Why AI Is HR’s Superpower (and How to Use It)
In this episode of the HR Leaders Podcast, we speak with Adam Holton, Chief People Officer at GE HealthCare, about the mindset shifts HR leaders need to harness AI, personalize learning, and lead with authenticity.
Adam explains why example matters more than instruction, why democratized learning is changing leadership, and how AI can act like a “superpower” for HR teams. The conversation covers embedding AI into coaching, rethinking processes instead of just automating them, and creating sticky adoption through daily use cases.
🎓 In this episode, Adam discusses:
Why sticky adoption requires integrating AI into routine tasks
Embedding AI into coaching and HR workflows for daily impact
How AI is transforming learning into personalized, scalable support
The cultural mindset shift HR must lead to unlock exponential value
Why authentic leadership is about example, not having all the answers
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Adam Holton 0:00
Adam, welcome to the show, my friend. How are you? Hey, I'm doing well, Chris, thanks for having me on. I'm really looking forward to the discussion.
Chris Rainey 0:07
Nice. You're probably tired of seeing me at this point, ever every event, and Chris turns up, he gets me
Adam Holton 0:14
look. You are everywhere, but, but, but it's also, you know, I got to say to you and your team, congratulations on on what you've built. You've become such an important part, I think, of the HR infrastructure really helping people to understand what's happening in a very meaningful way. And you know, we're in such an interesting and special time, I think, in our function right now, and more that we can learn from each other the better and and that's what your show does, and that's what what you all do. And I really appreciate what you
Chris Rainey 0:48
do. I appreciate man, I appreciate you, right? Because it sounds obvious, but without people like you giving back, there is no HR leaders. I think some people don't really make that connection. I'm like everything we do the last 10 years, and 20 years in total, for my career, is been based around leaders like yourself, giving back, sharing their experience and insights. That is what we do. You know, without that, there is no content, there is no events, so I appreciate you taking the time out. Yeah, absolutely amazing. I feel like we're gonna have, like, a tour of your books right now. What's the one that you have ending up right there.
Adam Holton 1:23
So that's the Carolina way. So I'm a huge basketball person, basketball right in my my family actually, my my dad's second oldest brother played for the Harlem Globetrotters. My dad paid in college. Oh, wow. My mentors growing up were basketball coaches, and I, I've been a huge fan of University of North Carolina since I was a youngster. And Dean Smith is kind of where it all started at at Carolina, and he was more than a basketball coach. He was just an incredible leader. And so that's, that's just one of his books
Chris Rainey 2:00
I love that. I know you wasn't expecting that. Yeah, I just was super intro. I can tell it means something to you, the way that you placed it there as well leadership, something we were talking about the conversation. Then, based on your background, your dad and you know what you just mentioned, how do you think that that's shaped you as a leader?
Adam Holton 2:20
So look, I think that, you know, I think the power of example. And I'll go back to my father. My father and mother were the first two leaders. Examples I had of leaders. So growing up, I didn't know any better. And like most kids, you know, there were times where I thought it was the most, unlike, you know, unlucky kid in the world, my parents were pretty strict. They made me do things. I mean, all the things now that I look back at and laugh, and you try to do it with your own kids, but, but they were the examples in terms of, you know, I look back at my dad was about work ethic. He was about do what you say you're going to do. He was about, you know, he had a saying growing up. He said Holton means over achiever and so don't do the minimum. Do whatever you do. Do it the very best that you can. He didn't really care what we did, as long as what we did. We put our
Chris Rainey 3:16
mindset, yeah, I love that, like one of the things I have a Robin, which is not, I mean, I like the way you put it is, she's, she's only six, but she, she's kind of going through that phase now where she's trying different sports, and when it gets hard, she wants to give up, right? So she's doing jujitsu, and when she gets tapped out, she has a little cry. She doesn't want to go back, she doesn't want to go back to class, right? And now, whenever she says, I can't do that, and I kind of it's like a game between us that when she says that, she catches herself in the moment, and I say, what can we do? And she's like, and then our response is, every time we can do anything we want. So it's every time she says I can't do something, she just looks at me and she she immediately she knows I'm gonna say, what can we do? She's like, anything we want, and it's become a thing now. And I've even heard her, which kind of made me so proud a few months back, where I heard her, heard her mumbling it under her breath before she went onto the mat. And I was like, wow. Like she's actually, she's saying, I can do this. I could do anything I want. You know, like, because there was a, there's a girl in her class She's scared of, who keeps taking her down, and I can see her, even a six year old, psyching herself up, giving herself those positive affirmations before she went out. And I was like, oh, that's actually really cool, that it's starting to, like become a mindset, you know,
Adam Holton 4:32
well, I would say, just, just keep at it, because, you know, our kids are, you know, a decent amount older than yours. But you know, for four years, decades, you could say, I remember thinking, I'm not actually sure that my kids are hearing what I'm saying. And you know, now they're mostly in their 20s, and the things they say, you know, I catch myself almost wanting to say to them, I didn't actually think you were listening, but it is a lot. Lessons, they come back, and it's, it's just amazing. And you know, you have those discussions with your own parents and your own parents. My parents have said that to me too, like I didn't think you were listening for decades. And it's just funny how that that comes along, and how even when we don't think our kids are listening, not only are they listening, they're watching. And again, going back to that power. Yeah, thing about what we say, but what we do is so much more powerful.
