Why Accenture Is Investing $3 Billion In AI
In this episode, I'm joined by Yazad Dalal, Managing Director at Accenture. He also co-leads Accenture's AI in HR working group in Europe and is the regional lead for AWARE, Accenture's offering for measuring Diversity, Equity & Inclusion initiatives and performance.
Yazad believes the doom and gloom predictions about AI stealing jobs are overblown.
"Historically, innovations like the calculator and Microsoft Office did not lead to mass unemployment, but rather opened up new types of jobs.
For example, Accenture recently announced a $3 billion investment in AI and plans to increase its workforce from 40,000 to 80,000 employees. Rather than reducing headcount, Yazad says AI will make people more productive and allow them to command higher salaries. The key is for workers to embrace AI as a "copilot" to augment their abilities rather than compete against it.
He advises developing centres of excellence to establish policies and governance for using AI ethically. He believes AI will lead to a massive productivity lift as technologies like ChatGPT allow workers to quickly access information and generate ideas during meetings and customer calls.
To fully leverage AI, Yazad recommends focusing on strong communication skills and critical thinking, rather than purely technical skills. With AI able to crunch numbers, humanities backgrounds will become more valuable in business.
Rather than fearing replacement by robots, workers should see AI as an opportunity to expand their capabilities and "feel promoted" into more strategic roles. But companies need to be transparent about how employee data will be used and strike the right balance between productivity gains and privacy.
Episode Highlights
How AI and automation are reshaping careers and workplaces
What Accenture's $3 Billion Investment in A.I. means for its clients and the future of work?
The skills and capabilities people will need to adapt to workplaces that are increasingly influenced by generative AI
Learn the 2023 Global Hiring Trends
In an age of evolving worker expectations, unpredictable economic conditions, and questions around the ever-changing future of work, talent leaders must keep their sights on attracting and hiring the people who will build and shape the future of their organizations.
🎙️ Automatically generated Podcast Transcript
Yazad 0:00
I was in an interview like this and we were talking about Cobots and a co bot. Sounds like C3PO. Sounds like or 2d to someone who's there to serve you. Not terribly brilliant, but supports you. That's the wrong term for what we're gonna say. It really is copilot, someone who is almost your equal who's there to support you. So I think that's going to be exciting
Chris Rainey 0:27
five one Welcome back to the HR leaders podcast. On today's episode I'm joined by Yazad Dalal who's a managing director at Accenture. He also co-leads Accenture's AI in HR working group in Europe and is the regional lead for AWARE, Accenture's offering for measuring Diversity, Equity & Inclusion initiatives and performance. During the episode. Yazad, as shares how AI and automation are reshaping careers and workplaces. He talks about what essential is free billion investment in a means for our clients and the future of work. And also the skills and capabilities people will need to adapt to workplaces that are increasingly influenced by generative AI. As always, before we jump to the video, make sure you hit the subscribe button, turn on notification bell and follow on your favourite podcast platform. With that being said, let's jump in. Yes, sir. Welcome to the show. How are you?
Yazad 1:14
I'm very well Chris. Good to be here.
Chris Rainey 1:16
I know. Can you believe like we've done probably 20 different events together workshops, summits, everything all virtually all virtually the last three years. That's for years. And now we're here in person. It's great to be in person. Tell everyone a little bit more about you personally, and your journey to where we are now.
Yazad 1:33
I'm New Yorker, which I'm very proud of born and raised. But I've been living abroad for the past 10 years. I'm living in London with my wife and my two beautiful boys about five years coming up in October. But before this, we were actually in Singapore for six years. Wow. Which was an amazing experience. So to be an American family living in Asia for over half a decade and now doing the same thing is there as well. They're both American even though one is born in Singapore. Okay, so Okay, all right. Oh, one is born in New York was born Singapore. But they sound like you, Chris. There's a lot of money that day. So jobs at
Chris Rainey 2:06
what age were they when they came in? six and three? Okay. Okay. Yeah. So yes,
Yazad 2:11
they've got their cute little English little boy uniforms. And they played the rugby, cricket and football, not soccer. Oh,
Chris Rainey 2:16
well, they call it crisps or chips, or crisps, crisps and tomato.
