but skills are a big deal, and in HR, the challenge is, you know, the average person employee logs into 20 workforce systems in a week. The data is everywhere. It’s very hard to find out what skills and talents we’ve got in our organization. And if you throw in the fact we’ve got a lot of freelancers, agencies and all sorts of other workers, it’s very hard to know what talent we’ve got in there, and now we’re in the age of AI with all this data, skills aren’t the only metric to look at, it’s experience, demographics, the context of the team they’re entering. So what’s very exciting is for work technology and HR, there’s an opportunity to really improve that look at what actually predicts performance, including skills and and, you know, be more effective with hiring and designing work.

Rebecca Warren 14:32
So I love it and thinking about that right, like the thing, the thought about emerging skills, things that are coming right, things that we can’t predict, right? Christopher, you’re right. It’s all over the map, like we’re not sure if we’re playing in yesterday’s space, today’s space or tomorrow’s space, and sometimes we’re doing all three at the same time, right? Exactly? Yeah. So we think about those emerging skills, and I’m wondering, right? Because, as we just talked about, we’re used to what we’re. A field that catalogs and organizes and puts things in containers, and we have org charts and we have job descriptions and we have lists of things, but that’s not how work gets done, and that’s not how the world is working. So that emerging skills like I almost wonder if it’s about paying attention to what our employees are paying attention to, what kind of things do they like to do? What things are they starting to ask questions about, where does that come from? Like, I wonder if it’s more about focus groups or ways to really dig into what employees are seeing, even if it’s like, you know, we ask the question, what would make your world better, even if they come up with something that’s completely crazy. Like, how could we start thinking about how to make that work? Like, I almost wonder if it’s less about us trying to solve this big, hairy problem, and more about figuring out what the work looks like, what are the tasks that go with it, and how do we pay attention to the most effective teams and how they get work done?

Andy Spence 15:57
I totally agree. Rebecca, absolutely. It’s a broader question than just skills, isn’t it?

Christopher McCormick 16:02
Absolutely, yeah. And I would say there’s also ask anybody in any sort of you know job that is more advanced, or is more of a thought job, or in that sense, what’s your pet project? What are you working on behind the scenes that we don’t know about, that’s going to tell you a lot of what is the emerging skill for them, or where their passion goes automatically. You know, if they’ve been working on something and tinkering in that, I’ll just go back to the lot of tech companies started in garages for some reason. Yeah, but if they are in their garage, either going home at night and they’re doing something and tinkering with stuff, because it’s what they’re passionate about, or what lights them up. Why are we not harnessing that, and how to embrace that or bring it in?

Andy Spence 16:47
Yes. What’s your side hustle? You know? What are you working on? Like you said, because people are bringing in different networks, different skills that can be used within the boundaries of the firm they work for, too.

Rebecca Warren 17:00
Agree. Yeah, I think, you know, talent marketplaces might be a way for that conversation to start, right? If you give employees the opportunity to create their own projects and to get people involved, or if there are opportunities for folks to take time at work, right? I know some organizations give you, like 10% of your work time should be focused on thought leadership or digging into questions. So interesting. Okay, so now let’s take it into consideration. We’re talking about emerging skills. How do we know what’s coming? How do we harness that energy and that excitement? Right? We’ve talked about that a little bit. Now thinking about agentic AI, how does that change how we think about things? How do we expect the future to change? Which, you know, we just said we can’t expect it. So that was a bad word. But how are we thinking about the world with agentic AI coming in, and maybe the first thing before we spend a lot of time on that, what we haven’t done is really defined what we’re talking about when we say agentic AI. So, you know, we have automation, we have Gen AI, and we have agentic. So do either one of you want to take a stab at describing what we’re talking about, and when we think of agentic? I mean, I have a definition, but I’d love to hear from you Andy or Christopher, what do you do when we’re talking about agency? How would you describe that which is different from automation?

Christopher McCormick 18:27
I think agentic is giving some it’s giving decision rights to the AI, where in the past, it’s not been you would answer. You give it a question. You had experts who wrote knowledge based articles that would go find stuff with your company and specific to your company, and come back and feed you the answer based on where your company is and what you’re doing. And so there’s all that sort of piece of AI. I think with an agentic, it’s going to give some real decisioning rights that I can make decisions to say, you brought this to me. I’m going to actually make a decision around whether I, instead of your manager approving your vacation, I’m going to go ahead and approve your vacation, because I can see everybody else’s vacation and nobody’s taking it. So in the workflow. So it’s starting to say, I don’t have to give that to a person to go look at and manually deal with. I can actually make that decision for you, or let you know you need to go talk to your manager, because there are four other people on your team that are asking for the same time off that week. So it’s starting to give it ways to think about if then, and if I can see bigger parts of the ecosystem, then I can make decisions, or I’ve been given the right to make decisions that can take stuff off of people’s plates that in the past, we’ve had there, right?

