Leveraging Generative AI to Build Skills-First Organization
In this episode, I'm joined by Loic Michele, HR Tech & Future of Work Entrepreneur and CEO and Co-founder at 365Talents.
In our conversation Loic underscores the advantages of a skills-first approach enhanced by AI in organizations, including boosted employee retention and engagement. He elaborates on AI's potential in crafting job descriptions and skills benchmarking, yet highlights the necessity of human validation.
He insists on integrating AI into current HR systems instead of incorporating new platforms. Essentially, he advocates for a skills-first transformation in HR and talent management through the strategic use of AI.
Episode Highlights
How to build a skills-based organization
Understanding the benefits of a skills-first approach
How to demonstrate ROI and how it impact on talent and hiring strategy
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Loic 0:00
AI is the biggest strength. So in our case, it's going to transform the user experience itself in the in the platform, because it's going to be more conversational, probably more 100%, personalised, even in the UX, even in the UI, everything will be generated for the user at some point. So I think in that case, it's gonna be really transformed
Chris Rainey 0:28
Hi, everyone, welcome back to the HR leaders podcast, and today's episode, I'm joined by Luke Michelle, who was an HR tech and future work entrepreneur, and CEO and co founder at free sick five talents, during episode like shares how to build a skills based organisation that benefits the challenges, how to demonstrate the ROI and the impact that it has on your talent and hiring strategy. He also shares the practical ways that free six fire talents are leveraging generative AI to build a skills first organisation. As always, before we jump into the video, make sure you hit the subscribe button, turn on notification bell and follow us on your favourite podcast platform. With that being said, let's jump in. Welcome to the show. How are you?
Loic 1:08
I'm good. How are you?
Chris Rainey 1:09
I'm all right. I think last time we saw each other, we had an amazing steak in London. That was a while ago.
Loic 1:17
Yeah. was a year ago a year ago.
Chris Rainey 1:20
Yeah. How's life treating you?
Loic 1:23
Could I keep having such good steaks? Actually, not that much. Not that much. I'm trying to reduce my meat consumption. So next time, we will need to find somewhere somewhere else do it.
Chris Rainey 1:35
No worries. Before we jump in, tell everyone a little bit more about you personally, and your journey with free six, five talents.
Loic 1:43
So I'm an entrepreneur with an engineering background. I like to say I am a curious engineer, I used to be a curious management consultant as well. And that turned me into an entrepreneur, because I am curious. And I like to take new ideas and transform that to new projects and, and new companies now. So at some point, after a few years in consulting, I wanted to answer these massive questions about how to leverage skills information in large organisation because I knew that it was not a successful attempt so far to that was a few years ago, and I decided to launch and I remember I woke up one day and I said, Okay, I want to create Google of skills for any enterprise. Like being able to mine this data, leverage this data, make it accessible for everyone, the employees, the managers, the HR leaders, I partner with my two co founders, Paul and material, and we created 365 talents, we invested in for two years 2015 to 2017 on product AI, and we tested the go to market as well, because you never know exactly what would be the best environment for your product and your vision and your your company. And then we decided to go and focus 100% on enterprise customers. So really big organisations with big challenges around skills and competencies. And we knew we we would be able at that time to help them on their transformation. And not only HR but business transformation as well. So that's what we started to do with different companies in different industry. We started in France, with companies like sock James citizen, or caddy agricole in the bank industry. And then we started work with new companies like EY, like bearing point in the consulting industry as well. And then we help large energy companies work on their big transformation, business transformation, and to leverage their workforce to do so. And we are on this way of helping our customers transform their business through their skills and workforce management. And here
Chris Rainey 3:53
we are. Here we are. So we were talking about this before we hit record, you know, I'm interested to hear your thoughts. What does it mean to be a skills based organisation
Loic 4:04