Yazad 2:22
They're following all of those. We're very lucky to have had the experience that we've had. It's amazing for me, because what I'm very passionate about what I love is interacting with people from different cultures, experiencing different business cultures, travelling seeing the world, but also sharing ideas from different parts of the world. So that that pollinates Of course, that requires a lot of learning, which I'm constantly trying to do, and especially the last year, so I think it's been like a firehose of learning. Yeah, not just in HR, but in technology in general. So that's been very exciting. And I was at Oracle for a long time, which is how you and I met. I've been at Accenture for the last two years, but always focused on HR tech HR innovation. That's what I'm excited about. How do we help amazing companies find and keep amazing people. That's what I love to do.
Chris Rainey 3:09
So when you say Managing Director at Accenture, that's for the Oracle HCM
Yazad 3:14
we have a huge business just dedicated to Oracle, of course, and also other huge businesses dedicated to other major technology forms. And within that Oracle Business Group, I look after the HCM practice, the HR software practice for Europe, Middle East and Africa.
Chris Rainey 3:28
Definitely keeping you busy then very busy travelling much.
Yazad 3:31
A little bit more. I mean, there was a drought. Yes. I mean, yeah, for someone who has chosen his roles because of the travel involved. There was definitely
Chris Rainey 3:39
so you enjoyed that talk, because someone needs to speak to they're like, oh, somebody does, Oh, can't go and you actually get energy from that.
Yazad 3:45
I get all of my energy from being in front of people. Yeah. And from being away from my desk. So sitting in my living room for two years, was not the most fun experience for me
Chris Rainey 3:54
is that while he was always happy to speak at the events, Chris Sure. Yeah.
Yazad 3:59
Absolutely. I think that connection, I think a lot of us need that human connection. 100%.
Chris Rainey 4:02
I know, one of the things that we both have in common is our passion for technology, and AI, generative AI, it's kind of just taken over. You can't go online or go on LinkedIn without even seeing it now. So I'd love to hear from your perspective, especially as you're speaking, you're working it in internally, you're speaking to customers, how do you envision generative AI technologies, and you know, how it's going to revolutionise current job roles, what process it's repressed processes, etc.
Yazad 4:27
Well, I mean, I'll share a few thoughts with you. But I think the first one that I really want to get across there is so much Doom saying about history, you know, and it's been true since the Industrial Revolution, right you have the whole Luddite movement is about breaking down these evil weaving looms that are going to steal our jobs. And so it's been true for 200 years, and it's never actually been validated ever. There's momentary pain. Momentary pain is when we as humans as employees as workers, don't At least try to keep up with change, then yes, there's pain. And I want to be very empathetic to that. So I think it's valid to have some fear or hesitation around, Hey, I've done the same thing for 20 years, I've probably going to work for another 20 is what I've done now completely invalid. And what do I need to do to now keep up? So I get that fear. But in terms of wholescale, oh, we're going to lose 5 million 50 million jobs over the next 10 years. And some very prestigious firms and and thought leaders are saying things like that. I don't buy into it at all. I think we have so many examples of that not coming true. If you look at simple innovations, like the calculator, hit all the people who were slide rule, experts suddenly lose their jobs. If we look at something that had massive societal change, if you are a female in the Western world and working in the 40s 50s 60s, very, very likely you were in some sort of administrative role. PA or a secretary. And we don't necessarily think back to it too much. But even mid level managers, almost all men had a secretary, everybody had a secretary, did those women lose their jobs and now have to stay at home for the last 40 years? Because we've got Microsoft Office or calendaring tools? Or we all know how to type? Of course not, in fact, it had a massive lift in opening up a tremendous number of other job opportunities to women. Yeah, that's a massive net positive for society. And these days, it's only very senior people that tend to have full time dedicated personal assistants. Very often, they're shared, in my case, and I'm not saying I'm super senior at Accenture, I actually have a support from a team of people that are probably managing 20 3040 folks that are in my role, that that, to me is evidence that technology advantage does not spell doom for an entire occupational class, and actually can have societal lift.
