EP 127: How AI is Impacting All Aspects of HR

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How is AI going to change the human resources department? You know, we kind of talk about this on the show at different times, and you know what even HR's role should be? Should human resources be the ones pushing for AI to be used? Should they be pushing against it? And how might artificial intelligence even change the role of HR in an organization? So if you care about that, if you want to know about that, today's show is for you. So welcome to to Everyday AI. My name is Jordan Wilson and I am the host. This is your daily live stream podcast and free daily newsletter helping everyday people like you and me not just understand AI, but how we can keep up with it. Right? So it's not just about using all of these tools and all of these techniques, but it's asking the big questions like, hey, how might AI affect my. My department? How might HR change in the future? So very excited for our guests today, but before we get into that, let's first do what we always do and talk about the AI news. All right, so there is a rising threat that terrorists may use AI in new ways, according to intelligence leaders at a recent, recent conference. So the chiefs of the FBI and Britain's MI5 expressed concerns about the threat of AI and terrorist activities at a Five Eyes alliance technology conference in California. So obviously, AI technology adds a new level of threat to terrorist activities as seen in the use of AI to amplify propaganda and find vulnerabilities in infrastructure security. Right, so just kind of new development. And, you know, people aren't really talking about this a lot, but I think that's an important one. So make sure to check out more in the newsletter about that as well. All right, next piece of AI news. So, popular talk show host Jon Stewart is apparently out of his show because of comments and disagreements about AI. So this was on the Apple streaming platform and Apple has reportedly canceled the show, which is called the Problem with Jon Stewart. It's kind of funny that that's the name of the show and now there's a problem with Jon Stewart. But this announcement came as apparently there were creative disagreements over a planned episode about AI and China. And Apple reportedly had concerns about the show's guests and discussions on artificial intelligence in China, ultimately resulting in the show being halted. All right, last but not least in AI News. So IBM is reportedly stepping up its chip game. Right. We always talk about chips here on the show because it's actually very important. You know, we have these, these GPU chips that are not just powering generative AI, but kind of responsible for the US economy in ways. But IBM has developed a brain inspired computer chip called North Pole that integrates processing and memory leading to faster and more efficient AI. So not a brain chip, but a brain inspired computer chip. So the chip has 256 computing cores with their own memory and is wired in a network similar to the human brain. So I don't speak chips, I don't know if 256 computing cores, I mean that sounds like a lot. But regardless, you know, Nvidia has been really running away in, in this GPU chip race, so to speak. So IBM is, is reportedly, you know, making some splashes today with this new announcement. And again, even, even, you know, a lot of the generative AI that we're using right now is because of advancements in these chips. So you got to keep an eye, you got to keep an eye on it. But you didn't come here to talk about chips with me. Maybe you did. But thank you for everyone joining us live. But we are here to talk about how AI is impacting all aspects of hr. So please help me, help me welcome to the show, our guest today. So please give a warm everyday AI welcome to Thiabo Gronaire. He is the senior manager of HR Mergers and Acquisitions at Baxter International. So Thiabo, thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you Jordan for having me. First of all, thank you for everybody and yeah, looking forward to discuss AI with you today, Jordan.

Absolutely. Hey, and as a reminder, thank you, thank you everyone for joining us. You know, this is a live show. People, people sometimes don't realize that, but you know, Brian saying good morning from Minneapolis, Mike saying good morning community. Thank you everyone for, for joining. And Ben, Big Blue. All right, cool. So what questions do you have about AI and HR if you're joining us live, make sure to get those questions in. If you're listening on the podcast, always make sure to check the show notes, come back and you know, ask questions later. But Thibaut, just, just real quick tell everyone a little bit about what you do. Kind of working in HR in M A at Baxter.

