Transcript
Mark:
Welcome to People Tech, the podcast of the HCM Technology Report. I’m Mark Feffer.
Today, I am speaking with isolved’s Chief Product Officer Pragya Malhotra. She’s been busy this year as isolved has moved to integrate more AI technology into its product set. We’re going to talk about balancing AI’s hype and AI’s reality, the impact on HR, and just how long can this AI buzz keep going. That and more on this edition of People Tech.
Hey Pragya, welcome back. I wanted to talk today about AI. The growth in the last less than a year has been fast and furious, and it feels like every software provider out there is offering some kind of tool based on ChatGPT. And I’m wondering how many of these products do you think are real? Can solutions really be developed this quickly?
Pragya Malhotra:
Yeah, ChatGPT since its launch, it’s taken the world by storm, if you will. And rightfully so. I think the advances in computer processing power data storage over the last few years have been very sophisticated and that has allowed AI algorithms to be developed and flourished with some of the new organizations such as the one behind ChatGPT. But what’s more interesting is that now with the launch of large language models and ChatGPT particularly, or Microsoft Bot or Google, everyone is doing something. But with that, what’s interesting is that AI has become available to everyone. The use of AI, building those models, leveraging insights out of models, it has now become available to everyone. Now, of course, we need to continually train these models, get the feedback, and with that feedback, the models will continue to improve.
But what’s really interesting is that this technology that was available not to everyone, maybe in the small businesses, medium sized businesses, this technology was not widely available. Now it is widely available, which I think is what’s super differentiated now in the last few months. But also what’s interesting while all of that is going on, that if the models or if these tools do not produce something that’s like it’s factually incorrect or anything, and if it comes out, the companies talk plummets right after, right? For instance, when Google demonstrated Bard, one of the responses which contained a factual error and the stock plummeted right after. But in my view, the fact that it’s now become so pervasive, that’s the power and all of us, all technology vendors are gearing up to harness that power.
Mark:
You see a lot of stories today about how AI is going to do this and it’s going to do that. And how much of a difference do you think AI has made already to HR departments?
Pragya Malhotra:
Yeah, it’s very interesting. In fact, right before our time today I was speaking with isolved’s CHRO to just get her perspective, regardless of the technology of from the ACM product, how does she use AI technologies in her ecosystem? And there are a lot of users. So for instance, earlier, benefits professionals, payroll professionals, they were generating a lot of comms, performance management comms, compensation comms. They now have an assistant sitting right next to them who can help them write comms. They can tweak them. So it has become super efficient for them to run their departments.
But now as we start thinking about what is available at the level of the products themselves, so many vendors including isolved, we are looking at how can we speed up job description authoring process. It took an average recruiter an hour to write a good job description that would attract candidates. Now, they can write that in a third of the time using some of these large language models. And that’s just an example and that’s just scratching the surface.
Also, if you think about it, 42% of what an HR admin spends their day-to-day on is just answering those repetitive questions and having a bot answer those questions is super powerful. So for instance, they can answer questions from the employee handbook as an example, or what are my tuition reimbursement benefits? What is the travel policy? These questions are repetitive, but employees do ask them over and over again. So if you train a bot with a company’s employee handbook, you now have a bot that can sit there, look at the handbook and respond to the employees or to the end users without having manual intervention.
So those things are very powerful, but of course the potential is huge. Every organization is doing a lot when it comes to figuring out what this means for us. So for instance, in the LMS space, there is so much content. There is so much learning modules that are available out there. Some of them are long, lengthy documents. With the help of new enhancements in LMS product, for instance, you could build a presentation, take a document, generate a presentation out of this, understand the language of the model, quickly generate a presentation. Now, that presentation is five to 10 slides. It’s easy to understand a quick bite for someone to understand and absorb. So that’s the power, right? We have so much content that has become available and now with immense processing power AI, that content becomes so much easier to understand, do something with it, and that power is just being unleashed. So we have a long road ahead of us.
Mark:
Let me ask you two follow-ups. The first one being, do you think those dynamics are going to change and put another way, is AI going to branch out into more facets of HR and give practitioners new tools in different areas?
Pragya Malhotra:
Yeah, that’s a great question. I think it can. Today, we… Payroll as an example. Payroll is we aspire for zero error payroll. We aspire for not having payroll Thursday stress as an example. So to be able to take an AI-based model and generate payroll with zero error, precision, effectiveness, efficiency is something that I don’t believe has been scratched just yet. But that power, unleashing that power would be incredible. So there will be new ways of doing work in HR and allowing HR to do that honestly frees their time so they can focus on creating that better employee experience. They can focus on creating that personalized learning, development, coaching, mentoring that HR is excellent at. So there are a lot of opportunities which are becoming available and companies and organization, all us as vendors, we are exploring what that means.
Mark:
Now, you were talking before about how these AI tools can change the practitioner’s work so that they spend less time on repetitive tasks and more time on higher value tasks. And you hear that a lot from people involved in the business and software, and I always wonder, do things really work out that way or are practitioners going to be laid off as opposed to redeployed? How do you think companies are going to adjust their workforce plans as the tools change?
Pragya Malhotra:
Right, and I’m going to maybe offer my perspective, which is an extension of your question. Not only HR practitioners, but practitioners in general. I think how I view this as back in the day we, in the US for instance, we had manufacturing jobs. Then manufacturing jobs relocated a little bit. We moved on to the next category of job and the next category, and the next category. So in my view, it is the evolution of technology. So the jobs are going to be more different, doesn’t mean that there’ll be the same jobs. The jobs will be more different, more strategic.