Chris Rainey 7:06
Same with the internet itself, right? Of course, when the internet happened. Think about millions of jobs that have been created from the internet. But when it first came out, everyone was like, oh, no,
Yazad 7:16
I come from an Indian immigrant family in the US very stereotypical in the sense that my job options in my mind as a teenager where man, I got to be either a lawyer or an engineer and accountant, Doctor, Doctor, yeah, my sister went to pursue her PhD, my brother is a doctor. I studied English literature in Paris. Not too happy about that. But what it meant was I ended up doing jobs that they didn't think a existed and be that I could possibly be qualified for having read English and French lit. And what were those jobs? Working in an internet startup? Called monster.com? That's a job board. Yeah, that hadn't existed before. 1995 90. Most
Chris Rainey 7:59
of the jobs we're talking about React, vast majority never existed in our generation in when we when we came out of school. Exactly. And it'd be the same for the next generation just kind of come out of school. Well, so
Yazad 8:10
now if we fast forward to today, one of the most sought after jobs on the market is chat GPT prompt,
Chris Rainey 8:17
and unless you have it written down on my notepad right now, because I had in brackets under that question, Chelsea with the prom engineer. Yeah, that's a brand new opportunity.
Yazad 8:27
It's amazing. Yeah. But if you if you think back to the dawn of the internet, like you were saying, Google was only as good as the searches that you put into it, or Yahoo, or Ask Jeeves or whatever you were using only as good as the question that's asked. And so that's the whole concept with chat. GPT now is, what do we want to ask it? If you ask mundane questions, you're gonna get mundane answers. If you ask basic questions, you're gonna get basic answers, and you'll question the potential of the tool. But if you ask thoughtful questions, and the big difference between there's many differences between chat GPT and Google, one of the biggest is it's iterative. So you can ask it a question, it supplies an answer. And you can then ask questions or give directions related to that answer. And keep going, keep going. Becomes conversational, which is I think, the whole point of the NEC and also tell it
Chris Rainey 9:13
to then save that for next time. So remembers, so the more you feed into it, the better it gets. Exactly. Which is really exciting. But also it's kind of scary. At the same time, how do you feel like this is going to change the way work gets done?
Yazad 9:28
I think we have evidence already of what we're going to do with this should just look at how we currently operate. So I think your typical white collar worker if they're sitting at a laptop or desktop, and I'm going to make a guess that this is true for 80 90% of the people who are watching us right now they have their email client so Outlook or Gmail open. They have their messaging clients, Slack teams, whatever open. They will have whatever is the main tool they spend their day in PowerPoint, Excel, Microsoft Word If they are in something to do with design, they'll have figma or Adobe open. If they're in sales, they'll have Salesforce open or whatever their CRM is all of that open. And especially in last couple of years, they have become habituated to while speaking to someone in a meeting or speaking to a client or talking to their boss or their their team to be querying, or acting in one of those productivity tools simultaneously. Yeah, that is our current way of working. And I think chat GPT fits and tools like it fits seamlessly into that, it will be one more window that's open, the primary difference is going to be that you will be and we will be able to use that to query much more than act. So in email, you're acting in all these other productivity tools, you're acting, you're building a table, you are writing a memo, you are creating a presentation, now the power will be to ask questions. And the massive advantage. First of all, if you are in a meeting with your boss, or someone that you hope to impress, you're able to answer questions on the fly, as they're asked to have it straight up. Yeah, you're going to look amazing, you know, the more clinical way to describe that as your productivity has gone up, depending on how far the chat GPT advances and the development tools that get piled on top of it. If it's actively listening to your conversation, it may surface suggested ideas, thoughts, responses, even before you in real time query, then it becomes truly like you and I were talking about earlier a co pilot? Yes, I was thinking about a few years ago, I was in an interview like this, and we were talking about Cobots and a co bot sounds like see Threepio sounds like our 2d to someone who's there to serve you. Not terribly brilliant, but supports you. That's the wrong term for what we're gonna say. It really is copilot, someone who is almost your equal who's there to support you. So I think that's going to be exciting, the danger. And what I think a lot of companies need to be very, very cautious of is if, for instance, in that example, you do allow it to listen, what are the rules you're going to put around that? What are the rules you're going to put around how much data you're willing to provide to what is essentially a third party? How clean is the data that
Chris Rainey 12:19
you're putting in? Explain that for everyone, though? What do you mean? Sure,
Yazad 12:22