Yeah, sure. So I'm typical, I'm French, I'm based in Chicago, So I'm an HR professional, of course, working in HR for more than 10 years. I had multiple roles in HR, from HR business partner to project manager in different countries, France, Belgium and Now the US and I'm currently specialized in M and A transaction, working, acquisition, spin off, divestiture. And I'm basically the HR guy working on those deals from an HR standpoint, making sure that we analyze the soft part of the team leadership culture and HR aspect. And of course, as you can imagine, I'm a deep believer into AI, into intelligence, artificial. And that's why I'm here today with you, Jordan, to deep dive into it and how we can understand the impact that AI will have in HR and in companies in general.

Well, let's just start there.

Let's start at the end maybe. So if we're talking big picture tmo, what is the impact that you think AI will, will have on hr? Like are we talking maybe smaller HR departments in the future? Are we talking maybe HR departments that stay the same and just handle more because of generative AI? I guess, you know, in what direction, you know, might this take in the grand landscape of things in hr?

Yeah, that's a great question. So it will impact the complete HR landscape and not only did not only hr but the complete company here. Because of course, if we focus within the HR department, there is several use cases that will be used. And the main thing here it's about the productivity. We will have AI as a kind of supercharged assistant helping us to be better professional on our daily task. So AI can help us on brainstorming aspect in hr, can help us on transactional activity. So it will really be helping the full HR department on plenty of tasks and we can deep dive on those use cases. Right Jordan? But it's not really a quick change. It will be a complete transformation of the HR landscape in the upcoming months and years thanks to AI.

Yeah, yeah, and let's do that. Let's talk about some of these business use cases because again, I've never worked in hr. But my thought anyways, thievo of HR is it's a group of people who are just drowning in documents, right? Just reading through all these policies, creating new policies, processes, job descriptions. But it seems like for the most part that so much of the role of people who work in HR is, is reading documents and writing and updating documents. Is that, you know, for those of us that aren't really familiar with how HR departments work, is that, you know, is that a big bulk of what people in HR are doing?

I mean, it depends. Of course in HR you have a lot of function, but with just read documents, as you can imagine in HR there is a lot with HR we are change Experts, project managers. So it's not just about document part, the compliance part. And usually people do think about HR about compliance part, reading document, hire fire. But no, it's not only that, it's about managing projects, changing behavior, being change agent within the company. So it's not just about that. But let me provide you some quick example that I like that I'm actually am I using or some HR colleagues of mine in my network are using with AI. So one very concrete example we can use is for example the employee survey. So of course as HRS we do need to take a pulse of how employee are feeling, how employee are engaged within the company. That's something you want to know as hr and we do have tools for that, providing us feedback, asking questions to employee. But sometimes you need to go in depth, you know, you need to go deeper into data and you end up not necessarily using the tool you have, but simply downloading the next. Right. And you want to really deep dive into this data that could take you hours if you want to specific package, specific groups or specific function. So what you could do here you could Simply use generative AI. You could use ChatGPT to simply do the analysis for you. I know a funny story that one of my friend was telling me. Yeah but on ChatGPT you can't use, you can't just copy past the Excel in there. Actually you can, you can just copy past the table and that's it. And it will do the analysis for you. Of course you should not take it as final. You should make it yours, you should fine tune it. Right. But you know, it's very interesting especially for large organization. For employee engagement survey we have feedback from us, from Japan, from Germany, from Mexico, in different language. Will you do the translation? I don't think you want to do that. Right. So you're using the tool, it will provide you the full analysis in few minutes instead of few hours. And the most interesting part, you can also ask for solution. Okay, so basically it's doing, it's doing the analysis for you. That's great. But then say hey, can you draft me an action plan on that? And you will get an action plan right after it. So that's, you even get the solution. Once again you should make it yours. Right? Right. You should adjust it after your organization but you'll get you gaining a huge amount of time and that will spike the productivity of HR people within companies. So that's one example employee survey. Another example I like this one is a bit more transactional. It's About HR policies, you name it. And let's imagine that. Let's take an example. We are back in 2020, right? Covid is there and you, Jordan, as HR, you need to implement a teleworking policy in your company. You can once again use ChatGPT, not to do all the work for you, but to lay out the foundation, right, to start the policy. Because you have it here on your mind, but you need to put it on the paper. You can use ChatGPT, doing a prompt, starting the document like this and gaining time once again. So that's how my friend or my HR colleagues are using ChatGPT, usually in HR. So that's two examples using ChatGPT. And I have a third one which is not used to, not linked to ChatGPT. It's about predictive analytics and I really love this one. So basically, you know, in HR we are using a lot of data to for example, understand the resignation rates because you want to know if your employees are being retained with your company or why they are leaving. And you may have a 10% resignation rate in your company per year, but when you have a lot of data and you put those data into a data lake, right, you can use predictive analytics, predictive data. And those data will provide you future trends. And they might tell you, hey, Jordan, Today you have 10% resignation rate, but in the coming months it will spike, it will go up to 18. What do you do? And in this case you can anticipate, right? Because if you know the information in advance, you can prepare accordingly. You can choose to hire temps or you can choose maybe to focus on the existing employee and do some retention action to make sure they are staying in place. So at least maybe your turnover will not go to 18 as mentioned by AI, but may stay to 10. So you will be able to impact in a way the future thanks to those predictive analytics. And once again, in hr, for me the best example is the resignation rates because you know that some people will leave because they want to take a job elsewhere. What can you do? And at least you know it in advance thanks to AI. So yeah, that's few examples here, Jordan.