Chris Rainey 5:25
Yeah, you're right. I'm trying to be, I've been a bit more in, both internally, in the business, and also my with my daughter, trying to make sure that I'm showing up and, you know, walking, walking the walk, right? And talking to talk, because that they will, they will. They notice what you do, right? You know. And even my daughter, who's six, sounds silly. She she really does pay attention. And if I say certain things and do certain things, she will, she kids. Kids are very ruthless. They will tell you, Daddy, you said you were going to do that and you didn't. And I'm like, wow, like, she just says it how it is. And I'm like, Okay, you're right. I said I was going to do that. I didn't do it. I own it. And I was like, wow, you're actually paying attention.
Adam Holton 6:07
Look, I think also in business, we spend a lot of time teaching leaders how we want them to behave, and I think that's all important, certainly the knowledge and teaching skills that's an important component of leadership development that pales in comparison to the idea of the examples that we set. And you know, you know, I'll be the first to admit and understand, I think in any organization, the way that your most senior leaders act is the most important, because we are setting the stage, we're either giving the right encouragement to drive the behaviors and the culture that the organization wants, or we're giving permission, if we're not doing that to our people, to do something very different. And so our example is most important. But one of the things that I like to remind every leader, and I think of we have 53,000 plus people colleagues. We call them at GE Healthcare, every one of them is a leader, and we should never underestimate the impact every single one of us has on others that are around us. You know, whether we care to admit us. We all want to lead, and we all want to be led, and part of being led is the example that we see, and often it's unconscious. It's we see things without fully sort of categorizing it. But that example and the impact that we have on each other across an organization is just incredibly
Chris Rainey 7:40
powerful. Yeah, one of the things that we spoke about before is, you know, authenticity and leadership. How does that show up? What does that look like from a practical sense, because you don't want to force it right and come across inauthentic. How does that what does that look like? At GE,
Adam Holton 7:58
yeah, I think you know, number one, I agree with you that it's important. I think there's a consistency to authenticity. For me, authenticity, one of the things that increasingly throughout my life, that I gravitate to is people who don't come across like they have all the answers, who are not there is a component of, I don't know if it's across our society or if it's increasing, or I'm just becoming more aware of it, but certainty, like individuals who come across like I am, 100% certainty, certain on everything I find myself turned off from that. I will listen more when somebody, when I hear people, say I might be wrong, I may not have this completely right. Here's how I'm thinking about this. Is an incomplete thought, but and that sort of authenticity, I think in leaders, you know, I think early in my career, I was lucky to have mentors who would say, look as a leader. You need to lead. You need to be there when decision making is happening. Listen to your people, but oftentimes they're going to look to you to make hard decisions, to help clear barriers and things of that nature. But you also need to be the type of leader that when you don't know something. Say something like you don't think that your people already know that you're not super human. They know. They know like there's no reason to sort of pretend to the to the other. And so I think that that authenticity, that piece of admitting, at times, mistakes, when you now look, if that's all you're doing is admitting mistakes, maybe you're in the wrong job, but, but if you're never doing that, you're probably doing it wrong as
Chris Rainey 9:48
well. Yeah, it took quite a long for me, for me to switch that mindset, because in the first 10 years of my first company was the opposite. It was like leadership in the organization was defined that you have all the answers right? Right, and that you are a leader, because you are a manager, because you have the answers, and that's kind of how my manager led and their manager LED. So the idea of servant leadership, and the idea of me, actually, my role is to, you know, remove barriers to my team, give them the psychological safety to show up, you know, make mistakes, fail forward, support them, help them develop and get out the way. Was quite a tough switch. I'll be honest for me to do that, because I'd always been in a role where, okay, you're the manager, Chris, you have all the answers, but you kind of like you're losing all of that diversity of thought or the perspective or the insight. You're robbing your team of the opportunities to fail and learn. You know it's so important now to do that, but So leadership really changed quite a direct dramatically over the last sort of 10 years of what it means to be a leader.