for anyone who's used chat GPT, which I think they've reached a couple 100 million users at this pricing, which is incredible, the adoption rates faster than Facebook faster than the telephone faster than TV. very famously, it's giving bad answers from time to time. And these kinds of phantom answers that it's giving are because it's dataset is the internet. And the internet famously has a lot of nonsense. Yeah. So it might have a quote that sounds like it came from The Guardian. And it may assess that there's a probability of 90% that the Guardian did say this. And so it will make that attribution, even if it's false. Yeah, that's where it gets dangerous. And that gets dangerous. But it's still a tool, and maybe doesn't have massive responsibility around that. Now imagine within the firm, if you are using a similar model, like a chat GPT, but it's basing its queries on your data. If your data isn't clean, isn't correct, isn't accurate, it's going to serve up these phantom responses that can have major consequences. I see with a lot of clients is recognising the importance before you invest and experiment with these large language models with querying the chat GPT like platforms, is your data clean? How do you set up definitions for what clean means? What are the processes you're going to put in place to begin that cleansing activity? How do you maintain that going forward? Because of course, the other thing is, there's a constant stream of new data coming in the moment you've got cleansed or processed a certain set your existing set, it's probably increased by 10%. So you need to have an active operation to continuously clean, that's really critical, then you can at least have a higher level of certainty or comfort. Yeah, in querying that data, how will you approach in our centre? So within Accenture, we very early on developed a COEs Centre of Excellence for data and AI. So it's kind of governing body it is a single repository of what are our policies? What are our security guidelines? What is our approach our do's and don'ts? What is our governance around data use of data. And to give you an example, very early on, we we had a very clear communication, that we were not to use chat GPT for any of our own work, because we wanted to be cautious that our data and more importantly, perhaps our clients data is not being uploaded to a third party. I think that's really important to have those clear guidelines
Chris Rainey 14:44
because if you copy in the field and rail, I think up we've realised that if you whatever you copy in DBT is now it's out there, correct? Yes. So you know,
Yazad 14:54
I think I think we have a false sense of security because so much of the consumer tools that we use are making a big deal. encryption, WhatsApp, all your whatsapp, sorry. Yeah, great, literally in order to function chat GPT needs to take what you gave it and put it in its servers to process. It's not able to give that back to you.
Chris Rainey 15:13
That's a big issue right now. A lot of you seeing a lot of news issues around IP? Yes. Who owns this people writing books and selling them online? With other people's IP integrating it? It's getting really confusing. And there's no legislation for this yet? Not yet. I mean, they're working on it, but there's no precedent,
Yazad 15:31
and we can't wait for governments to do it. I think that Rishi Sunak in the UK has announced that he wants the UK to be one of the leads in providing regulation around not AI itself, but the use of AI. Yeah, just a very important distinction as well. I think it would be foolish, dangerous and impossible to say, stop developing AI tools, which I think recently somebody a group of people had said, Let them put a pause on it for six years, not realistic. But to put in guidelines to regulate how it's used, how data is treated, how privacy is addressed. And I think it's going to take some time for governments to do that. I think Emmanuel Macron, also announced in the last couple of days that he intends to, to spearhead something like that in France or in the EU, I think companies can't wait. They need to have their own sense, build a centre of excellence for AI within the firm, even if it's in early days, to identify, how are we going to clean our data? How are we going to treat our data from a security standpoint or risk standpoint? How are we going to cover developing government policies around AI usage for our people, for our clients? At least start with this. Yeah. And then you can start experimenting?
Chris Rainey 16:40
100%? What are you hearing from clients? Right now? I'm sure you got a lot of fun, a lot of people calling we've had, what do we do?
Yazad 16:46
Hundreds and hundreds of conversations about AI just in the last few months, there's a few common themes that we hear from clients. One is to your question, where do we start? Yeah, very often, what we're saying is, well, look at what we're doing here, within Accenture, we built a centre of excellence for this, start with that, who owns this in your firm? What resources do they need, give them two or three goals and point everyone to them so that at least you know where to go. Even if there isn't clarity on what to do yet, you know who to discuss it with? So I think this is a big one. And we're helping clients figure out what that means for them and how to build those centres of excellence. The other is around experimentation. Where should we start with this? Is it to examine how I love this example. And I'm very curious myself personally to learn more how effective it can be? How do we use AI to examine our supply chain, and our vendors, vendors and customers so that we can track how they are performing against our ESG goals.