Rebecca Warren 19:40
Andy, what do you want to add to that?

Andy Spence 19:42
AI is a terrible name for a whole lot of technology that includes statistics, advanced statistics, algorithms, natural language processing, machine learning, pattern recognition, and large language models. It’s so broad, so much tech. And if you ask 100 psychologists to define intelligence, none of them will agree. So it’s a terribly distracting name. It’s very handy, you know. So AI agents, I agree with Christopher. They’re basically around doing specific tasks for us, and that’s the way I look at them, as opposed to all those other technologies I mentioned, which have a specific purpose.

Rebecca Warren 20:22
So 100% so thinking about right automation is taking things specifically and checking the boxes, right? They are automating a process. There’s a certain way that they do it. It’s a container. It’s automated. It’s a task we think about Gen AI, right? That is creating maybe new ideas or thought content based on ingesting large bits of data, right? Like I talked to chaos Goblin, and I asked him things, and I don’t know why he’s a he should be a she. I got to think about that. But ingesting all of this data and then coming up with a conclusion or putting something together, maybe in a different way than hasn’t been done before. So and then agentic thinking about that workflow like they can an agent can take the entire process. Now we can build in toll gates where we say, hey, we want to check in. And does this feel right? Does that feel right? But, completely taking that off of our plate, and it happening without our intervention or our need to push a button or make it happen. So if we think about those workflows happening without folks having to push the button. What do we think that’s going to change in terms of how work gets done in the future? Because there’s a lot of jobs out there that can be automated, or can be AI assisted, or can be augmented, what do we think work is going to look like when that comes into play more holistically.

Andy Spence 22:05
I think one way of looking at this Rebecca is, rather than thinking of jobs and work on a big scale, think of the future of tasks like Christopher mentioned, the AI agents can go off and do specific tasks in a workflow. Humans are still making decisions, but they’re sending emails or drafting, drafting emails, or setting up meetings or taking notes, that kind of thing. So I think that, I think that’s important. And you know, you know around that, I think Deloitte have predicted that a quarter to a half of organizations are going to be using agentic AI in the next two years, so it’s pretty commonly used, and I think we tend to overestimate the effect of the technology. There’s a lot of fear in organizations and the workforce, but I think we also underestimate it in the long run. If it really can help us make big life decisions, then Gosh, it’s become an awful lot more complex than it is now. So that’s some initial thoughts.

Christopher McCormick 23:08
I think oftentimes we think of AI coming in and taking a lot of stuff off of our plate, or augmenting work or doing this or that, and the light bulb goes off to an executive or the leadership team is, oh, well, we can give our other people more work to do, or set more goals or put more stuff in the system. Work, different words, differently, and there’s so much noise that’s already out there, I think that the for better or for worse, as we do have aI come in and take away some of those tasks and just sort of things that can be automated, and there is more space for people to think about, what can they do? What should they be focused on? The caution I would have is having the executive teams put more stuff into an already noisy system, and then everybody, everything’s a priority again, and I think an executive’s team is to de-prioritize things and make it laser focused on, what are the real priorities for our customers, our clients and our employees? What are we trying to solve? What are we trying to do? And the more you throw stuff at that with more tasks or more initiatives or more efforts, everything just gets watered down. So I think we have to be cautionary there, yes and yes.

Rebecca Warren 24:24
And that’s exactly what I was just thinking as when we understand the pieces of the work, we can focus on the outcomes. And I think Christopher, that’s exactly where we need to go, right, like, what do we need to achieve? As opposed to, what does my job description look like? And that’s where work I think, is going to continue to evolve. Some organizations have people working in pods, working in small groups, and looking at what that outcome is, and then figuring out how you get there, and everybody gets there in a different way. And I think that’s where agentic makes that job. Difference agentic. If we think about agentic, AI is really focused on the outcome, right? You give it this beautiful prompt, this beautiful list of this is what you want to do. It’s not following like a Gantt chart, or, you know, doing any of that. And it’s really not even following a race, as someone asked about that, about following a racy matrix. I don’t think it’s like that, because in an agentic workflow, it has autonomy to make decisions, to make conclusions, to decide if we need to get here right? These are the things that I may need to look at in order to get to that outcome. So I think Christopher, I think that’s where we need to focus is, what are the outcomes that we’re trying to achieve, as opposed to, let’s add more tasks to somebody that’s right, or in any in the broader ecosystem, in general, for the company, let’s add more goals for the company.