I could provide Thibaut so many, so many good examples there. So I, I do want to follow up on a couple of them. But as a reminder, if you're just joining us now in the middle we have Thibaut Gronaire, who, who's the senior manager of HR Mergers and Acquisition at Baxter International. So speaking of that, like this is something, I guess I've I've never thought of Thibaut, but it makes perfect sense, the international aspect of, you know, HR departments.

Right.

So if you are working at a multinational corporation, you know, the HR documentation, I, I guess has to be perfect. Right. Because you know, even kind of nuances in language at the HR level for an international company can cause some problems. Right. So, so maybe let's, let's dive a little bit more into that. Tiabo, like even just for the translations and setting those policies in different countries, I guess, number one, how is that done now? And number two, by kind of handing that over to Generative AI. Is that something that it's kind of like, oh, yep, we can move forward with that or are there kind of like risks that you kind of have to keep in mind?

Yeah, that's a great question. So basically, first of all, disclaimer. You need to make sure that before using AI, you need to make sure that it's okay internally from a legal standpoint, from a privacy standpoint, to use AI in terms of firewalls and data privacy standpoint. So that's the first thing to check, especially in big corporation, as you can imagine. But when this is okay. So of course this is depending per country, those documents may be different. In Germany, especially in Western Europe, the law are very strict when it comes to HR policies. You don't want to do any mistake when it comes to European laws. So first of all, HR is very deeply involved in those documents. So that's why you can't fully delegate it to AI. But you should still use AI to start the work with you to draft the foundation of this work. So you may have some document you want to change or to improve. I would use AI. I would use Generative AI to do that. But once again, make sure that there is some firewalls when you use AI from a privacy standpoint to not have any data leaks. And you should not use it as a final document. Of course, Please see AI as your assistant working on you drafting something and then on this draft, on this improved draft, you can build upon it and then you can add your HR knowledge, your labor knowledge based on your country. And that's how you use AI really as a supercharged assistant to help you to draft better documents if you need to do that. But it's not providing, providing you any final product. Right. So that's really the main difference for me, draft versus final product. Yeah, of course. So you should not delegate it completely.