Chris Rainey 17:50
And that's going to be a big one, right? It's not enough for
Yazad 17:53
a firm to say we have a carbon neutral goal of x, or we have a gender equality goal of why but if our entire supply chain, our partner ecosystem is really far away from that, and they are building their businesses on ours, how pointless or or irrelevant are our goals? Yeah, I love that idea.
Chris Rainey 18:12
But that would mean you would need to be able to access their data.
Yazad 18:15
Right? So that, again, depends on what they're willing to provide or not provide. The dilemma? Yes. To me, everything to do with AI starts with data. None of these tools are effective, unless the dataset exists, is accessible, is clean, and has very clear security protocols. Same
Chris Rainey 18:32
thing we talked about when we talk about people on legs, even even the question of where do you start? It's, it's a similar thing for many organisations. There's a use
Yazad 18:39
case, though, that I really like, which is, you know, a lot of clients ask us about end to end use cases give us some examples of how we can implement this. Not necessarily across the whole firm, but in a particular area. And there's there's a great one that's people oriented, which is similar to what we were talking about, with the co pilot to take a customer service agent and turn them into a super agent. You know, how often do we as consumers were sitting on that call? And they say, Oh, let me get back to you. Let me check. Every call. Let me check my CRM, oh, let me get my manager, how much of that goes away? If you have a super smart co pilot that's chat GPT or equivalent, Howard, that has access to your CRM access to all of your databases. That's basically giving you that information almost in real time, because it's listening to the call, and it's listening to the call might even anticipate what your customers about to ask and say, You know what, here's the answer. You can do more calls customer satisfaction goes up, productivity goes up as productivity increases by the way, compensation increases. That's why it gives the lie to this whole going back to the earlier point, the whole point about people saying this is going to steal our jobs false. It's going to make existing roles more productive, open up millions of new roles and jobs and opportunities for people around the world. And because as we become The more productive, we can demand more pay for those of us living and working in market economies, we're actually going to be more successful as a result, I think is something to be very excited about not scared of,
Chris Rainey 20:11
well, essentially is a, you're a good example of that. So in the news, you're making a $3 billion investment. And that, and that includes another hiring of another, you said around about 40,000, while going up to 80,008, from 40 to 80,000. People, so you're, you're hiring people, not letting people know. So that's pretty incredible.
Yazad 20:30
It's amazing. And I think the investments in these things, it's not just chat GPT prompt engineer. Yeah, but you know, if I think back along the last 15 years, the number of jobs that just simply did not exist, social media manager, SEO analytic, you know, analyst, so many, there's so many roles that didn't exist pre internet, you know, and as we moved into this web three, economy, there are so many roles about supporting businesses that are exclusively in that area of technology, that literally the industry didn't exist, the roles that didn't exist, the skills didn't exist, the massive opportunity for people, I think, who are in high school today in university, to pick up skills that didn't even occur to us, even 510 years ago.
Chris Rainey 21:15
What does this mean for leaders and managers and how they make decisions, we've always spoke about data driven decision making. But this takes that to a whole nother level,
Yazad 21:25
it's two pieces there that we have to be aware of. It's not just augmenting our own personal skills for our own role, but at least augmenting our awareness of the skills required for the people who are working for us so that we understand what learning they need, how much time that learning will take, and then how they can apply it. So we may not need to necessarily be an expert in writing prompts for chat GPG, but at least be aware of the importance of it. So that we can empower our people, give them permission, yes, go get trained up on that I know it has value, I may not recognise yet, how what the application is, in my team, in my business, in my practice, I do understand that it has value. So go get it. What I worry about is managers who think that some of this is a little bit fluffy, or only going to be relevant in the more distant future, not allowing their people to invest in it. And I feel bad for them, because what's going to happen is that people will leave
Chris Rainey 22:25
my wife's company, they've banned the use of it to the point where they can track whether you open it on your PC, right. So that's how serious they're taking it, as well. But in many instances, it's really helpful for for a million reasons for employees to use it to your point, but because they're afraid of it, and they haven't set a clear governance structure and a COA for it. They did no one and she and I asked my first, who do you go to for that? No idea. To your point. Like, I wouldn't even have a clue. I think we do have to be conscious of that. You know, and this is a large finance company, just to be clear, right. But that's important. And
Yazad 23:03
I think it's not just for finance, we have to be conscious of the privacy that we are letting go of as consumers and as employees in return for higher productivity. Okay. As