Rebecca Warren 25:56
Yeah, because it should be right. That’s how work should get done. If we have our big, hairy, audacious goals, if our company has set these outcomes, these things that we’re supposed to be working towards, if anything that we do doesn’t fit with those outcomes, we should stop doing it right. If we do, it should help us be more focused, instead of worrying about work that’s happening that maybe isn’t adding value.

Andy Spence 26:20
I completely agree. Don’t do something efficiently that shouldn’t be done at all.

Rebecca Warren 26:25
I completely agree. I’m writing that down.

Andy Spence 26:29
What didn’t come from my wisdom is from Peter Drucker, the management theorist. It’s a good one, isn’t it?

Speaker 1 26:37
Okay. That’s right. Don’t do something that’s my favorite quote.

Rebecca Warren 26:45
Okay, so we’re thinking about that too. So if we are focusing on outcomes, if we’re using agentic to help us get to better outcomes, take off the stuff, off of our plates, organize it, not doing it more efficiently, deciding, does it need to be done at all? Maybe it can be done in a horizontal manner, instead of everybody having their own little bits and pieces, right? How do we shift how we work? So what kind of risks or opportunities do you think will come for employees when an agent takes shaping and the work, the shift in work starts shaping what employees learn, how they grow, how they think about their future, what career paths look like. What do you think the agency is going to do for the employee career path?

Andy Spence 27:37
I think the first, the first impact in the short term is it will make our life a little bit better. It will do things like schedule interviews with candidates, you know, take out some of the admin to free up, free up some time. So in the short term, that looks good. But we also have to be careful as these tasks start reducing, then jobs will get re-clustered in other ways, and it has an impact on your department. So I think that’s the first thing. What people might overlook is the impact in the long term. So it’s not just AI agents, it’s all the other technologies that are around that are transforming industries. And before we know it, those industries, those services, are going to be changed, and the very nature of the organization is going to change. And therefore, what HR does, what learning does, what recruitment does, you know, my hypothesis is that we’re going to need smaller organizations in the future, because we’ll be able to pull on more of a liquid workforce. And so our work won’t necessarily all be with one employer. One job could be with multiple contracts. It could be with your side hustle, for example. So I think in the short term it’s pretty straightforward. Medium long term, it’s rather hard to predict, but I do think we’re not looking at the changes going on in our specific industries, whether that’s farmers, defense, education or whatever.

Christopher McCormick 29:02
Yeah, I would also just add that I think there’s the fear that that’s there, from an employee perspective, is it’s going to replace me, or the organizations are going to get smaller and and I think the we’re so conditioned or trained, or what we’ve learned along the way is that we have all these things that we have to do, so we start to become human doings, and so you get your value out of accomplishing that list of tasks and checking it off the box at the end of the day, all that doing stuff on your to do list can actually be automated. And you know, you know, you know, sent off to AI to accomplish for you. And so then you start to look at yourself and go, Well, what value do I bring? And so then you have to start to think about how I am showing up. You start to look at the human being aspect again. So who am I being in this meeting? How am I showing up? Am I bringing the right thought leaders? Leadership. Am I bringing a lot of different perspectives? Am I going out and doing the work that I could be doing? Because I want to be doing thought leadership. I want to be bringing industry insights. I want to be focused on how we get more innovative and bring in the future of work to fruition and meet these outcomes. I’m not, I’m not given the time because I’m doing all the to do list stuff. So get rid of, you know, offshore that to AI, then you have the opportunity to actually sit back and start to do the thinking. That’s requisite for why that’s the challenge, isn’t it?

Andy Spence 30:31
I really think that. And, you know, we’ve got some history with digital transformation freeing up time for people. My experience of doing lots of these is you can’t just reduce the admin by implementing technology tools. You’ve also got to work on the other side, which is, what do we do with our time? How do we become more strategic? You can’t just let it happen. You have to be very proactive. And to Christopher’s point, you need people to move up the chain, be ambitious, achieve their goals in life that isn’t just going through the task, because the computers will be doing a lot more of that.

