It’s Not Adoption, It’s Reinvention with Zachary Parris

[00:00:02] Welcome back to the Dont Tell Me About Yourself Podcast. We are at the Shaker booth at Unleash America and we are sitting with Zach Parris. Hi Zach. Tell us what company do you work for? What industry are you in? Yeah, absolutely. So I work for Google. That's fairly recent. I started... No big deal. Yeah, I feel like I've heard of that company. I think. They're around. We're around. Started pretty recently but have worked with a lot of different tech companies.

[00:00:28] I'm always on the people team and really have just played at this kind of intersection of product and people and innovating within HR and what HR organizations do at Meta, now at Google, at Atlassian before that. That is amazing. And from what I understand, these views are your own and not Google's. Is that right?

[00:00:52] They are very much so my own and not Google's. I am still pretty new at the organization and so I'm kind of bringing the experience that I have rather than representing the company. Yeah. The disclaimer, flashing on the screen everyone. Big red letters to make sure my COBS folks are okay with it. Well, we're very excited about your personal perspectives. I'm curious to know, is there something about your industry that most people completely misunderstand? Yeah. I mean, I think that everybody's talking about AI, of course. Yeah.

[00:01:22] And I think that what a lot of folks miss is that it really needs to, for HR to be successful in an AI era, it really requires a change in mindset to become product-driven rather than program-driven. Yeah. And so, you know, I grew up in HR. I've worked in HR for the better part of 10, 15 years or so. And my roles have always been defined as kind of owning a program or a process that the company does.

[00:01:50] And today, especially in an AI era, it's so much more about owning the product and building that product and iterating on the product and using AI in ways that non-technical folks like me have never been able to in kind of previous generations of technology. Yeah. And so then what metrics or data do you rely on most now?

[00:02:13] Yeah. It's a great question. You know, some of the most basic ones that I kind of latch onto in an AI era are just usage, right? There are, especially in a world where anybody can code anything, there is no greater voice of endorsement than someone using your product and kind of coming back to it, especially if they don't have to.

[00:02:35] So one example, when I was at Atlassian, I managed a new hire onboarding. And so I built an agent, an AI agent. This is about a year or so ago when that was a little bit more novel. And it became the most used agent within Atlassian, a company that's 80% engineering. And it was built by me and my team of two non-technical folks who grew up in HR.

[00:02:58] Wow. And that was such a strong endorsement of product market fit. There was a real need for new hires to be able to have kind of this virtual onboarding buddy that they could talk to. That's the easiest thing to look at. I think there are lots of other metrics to care about that HR organizations have traditionally looked at. And, you know, in an onboarding space, I thought a lot about time to impact, which I know you guys think about in terms of like hiring efficacy.

[00:03:21] Yeah. But I think the biggest one is just if we're building products, who's using them and what's the value they're getting out of them? Those are the top line metrics. Sure. You had just mentioned a space where AI has helped you in your job and has helped with onboarding. Are there other areas of your business that you've noticed you've implemented AI and it's helped? I've obviously been on the channel. Yes. Do tell. Almost innumerable. So, you know, when I think about like the value that AI can provide,

[00:03:50] I think about it in a couple of different layers. I think about kind of individual and individual productivity. And there it's been enormously transformative for me. I mean, I'm a vibe coder, which is such a cool thing to say. Can I ask you this? I hear that term all the time and I'm ashamed to admit, I don't know what it means. Oh my God, that's such a great question. Yeah, it's fantastic. So it was coined by, I'm going to butcher his name,

[00:04:16] but he was one of the co-founders of OpenAI and he basically was kind of messing around with LLMs and he really, the large language models that underlie AI. Thank you. And he realized that basically instead of writing code like line by line with the symbols and, you know, the kind of thing that like you or I would probably recognize, but not have any idea what it means. The like zeros and ones. Zeros and ones and brackets and code. Yeah, exactly. That sounds really scary. Yeah, I can't. It's totally terrifying. I hurt my brain just thinking about it.

[00:04:44] Yeah, it's terrifying. But actually that's such a good point. I'll kind of come back to it at the end of the story. So he realized that like he doesn't need to write code as much anymore. He can just kind of like describe what he wants in this vibey kind of way and just talk in natural language. And basically the AI was smart enough to figure it out, which is wild. And what happened, he coined the phrase, I think about a year, maybe a year and a half ago now.

[00:05:10] And what's happened is that the AI has gotten smart enough that even in the last week, I was working with Gemini and AI Studio, the Google products. And I was vibe coding and I was like, I want to build this thing. I want to build this product. And I think this is what it needs to do. And it was like, great. And eventually we got to a point of technical where it actually gave me the code. And it said, take this code and kind of put it into this place and kind of run it this way.

[00:05:36] So funnily enough, I touched code for like the first time in my career. And it was that horrifying sequence of zeros and brackets, et cetera. And I was like, oh my God, I hope I don't mess it up. All I have to do is copy and paste and then read it and like it worked, which is great. So that's like vibing. I mean, that's vibing. I do vibe code myself. I'm just constantly, she just, Lerner just witnessed it over there. I was just talking into my AI. I was like, blah, blah, blah. Give me this. Give me that. So I feel like that's what you're talking about. This is what I want to do. Yes. Okay, I love it.

[00:06:05] And let's get the code and put it somewhere. Yeah. Because I can't build it. I wanted to ask you. Yeah. So we're thinking, we're here at Unleash shaping, I think, you know, HR in the future and whatnot is kind of the theme of the event. And I'm curious, like from your perspective, what's the number one thing that talent leaders need to know going into the year ahead besides the definition of vibe coding? Wow.

[00:06:33] I mean, there is so much that needs to be on folks' radar. You know, I think that there are a few things. I just think that a lot of leaders, especially like in the last 10 and 15 years, folks have seen a lot of different waves of technological change and transformation. I remember when like digital was such a thing and we were doing ERP implementations.

[00:06:58] And this, the technology around AI is so fundamentally different. Its capabilities are so incredibly novel. The rate of change is so high and the pace is so high that in some ways it's kind of an equalizer. So if I'm a talent leader right now, what I would really be thinking about is how am I personally using AI to understand what it's capable of?

[00:07:26] And then how am I empowering my teams to go off and build and create and innovate and make products on the back of that? But it is both individual and organizational. And I think being able to do both is a real call to action for any talent leader for this year. I love that. It's like giving people space to have creativity. I mean, because without creativity, you can't learn about how these can possibly impact your business. That is fantastic. And like what you're saying kind of goes along with the trend that I've seen all over social.

[00:07:55] There was that viral McDonald's video where the CEO of McDonald's was like, everyone's like he was eating it for the first time. And it's been crazy. So people have been like, I'd like to see, you know, the CEO of this company go through his own application process. Right. So I hear what you're saying is like leaders need to be doing it themselves, getting their hands dirty and like actually doing these things versus being on the outside, which I think is really important. So that's such a great point. Yeah. In a moment of uncertainty, like being able to go back to first principles and just like

[00:08:24] hands on experience, I just think is imperative. And like we are at a rethink everything first principles moment. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We've very much learned hearing about your personal perspectives and where can our listeners find more of your personal perspectives? Sure. I am on LinkedIn, as I'm sure most folks are. And I do post semi-regularly. That's probably going to be the best place. I have a couple of things on YouTube, but LinkedIn's best for us. All right. Well, good. Well, thank you so much for your time today. We just hope you enjoy the rest of the conference.

[00:08:53] Absolutely. I will. Thank you both for hosting me. Appreciate it.