Adam Holton 10:57
Yeah. And look, I also think that you know, once upon a time that almost gatekeeper of information that a leader played may have been more appropriate at a time where we didn't have as many ways as we do today for people to learn. You know, learning has really become democratized. You know, it used to be that learning was for a certain few you would go physically somewhere, into a classroom, some other environment. You did learning, and then you came back and you tried to apply it to the to the job. I think over the last 20 years, technology and maybe mindset shifts have given us a much better way of thinking about how do we reduce that cycle time between learning and my job, my job and learning. So now in the best organizations, I think there is a understanding and also capability around my job is to learn, and learning is my job, and that that window, if you will, that cycle time of being able to put it into practice is is really, really short, you know, when I think about it. And this is what excites me around the transformational capability of of AI and the digital age that we're in when I think about learning for the future. Have you seen the movie Iron Man? Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, you were gonna really hurt me if, if you hadn't seen it, because then the analogy wouldn't make any sense at all. But to me, the learning of the future is Jarvis, yeah, right, this idea of, you know, you think about Tony Stark, you know, in and of himself, he was a genius, and things of that nature, but just watching him in the movie interact with this, you know, computer voice that knew everything about him, that had access to information all across the world, and in a moment's notice, if he needed a piece of information, in two seconds, he could get it Right. It's that starts to sound very, you know, very like what we are seeing right now with llms, right? Llms,
Chris Rainey 13:09
we're one step away from that now, you know, like we're sorry, seems right. Carry on. I'll jump in after. No no, please go ahead. I was saying like we already there, right? We, kind of we, we're now moving to the era of we had large action models, sorry, large, large language models, which is kind of where we are now, where you can ask a question, get an answer. The next evolution with large action models is Jarvis. Is create me the new Iron Man suit, and it has access to the tools and technology in the lab to then create the suit, right? So now you're delegating the tasks to Jarvis. So we're seeing it with every company. Now, Apple has just launched Apple intelligence. So now Apple's AI is connected to every single app in your phone. So if you want it to book a flight, you want it to book a calendar, you want it to book a restaurant, it has access to all of that, to take an action, and it's learning about you. So what we thought was going to be 10 years, 20 years down the road, is already here. In fact, it's just the way that companies are architectures in terms of their technology and their tech stack is just not set up to the technology is here. We're just having to now figure out, how does this fit into our existing tech stack? And that's going to be the challenge.
Adam Holton 14:18
Why do you think companies are not set up for that. I mean, I have a theory on that, but I'd love your, your personal because most,
Chris Rainey 14:25
because most technology stacks are not connected, for example, like, right now, there's this sort of big battle going on of who and which tic tech player is going to become the sort of master AI agent, right? So I was speaking to CHRO the other day. I was like, Chris, tomorrow, or if I wanted to, I can turn on seven agents, right? I've got my service now. Agent, I've got my work day. Agent, you know, I've got my Cornerstone age. I've got all these agents, right? But the problem is, we want to make, we want to create one consistent experience for our employees and customers, so we can't have them access in 10 different agents, right? So we have. To feed that into one UX and UI and most companies, APIs and integrations are not set up that way. So you see companies like ServiceNow who kind of winning the race in many ways, because they're playing nicely and they're integrating with everyone saying, hey, we'll bring all of you, all of that into our agent into service now, and that's why you see them winning, winning, winning, in many ways as well. So that's kind of what I think. But also, there's a huge culture shift that's taking place as well, right? So it's not like anything, isn't the technology is not. People always think like the technology part is going to be the challenge. You know, it's not. It's going to be the actual human part, the the culture transformation and adoption. Always, I've done one and a half 1000 episodes. So whenever I talk about a technology, technology transformation, it's never the technology that we talk about. It's the people, right, and the cultural transformation that comes with it as well. So I think there's, it's a combination of
Adam Holton 15:59
both, I agree with you. And I think your second point, I think that's an exponentially greater impact. You know, when you think about I think we're stuck in a paradigm that we've been in our whole lives. When we think about technology in our whole lives, we think about technology in HR and in business as standardizing processes. We're going to take a process, hopefully, we're going to make it faster, we're going to make it more efficient, we're going to make it more productive. We haven't thought around how does technology allow us to rethink processes? Yeah, and I think that's a mindset set shift between sort of the technology of yesteryear and what llms and AI brings to us today, right? If we're just thinking about using AI to try to do our current processes, we're completely missing the boat, right? Technology of yesteryear was, you know, long cycle, you know, somebody else put it in place, the users had really no ability to sort of change it and innovate with the technology. It was used for very set processes. And now we are introducing something, you know, that I don't even like calling it a technology. I call it a capability, because I think when we say technology, we think of information technology. We think about technology from from the past. But to me, the paradigm is you're sitting in a room and you are surrounded by 10,000 PhD level individuals, and each of them have a PhD in a different subject. Each of them are the most are as smart as you possibly can be in all these different topics, and you have instant availability to them. How are you going to use that in a very different way?