Rebecca Warren 31:08
Okay, so both of you have sparked something in my brain, and I’m going to share this, and then we we’re going to move on, even though I would love to spend all of our time here, I’ve got some other things that I want to make sure we talk about, but the idea, Christopher, I love that let’s stop being human doings, and let’s be human beings. Because I think that’s really where the magic happens, right? Is how we think about things, how we put things together. My husband and I were talking about this the other day. I’m like, I don’t produce, like, a widget or a thing, right? Like, I’m here because of how I think about things and the value that I’m able to add that way, that is where I think we should be going. When there was a question that came in that said, which I think is a fair question, do we think that AI is or is going to make us lazier? And I would say, No. Like, I think about my days in the last week or so when I haven’t had to spend time on manual tasks, I’ve been able to use Gen AI to spark ideas to write a blog. I was able to get a blog out in four hours, as opposed to sometimes it would take me a week or two, because you’re writing and rewriting and like, what do I think about this? And then I’m asking other people questions, and I still do that, but I’m able to throw it into and like, hey, does this make sense? Give me some ideas. Give me some thoughts, right? So as we shift to human beings, giving our brains time to think, when we spend our time thinking, spend our time doing we kind of shut our brains off in some cases. So, Andy, you made me think about the show severance, right? Where the idea is that work is so monotonous and boring and horrible that we want to disconnect our brains from the cool things that we do outside of work and just go to work and be robotic. And so I don’t want that, right? I want to get value out of my work. I want to be energized. I want to be able to take the things I learn at work and bring it home and learn from that, and vice versa. So I think that’s where we’re going, of using it to help us be more strategic, more effective. Use our brains differently, share what we are thinking, be at a different level, as opposed to being human, Christopher, I am shamelessly going to use that, I think, in probably every conversation.

Andy Spence 33:25
Now, that’s a great phrase. That’s a great phrase, but Rebecca, thought occurs to me if people have said this. This 100-200 years ago, with automation, we’re not gonna have any work to do. People like Karl Marx said we’d all go fishing, you know, whatever? Would we be lazy? So that’s because they’ve seen new technology come in with factories and electricity, and they’ve thought there won’t be any work to do. But you know what? We find new things to entertain us with, whether that’s tick tock, social media or whatever, we’re going to have a life of leisure, hopefully, if we get some of the politics right, but that’s probably a topic for another show.

Rebecca Warren 34:02
I like it. I like it. Okay, so as you said, that’s for another show, because today we’re also talking about some of the things that happen inside organizations when maybe we don’t have all of our dots connected, maybe we’re not thinking the same way when it comes to work and how work gets done. So if we think about disconnects that happen in the organization, right, talking about HR, talking about ops, talking about it, and we’re thinking about the technology that we’re using in HR, what are some of those disconnects that cause some challenges between HR, HR ops, it maybe legal. What are some of those things that maybe cause this to maybe not work so smoothly?

Andy Spence 34:57
I’ve mentioned before about the employee. Experience that the average worker logs into 20 systems. And if you think that one strategic goal might be to improve the employee experience so people stay longer and are more productive, for example, to solve that problem, I would want the head of it, the head of HR, legal compliance, in that room. So a lot of our challenges need this multi-function approach to solve it. So some of the disconnects, I think, around some of the corporate silos we have, we have to break them down or make more links between them. How do we do that? Well, we can do it with mixing teams up, taking the IT director out for dinner. You know, there’s all the old fashioned ways, but I think it’s really important to set up pilot projects that have got key members of these two different teams. So I think there’s a ton of problems involved. The silos are a remnant of 20th century organization design. They don’t work so well. Now, in fact, I’ve written in my work three newsletter around the end of the corporate silo, because we’re moving to an era of more self organized, self sufficient teams. But in the short term, we need to increase the cooperation between these departments. Definitely.

Christopher McCormick 36:19
I would just add, I think each of those groups that you talked about, HR, IT HR, ops, legal compliance, they all have an expertise, so they’re all bringing that point of view, and have a point of view based on their expertise. I think where we could go back, I’ll go back to the human being versus doing. If we’re if we’re taking some of that expertise and we’re allowing them to get some of that doing out of the way, then they can start to look at the bigger piece, the bigger system, and they could start to have more of an enterprise mindset and be shared with each other, versus, yes, their expertise is valued. It comes into play. But if we’re really driving outcomes, if we’re really trying to get this work done for let’s say I saw somebody in healthcare, a patient outcome, if we’re trying to drive, you know, a distinct thing for a technology, and emergent technology, and in tech, and the outcome is to build this thing. It gives all of those people at the table that spend a lot of their time doing stuff, the opportunity to be in conversation about, what can we all add, and what can what? Where does the point of view come in handy, versus where is it getting in our way? I think today it’s all getting in our way because they’re all stuck in sort of, to your point to that going right back to the 20th century model of working, or just thinking about in that siloed level or way well, and that our value had been tied to the tasks we perform, right?