Right, of course, of course. Yeah, that makes perfect sense. And it's, it is Interesting to hear, you know, from, from the viewpoint of someone that is working at an international company, you know, how transformative generative AI can be to help solve some of those solutions. So I actually have a great, great question here from Ben. So, Ben, thank you for joining us and for this question. We actually have multiple questions from Ben. So Ben M here. So, so Ben, asking, how do you see AI helping provide more personal experience for employee experience? Because I, I feel that's always something that HR departments, you know, they have to keep kind of upping their game. You know, what's the employee experience, what's the onboarding experience? So you know, how can generative AI help in, in that aspect?

Yeah, that's, that's, thanks for the question, Ben. So there is many points where HR can help here, but let me provide you a very common one. So as a newcomer in the company, you may need to look for a lot of information, right? You ask either asking your manager or asking your HR department about something, and in some cases they know where the information is, sometimes not. So this is what HR can help you into the personal experience. Let's imagine that tomorrow you implement a chatbot within your company. This chatbot could help you to find information very quickly in a very pleasant way. Right? You are looking for that document. It will completely provide you this document, first of all. So you will get it. And then based on what you're asking, the same chatbot can also propose you some other suggestion so they can kind of anticipate what you will need in the future. You made a, you might need this, you might need this training, right? So thanks to AI in the company, it can both answer your need and also suggest you what you, what you could do. Right? Hey, you just come here. It's been three months in the company. Welcome. Maybe it would be great for you to do this leadership training online, right? AI can suggest it to you. So that's why we should use AI typically for chatbots in this case, and also generative AI in general, ChatGPT. But this is how it can help you. And for me, it's more about the anticipation and the suggestion to new employees about, hey, you just came here, we would suggest you to do that, to do this and say, oh, that's a great idea and you do it. So that's how I would see it from a personalized experience way. It's more about the suggestion that you should receive from AI tools.

I love that. Yeah, it's, it's, that is something that I don't, I don't know, Thibaut, if people, you know, truly tap into generative AI for those types of use cases where, you know, I think people are always like, oh, we can create more documents, we can create more content, which is great, but the ability to personalize things at scale, I believe is such an untapped use case for generative AI. Another, another great question. We have so many great questions here, Thievo. So let's get to another one. So Ben, asking, you know, are you using AI to flag and help leaders address corporate culture or fit issues? So maybe let's just talk about this big picture in general. So you know, cause I know all HR departments are a little different, but is this a use case for HR departments to flag and help leaders address corporate culture or fit issues?

Yeah, completely. Completely. And I can provide you two complete examples you could use on the corporate world. And actually I love those examples. So you may have a fit issue in a department or a performance issue in the department. Right. Or maybe you believe that this department could do better in terms of productivity. What you could do here is that you could try to equip the employee of this specific department with AI and train them with AI and then you could see basically the results, the outcome in terms of productivity. And I would say most likely that productivity may spike because of AI. So that could be a way of using AI and seeing result of AI within your company. Another example that I like, especially in the corporate world today, is that you may want, for example, Jordan to hire someone from outside. Right? You may want to hire someone and you know, today's market, it could be very difficult to find the right talent. You may be looking for someone for five months, six months, and not being able to find the right fit. So what do you do? There is another way to tackle this problem. You can basically invest on the existing employees, equipping them with AI once again, training them with AI, and then potentially their productivity could spike. Their productivity could increase so much that you may not need these external talents by investing in AI internally. So you're actually reversing the problem. So that's a way how you could use AI to address an issue you might have in the corporate world. So yeah, that's typically what I would do. And in terms of culture as well, it's very important to as HR to act as a change agent. Right. Because you're saying, Ben, corporate culture issue, you want to make sure that as HR AI is embraced internally. Right. And to embrace AI internally, you have to provide some success stories. You have to inspire people. So to address those issues, you have to come up with some success story. It could be within hr, it could be marketing, but you have to provide the stories right? Then when you do that, people will grasp why AI is important. They will grasp why there is another value of using AI. So that's why it's extremely important to provide visibility on those success stories. And that's so step by step, you will be able to address some potential future issues you have internally.