Chris Rainey 17:44
Yeah, no, I agree, like you mentioned earlier that around information being democratized, we thought that was huge when you had things like, you know, obviously the internet, youtube, AI, has just taken that to a whole another level. So it's no longer a the technical capability and access to information that those barriers are gone, right like because you can, you can develop those, but now it's going to be so creativity, the critical thinking, those are going to be the things that are really going to be important moving forward, and that's what I worry because I can tell with my team sometimes when they send me emails and some work that I've that they've just done, they've just used chat GPT and sent it to me, and I'm like, they haven't gone through the critical thinking of thinking through it, because we all know the days of starting with a blank piece of paper, and it's tough, right? And you because you really do have to think right and like, process it and really get into the work, whereas now you just ask, ask chat, GBT, and you, you don't have to do any of that. So I do worry about that, about what that means for the future. Does that make sense? It
Adam Holton 18:56
makes perfect. Makes perfect sense. Are you also, um, I'm kind of amazed at a in a very short period of time, how used to we've gotten to capabilities that five years ago would have seemed 50 years away. Yeah, right. And one of the things I worry a little bit about, there's, there's two things in sort of, you know, we're at GE Healthcare. We are experimenting with a number of the different llms, giving our colleagues access to it. One of the things we're mindful of is how much will change over the next several years. And I think to sort of pin our future to one tech stack right now, seems a little naive, just in terms of how much I 100% agree, yeah. So we're experimenting with a lot of different things, and what we're seeing is, is a couple of different things we're seeing already, um, fear of missing now, right? So if I have copilot, why don't I have chat GPT? If I have chat GPT, why don't I have co pilot? If I have both of those, how come I don't have Claude and. What's the sort of best system? And it's interesting, because all of the llms, you know, people have their different preferences, and there are, I do think objectively, some uses where certain llms are better than others in terms of how you use them, but every single one of them provide transformational capabilities that 234, years ago, we couldn't even imagine. And so there's a bit of a how do you get the very most out of what is in front of you? And this idea of utilization, to me, mindset, the biggest indication of mindset is utilization, right? So I know there are some people, one of the things we try to teach at GE Healthcare is, you know, we have a lot of colleagues who would say, you know, I set aside 30 minutes of my week to really experiment with, you know, whether it's copilot or chatgpt or any of the other models that we have. And our view is no no Jarvis, figure out how to integrate it. It should be a part of everything that you're doing. You know, how do you use it and integrate it? How do you get away from what you are indicating, which is, hey, I'm just going to give my whole answer as it relates to something that that pops out of, out of, out of an LLM for me, where I see the biggest use is I'll think of something, and then I'll go to chatgpt or copilot and say, give me 10 other ways I should be thinking about this. How can I better explain this and what I often will find, and this goes with some of the psychology of you know, really great facilitators. Know that when you're doing ideation, one of the most important questions you can ask is, what else? How else? What else? And often, that 10th idea that you come up with when you think you're completely exhausted and there are no more ideas, is the one that you choose, yeah, because it's that it brings out, unlocks that innovation.
Chris Rainey 21:59
I would say that I completely agree, but I'd say most people I speak to don't use LMS in the way you're describing I do. I ask it to give me because the whole idea is, I don't want it just to feed give me a mirror reflection of what I'm asking. So asking that question and questions like that bring you back. Oh, wow. Okay, there's another way of doing that. I'll give you an example, right? I asked a similar question recently about, what are some of the other ways I could help automate my LinkedIn? You know, I'm getting close to 2 million views a week on LinkedIn, and that comes along with hundreds and sometimes 1000s of messages a week. I'm not even exaggerating. So I asked, actually, see this is my challenge. How can I, how can I ensure I get back to people in a timely manner and manage my LinkedIn? And it came back, and since then, I've been embedded two chrome plugins now that connect with my LinkedIn, gives it an order of what people have have messaged me, has already written predefined responses, and I have to approve them. But it's already saving me, say, Me, My Patryk and the marketing team hundreds of hours, probably just going through this manually. And then it also for some that are very simple, like, hey, how do I sign up to the event? It sends them the link, right? So what was typically, I think we probably replaced two employees time with the amount of and I was just asking it, or a silly one last night, I came to my wife, and I was like, oh my god, I built something so cool. She's like, What are you up to now? My daughter, as I mentioned, is in jujitsu, and they have like this, this Google Drive of all these videos of like, how to, you know, all different types of jiu jitsu drills and stuff like that. So I just fed that into Atlas, our agent that you're aware of our Atlas, our HR copilot. And now Robin can ask a question, and it takes her to the exact second in the video that demonstrates the technique, right? So now I've built this AI BJJ coach that can translate any jiu jitsu training into any language and allow them, allow anyone just to ask a question. And I even said, I'm going, I'm six years old. I've got a competition coming up. Build me a training program and a plan based on a bottom game, which is a type of strategy for jujitsu. And it built a whole plan for in the AI, and that took me like an hour. You took me like an hour to create that. So now, like, here's this jujitsu AI coach, right? And I didn't have to code anything.