Rebecca Warren 37:44
Like I think about my grandpa, who delivered flower pots when he got back from the war, that was his job, right? He got up, they loaded up his truck. He delivered flower pots all around Chicago. He came home 445 dinner was on the table, right? He got a sense of satisfaction. I completed my route. I did the things right. And I think a lot of times we attach our value to the things we check off, or the things that we do, as opposed to the way we work, or how we think about things, or the value we’re adding by contributing to conversations and thinking about that bigger picture. And I, and I was thinking as both of you were talking, a lot of that comes from fear of the unknown, which we’ve already talked about, right? Like, what is it? We don’t know what it looks like, so we’re going to control what we can control, right? And it’s and then it is that control piece. How do we think about letting that go, like I don’t have to control it, it’s going to be okay. And then that starts having more robust conversations, because we are getting ahead of it, as opposed to being scared of it and shying away from it. Any other thoughts on that? Go ahead, yeah. I was just going to say we just haven’t been conditioned or brought up in a system, either educational or structural conversations that are all around or you’re supposed to know the answer.

Christopher McCormick 39:02
You’re supposed to have that get your tests done. You’re supposed to be productive. You’re supposed to, you know, do this, do that, do this. I think I’ll give you another pithy thing, because I love, you know.

Rebecca Warren 39:23
I’m writing about down, dude. I’m writing it all down. We all have that, you know, the badge of busy.

Christopher McCormick 39:27
You know, we have. We earned that badge or that stripe. Everyone’s busy. We get it, okay. But what are you busy with? Are you busy with the things that bring you joy? Nine times out of 10 The answer is probably not, not. At some of the stuff that you do at work, people are like, Oh, I have to go to work on Monday. They’re like, yeah, no. They’re mostly like, back to work to do all this stuff that doesn’t necessarily bring you joy, it brings you the paycheck or the sense of accomplishment, but that might be it. And then there’s all that side stuff to Andy’s point. You’re thinking about, if you’re not going, we’re not going fishing. Some of us don’t like fishing, so I’m not going fishing. Andy, you can go, you go fishing. But what do I do that lights me up? What brings me passion? Where can I bring that to the fold that will make the experience and the patient outcome, or the customer outcome, or the technology solution, whatever it might be, I can make that experience even more nuanced and even more personalized, because I’m at the table helping shepherd that along the way.

Rebecca Warren 40:33
Yeah, and that ties to what Andy talked about, too, right? When we knock down silos and we take away those individual lines of work, right? That transparency. And someone just wrote in too about doing, potentially, an ops integration meeting where you have an opportunity for folks to come together and say, Hey, here’s what I’m working on, or here’s what we need to know about having folks from the organization all come together to communicate, right? And I think overall, that was a great way to do it. Overall, it’s transparency inside the organization. And this is something I’ve been saying for a while now. We talk about trust and transparency. You have to trust that the organization has your best interest in mind, and then that transparency between departments breaks down those silos, takes people away from the fear, because then we all know what’s coming, even if we say we can’t predict what’s going to happen in the next year. I always talk about the, you know, clarity in the now, as opposed to certainly for the future. Let’s all work on this together. Here’s what we’re trying to solve for when you’re transparent, people then feel comfortable to lean in as opposed to being scared.

Andy Spence 41:47
Yeah, I agree.

Christopher McCormick 41:51
I think people, people, people, leaders and people in the organizations need to be modeling that first, they need to be free to show that it can happen in the organization, and be willing to challenge themselves because they set the sort of the tone or the model. And I think a lot of times, if you’re in an organization that is not as psychologically safe or not as welcoming of ideas that are not in the flow of what people want to have structured. It can feel very much a threat and feel very much like I could, you know, lose this job or this safety or this thing that is mine. And so how do you give people that sort of freedom or empowerment to feel like they can take those leaps of faith and they can work in the ambiguity. And I don’t necessarily know that we’ve solved that in a lot of large organizations.