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I love it. I love it. Hey, so many good questions. We got more. Here we go. So Josh, love the questions today, y'.

All.

So Josh is asking how will HR systems like SAP, SuccessFactors, Microsoft via. Sorry if I'm, if I'm not getting these names right in workday impact the way AI shows up for corporations. You know, Josh, I love this question because you know, Tiabo, like there's all of these AI systems built for specific departments, right? Like gen AI systems for marketing, Gen AI systems for legal. So are we going to see kind of these systems or these large kind of HR applications adaptations, AI in a big way. And if so, how will it, how will it impact AI HR operations?

Yeah, thanks a lot for, for this question and let me provide you a very concrete one on the workday aspect. Just a bit earlier, I talked about predictive analytics, right? Today, if you want to do predictive analytics, you have to do, you have to build an enterprise data hub, which is very expensive, right? You have to have a Data Lake where you load all your internal data, financial data, HR data regulation and so on. So that could be very expensive. But thanks to AI and if you take the example of workday, you might not have to invest in a complete enterprise at a hub workday, we provide you, thanks to AI, some predictive analytics off the shelf, right? So that's how it can be impacted if you use workday today. And of course if you purchase the right module for it, it can simply provide you creative analytics like this, which was not possible in workday a few years before. So that's how AI will directly impact the landscape. All of those modules, all of this company, they will have to have this AI module workday is doing it today. And you know, what they are doing in terms of creative analytics is impressive. Once again, same example I provide you. But they will be able to tell you, hey, your resignation rate will go up in the coming months, prepare accordingly. And before only the large corporation with huge investment could have that, you know, no, it will be. As long as we have workday, you will have, you will be able to get this information. So it's basically opening the scope for everybody in order to use AI. And of course you talk about Microsoft and I'm sure you know it better than me, Jordan, but there is copilot, right? Coming, coming soon. So when it comes to the PowerPoint, right, that will, that will be a huge impact, especially in the corporate world when you have to do your presentation instead of taking maybe one hour or 30 minutes, might be five or seven. Right. So that's. So HR will be impacted as well. But yeah, on the, on the world example, it will basically AI will be available for everybody in the upcoming months where in the past it was more an elite thing, you know. So that's how HR system will be impacted, especially for corporation.

Thiabo, I'm glad you brought up Microsoft Copilot. You know, I've been dorking out and counting down the days. You know, I think November 1st is when it's going to start to be rolling out. I've been telling people like, hey, if, like if y' all thought chat GPT like you know, made a difference or if you're impressed by its capabilities, it's like, all right, well wait until Microsoft co pilot comes out. You know, people like, if we can. I want to kind of get back to the beginning and kind of go full circle here. So, you know, talking about in the beginning how AI can, can change hi departments. But, but maybe let's just go over maybe One or two more practical business use cases of AI just kind of like not like easy wins so to speak. But if like if we have other HR leaders tuning into this and they're like okay, this seems like something we can get going in our organization, what are those easier, you know, use cases where we're going to get a big return on our investment, a big time savings. What would those, you know, maybe you know, one or two things be?

Yeah, that's a great one. And on easy use cases, and that's not necessarily hr. It's spanning the full company here. It's really about the daily operation, right? You know, as HR but also as marketing employee, as IT finance, you have to do a lot of communication, right? You have to send emails, you have to send communication, you have to do announcement rights and those make them, those take time to write. Very simple use cases is to train people on how to do a prompt, right? In chatgpt. But when I say a prompt, how to do it correctly because it's easy to do to ask something to ChatGPT, right? But you want to use the best of it to take the best of it, right? So how to do a prompt, so what could be a good investment, right? It could be about having a training on prompt engineering, how to use ChatGPT correctly, how to train it and then you will simply do a lot of communication things with your email, your announcement and that will be, that's a very easy use case, right? Very easy. But you will get a lot of time because you as you can imagine, announcement communication plantation, you're spending a lot of time with that if you know how to use ChatGPT. But of course you need to be trained, you need to do how to do a prompt properly, right? Using the right guidance to the tool. So that would be a very easy use case, right? And how to do how to do something.