Adam Holton 24:29
You created that, which, again, I think is the power. I think once people get the light bulb of, yeah, I don't need to be a coder. I don't need to be technical to do what you just said, I think it starts to change the game. So this idea of how you embed it into, you know, everyday workflow is one of, you know, we have five, you know, I would call behaviors or principles that we're really stressing in our transformation at the GE Healthcare around this, and that's one of them, how you embed it now. Well, you you can go too far, and you got to be a little bit careful. I found myself last week I asked my wife a question on something, and she was like, Why don't you ask your best friend? What are you talking about? You're my best friend. And she's like, No, I'm not. Apparently that GPT has taken that title.
Chris Rainey 25:19
So I was
Adam Holton 25:20
like, whoa. Like, maybe this is this opened up a whole other set of discussions, but maybe little bit
Chris Rainey 25:28
it's gonna be interesting. I'm doing a new I haven't named it yet. It's a kind of a work tech series, where have you technology that I feel is going to impact the work the workforce and workplace of the future. So physical technology. So next week, I'm getting a pair of headphones delivered to the studios that have got open AI and chatgpt built into the headphones, right? So even if you disconnect from the internet, it stores it and then it can and so throughout the entire day, your headphones, that which are tiny, are listening to every conversation, transcribing. But anything about privacy is that even right that my headphones are listening in every conversation by the end of the day, it sends you an email with here's the key takeaways from the day. Here are the tasks that you got to do, and it automatically then schedules it in my calendar, all just from a little headphone sitting in my ear. And at the same time, it can also translate any conversation I'm having. It can translate into any language in real time. So if I'm talking to someone in a different language, the headphone will just translate headphone will just translate it, right? There's a there's way more applications for that. But like, I got the ethical piece is also coming into play. Like I'm, Is it right that I'm recording every single conversation that I'm having all day? You know? I know we record our zoom calls and we transcribe those and our teams calls, but imagine having that always on and giving you a recap of every single day. That's very powerful to have that, because I can't remember, I think I agree to and said every single day, all day, or give me a summary of some of the ideas that came up during the day, like, it's like things like that. So I'm really, I'm really interested to see you've got all these sort of LLM wearables. You've got rings, you've got necklaces, you've got all sorts of things coming out now. So it's going to be, it's going to be really interesting to see glasses. So a lot of the recent TED talks, anyone listening right now, go, go on TED Talks. Look at the last few TED talks, and you'll notice a lot of the presenters have this black pair of glasses on, and the glasses actually have open AI built in to the glasses. There's many CEOs of large companies that have been wearing these glasses, and I was because I looked at I was like, why are they wearing these glasses? Because I love TED talks, and what in the lenses of the glasses is projecting their teleprompter, so in real time, they can access chat GBT through their glasses, and they look like a normal pair of glasses, and the normal lenses, you can't see it, but there's a tiny little teleprompter that's feeding in all of the notes, any insights that they need in real time whilst they're speaking. So it's getting, it's it's getting crazy. What the technology is out there,
Adam Holton 27:58
yeah, and look, I think, I think some of the examples you gave is what you are doing is a great example of the idea of create a lab mentality, right? Again, going back to mindset, you'll try a bunch of things and, oh, by the way, certainly responsible. Ai, yes, is really important. I'm actually and I don't want to dismiss it. I don't want to sound dismissive as it relates to it, I find like at GE Healthcare, we've got a great team, and we're really putting a lot of time and effort, and it was the foundation that we started with so that we can move faster as we put into it. I'm not actually worried that that's what's going to get in the way, or that's what's going to be a shortcoming. I do worry that when we won't have enough of what you are demonstrating, this idea of, you know, I'm going to try 1000 experiments, small little experiments in a year. Many of them aren't going to really go anywhere. They're not going to pan out, but you're going to find 10 of them that are going to continue to transform the way you run your business? Yeah, and that's really what we are. What we are pushing for at GE Healthcare is for our colleagues to use them in small ways. Increasingly, we are changing our paradigm from Okay, now that you know how to use them in small ways. What are the biggest problems? You know there is a another Mindset piece that within our business that we really try to focus on, which is the idea of, I will have people ask me, What can an LLM do? And I'm my my point back is you're asking the question the wrong way, what can it do? That's true. We should start with a a paradigm that the biggest problems that we deal with on a daily basis, that AI can be a meaningful part of the solution. If you start with that paradigm, you think about it differently. That helps you get to Jarvis versus iterating. We are all wired, I believe. For incremental improvement, and we now have a capability that really screams exponential improvement, but we've got to unlock it. And to your point, it is the mindset piece. What
Chris Rainey 30:13
would you say is the because there's so many HR leaders and companies that are just only just now, believe it or not, starting their AI journey right, better late than never, right to do that. What are the areas and use cases specifically within your HR team that have been the most valuable and that I know you on the journey still, but just for some examples that would be really helpful
Adam Holton 30:39
for everyone? Yeah, look, I think we're we are just getting into the how do you ensure that information that that colleagues, our employees need, is available to them in a way that they go to one place, that they can get the right answer that's personalized for them. They're not spending time waiting for answers to come back, maybe the answer is wrong, but that they get really good information. So we're starting small, as it relates to that, we're taking all of our benefits information in the US and making that available to all of our US, colleagues as sort of a a pilot. As it relates to that, what my concern on that is, is we certainly can do more and faster, but it's got to be right from the beginning, because there's a brand associated. Yeah, if you're going to tell me, I can go to one place and get all of the information that I need, the first two times that I get erroneous information, will I come back? And that's what I'm sort of paranoid as it relates to it, in terms of how important doing that piece is, right? So we're going to start slow, and then layer on top of that, like it's kind of like you probably are young enough that you didn't have to go through this. But I remember when I first started in business, we would have passwords for every different application. Yeah, and I remember when Single Sign On first came about, and there was like a six month like campaign, and everybody was so excited about it, and then we all got our Single Sign On password, except that single sign on only worked for three applications, so single sign on only became another password.