and when we prepare it I remember I told you, it means so many things, it's gonna be hard to to summarise most of the HR leaders it means going from the role organisation or role HR policy to skill, HR policy or skills based organisation means that you need to understand that any talent any individual in your organisation is not only connected to one wall in one particular position at a time. It's a combination of many, many aspects and many, many assets. And that's even the root of our name at 365 talents. It's every day, every day you you gain new potential new skills, new competencies, and everyone is a talent by by nature. So the combination of these two means that you need to be able to as an HR leader to understand that the skills might be coming from everywhere from everyone in every situation in real time, every day. And once you say that, pretty much you need to reinvent all your talent management or your talent experience, because it's not having people interviews every or performance interviews every year or twice a year, that will make the difference because you will be missing part of the story. It's transforming the wall idea in having more contact points more insights on the business on the people impact. And that's beneficial for you as a company, but that's beneficial for the employees as well. So you have to help them understand that they have this potential of being successful in their role now and tomorrow based on the skills they have. And you have to help them identify the skills as well. It's definitely transforming talent management and tenant experience by putting skills at the centre. And we know on the market, everyone is talking about that. Yeah. But I think it's important to start from the root, which are the skills themselves. And so that's why skills, technology skills, intelligence is at the, at the core of everything, when you want to do this transformation, you cannot say, Okay, I want to be escaped first organisation, my main focus is internal mobility. And I want to reduce our internal mobility platform. That's one angle, but it's more global. So you have to start from the start from the beginning. At some point, yeah, you met
Chris Rainey 6:33
you already. You did a great job. Firstly, you said it can mean many things. But you did a fantastic job of capturing that. You mentioned a few of the benefits, but what are the main benefits for the organisation? And and what are the main benefits for the employees? Yeah, I
Loic 6:49
thought it's five talents. We we created the toolbox with ROI elements, this main elements are structured around five pillars. But first is engagement and the impact of a positive retention on employees that's really beneficial for for the company, why does it increase tension because you have this new way of capturing this information and understanding the people assets, that they have multi layers and multi facets. And so they are not only one person in one role, they are more than that, in continuity of that you provide some opportunities in a more dynamic way. So you can go into the talent marketplace approach. And it's really beneficial for the employee to have such access to information and opportunities. Yeah. And if you don't do that,
Chris Rainey 7:40
they leave Yeah. Well, I think I'm a perfect example, I was in the same company for 10 years. And I was asking my business saying, hey, I want to new opportunity. I want to I've been in sales now for 10 years, kind of I want to work in operations or marketing or finance. And they told me, No, you're in sales, that's what you do. There's no opportunities. And I left,
Loic 8:00
the opening, opening the opening the eyes, opening the opportunities, employees need more visibility on what they need, on what they know, and what they can do. And as a person, and so they need to be able to see what they can have access to in the company. So visibility on the opportunities, but at the same time, the company needs to have more visibility on this person, because this person has more to offer than the company knows at some point. Yeah, so this visibility aspect is key and retention. And then internal mobility is really is really beneficial. And you know that when you hire someone internally, it costs less than externally. And there are many, many, many figures to demonstrate that and studies. But that's that's true, actually. Then you can push that to the real, like talent marketplace approach with lots of agility and gigs and project staffing. And when you staff internally, you don't staff externally with consultants external resources that usually cost more than the internal resource that is under staffed for any reasons, so you optimise your efficiency, your productivity at that point. So that's the third. The fourth one is on HR efficiency. And I think we're going to talk about generative AI and some that's some at some