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AURORA, Colo. — “As you know, it’s the law now that all keynotes have to be about AI,” Eric Mosley, CEO and founder of Workhuman, joked in his opening address on Tuesday. The quip set the tone for the event, where even non-AI sessions touched on the technology’s promise to shape the future of the workplace.
Following Mosley’s address, organizational psychologist Adam Grant delivered his own keynote and sat for an interview afterward, which also veered into the topic of AI. Grant said in some ways the AI transformation is unfolding in the opposite way of early digital transformation. At that time, a number of organizations put themselves out of business by failing to adapt to the internet, despite the roadmap being fairly straightforward; in contrast, companies are now falling over themselves to adapt to AI, but the roadmap is anything but clear.
“As HR leaders, I think the best thing you can do is you can make a range of tools available to people and then encourage them to learn, experiment with them and share the results,” Grant suggested.
On Wednesday, Workhuman Chief Human Experience Officer KeyAnna Schmiedl made a guest appearance during a live taping of the HR Besties podcast, which focused on maintaining the human element during the age of AI transformation.
Echoing Grant on the importance of experimentation, Schmiedl shared a story of a particular successful AI integration that arose out of a company hackathon. The idea came from the call center, where employees noted the high stress of their roles due to managing customer dissatisfaction all day. Having to put people on hold to access their information tended to ramp up existing frustration even more.
The engineers and designers took the problem and developed an AI tool that creates a summary as soon as the customer’s phone number is recognized, providing customer information, history and potential order numbers.
“To me, that whole solution coming from them meant that they could do the thing that they do best, which is being that empathetic human on the phone, as opposed to them being reduced to the robot,” Schmiedl said.
An original AI developer weighs in
Shortly after that session on Wednesday, Noelle Russell provided a notable takeaway on AI integration in the workplace.
Russell, who worked on the original Amazon team that developed Alexa and founded the AI Leadership Institute, is an AI optimist. It provides the tools to “bring back the backlog,” she said, or focus on the things that have never been addressed because they were difficult or expensive, or because there weren’t enough resources.