Chris Rainey 32:25
Now, over time, slowly but surely,
Adam Holton 32:27
they added it, but when it first came out, like I said, You got to be kidding me, this isn't single sign on this. So in a similar way, I want to make sure that what's in this is, is, is really done well, that the experience people have so that as we add more knowledge to it, the brand is strong. As relates to that, I think that's number one, number two, coaching, right? You know, we have a view that an LLM right out of the box is a better coach than most humans. That's hard to really that's a paradigm shift. I actually think chat GPT is a better coach than I am. That's hard for me to say that out loud, because you know, so much of what I think a good HR leader and professional does throughout their career is coach other individuals and people to be better leaders. But you know, if you think about, okay, if I'm not coaching, what am I doing? The answer is other higher level problem solving as it relates to and, oh, by the way, there's always going to be a piece, I believe, for humans in the loop as it relates to coaching. But if you think about now the ability for our colleagues to have access 24 by seven to a really solid coach, you know, we're working through some pilots in terms of, how do we use that in career coaching, how do we use that in performance coaching? How do we use that just to make our people better, and problem solving, so lots of of use as it relates to that. And we are now just starting to get into the talent acquisition chain and really thinking about, you know, our recruiters spend anywhere from 30 to 40% of their time on non recruiting, non attraction activities. It's all things that have to be done when you whether you want to talk about interview scheduling, all the administration that goes on with that is, how do we really use AI to rethink taking that off of their plate? Because, quite honestly, AI can do that faster, can do that better, and get to a better solutions as it relates to that, so our recruiters can spend more time really assessing the talent, really helping the talent onboarding before they start onboarding, to truly understand the environment they're walking into, so that as they get in, we shorten that site. Of time between start and full effectiveness?
Chris Rainey 35:03
Yeah, I think, first of all, I think that what you just shared those three areas is kind of also what I'm hearing from most of the community. I think that makes sense, and where we can have the maximize, maximize our value along the way. I've already seen the research, which was quite shocking when I saw it, that most people would rather have an AI coach than actually talk to their manager, which is quite sounds shocking when you hear it, but then kind of okay, I get it. Maybe you don't want to have that relationship with your your manager directly. You'd rather have it externally, and they would prefer an AI which
Adam Holton 35:39
doesn't that doesn't that make sense, though, because I remember when I saw that, I kind of had that belief, but when I started to see some data behind that, it is a little bit shocking, until you sort of Yeah, I think about the most trusting relationships in business I've ever had, and I've been lucky to have some incredible leaders that I've worked for, would I ever share with them everything?
Chris Rainey 36:04
Yeah, no, you're right. It makes sense. It just, I just, it just came around so quickly. I think it's like now I'm seeing so many AI coaching tools that are being deployed, and I've never seen every I got in the space of three days. I can't say to companies, and they don't have to let me get in trouble. But three very large companies, over 100,000 employee each. I interviewed three citros in a week, and they all mentioned an AI coach that they're using, and it was the same vendor, it was the same company. And I was like, Wow, this, this is like, rapidly being deployed in so in so many companies, right? And the thing that I think I'm most excited about everything you just shared, is the capability that we never had before to create a personalized experience. That's the part that we had that now llms allow us to have. It has the context of the individual, and can, for the first time ever, create a truly personalized experience, right? Where, if it's talking about the benefits, it's not just a generic intranet with all of the details, but it's talking about the benefits that are specific to you, and maybe even at the time of life, the time in your life that may it makes sense, right? So it sort of shows up in the moments that matter. To really create similar with learning. We've never been able to create that person, those personalized learning pathways right before. Same with coaching as well, that personalized coach. So I think that's the bit I'm most excited about. Is a personalization piece.