point in the conversation, but HR productivity and how to prepare people reviews, how to prepare a strategic workforce planning tasks and meeting assignments in the company to prepare and to work on internal recruitment or any recruitment. If you have access to these skills, first data. If you have a better understanding of the potential profiles for any of you opportunities, then you will be way more prepared in a way shorter period of time. So in the end, you will be more efficient and FIPS one is the connection with learning and development, we say that when you have a more precise knowledge of the skills and competencies of everyone and the skills and competency that you're learning catalogue and learning, content can contribute to develop, then you can have a way better matching in between the needs and the, like the needs and the supply of learning opportunities and upscaling opportunities. So you can even optimise your learning budget, the consumption of your content of learning, so you make some significant savings as well in in your tools and content. Learning budget. Love that. So that's global. And for the employees, it's employability its visibility in the company and in what I can achieve in the company. So that's, that's definitely really beneficial as well. Yeah,
Chris Rainey 10:59
amazing. And we'll find that link and leave it in the chat in the description for everyone, as well. That was a lot to take in. And I'm sure people listening are thinking, Well, where do I even start? What advice would you give to people about where to lay start on this journey, what we
Loic 11:16
usually do with our partners is starting with a real focus on skills intelligence. And we like to say, Okay, come here, bring you the data you have or the source of information you think you have, or you think you don't have, because usually, it's 5050, some of the partners say, Okay, this is our existing frameworks. And this is how it works in our company, tell us how to put that into a dynamic mode in real time mode, a decentralised approach, because at risk five talents, you have the technology to do that. So we can do this. But the other 50 came and say, We don't have nothing, we don't have any skills framework, we don't have skills data, we have to focus on roles. And we've always been this way, please help us build from scratch, something that will help us in the end, other skills intelligence engine at the centre of what we want to change. So whether they have something or nothing, we ask them to come with what they have or don't have. And that's where you combine the existing and what the technology can bring. So coming with our own skills, intelligence and frameworks with external data with benchmark data that we have, and technology that is able to infer skills to gather skills together to cluster and structure this information in different languages. So now we cover 46 different languages. So you can create something really strong. One element is saying, you cannot rely on an external ontology that should be global and apply to you with no adapting face. And that's why we start with this common work on this. And it's not a massive project for that. Just to give an example, when I talk to, to a partner, I say come and we'll spend one hour talking about that. And I'll demonstrate how it works in our platform technology. And in one hour, if the partner has work on okay, what are the data I have? What do I want to see at the end? In one hour of conversation, we already know where to where to start? And what are the first steps in this case approach. And then you can work on and that's key, the ROI. And we were talking about the benefits, but the ROI on OK, why would I do this, and what will be the benefits in the end. So we go through these five pillars, and we check with the customer and with the partner and we validate the figures. And in the end, they have the ROI that they can attain with such transformation. And finally, we talk about project and implementation and the resources they need to allocate the resources we allocate when we do that, and then you are good to go.
Chris Rainey 14:01
And then they can take that back to the business to demonstrate a case there. Here's the ROI. Here's the plan. Because I'm sure that's half of the battle, right?
Loic 14:10
That's more than half of the HR leaders that we work with, yeah, they always need this ROI proofs and they are not always good at managing these figures and, and financial elements. So we are here. We're here to help. And our skills first transformation is definitely transforming the company and really beneficial. So it's concrete. It's very concrete.
Chris Rainey 14:35
Amazing. You mentioned earlier I want to pivot quickly. You mentioned generative AI How do you see generative AI transforming organisations and the HR function?