Chris Rainey 23:18
scary for many companies,
Yazad 23:20
it scares for many companies. It's scary for many people as well. Yeah. So for example, long ago, long ago, 10 years ago, I think the majority of people around the world stopped worrying about who has their credit card number. And it's very likely that most of the people watching this have at least one credit card uploaded with some website will say is it in your browser now? Right, exactly. I'm currently on your phone, say there's a new browser. And when we talk to customer service, we don't seem to mind anymore, that someone in India or Philippines or anywhere else on the other side of the world has access to that credit card number. Because the productivity that it provides in our personal lives, obviates the risk that we perceive around someone stealing our number. So we need to get used to that in our professional lives as well. It probably does feel intrusive. For instance, in the company, you were just describing that, who they're watching everything I do, but we need to get used to the fact that that's okay. Because in return for that the tools that I have at my disposal, make me superlative in my role. And we have to become accustomed and willing to respect those rules, not violate them and not cry really if we do violate them and get punished for them. Because it has to be a give and take
Chris Rainey 24:38
okay, but that's the problem in this case is just, it's just a take. They can't use it. But we want to collect the data, the information. So it needs to work both ways. I agree you need and also sending a clear message
Yazad 24:49
if you don't trust while trust is a massive piece of this. So
Chris Rainey 24:52
if that's the message you're delivering from the very beginning that we're going to punish the many because a few people may misuse it as the message But you're you're sending out that right, which I don't think is the right one to do. What you mentioned before we went live an analogy involving space. Which I, which I want to share with everyone, I think it's a good segue.
Yazad 25:12
So there are, in my opinion, three great use cases of humans who have given up almost all their privacy in order to be successful in what they do. And when I say all their privacy, I mean really intrusive, even physically, okay? Babies, astronauts, and senior executives, slash wealthy people. All right, if you think about babies in order to be successful, which in their case honestly just means staying alive. Everything about their life is done for them. They are fed, they are bathed, which is highly intrusive, their diapers are changed for them. And of course, they are helpless. And there's a reason for it. But they are willing to endure this massive intrusion of privacy because it's keeping them alive. As adults, I don't think we would necessarily be comfortable in during that level. However, there is a certain type of adult who doesn't do that. Astronauts, an astronaut in order to be successful in their mission. First of all, jokes aside is probably wearing some form of diaper. Yeah, has monitors all over her body, tracking every aspect of her health, monitoring every action she takes whether it's on a spacewalk or doing an experiment inside the capsule, and constantly being scoffed at, by literally a co pilot in Mission Control, correcting her giving advice giving direction? Is she complaining that if she has to go to the bathroom that probably in the suit? Yeah, doesn't matter. She's got to complete the mission. Does it bother her that some group of people know her exact heart rate or that she's got a bead of sweat trickling down her neck? No, she's super grateful for that. It allows her to complete her mission, massive intrusion of privacy. They know everything about her her life, the security clearance is probably meant that they interviewed everyone she's ever met in her life, totally willing to endure that to be successful in the mission. And if we look at the very wealthy or the very senior CEOs of large companies, they have a squad of people whose job it is to take care of every possible mundane task in their life up to an including taking care of their home, their family, their children, but also their food, their health, their well being. What do you need to drink next? Where do I need to take you next? Almost like they're a baby? Yeah. Why? So that they can focus single mindedly on their mission, which is for their people, their customers, their shareholders. I like to share this analogy because I think this is in a way where we are all headed. And in fact, as technology has progressed, we have all been able to avail of the advantages that used to be only for the super wealthy, or even the more senior to us. It used to be that only mid level managers and above had a secretary. Now everyone's got a calendar app, totally democratised. It used to be that only the senior people in your firm send each other memos, or for 50 years, we've all been sending each other emails. It used to be that only senior leaders had access to a team of MBAs and analysts to crunch data and come up with new ideas and narratives and business models. We're all going to be able to do that we're attached
Chris Rainey 28:38
to a team of creatives. Exactly. We're a team of creative now you can do that in mid journey and
Yazad 28:43
create exactly. So I think we're all headed in that direction of being as catered to, as a baby or an astronaut or a CEO, with the same benefit accruing to us have helped me complete my mission single mindedly without having to worry about all this other mundane stuff.