Adam Holton 37:35
Yeah, you know, we have a brilliant HR leader on our team who sent me a note the other day and she said, try this prompt in copilot. And so the prompt essentially was, take a look at all of my emails and tell me what skills I've developed over the course of the last fill in the blank, however long you've been at that company. Justin, yeah, tell me where I need to focus on more and give me suggestions on how I can improve in those areas. Yeah, I did that exercise. I've been back at GE Healthcare for the last year, so it had a year's worth of of emails. What came out of that was incredible, to your point, around from a personalization, and again, this is a generic LLM, straight out of the box. But when you're and you can, you can say asking great questions is the secret in any sort of scenario, but when you have a capability like an LLM that can respond to great questions like that fundamental game changer when you think about personalization of learning and development and and sort of the future. Yeah,
Chris Rainey 38:42
it's so crazy. You just said that because we, we had our advisory board call last night for all of, all of the CHROs who are part of our Atlas copilot advisory, and that was one of the ideas that came from the group, is that we, we've now developed AI learning pathways in Atlas, which kind of builds a customized learning pathway. We're launching it next month, and we were sharing it with with the investors, and they were like, hey, one of the really things we want out is, is, could you share at the end of the learning pathway, combination of the learning pathway, their emails, any search I've ever done that this D, Hey, these are some of the skills and that you've you've developed, because sometimes you don't know, right? Because you're asking questions, you're taking the courses, you don't know what you're learning. But then the second one, I think, which we're missing to add to what you just said, though, is then providing feedback on how to go and use them, right? Because so sometimes we just consume, consume, consume. Now, what we've built, we're building into Atlas, is here are some ways you can go and execute based on what you've just learned. And here are some of the areas, based on your searches, that you can solve problems with these new skills. So I'm excited to see how that evolves. And by the
Adam Holton 39:47
way, think about that through the eyes of our colleagues. Right for years, as we've tried to help support career paths and their learning journeys, the ability I was a high school teacher. Um, prior to coming into the corporate world, and one of the things that I think is the hardest thing as a teacher is to not teach to the middle of a classroom. It's really, really hard to personalize. If you have 30 students in a classroom, each of them have individual needs. You do your very best to try to get to that. But, you know, when I was a teacher in 1998 you know, and I thought I was a good teacher, but it was hard to do more than teach to the middle and so in, you know, sort of corporate learning to the best of where we've tried to personalize learning, it's still to the most of your colleagues, they're looking at what's being brought out there and saying, This feels kind of generic. Yeah, this doesn't feel like me. Now we have the ability to personalize learning for every single person. Yeah, in our in our organization future right now,
Chris Rainey 40:57
have you been sneaking in my calls because I felt like you were on the call yesterday. So the other thing we demonstrated yesterday, and as someone like myself who didn't I struggled in school. I didn't learn how to read until I was 13. I struggled to read and write. And you know, that wasn't my strength. You know, if you asked me to draw or paint a portrait of you, I could do it perfectly at that age. But, you know, I just, but that wasn't rewarded in school. You know, it was the English, maths and science was seen as important, not my creativity. Well. So when we built Atlas and Guillermo, who's my co founder, former chief learning officer for IBM and Boeing, we from the very beginning, we said, we're only going to do this if we could really meet the learner where they're at in the sense that when you first start taking some level setting questions, which is the beginning of the learning pathway. We ask you some questions to see where your level of proficiency is. We also ask you how you would like to learn. So when it generates the learning pathway, if you want it all audio, you're good. You want it all video, you're good. If you want it to be all coaching, where I just have a conversation verbally with Atlas, you're good. And it develops the entire learning pathway based around how you want to learn. And for me, that was a game changer. And it took us a lot longer to develop this. We could have had this probably released a long time ago. We were like, no, look, let's take this opportunity to meet, to meet people where they're at and and make sure that this isn't again, this sort of one size fits all approach where everyone's going to sit there and watch a series of videos and then then take a quiz, and then, you know, go through because that's not how I learn and consume information. And that's going to be, going to be, I think that's going to be a game changer, because with with AI now you can take a piece of research in the in the learning pathway, and say, just turn that into a podcast for me, and it will generate the voice, and you can just listen to it. It's like unbelievable in any language you want. And then what we're doing is then distributing that in the flow of work. So you're actually taking the learning pathways inside of teams and inside of slack in the flow of work. So you're just removing all of the friction that you need there. And we kind of built that a couple of years ago, but we just didn't. The llms just wasn't there yet. And I remember marving Our head of AI calling me a few weeks ago, and Chris, you need to jump on a call with me. And I was like, why? What's going on? Is there something wrong? He's like, no, no, no, it works. And I was like, What do you mean it works? And he literally just plugged in for chat, GPT four, and it just worked. It almost like it was like it was like a movie where it all just worked, and it kind of came to life because we just didn't have we were a bit further, too far ahead, if that makes sense, of what the wider models were right now. And to your point, the reason it works is we are also, LLM agnostic, so underneath the base layer, and I'm sure most companies are doing this now, we're not betting on just one, because each has different capabilities in terms of audio generation, video generation, depending what you want. Atlas actually switches between llms in real time to utilize the best for the task at hand, if that makes sense as well. So yeah, the possibilities are endless.