Loic 14:46
We are a tech company at risk five talents with AI they data DNA from the beginning Paul is so my co founder and CTO used to work in labs and so he is really wrong and committed research and the proof of what this new technology can bring in an non technology subject, which is a child. So we've been the first in, in the space to work on generative AI without knowing it at the beginning, probably, but once it, you know, it went public, we said, okay, naturally we, we can embrace this transformation. And we will need to leverage that. And why naturally because we believe you need to have this decentralised approach on skills intelligence, and on talent experience, to leverage generative AI. If you have something too structured, to process oriented, to organise to framework, you know, organised, then generative AI will come with ideas and with concepts and, and even skills if you're talking about skills, benchmarks, and you won't know you won't be able to integrate that into your system, because it's going to be too transformative to new, while with the decentralised and dynamic approach that we have. At the same time, you can say, okay, in all systems, we consider that every people can bring some new skills, new data in the system, every system HR business can be leveraged to extract skills as well. And information. Generative is like a new brain contributing to this data collection, it's like if you had a new employee named Chris, and Chris is, is a really big brain and can generate ideas, either to describe a job description, or to describe a learning opportunity, or to attach the trending skills to a new role. And Chris is capable of doing that, because he knows he might not be 100% Sure, and exact Yeah, but he will, it will suggest he will give ideas. So then you just leverage what Chris can say, and you integrate into your model, like any other insights that you're gonna have. So I think this is the big part of this transformation. But considering that you can have this new brain in your team is really cool if you can integrate this new brain into your systems. So that's what we do. And three examples of what the Dow is concretely, the technology now, we integrate that into our platform, is helping writing job and projects and mission description. It's easy, but it's still assisting the HR or the managers in their daily job. So that's an easy one, then it can go it can do as well, so benchmark and extract skills information on what's going on on the market. But to do that, you need not only to ask, it's not Chad GPT. Here, it's prompting with context and explaining what you want to get in outputs. And then so the system is able to say, Okay, for this role, the top skills are this one and the one that are trending, because I can search on the web right now. And I see that there are some trending skills and decreasing skills. So these are increasing, these are decreasing. So this is really cool for HR leaders, but for our employees as well for their employability, so they have access to these insights. So this is one new area. The third one is what we call Smart Insights or analytic insights. And then actually, the system's able to understand any page, any report any dashboard and to translate that into Word. So you can push some summaries of analytics pages to the HR to the managers, so that they have a wrap up of situation on their skills context, on their team's strengths and weaknesses. So that's text generation here. And finally, we integrate that as well in the Strategic Workforce Planning features of our platform. As a leader, you can build some scenarios and say, okay, the scenario is that I am an energy company, I need to have a 50% of my business with renewable, what does that impact does it impact my roles, then it translate the impact of this 50% Target into your role saying, Okay, this energy, electric electrician engineer, need to do this and this more than it used to use to do and then you have all the skills that you need to get for the one you have to let them decide for this transformation. So it's really useful for strategy planning as well. And that's integrated into our system now. So it's really it's really quick, really exciting period. It's definitely transformative.
Chris Rainey 19:51
How do you ensuring that the source of truth is correct, because obviously it's going out into the market, bringing back information There may be inherent bias in men, you know, not everything on the internet is right. So how do you manage that element of it in our
Loic 20:07
skills management system, if I just talk about skills, we re integrate all the insights coming from employees, from HR managers for systems from a new tool that is used from new documents, but coming from the external world as well. So we pre, like we combine everything, and we tag them automatically with the sources. So you can say, okay, in my, in my automotive company, I see some signals coming from the ground, and from the field, new skills in this region, new skills in this team. And I see some signals coming from the external world. So benchmark of competitors, or Gen AI suggestions, and you have a dashboard where you see all that live. And then you have tags, and you can say, Okay, I see the sources, and I see why this information is suggested to me or where it's coming from. And then we work and we have some treatment to work with our partners and our customers to say, Okay, what to do with these insights? Do you want them to be directly available in your systems? Or should they stay on the site for a period of time like quarantine. So you can work on that and manage the insights. So on skills, you can, if you identify the source, and don't say that any source is the good one, but a mix of these sources will be the good, the good ones, then you can filter everything. And then on the other side, text generation, role, description, generation and so on. We like to say it's an assistant assisting tool, so it's helping you and if, if you think that the suggestion is good, you can go with it. But usually you modify these by 3050 60%, so that it's relevant and so that you have your, you know, your human touch on top of the suggestions. So the human touch is key, and you cannot remove that and you should not so it's essential to be able to have the systems to have this step by step validation.