Andy Spence 42:49
No, Christopher, I see that a lot, because you can’t just tell people to start pilots and do experiments with AI if they think that they will get sacked if they fail. And to your point, it’s all around the culture and demonstrating that that won’t happen, that it’s a safe environment to experiment, try things out. I think that’s really, really crucial.

Christopher McCormick 43:12
Yeah, and how do you build it into systems like compensation and incentives and things of that nature, so that it’s getting the reward, rewarding people for doing those risk taking moves, versus getting all those tasks done and, oh, by the way, trying to do this so we can replace you with a robot, right?

Rebecca Warren 43:34
So okay, so let’s talk about that inside an organization, right? We know that we’ve got ways to go. We’ve been talking to many, many different companies, and people are at all different levels of interest, adoption, excitement, trepidation, right? All of those things. Are there? Agentic, AI, AI in general, it’s not plug and play. You just can’t say, Okay, today we’re going to flip the switch and turn on AI, right? That’s not how it works. We’ve talked about this trust and transparency and new ways of working. So from all of these different perspectives, practical, legislative, ethical, how are we? How should we be thinking about driving this excitement towards new ways of working and thinking, how do we help people get out of the fear and the questions and get them to lean in?

Andy Spence 44:39
Well, I think we’ve touched on some of the ideas around experimentation. You know, we’re going to get people who become super users of this technology, and boy, are they going to become more productive than their colleagues. You know, if somebody is doing the same job as Christopher said, a thinking job in the knowledge space, and they are amazing. At Claude, Chat, GPT, and have set up all sorts of programs to help them. They’re going to be five times more productive. That’s something that’s happening in the workforce, in certain jobs, and that’s very interesting. But maybe we can harness that, get them to share with their employees, you know, set up, you know, skill sharing and projects and that kind of thing. So I think that’s one thing. And I think, you know, I think we need organizations to help cut through some of the myths around AI too, that it will take all our jobs, for example, is a good one, you know, to play that down. I think that’s important. And there’s one around what I would call anthropomorphism with AI. You know, it’s very interesting, Rebecca, that your Chat GPT is a guy, you know. So of course, you know, these are computers, and we’re assigning gender onto this, these statistics and algorithms are crazy, but this anthropomorphism means the biggest use of large language models, okay, is therapy and companionship. People are using it for dating advice, WhatsApp conversations and this kind of stuff. So we have to be careful around what I would call the emotional economy of work. Yeah, actually, there’s all sorts of work we do that isn’t doing tasks and setting up meetings and writing and graphic design. It’s, you know, it’s emotional support for people. Us humans have amazing qualities that the machines don’t, critical thinking, empathy, curiosity, all these things. Let’s play them up with our workforce and encourage them to develop these skills, because in two or three years, they’ll probably be even more important for us. Yeah,

Christopher McCormick 46:51
What are you saying? Andy just reminds me of an article I read. It came out of Denmark. They were trying to solve generational gaps and people understanding different generations. And in Denmark, they they give college students free room and board to live in more of senior homes, and the goal is to have them spend so many hours a week with seniors and and the younger generations in college, living together, sharing stories, building camaraderie, thinking about, you know, passing on that you know, knowledge through storytelling and through the experience and through that you know, kinetic, emotional moment that you’re never there’s no robots ever going to replace that nobody. Nobody’s ever going to be able to tell you my grandmother’s recipe for banana pudding, or what you know and like, and actually, have you made it for you to sit down at a table and have you taste it. That’s that emotional experience or that emotional connection that I think we have to harness and figure out. How do we drive people to find those things, to bring into our products and services, and also, how do we continue to engage them around, challenging them to make it fun? So I have to learn something new. I remember we used to do hackathons, right? That was a big thing for a while. Or, yeah, how do you make it fun? A learning journey. How are you ? I was on Facebook the other day. I know I’m a relic, because I’m still on Facebook, but there was an ad on it that came up because it knows I’m of a certain age, and it was like, Do you still use AI, just like, as a search engine? You should join this 40 day thing, and you could learn all these different AI systems in the next like, I don’t know, 60 days, but it was like, Oh, that actually, I actually looked at it just like, that could be quite fun. Like to learn a lot of different pieces of AI, but how are companies being able to do that in a way where they feel is so compliant and safe for what they’re doing, but also bringing in sort of that fun learning aspect where people do feel like they’re that sense of accomplishment that that your grandfather had at the end of his route. It’s actually, yeah, having them feel like I learned something new, I now can use that in a broader sense, now that I’ve done that work.

