Anthony Onesto argues that AI-powered chatbots will transform people analytics by letting users ask direct questions (e.g., “What is our current headcount?”) and receive concise answers instead of being forced to interpret poor dashboards. He highlights friction caused by disparate HR systems and bad visualizations, suggests chat-based interfaces democratize access to HR data (with proper permissions), and cites vendor/implementation examples (Suzy working with Orgnostic; ADP mentioned) plus a Gartner prediction about enterprise spending on chatbots.
Chapters
So are you wondering about the impact of AI on people analytics? Here's my prediction for you. Hey, everyone, it's Anthony Ernesto, and this is my burn the box drop for this week. I am talking about the rise of AI chatbots and people analytics. Former colleague of mine used to respond in frustration whenever he asked a question and didn't get the direct answer. He would say something like, I asked you what time it was and you told me where the watch was made, which is essentially saying, give me the time. Instead of you just telling me what time it was, you gave me the history of where the watch was made. So you did not answer my question quickly. And I feel like that is a great example of analytics, particularly in people analytics. And I'll explain why, but this resonates with a lot of us. So a lot of us that deal with people analytics, if we can get to our analytics. By the way, there are so many different systems and so many roadblocks, so many HR systems just make it so terribly difficult to grab information, to share information. It is just an absolute frustration. And when is friction and frustration. I always say there's business opportunity here, but this concept of if I asked you what time it was that I wanted, the time, not where the watch was made, is something we see in people Analytics. We get these wonderful dashboards sometimes of all these analytics, and half the time we're looking for a specific answer to a question. And so when I started seeing the proliferation of AI and particularly the chat experience with, with OpenAI and ChatGPT, I immediately saw the future of people analytics. Because in my opinion, even though there's a chart, even though there's a graph, and there's so much really, really bad dashboards that are out there where you look at it and people are like, yep, check, we got a dashboard. What information are you looking at? How are you deciphering this information? In fact, there's a great training organization that I like, Story iq, that teaches you how to create better stories and graphs from data. But I'll still say that at the end of the day, whatever you're looking for is a question. So, for instance, what is our headcount? This is where I asked you what time it was, and you're telling me where the watch was made. What is our current headcount? That is a number, and that should be easily answered through a chatbot experience. Now, if you want to add charts on, show the growth of your headcount, that's fine, but that's not the question I'm asking. I can ask the question what has been the growth of my head count over the last couple of months? Again, getting to the answer. And if you want a graph because you want to put it into a presentation, totally fine. But I really do believe the future of all analytics. But I think specifically people analytics is this ability to ask a question and get an answer. And I think we just have to stop loving our graphs. I see the hesitation already with when I talk about this. You're probably a little bit anxious as you're listening to this, but I have to be honest, I think this is where it's going. Do I think that this completely removes graphs and charts from our world? Absolutely not. I. There is power in an image to tell a story. We have to do that really well. Go to the training at Story iq, you'll find how to do that really, really well. Then I think about and I actually there was a dinner, I was at Transform HR in Vegas and I was having dinner with a bunch of folks and I was talking about this. I said that the point of graphs and the point of reports are to answer questions. And so why not? Why isn't this a chat experience? Why can I see it? What is my year to year growth of my headcount? I keep saying headcount because honestly I learned, you know, in the spirit of Adam Grant and think again. I'm thinking again about headcount because I talked to Ben over at Rev Leo Labs about HR metrics and of course the move to really push on SEC reporting of HR metrics. He convinced me headcount is actually a pretty good indicator of what's happening in a company now. You know, in the spirit of transparency, it's not purely headcount, it's the flow of headcount. If you're adding, you know, if a public company is adding more into their engineering department, they're investing in R and D. What is the result of that? If they're putting into sales and marketing, they're, they're, they're gunning for more sales and marketing opportunities. And so you can really get a sense of where the future or strategic heading is through headcount. So I want to retract my headcount is not an HR metric. I'm putting it back in. But it's the nuances of the headcount that I think are, are the real HR metric. And Gardner, there's a report by 2025 say that 50% of enterprises will spend more on BO chatbot creation than traditional mobile application or mobile app development. It's a really interesting trend that we're seeing here. And to me, the chat experience is intuitive. I think if you go across the globe, the chat experience or the chat user experience is something familiar with most people. And so instead of serving a graph that I look at, what's the data, what exactly am I looking at? And given the fact that most graphs are really terrible storytellers, again, unless you go to that training at StoryIQ, I think the opportunity here is incredible. And I started talking about this six to nine months ago and I'm starting to see it come to fruition. We here at Suzy are working with a company called called Orgnostic. We're getting all our feeds from all our different HR systems into one place and then what we're going to do and it sounds scary, but we're going to democratize it. So I can give our CEO Matt Brinton a chat link and say ask it whatever you want. Do you want to know what our headcount movement is? What is our headcount? Year over year growth, what's our attrition, what's our performance metrics? All this sort of st here. I am no longer the wall to this information and that's scary to some folks but to me I think it opens up HR and people analytics to the entire organization. I think it really opens up conversations. Who doesn't want to get a phone call from their business leader saying hey, why do we have such high attrition or why do we have such low attrition? Those conversations, now we're starting to get a seat at the table. We're getting that strategic conversation versus like hey, can you pull a report? And I will say outside of larger companies, most HR department departments or people departments do not have analysts or budgets for analysts. So now what has happened? If you look at chat GPT and their data analytics capabilities, if you, you know, look at all these different systems like agnostic, I know adp, I've been just appointed to their client advisory board for their data solutions products. They're coming out with something. So I think what happens here is now we get an analyst on our computers, we get these chatbots where we can really have a conversation and get to interesting questions, get to interesting correlations and that's without having to hire an analyst on the HR team. So I think what happens here is we get access to data, we democratize that data to a certain degree with the correct profile and permissions. As we democratize data, we'll start having really more in depth strategic people conversations with our business units. And I also feel like we're going to get that analyst that we've always wanted, our people, analytics analysts, through these AI experiences. That's my quick drop for this week. We'll see you next time.