So as an example, and I’ll answer this from more of a tech perspective than pure HR, which we’ll get to in a minute. Now, with tools, with large language models, for instance, Microsoft has developed assistance. So with GitHub coding assistance that you can give it some regular code and it’ll generate your program for you as an example. So that makes your job efficient, doesn’t take away. A developer is still a software developer is still developing the code, but their job has become so much more efficient. So when they were doing say X amount of work in a day, now they can potentially do, I don’t know, x1.5 Times or two times and it’s still evolving. But that’s just an example.
So similarly in other jobs, there will be different types of jobs. Not all the jobs will become more efficient. As I was saying earlier, from an HR perspective, it took an HR recruiter an hour to write a job description. Now they can do that in 20 minutes. So they’re still doing that job, they’re doing that job much more efficiently so they can go focus. So you can expand the HR department and have them focus on other things, which they were so strapped earlier that they could not focus on.
Mark:
I’m curious, how do HR professionals feel about all this? Are they thinking first and foremost about the technology? Here’s a new thing, or are they first looking at what they can do with it?
Pragya Malhotra:
Yeah, absolutely. I think it’s the latter. In my view, they do not think of technology just as technology and not employing technology just because it is available, they want to solve a business problem. So understanding what that business problem is is super important. And also providing them the tools so they look to these products or these services or these tools as helping me in my job rather than taking over my job or being in the way type of thing. So as I said, mentioned earlier, in my view, the job doesn’t go away, but it becomes augmented. So that’s how in my view, HR professionals will be looking at it.
But that being said though, HR professionals always have data privacy issues, security issues, compliance issues top of mind. So whatever technology is developed has to be developed from the mindset of is this secure? Does this help with compliance? Because that’s still bread and butter, so we cannot take that away and all the tools need to have at the forefront, how do we make it secure? How do we make data privacy issues top of mind? The development needs to take that into account.
Mark:
Do you think HR practitioners especially, but do you think HR is being included in the corporate discussions about these different solutions and which ones should be implemented and just the general planning and strategies?
Pragya Malhotra:
I very much think they are. In many organizations, compliance and employees, what employees can access what employees cannot access. Even though it starts at the CIO level, the implementation of that at the employee level, HR comes along and helps in that implementation. So it is important for the CIO or the CISO to work hand in hand with HR and make sure that they are in one, in agreement with the policies. Two, they are being supporters of that policy, and then that there is a partnership going on there.
Mark:
We were talking before about how quickly this has all gathered steam, and so I think it’s fair to say that AI development’s in the middle of a hot streak. Do you think this pace is going to continue or do you think it’s going to slow down to a more traditional pace of development and new products and all that?
Pragya Malhotra:
In my view, the pace is going to continue. How they say that the amount of, I don’t have the exact statistics, but the amount of data that was created in the first 20 years of the internet now gets created in these many months or days or weeks. So I think it’s the same pace of innovation that now that it has kicked off, it is, I know for me personally and my teams, we spend so much time thinking about how can we make the job of our HR practitioners, professionals, how can we augment their day-to-day using these tools? And that’s just going to continue. So I do not think it’s going to lose its steam. It is going to become more secure. It is going to become more resilient. But with time, now that this technology has been unleashed, it’ll have far-reaching outcomes.
I mentioned earlier, but I think what’s so powerful is that as an SMB or a medium-sized businesses, for instance, they did not have ability to maybe hire a data scientist or a data engineer, some of those very sophisticated jobs. But now with the advent of these tools available at a small fee, they have these tools and technologies available to them, which is powerful.
Mark:
So where do you think it’s all going? When you think about the world 10 or 15 years from now, where do you think AI is going to be or how tight is it going to be integrated or how do you see it all playing out?
Pragya Malhotra:
I wish I had a magic eight-ball right here with me. I think in the last few years, a lot has changed after COVID especially, and I know that’s probably what everyone talks about, but employee experience, and a lot about employee experience, and sometimes we’re like, is that even overrated? Us talking about employee experience? But since after coming out or off from COVID, the nature of jobs in so many industries has changed. We still have hourly workers, we still have white collar, blue collar, gray collar workers, but we now live in this hybrid world and hyper awareness with all these apps and having to get these apps to work together. So the dynamics have shifted a lot. So in the next 5, 10, 15 years, the interconnectivity between all these technologies is going to be paramount. And maybe even for the last five years, we’ve said interconnectivity is paramount, but still because employees were in the office, they were always working or employees were, there was the work life fluidity. The balance has morphed so much that now all the apps, everything needs to be connected.
So I was just having a conversation earlier today, Twitter for many people used to be, for some people, I’d say it used to be like their business account and Instagram was their personal account. Now Instagram has Threads or Facebook has Threads, that’s your personal account. That fluidity is shifting. Your identity is your identity, your social identity, your personal identity. All of that is coming together. So that interactivity, that integration between the apps, between your work life, personal life, that boundary has become so blurry now that the apps, the AI has to morph and keep pace with that. That’s where, in my view, that integration between our world will continue to become more and more blurry and apps or applications will work around it.
Mark:
Pragya, thank you so much. It’s always great to talk to you and thank you.
Pragya Malhotra:
Awesome. Thank you very much for having me. Always exciting to speak with you as well.
Mark:
My guest today has been Pragya Malhotra, the Chief Product Officer at isolved. And this has been People Tech, the podcast of the HCM Technology Report. We’re a publication of Recruiting Daily. We’re also a part of Evergreen Podcasts. To see all of their programs, visit www.evergreenpodcast.com. And to keep up with HR technology, visit the HCM Technology report every day. We’re the most trusted source of news in the HR tech industry. Find us at www.hcmtechnologyreport.com. I’m Mark Feffer.
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