AI Isn’t Terminator, It’s Avatar with Peter Lynch

[00:00:02] Welcome back to the Dont Tell Me About Yourself Podcast. We are at Unleash America at the Shaker booth and we are sitting with Peter Lynch. Peter, tell us a little bit about your role and what industry you're in. Yeah, so I'm the Chief People Officer. I have a unique role in that I own HR and IT. So I own both functions and I work for Cardinal Group Companies. We're in real estate, multifamily, mainly student housing.

[00:00:26] So think off-campus, college kids living. We have about 120,000 kids who live in our dorms, if you will, off-campus housing. Yeah, that's amazing. What's something about your industry that most people completely misunderstand? Oh, wow. I think just, you know, how hard it is for us to create a living experience that's meaningful for a student. You think, you know, they're getting all of their meaning through college and actually where they live is the community they're most connected with.

[00:00:55] That's a really great point. When you said that you cover HR and technology, I mean, those are two individual massive jobs. So I'm kind of curious to know, where is AI delivering value in your business from your technology side? I mean, it's in a million areas right now. One of the reasons we brought those groups together is I actually, and my talk later today is on why CHROs should be the next CTO.

[00:01:20] I actually think the heads of tech should be the people who are the culture warriors and the culture champions. And so for us, AI has really helped us because we are doing it with a people-first, culture-first mentality. Not that we want to eliminate humans, but that we want to empower humans. Yeah. And we don't want to lose our soul in the process of winning at business. Yeah. Is there a space that you've noticed so far that you refuse to automate?

[00:01:49] That's a great question. I mean, I think kind of the last mile related to client, like really key client interaction. Yeah. Like we're automating a lot. We're automating, you know, follow-ups, notes from meetings, different things like that. But that personal touch, that last mile of how do you make a client and a resident experience meaningful? I don't want to automate that. Yeah. That makes sense. Keeping the humans a part of that human process.

[00:02:17] I wanted to ask you, we've been talking to a few leaders today. And one thing that a lot of folks have hit on is that individually with AI, we're making a lot of strides, right? People are getting more comfortable using it to create efficiencies and everything. But maybe there's a gap in the enterprise, right? Where it's not connecting to all the other people that are individually doing the same thing. I'm curious, like with your CTO and CHRO role, how does that show up for you? I assume you might see some synergies. Without a doubt.

[00:02:45] And we, you know, I had a call with Mercer the other day and we were talking about our monthly active and daily active users on generative AI. And our monthly active users right now are 72% of our organization. Our daily active users daily is nearly 30%. And they're like, this is best in class. Like we're not seeing companies at that level. Now why? Because we've approached it from a human first methodology. And I always say to me, AI is not a robot. Everyone thinks it's Terminator. I'm like, don't think of Terminator.

[00:03:15] Think of Avatar. It's exoskeleton. It actually is designed to make you even better than, you know, you are. So this is not about replacing you. This is about enhancing you. Yeah. Yeah. That's the title for the episode right there. I love that line. It's not about replacing you. Yeah. Oh my gosh. It's so good. You're soothing a lot of people's souls with this, you know? And the exoskeleton piece. I love that. Yeah. And I'll talk today in my talk about that.

[00:03:43] You know, I'll share what is, you know, what is the brilliance of humanity that we cannot lose? Yeah. And it's funny. We were talking about this the other day. Is this a reinvention? And I said, I don't like that word. Some of what we're doing is true invention. Yeah. But to me, it's a reimagination. Now, what does that mean? If you're at the strip here and you go to the sphere, what is playing there right now? The Wizard of Oz. Yeah. That is not reinvention. That's reimagination.

[00:04:09] They reimagined a classic into the modern world and now people are loving it. Right. I've been in when the apples fall from the sky. It is a transformative experience. So you're so right. Oh my gosh. It's so good. Just a shameless plug for that. Yeah. Yeah, it was great. That's awesome. So you mentioned, you know, you're giving a talk later and we are talking a lot about like the future, right? The year ahead. So I'm curious, like, what do you think, like, what is the number one thing?

[00:04:37] And talent leaders need to know going into the year ahead? Man, a great one is, you know, we've talked a lot about skills and how skills play. And the focus on skills has been about skills training. I think the game changer in skills is skills-based hiring and skills-based assessment. So what does that mean? LinkedIn did a study and said, if you look for candidates based on skill as opposed to job title, you will increase your talent pool by 15.9% or times.

[00:05:05] Like you epically create a lot. Why? Because there are adjacent organizations and entities that have roles, but they don't look like yours. So people don't find them. Example for us in multifamily is hospitality. Why aren't we looking? It's the same skill set. They're dealing with a resident. You know, their resident lives shorter periods of time than ours. It's still a resident. Yeah, that's number one. And number two is we're attacking skills related to AI automation at a skill level. And here's why not at a job level.

[00:05:34] We're automating skills because we don't want to eliminate humans. What we want to do is we want to take some things off their plate and then say, can we expand the ratio so that we don't have to fire people? We can do it over time. Number one, or can we add something higher level to their work so they have a greater impact? So I think the skill focus is on hiring. I think the skill focus is on AI automation. Oh, we love to hear that. Hiring's our jam.

[00:06:01] So hearing that is soothing to our soul because I think what we're experiencing too is a lot of companies and leaders are getting a little more lax with that because it is an employer's market, right? Yeah. So you tend to get a little more cocky with it, right? Like they're just going to come to us. Like it's, you know, I don't need to be expanding my searches. I'm overwhelmed with the searches I have. And it's like, well, but are you getting the right people? So to your point, expanding for the skill versus the job title, because as we all know, so many job titles are made up.

[00:06:30] It's like, what even is that? And they're different across the board. So that's really great. Nice. Yeah. Thank you. And then where can people find you, your information? Yeah. So on my social media accounts, whether it's Insta or TikTok is RealPeterLynch. And on LinkedIn, it's RealPeterLynch too, but you can search Peter Lynch, Cardinal Group Companies, and you'll be able to find me. That's fantastic. Best of luck on your speech today. You're going to nail it. This is the content. I mean, you're going to absolutely nail it.

[00:06:59] And we hope you enjoy the rest of the conference. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.