Rebecca Warren 49:12
Reward. Go ahead.

Andy Spence 49:15
The example from Denmark was so innovative and creative solving a problem for two groups of people. It’s a wonderful example. Trust the Danish. They have an awful lot of good ideas.

Christopher McCormick 49:28
They’re the happiest people in the world. They have been forever.

Andy Spence 49:32
I do talks around the world about building a preferable future of work. I’ve been all around China, the United States, and Europe. When I do my talks in Denmark. At the end, they go, Yeah, we do all those things now. Well, you know, they took a lot of the boxes.

Christopher McCormick 49:49
All right. So early adopters, early adopters.

Rebecca Warren 49:52
Yes, watch the early adopters, right? Listen and learn. So watching the time, of course, it’s flying by. Um. Um, let’s, let’s shift here a little bit and think about this with the employees in mind, right? We have been talking about big things like organizational, you know, structures, and how are we going to maybe change the rewards and the benefits? Let’s think about this from the employee perspective, like, how? How can we put employees at the heart of this transition? I think it’s easy to, as a leader, to think about changing this, this, you know, workflow, or put this new thing in place. But how can we make sure, if we’re saying, right, we are human beings and not human doings. How are we going to keep that human being, that worker who’s got, it’s not severance, right? That worker who’s got things that are happening outside, and they’ve got families and lives, and some like to fish, and some like to bike, and some like to do other things, like, how are we keeping the employees at the center of this transition? What are some things that we should be thinking about?

Andy Spence 51:05
First of all, for the record, I don’t like fishing. I just like to put that out there.

Unknown Speaker 51:10
I don’t like fishing either, really.

Andy Spence 51:13
But the thing is, it’s a great question. I think, look, there is fear out there that always has been with new technology. You know, I read in the paper that tick tock in Germany are replacing their trust and safety team with AI bots and outsourced labor. So some of this is a genuine fear in certain sectors. But, you know, I would throw in some historical context. Imagine, you know, I’m talking to a HR audience about spreadsheets. In the 1980s they implemented lotus, 123, and Excel. And everyone thought that the bookkeeper’s work was finished. But what actually happened is some of the admin work was reduced, but there ended up being more skilled work, probably more highly paid work. You know, it takes decades for this to play out. I would reassure the workforce a little bit along those lines. The truth is, we don’t know how it’s all going to play out. And, you know, that’s it. And on the other hand, we’ve picked up on being more human and also trying to be more of a super worker, you know, I think that’s an opportunity for people, for workers.

Rebecca Warren 52:20
Yeah, there may be some organizations out there that are still using TPS reports. Any office space fan, right? Give me my stapler.

Speaker 2 52:30
Yeah, the worst. Okay, so where’s your player? How many pieces?

Rebecca Warren 52:36
How many pieces of flair? 37.

Christopher McCormick 52:41
The required number is 38 so I need you to go home and change. Thanks for bringing that one back. The other thing I would say is, we have to keep them engaged. We have to get the employees engaged. If they don’t feel engaged and we’re not communicating and bringing them along the journey that we’re having as an organization, they’re going to feel disconnected. That fear is going to continue to be there. I wrote an article a couple of weeks ago around indigenous peoples. It was World Indigenous peoples day and their whole theme this year was around AI, and what that could do for the indigenous peoples world, and what it could also instinctually they might get really fearful that it’s now going to take away more stuff. So there was a whole litany of things that lots of research that had come in around that. So I think where the outcome, basically, at the end of the market research and everything, was make sure that you have the right people at the table. You’re getting the right thinking from all the different people who have a, you know, a say in the matter, or do the work today and want to see it be better, or want to see the outcomes that we’re trying to drive be better, or, you know, improved. They want to. I think everybody comes to work and they want to do a good job. I think the innate nature of human beings is that we want to do the right thing. We want to take care of each other. And when you don’t empower that, or you put a process or procedure in the way that gets it, then it gets muted. And so how do we create more of that connection, and more of that way to keep people engaged in the work that we’re doing as we’re continuing to evolve it and continue to communicate. I think a lot of people, especially the employee experience, feel like there’s a bunch of people in a room making a bunch of decisions that are going to impact me. Communicate, communicate, communicate, tell me what is not changing and what is changing and when. And so if I can understand sort of the road map, then I can start to think about how I see myself in the future along that road. I don’t know the roadmap. I’m going to make up the roadmap so you’re either communicating and your non communication is also communication. So that’s you know, that leads to that fear, that leads to the fear. So I think that’s where companies are strong. Struggling is they’re all trying to make important decisions over in this room around X, Y and Z, and they’re not even sharing that. Hey, we’re struggling with this too, and we’re trying to make decisions around our roadmap, and we promise we’ll tell you as soon as we have it, but we haven’t figured it out either. If we could just be that transparent about things, I think employees would be much more like, okay, they’re still figuring out. Okay, nobody’s figured it out. Yeah, nobody’s