Adam Holton 43:59
But it also goes back to what we said earlier, which is the idea of mindset, because there are going to be lots of people who are going to take what you just described and they're going to use it to basically make what they have done in the past, on how they teach easier on them, no better for the consumers of that And now, like the the reasons why we've always done learning in the past, the way all of those are out the window. The capabilities are completely different and changed and transformed. But if the mindset doesn't shift, what we will end up with, and we already start to see this a little bit, right? This idea of a Morris law and, you know, sort of technology adoption, there's an over hype cycle, and then that causes an under hype cycle. And we're already seeing, you know, some after that initial Wow, this capabilities are, I've never thought that this was possible to well, this isn't exactly what I thought it was going to be. And is this really what it can. Be so the utilization starts to go down. We've been, I was gonna say lucky. I don't think lucky. It's fortunate. We've had really good utilization, and we're continuing to sort of drive that. And again, I feel really fortunate to work with leaders at GE Healthcare who understand that there's a foundation of experimentation that by by having our colleagues go through that, that sets up the foundation for everything. But there are a lot of people I'm hearing disillusionment in other organizations, because it doesn't quite meet up to that. And my view is, and it's an easy view to have, but you're probably just not asking the right questions. Yeah, it's not the it's not the capabilities, the questions we're asking is the how we're thinking about it's our mindset in terms of how we're thinking about you. But
Chris Rainey 45:47
to your point, lastly, and then we have to wrap up, because I could talk to you forever, I feel like me, and you can always like the adoption thing is interesting, right? Because you see, with a lot of these technologies, there's an initial huge spike, right? Like you're saying, but unless you find ways to embed people's daily tasks and stuff they're doing in the flow work every day into it, they just won't use it. Then maybe we'll check it once every few weeks, and it will kind of slowly decline. I was interviewing Nestle, global, head of it and AI and technology in the studio last week, and I was like, What's the number one question across the 200,000 employees at Nestle that they ask your agent, because the whole company has access to that to their AI agent, you wouldn't believe the answer. The answer was, and this is something they intentionally did, was what's on the menu today, because if they have locations in the office where people obviously can get food, because a lot of people work in in the office. And I was like, why? And I said, Why did you decide to include that in your agent? Because he was like, we found as many ways as possible to bring people back to using the tool every single day. And it sounds silly, right? Like, Well, okay, people want the menu of what's what's been served for lunch in the office. But it's another way that him and the team have found to make sure that every single day people are going back into their into their agent, and he's like, the stickiness that that's created because they're in there, then they ask them more questions, and then they kind of, you know, so it's like, and that's one of many, many they've also integrated the way of, you know, you can book meeting rooms within there. You can see who's in the office. Oh, if I want to travel in today, you know, is Adam gonna be in? Let me check. So you just gotta embed as many things as possible that people will normally are do on a daily basis into it, so that you create that really sticky experience, and they've got crazy utilization rates now, because everyone uses it as their daily companion as well. So that may last sound like a city, city examples, but it just they work and ensure people are using it every day as well. Cool, man. Well, listen, I know I got let you go at some point before I let you go. We covered a lot. What would be your party, buying piece of advice based on everything we discussed, and then, and then we'll say goodbye,
Adam Holton 48:10
yeah, look, I think that, you know, we talked a lot about AI today. And you know, the thing that I would say, you know, we talked about some of the principles we try to use the GE Healthcare, how you're using it which which is just brilliant to me, though, we've got to keep the focus on at the end of the day, we should start with the question of, how do we become exponentially more effective in terms of how we serve and support our colleagues, how we serve and support Our organizations? If we're using it from that paradigm, right? We're not going to go wrong on it in terms of it, but we've got to keep it focused on that. And, you know, look, I really enjoyed the discussion today, Chris again, congratulations on what you've built over the over the years. I really, really appreciate what what you do and what your team does, what it means for our function, and how that's gonna help us to continue to get better as we go through this very exciting future.
Chris Rainey 49:06
Amazing. I appreciate you always taking the time out and giving your time to us, so it means a lot. And yeah, wish you all the best until next week.
Adam Holton 49:13
All right. Sounds good? Yeah. Take care. Thanks. Yeah.
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Adam Holton, CPO at GE Healthcare.