Chris Rainey 22:21
As you said, it's your sister nature copilot. Right? So like, yeah, I recently wrote a job spec using chat, GBT, you know, it, it's a, I think it may probably did 60 70% of the work for me. Yeah, then I had to go in and add, you know, our unique touches of our brand, you know, the role explicit, more specifics around the role, making sure it's inclusive, language, etc. but it saved me hours of work.
Loic 22:48
I remember, I don't know who was this writer, but he was saying that is I think it's 100% more complicated to write than to rewrite. So it's way harder to have the first, the first. That's the hardest part. So if someone or some technology is helping you having this first part, then you can focus all your energy and knowledge and competencies on the second part, and the final outcome will be the sum of these two parts. So yeah, we'd be fine.
Chris Rainey 23:26
What are the potential risks that you see? Because there are many organisations that are very anti AI? They're terrified? No one. No one in our company can use AI.
Loic 23:40
Oh, we yeah, we heard that in some really regulated industries, but was mostly okay. You cannot use Chad GPT like government did, Italy did that for a few months. Because like the tip of the iceberg was charged deputy. So it's not about all the all the generative AI capabilities, but Chad deputies, the public vailable version of that. And basically, you talk with a chatbot, which is hosted in the US somewhere and dealing with your data the wait wants. So that's a little bit scary. You don't know. Woo, woo will be asking questions, what questions will be asked what information will be prompted into these systems and they will be dealt with, obviously is in in another state policy. This is different from what you can do. Now if you integrate naturally such capabilities into you frameworks and new systems. That's what we do at risk five tournaments. We have a really high level of collaboration with Microsoft. So yes, it's this American player, but we have our own infrastructure. And we leverage their technical capability in our own infrastructure. It means that the data the customers data are all dealt into are secure, like Oh, yeah, oh, it's really protected. So it doesn't go somewhere anywhere. And we have no policies around. It's there by our existing policy on our existing infrastructure. So. So that's for the technical aspect of things. And then for sure, you can be not afraid. But that's a big, such a big transformation, even our AI team, in the company saying this generative AI transformation is really big, it's the biggest one we have ever seen means that you have to take that seriously and cautiously. But still, as we say, it makes us progress if we can manage it at the global level. So it's a global thing.
Chris Rainey 25:44
You mentioned some of the great ways you're leveraging it right now. But where do you see AI? is impacting the future?
Loic 25:51
Well, I personally think it changes the experience we can have with systems. So in our case, it's going to transform the user experience itself in the in the platform, because it's going to be more conversational, probably more 100%, personalised, even in the UX, even in the UI, everything will be generated for the user at some point. So I think in that case, it's going to be really transformed. And I'm not talking about the other jobs and roles and even industries that are really challenged by this generative AI but my sister is working in the in the movie industry. And I know there are so many stuff that can be done with generative AI today, like so. Everything is every industry is a little bit challenged differently. But in our case, software for employees in the workplace, I think the employee experience the user experience will be even more transformed in the future. Yeah.
Chris Rainey 26:49
Do you think that becoming a skills first organisation will help companies adopt AI quicker?
Loic 26:54
Yeah, it will, because it helps you adopt any new significant trend quicker, because you're connected to the ground and to the market and to what's going on right now. It's not I have a framework and every five years, I'm going to transform the framework. Adoption is accelerated for sure. Yeah. And AI is the biggest, is the biggest trend now. So I think every every company is prepared, because they have been chasing data analyst and engineer and for for the five past years. And now it's even more important to have these guys and to understand how it works. It's and it's not easy. It's one. One key thing I'd like to share it's generative AI is visible through chat GPT, that seems really easy to manage and to handle. It's not easy at all to create models and to leverage these into a system into software into it requires lots of skills and competencies, and you cannot improvise on that. Otherwise, it will do notes. So I think it's something important even in HR leaders, mine, they need to understand that it's not because it's accessible to charge GPT that you can build from scratch anything, if you don't have the background, the expertise, the team, the like the years of experience in that field. So yeah, all the investment made in data in an AI in general over the five, seven years, is really relevant, because it's the only way to be able to end all this generative AI new stuff
Chris Rainey 28:32
responsibly.
