Anthony Onesto argues for contextual AI that reads your company's HR data to give managers real-time nudges about feedback, flag bias in pay decisions, and help leaders understand human-capital ROI. Unlike generic chat AI, it knows your people, your compensation, your engagement scores.
As we're all navigating this new landscape of work tech, I've been thinking a lot about a game changing idea on how we can revolutionize and understand our workforce. It's called contextual AI. Everyone, this is my burn the box drop for this week. This week I'm talking about the power of contextual AI and human resources. A couple of weeks ago, Apple announced Apple Intelligence. It's their play on AI, Apple Intelligence. But the really interesting thing other than, hey, everyone's thinking they're late to the game. Apple is always late to the game. They look at what's happening and then think of things in a very thoughtful way. What I'm thinking about here is how AI or Apple Intelligence is going to be powerful here. It's because you have all your information. If there is an AI that can sit on top of your phone, which has apps for everything that you do, that intelligence is going to be really powerful. Here's the struggle I have with current AI tools. So you go into ChatGPT and you're looking for information. It has zero context unless you train it, unless you connect a GPT. But that is what I would call proactive contextual AI. So I am having to go into those systems and add documents and add certain pieces of information, some customization, things like that. Imagine now you have an AI that sits over and we use Lattice here at Suzy. Imagine that you have it that sits over your Lattice, which has your performance, your engagement data, your employee data. Even if you don't subscribe to their, their HR tool that just recently launched. But even if you have their HR tool, compensation is in there. All of these things are now in there. Think about the wealth of data that is in this system that you now overlay AI on top of. And that AI is constantly looking within that data and providing information. It could provide information to your HR and your admins, your leaders. Think about the nudges, the ability to look at something perfect. Example here in Lattice, you can do reviews, you can do feedback. Let's say for a period of time you haven't provided feedback to one of your employees or you haven't done a one on one. That's another feature within the Lattice program. You have the opportunity now with AI to go out within Slack and say, hey manager, you haven't had a one on one with your employee. Or even better, you can start correlating some of these things on the back end. Now of course there's going to be folks that say, hey, how about privacy? Of course the idea Here is to provide the nudges to the folks that really need them at a high level, providing your HR team and your leaders some correlations between these different data points. But it's that contextual AI that's going to be really, really powerful. Right now if I go to Claude, it doesn't know about Anthony Onesto, it doesn't know about my performance, it doesn't know about my one on ones. I would even think there's an opportunity to go into Slack and emails again in a very privacy focused way to be able to provide that nudge to the employee. Let's say if there's something that the employee, the tone to which they're communicating or other things. This idea of AI sitting on top of all of your data within your company is going to be really powerful. That's contextual AI. It knows exactly all these data points and that's going to be the future of these systems. You're going to see a lot of these systems make missteps. There's one in particular that recently made a huge, huge misstep. Listen, I give them, I forgive them, but they made a huge misstep around how they're looking at AI now. They have some really thoughtful ways that they're thinking about AI in the contextual AI type of way. But for me, the future of this, if I can get one system, one HR system that has my recruiting, my, my HR employee data, my performance data, my engagement data, all the sort of people analytics overlay an AI system on top of that. So that way it's constantly looking for correlations. Imagine you can actually show the the equation. And Dr. Taras talks about human capital RHC ROI which is how do we measure the impact of human capital programs on our business? Imagine the system can now tell you that or you can even scenario plan. Hey, I want to launch learning and development, I want to launch leadership programming. It's going to take six sessions, an hour each session. My average manager salary is X. But here is what I think the impact is going to be and then it calculates the human capital ROI for you. It's just this concept of AI sitting outside of your systems versus within your systems is going to be the next phase of the incredible opportunity. So if you're in a work tech company and you're not thinking about this, it's time to think about contextual AI. It's going to enable HR to make data driven decisions. I would say arguably the number one skill now and into the future for all HR professionals. It's going to personalize the employee experience. Imagine being able to put your employees through personalized, customized employee experiences, proactively address issues. You're going through a comp cycle and a manager's giving a promotion, and the system recognizes that all the promotions are one specific gender or one specific ethnicity. And it pops up almost like a copilot and say, hold on. If you do this, what we're seeing here is that we're seeing a trend. This idea of a copilot for leaders. It's not going to flag hr. Maybe it will, but it's going to flag the individual in real time. Think about recruiting. Being able to be on recruiting conversations and having the questions and things pop up for you. Optimizing resource allocation. One of the biggest things in the world right now, particularly in tech, is doing more with less. How do I optimize my resources to make sure that I'm getting the best return on investment? And of course, engagement. The idea, the core of what we're trying to do is create engagement so that way employees are more productive. That's my quick drop. It's all about contextual AI and the future of work tech. We'll see you next time.