Chris Rainey 29:01
I love that analogy. By the way, it kind of really makes you think. And one of the things that Shane and I did when we first started the company is we sat down and said, How do we automate all of those things that you're describing. So we can focus on growing the business and leaning into that our strengths, and things that technology can't replace. And that was a game changer for us, whether it was our scheduling tools, whether it was the the way we created content and edit it, whether it's the website, whether it's our calendar, these people can just schedule it, you can keep going, you know, LinkedIn tours, where we were getting hundreds of people messaging me on LinkedIn, not San Hurrican. By the way, how do I prioritise those and Ryan automatically comes up with responses to the point where didn't really we only focus on the value add tasks as well? And that really allowed us to scale the business and focus on those things. I think
Yazad 29:53
there's a massive productivity lift that's coming as a result of nudge. And it's that combination of proactive nudging, plus the proactive on the part of the user leveraging a chat GPT or other conversational regenerative AI, that's going to be game changing for a lot of us. There's one piece I'll add to that, which I'm particularly always happy to repeat is that, you know, we were talking earlier about educational expectations. I think people who study the humanities are going to finally have a massive edge in business. Because when you come from an educational background, where the onus is on thinking critically, versus learning these formulas, learn the periodic table, learn this process. So much of what we're going to be doing is writing based thinking analytically, processing ideas, and generating ideas. That's a huge advantage for people who went through university not just studying formulas, but reading books, that is
Chris Rainey 30:56
sort of post today about that saying it was something is like a meme on LinkedIn saying, it was like all of the English English Lit. People that have had that degree, like it's your time to shine. Yes. Is it now it's going to be using those skills to
Yazad 31:11
that's from Connor grendon, the Dean of Students at NYU? Was that what it was really focused
Chris Rainey 31:14
on your profile? Right, that I will I reposted that. Yeah. And I was like, and it made me think it took me a major stand up. Yeah, that's what it was. Okay, yeah, sure. That makes that makes so much sense now,
Yazad 31:28
huge opportunity for people who have a technical background, to leverage their ability to think critically, and a huge opportunity for people who come from the humanities to lean on that superpower. In order to avail of this technology, it is going to be a really significant convergence.
Chris Rainey 31:43
How do you see this shape in your own industry? And what do you do and how you serve your customers?
Yazad 31:50
Specifically in the HR domain? Yeah, but
Chris Rainey 31:52
it's also essential as a business as well, you know, it's already evolved and transformed significantly over the last 510 years. But now this is, I can't even the type of work that you're going to be doing for customers is going to change a lot. Right?
Yazad 32:08
Well, it's gonna be interesting to see what happens. I think the two different ways that we're approaching it today is one, we're trying to lead by example. And so very often when clients ask us, How should we approach this, one of the first things we do is show them what we're doing. Yeah, not that it means it's perfect. But it's a good example. And maybe we've started a bit earlier than they have. But the second is around co innovation and experimentation. Because honestly, this is new for the whole world. And the best way to test what works and doesn't work is to play around with it, and experiment together to innovate together, where we tend to focus is what are the industry specific applications to these experiments? Because that's where I think companies will benefit the most. So what are the specific shipping and logistics applications and use cases? What are the specific financial services applications where the specific retail or education or public sector or health applications? And how do we dive deeper and deeper and deeper, and one of the things that I love about chat GPT, as we talked about, it's iterative. That's a fantastic feeling to go down last night, my son was an Alice in Wonderland at school, go down the rabbit hole, like Alice. Yes, just keep going is fascinating. What will we find? Now? Now, we figured out that this has an application that we hadn't expected. Let's ask it five more things. Let's query further. Oh, by the way, we might reach a dead end so we can backpedal. But to do that, together with our clients, I think is really exciting. And to identify, what are the industry use cases that we can quickly determine are are beneficial that we can provide out of the box. While we continue to experiment on on additional use cases,
Chris Rainey 33:52
I kind of felt like this is there's never been a better time to be alive honestly, about this, like, as someone who's in a small business, and scaling, like I'm like a kid in a candy shop right now. You know, last night I was I was awake to 1am. And I was playing around with mid journey, which is generative AI, you can create images, type in your prompts are created, right? So I actually built a pathway that it will take the audio and video from my podcast, it will generate a avatar of Chris and I would feed in the audio and video into into the platform and this avatar will read. So basically, I've got to the point where I can replace me just feed it and I can create a script, I could say, write me a script around the top 10 HR trends, right? I've fed it my voice, I can talk like me without me being there. Okay, so yeah, you have to read a certain script and it creates your resume glitchy or does it feel smooth, it's smooth. And that's what's scary about it. So now I added the avatar. So now I've got an avatar and it's basically like a Pixar version of Chris with my voice and I can feed it any script whatsoever and the and it
Yazad 35:00
will the right now your sound engineer is plotting how they're going to get you to offer them a raise and call their phone and drop it into voicemail.