Rebecca Warren 55:24
trusting that the right trust exactly, trusting that the organization has their best interest in mind. Yeah, that’s

Christopher McCormick 55:30
right. That’s right.

Rebecca Warren 55:35
Andy, what are your thoughts?

Andy Spence 55:37
I completely agree. I think it’s communicating and getting them involved, sharing examples, all those kinds of ideas are worth pursuing.

Rebecca Warren 55:50
All right. So I love this conversation. I think it’s very needed. I think agentic AI is a disruptor, right? It’s coming in. It’s forcing us to do things differently. When I think about it, when we think about five years ago, right, pre-pandemic, and the things we were doing, the ways we were working, were very different from what we’re doing now, right? When I think about when the pandemic first hit, and the company I was working for was thinking about doing a team roll out, and they had, like, an 18 month plan, and then pandemic hit, and they rolled it out in four weeks. And we were like, This is the coolest thing ever, right? So we learned that we could do things faster. We think about the remote. I’m sitting in Arizona, and my organization is in California, and we have customers all around the world, right? And the people we’re talking to are all around the world. Five years ago that wasn’t a thing, right? We were on strange conference calls where you couldn’t see anybody, and you were kind of this weird voice coming out of the Polycom, right? So like, when we think about how we were able to shift. It was forced. I think that’s where we’re at right now. It’s a disruptor. We’re forced to think differently, and we have to help folks get on. We have to help connect the dots for organizations and employees to take that fear out, to drive that trust, that transparency, that connection, that ability to say, we are all knowledge workers, right? Maybe we say, Hey, we got satisfaction out of checking the boxes because nobody gave us an option to do something different. So how do we allow people to do something different? Okay, I’m getting off the soapbox. I could, I could continue. I’m not going to, because we have two minutes left, and I want to make sure that I get your final thoughts. So I close with this question each month, what’s one piece of advice you would give to today’s audience? And I would ask, maybe, let me change that a bit, what’s one piece of actionable advice? What’s not just something that you can say that’s a cool sound bite, and believe me, I’ve written down some great ones. What’s some actionable advice that somebody can take away from this conversation and start this afternoon, tomorrow, next week? Andy, let’s go to you.

Andy Spence 58:11
So as a futurist, my advice would be for your industry, work out three or four potential scenarios in where your industry might be going in five to 10 years, and then work out the impact of that on your organization, on HR and probably most importantly for you, love it, I would say, Look at what you’re afraid of, what you’re not doing because you’re afraid of it, and start taking tiny steps to embrace it.

Christopher McCormick 58:33
And that may be because if it’s AI, it may be like, I don’t. Can’t make the presentation. I went to school to make presentations, or I’m a marketing genius. And you’re like, okay, just give it a try. Dip your toe in, give it a whirl. Throw your hat over the fence, and then guess what, if you want that hat back, you’re gonna have to get over the fence to go get it, and you’ll figure it out. Be willing to take the risk to do something that you’re scared of and see what comes of it.

Rebecca Warren 59:11
Throw your hat over the fence. All right, yeah, and I, and I totally agree that’s, that’s where I would land right, try it, play with it. Give yourself a chance to sink into what’s making you uncomfortable. Ask yourself the question, why does this make me uncomfortable? What am I scared of? And then move past that to say, Okay, I’m gonna try this. I’m gonna do something different. I’m gonna spend time on research. I’m gonna unpack all of that, you know, around AI or agentic or my job. And so what could I learn that could make me better, right? So I would say that playing, that learning, that questioning, I think, continues to help drive our brain here. So this has been awesome. Appreciate you both again. We could have talked for hours. I appreciate this. Conversation and the sound bites. There’ll be a summary coming out on LinkedIn shortly. Find us on LinkedIn. We would love to connect, and with that, we’re going to say goodbye to August’s talent table. Peace out.

Andy Spence 1:00:17
Thank you. Thank you.