Loic 28:34
Responsible. Exactly. Exactly.
Chris Rainey 28:37
You mentioned briefly, integration. And you said to me before, like integration should be sort of what the number one key word for HR leaders? What did you mean by that?
Loic 28:47
You know, we do provide a new and new solution in a complex ecosystem of our customers, they usually have dozens of different systems in their HR tech stack. But our mission is not to provide a new platform. It's to contribute to a new experience, the new talent experience. So when we think internally at risk five tenants about this mission, we said, Okay, what is the best way to provide a new experience without adding and piling new platforms? And the answer is integration, because you need to be perfectly integrated into what is existing into the customer's environment. If nothing is that much existing, then you just have a core HR and you have an LMS and you have an ATS, then it's all about data flows. It's an easy integration and it works well and you will provide the tenant experience the front end of the tenant experience the talent marketplace, and these capabilities on top. So this is cool. But if the company and the customers already have already has a really complex ecosystem with homemade piece of software, it's because they are really good. In tech oriented, and they want to build their own because they have some really complex business rules, then some of them just need to have access to the skills, intelligence and smart suggestions that you can provide on top of that directly into their system. So you need to be able to provide that not piling up a new front and a new platform in the employees. On the employees desktop, yeah, but, but integrating into what is existing already. And in the middle, you need to provide visual integrations. So if the company is using Microsoft Teams, 80% of the time and every employees using Microsoft Teams, you need to be able to integrate your experience and your skills management and your talent marketplace, and your talent experience directly into teams. And if it's not teams, but something else it needs to be done, I think that's the full scope that you need to be able to answer. And that's, that's something we are really proud at first, as far as I know, that's what we've built over the last 12 months 50 data flows integrations, API first approach for full integration into customers ecosystem, and visual integration, including in teams for like skills management and talent experience in the flow of work. So that's, that's it. And when you integrate new skills, in skills, intelligence and skills, technology and smart suggestions into your existing systems, that the the message for the employees is really interesting as well, we are just enriching what we have. And the experience in the end will be beneficial for everyone.
Chris Rainey 31:45
I love that I think the key thing you mentioned there is make sure it's embedded in the flow of work or the flow of work, right, rather than trying to pull them somewhere else. Which is where you have exactly if he's already in the flow of work with the work I'm doing, then you're gonna have much more success, of course, exactly. To be able to do
Loic 32:03
that. And all the collaborative tools, the workplace, digital workplace environments, like provided by Microsoft and their peers. I think that's the COVID and the pandemic's effect as well. But really, in 100% of the companies and large enterprises are leveraging a lot these new capabilities. So you need to be able to provide services into these systems.
Chris Rainey 32:27
Yeah, I agree. This and before I let you go, we covered so much. First and foremost, so incredible policy since we first met, it's been amazing to see the journey that you and your business have been on. So firstly, congrats on everything. It wasn't easy in the last couple of years, likewise. Now I appreciate before I let you go, where can people connect with you if they want to reach out to you personally? Where's the best place? And if they want to learn more about free six, five talents? Where should they be going?
Loic 32:56
Or is it safe silence.com. That's the like the single point of truth on what we what we do. Someone wants to contact me directly on LinkedIn or on my email, feel free to do so. Dot Michelle at 365 diamonds.com. And we have a really dynamic LinkedIn profile for 365 Diamonds sharing lots of product enhancement, innovation announcements as well. So follow us on LinkedIn, for sure.
Chris Rainey 33:22
Well, as always, everyone listening those links are all below. So wherever you're listening or watching right now, the links to the website to connect with like, I'll also put links to the resources that were mentioned throughout the episode. So make sure you click there. Apart from that, appreciate you come along and look forward to seeing where the journey takes us. Thank you
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