Chris Rainey 35:09
As I know, you called me you said, but it's all the way from the beginning in terms of scheduling the call recording the podcast, you know, the entire process can be can be not say outsource but can be recreated using generative AI.
Yazad 35:24
And you don't worry about replacing yourself, because I'm sure what you're thinking. I mean, you tell me if I'm wrong, is that frees you up to then Ida exactly what am I going to do?
Chris Rainey 35:33
I'm just just that's my whole point. You know, like, I would love to a point to where I can grab clips and post them on social media where it's not even me sitting in it actually me there is taking the content, repurposing it. And it also the way exports, you can say I will export five versions, one for LinkedIn, and one for Instagram one for Tik Tok, and it automatically shifts that I mentioned, it automatically writes the posts and adds the tags. So I had one for LinkedIn, and it automatically had the exact tags that I wanted on LinkedIn, without me even asking for it in there. So it's so exciting. It's scary, it's all at the same time to see it. Because now you're seeing posts where you don't even know if it's actually a person or not.
Yazad 36:12
That's something we need to learn. That's where regulations and you know, what, what is the watermark equivalent? Yes, we need to figure that out acquired for that, cause, unfortunately, it is a big world. And we have varying degrees of awareness. We have varying degrees of susceptibility that's based on age demographic location, you know, access to, to, to these tools, I think, unfortunately, has to become part of our childhood curriculum, to teach people to teach people 100%. We're capable of identifying strangers. And I think that's something in our DNA. So it's very hard for someone to go to a school and say, no, no, I'm your father, I'm here to pick you up. The child will know. But with AI and online, how would they know? You have no idea? And that's not something that's built into our DNA as humans. We have to I think, proactively build that in I don't have the answer for that. Yeah. But I think that's something that we do need to figure out as parents, we need to start educating our children on at least the awareness until such time that there's a clear, obvious way to identify.
Chris Rainey 37:22
It's a scary Yeah, we need to figure that out quick, quickly as well. But aside from that, I thought it was more positives than negatives, and we'll we'll figure
Yazad 37:31
it out. You know, going back to where we started, I hope that people stay positive. I hope that the mindset of people as consumers, and more importantly, as employees, that instead of feeling like man, I'm gonna get replaced. That is this my opportunity to, in a way feel promoted. You know, when if we go back to senior executives, when a CFO gets promoted to CEO, she doesn't say, Oh, my God, I've lost my job as the Chief Financial Officer. No, she's moved up a level. When we start to bring on these co pilots, we shouldn't feel less than because they're doing so much of our work. We should feel promoted in the role. That now I've got someone who full time works for me, helping me be even better at my job.
Chris Rainey 38:16
Yeah. Now, I love it. Before I let you go, where can people follow you want to reach out say hi, follow you? Where's the best place?
Yazad 38:23
LinkedIn? Twitter, twitter.com/yazid, or linkedin.com/in/yes? I've
Chris Rainey 38:30
got Yes, add on Twitter.
Yazad 38:32
I mean, one of the benefits of having an unusual name is pretty good. Yeah, a combination of being early to some of the platforms. I think I joined Twitter in 2007. Yeah, and having an unusual
Chris Rainey 38:41
name. Yeah, that's gonna be an interesting one. Wherever social media evolves, there's a whole nother episode where they can talk to the AI version of you. And with your voice, this is what I mean and get a response. That's a whole nother episode. But thanks, Colin. It's great to see you
Yazad 38:54
Great to see you and very, very happy for all of your success in the studio looks phenomenal.
Chris Rainey 38:58
Thank you. I appreciate and I'll see you again soon.
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Tony Buffum, VP of HR Client Strategy at Upwork.