Anthony Onesto explains how AI will reshape enterprise work tools through chat interfaces and automated workflows on the front end, plus smarter analytics on the back. A study found 92% of product managers believe AI is transformative.
92% (per Air Focus, as stated by the speaker).
He says he was the 61st customer of Workday.
The landscape of work technology, or work tech as I like to call it, spans so many different tools that we use on a daily basis. And AI is going to have a huge impact on these technologies. Everyone, it's Anthony Honesto and this is my burn the box drop for this week. We are talking about the impact of AI on work tech. So what is work tech? It's the stuff you're using every day, folks. It is the HR tech, Workday, adp, Lattice, it's the recruiting tech, it's Ashby, isims and all these different applicant tracking systems. It's Jira, it's metrics, it's Zoom, it's Slack, it's email, it's all these technologies. And this, these, all these technologies are the underpinnings or the operations of every organization. Think about if you don't have email tomorrow, what are you going to do if you don't have slack tomorrow, I'll celebrate. But again, really critical work tech piece of software. I've been doing a lot of advisement in this space. I advise a lot of HR and recruiting and what we'll call work tech companies. And a lot of what I do is not HR, but I bring 20 plus years of instituting every platform. By the way, 61st customer of Workday. When they came out, I saw the opportunity of moving HR technology into the cloud because my IT team at the time was like, we ain't hosting that, we're not going to be responsible for that. So I had to go and find a cloud solution called Workday. And I think they're still implementing it, by the way. And that was about 15 years ago. But anyway, I digress. So when you think about the work tech, you know, Ben Waber, who runs a company called Humanize, talks about these digital breadcrumbs. Now that we're all remote, we're leaving these little breadcrumbs of our digital presence in each of these tools, whether it's a Slack, so we send another Slack to someone or in a channel, we're creating metadata in that channel or in that software. And the beauty of this is we can. Now from a work tech perspective, the impact of AI is going to be incredible because we have all this information. So there's two types of impact here that AI is going to have. On one side, it's going to help facilitate better organizations, better hr. It's going to feel almost like electricity and plumbing in the sense that you're going to log into your AI, your HR tools and, and the user interface is going to Be absolutely different. It could be a chat experience where you say, hey, I want to take a PTO next Thursday. Boom. Throws it into your HR system. So AI is going to have a huge impact on the front end or the front of stage of these platforms. But on the back of stage or the back end of these platforms, it's going to also have a huge effect because we're now looking at the digital presence of the user. And so when, when we think of product features, we're still going to need that human interaction. We're going to need to reach out to our customers, but we're going to see where the user experience drops off or where people are challenged just by the motions and the digital breadcrumbs they leave in the system. And so traditionally it's been hard to grab a lot of those because it's a lot of metadata that's hard to analyze and you would have to hire staff. But now with AI and the tools that are coming out, I imagine that you're able to look at these things and say, okay, this user does this. After that, you know, maybe we should upsell our comp module if we're a lattice platform or, you know, they now have an HR platform. So it's an opportunity to do a couple of things. One is have a better insight of the user experience for your product team. And that's what I love. It's part of what I do on as an advisor is I help a product, I help with workflows. They are asking me like, does this work? Is this button here in the right place? Because I've been in HR systems, I've been in recruiting systems, I've been in work tech systems. The other side of it is also product marketing. So the idea of product marketing is to be able to market your product to users to help them expand or create usage or drive more usage. Because there is a common denominator here. And the more someone uses your system, more likely they are to renew. Very simple. It's not linear, but it's, it's correlated though, making sure that you're putting prompts and doing product marketing for folks that are already in your platform to say, hey, I see that you're doing these things. Why don't you try our comp module? Or I see that you're doing, you know, one on ones. Have you ran a performance review? The ability to get more use cases and more capabilities and features being used in your system is going to be influenced by AI. It's almost going to be you're still going to need the humans to think about the messaging and be editors for these things. But the amount of data that your systems are putting in place, I think AI is going to have a huge impact in terms of how you think about these things. So let's look at numbers around the uses of AI. There was actually a study by Air Focus that highlighted that 92% of product managers see AI as a transformative force in their work. The ability to leverage the wealth of data that these in these systems that's hidden as these digital breadcrumbs are going to be really critical for product product managers. It's going to be a co pilot to help product managers think about new features, new releases and how they do those things. AI is going to streamline report generation, performance track personalization and product marketing. The ability to look at the data per user and be able to deliver customized user specific messaging is going to be really key in these platforms. Predictive analytics, what's the next step? Where is this going? We see traditionally that are in this module, then go to this module. You know this module would be the next one. So for the company that doesn't really use that module or hasn't bought that module yet, opportunity to upsell or cross sell them really really important and just, really just risk management and quality assurance too. Be able AI's ability to pinpoint potential risks and quality issues can surface some of these things up in your features or your QA and your engineering groups. In essence I think the AI is absolutely a tool and a companion that's going to be more and more on the side of product and product marketing managers, especially in the work tech space. It really will empower them to harness all this data to make more informed decisions to streamline their software. Product line management, predict software reliability, which is really important. Foster innovation and enhance the marketing or the product marketing strategy. Integrating AI work tech is just not this evolution. It's a revolution folks. And it's here and it's going to be more and more in our day to day lives. That's my quick drop. We will see you next time. Remember, don't think inside the box, don't think outside the box. Burn the box. See you next time.