Love it. Hey, I, I, I feel I have to do this. Like we have a free class that does this anyways, you know our prime prompt polish. So you know, if you are listening, if, if you heard what Tiabo said it's like yeah, I need to learn how to prop properly just you know, email, email us. Check your show notes, leave a comment here. Ppp. I'll send you the information. So Tiabo, so we've, we, we've talked about a lot here. We've talked about, you know, how AI can, can help with your day to day business operations, how you can use kind of predictive data to tackle resignation rates in international hr, right? So we covered so much. But maybe, you know, as we wrap up here, maybe what is that one piece or that one takeaway message that you hope that people can, can take away from our time here to really help them use and, and leverage AR to maybe change or, you know, improve their, their HR operations?

Yeah, yeah, that's a, that's a great one. And what I would like to say here is for hr, but also for leaders, you might, you, we might have today in the chat, please be the ambassador of AI in your company. And of course I'm a deep believer that HR is at the center of the audio organization. So that's why they are well placed to do that. But it's not only about using AI for the sake of using AI. It's about changing the behavior, right? And when you start providing success story on AI, when you say, when you showcase the added value of it, people will adopt it, right? And when you adopt AI on a daily basis, you start to grasp more of it and then you start to change your behavior. So I would, I would really encourage my HR colleagues to be the change agent of AI providing success story, but also providing, let's say, training, training tools to the, to the, to the employee. For example, it could be about AI information, AI literacy, encouraging people to read, to inform themselves, to go on your podcast, for example. Jordan, you know, to learn more about AI, that's one thing. The other thing is to use AI once again on a daily basis. Try to use on everything you do. Sometimes it may be applicable, sometimes not, but you use it on daily basis. Then you will grasp more about AI and the thing, more how you can use it. And once again, it's not about using AI necessarily, it's about the behavior. Then you will get an agile organization knowing how to use AI and you might take the lead on the competitors, right? Because I'm hearing some company that will implement a ChatGPT version internally in one year from now. Okay, great. But one year is a lot, right? If you have another company implementing today, do you imagine the difference between this company doing it today and the other one in one year? One year is 12 months is a lot. You want to do it today, you want to change the behavior today. So please, as HR as leader, try to do the best as you can in AI to implement it, whether it's ChatGPT or predictive analytics. Because you want your employee to be savvy in AI. You want your organization to be agile and efficient. So that's, that's my key takeaway. And as hr, we need to be the change agent. We are the center of the of the company, right? So we have to spread the world. We have to provide success story. We have to inspire people on AI. And of course it's not only hr, it's together with the management, the CEO with it. But at least we should influence it. HR should influence it definitively.

Write that one down. My gosh, I love it. Saying you gotta get after it today. If you wait a year, that's too long, right? I love this thievo. Thank you so much for joining us and going over how AI is impacting all aspects of hr. We super appreciate your time.

Thank you everyone. Thank you. Jordan. Thanks for having me.

All right. Hey, as a reminder everyone that there was a lot there. We always go over a lot. We bring on great guests like TBO so we can go deep into all of these aspects affecting our daily lives. So make sure if you didn't catch it all, don't worry. Go to your everyday AI dot com. Sign up for the free daily newsletter. We always recap our like what we talk about the topic for the day as well as everything else that's on going, going on in the world of artificial intelligence that affects you. So thank you for joining us and we hope to see you back for another Everyday AI. Thanks y'.

All.

And that's a wrap for today's edition of Everyday AI. Thanks for joining us. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and leave us a rating. It helps keep us going for a little more AI magic. Visit your everydayai.com and sign up to our daily newsletter so you don't get left behind. Go break some barriers and we'll see you next time.