AI's Role in HR Tech, with Oracle's Nagaraj Nadendla

[00:00:00] Welcome to PeopleTech, the podcast of workforceai.news. I'm Mark Vefor.

[00:00:18] Today, I chat with Nagaraj Nadendla, Senior Vice President of Product Development at Oracle.

[00:00:24] We're going to talk about some features that were recently added to Oracle Fees and CloudHCM,

[00:00:29] the thinking behind them in AIs role in HR Tech in general, all on this edition of PeopleTech.

[00:00:37] Hi Nagaraj, welcome!

[00:00:38] Now, Oracle recently added a bunch of capabilities to Oracle Fusion and CloudHCM.

[00:00:45] And I'm curious about what was the thinking behind it? What were these meant to do?

[00:00:54] So, if the references to the two announcements that we made to the market,

[00:01:01] these are critical capabilities that we worked on and making available to the market.

[00:01:08] One is what we're calling activity centers, and the activity centers are intended to enhance productivity,

[00:01:16] deliver a much more consumer-oriented experience for various roles within that interact with CloudHCM in particular.

[00:01:25] Recruiting activity center for people who live in the recruiting function within any organization.

[00:01:32] Employee activity center as an employee interact with CloudHCM and for a variety of needs.

[00:01:38] Likewise, managers that manage a team, you know, they're monitoring, interacting, they're managing performance,

[00:01:47] they're ensuring that their team is going through learning and development activities.

[00:01:51] So, you know, it's a single location for them to manage the team.

[00:01:55] And similar to recruiting activity center for payroll, you know, payroll specialists are in the product,

[00:02:01] in the experience on an ongoing basis daily.

[00:02:05] So making them productive, delivering the kind of experiences they...

[00:02:10] that the activities they undertake on a regular basis daily to help them with those,

[00:02:16] that's the intent of the activity centers.

[00:02:18] These functions are generally available. This is to bring it all together to make them much more productive.

[00:02:24] So that's the first announcement.

[00:02:26] The second one is we have invested in candidate experiences, you know, as part of a recruiting set of functionality

[00:02:37] that we deliver to market. That's part of CloudHCM.

[00:02:41] One of the big investments and we have a plethora of partnerships.

[00:02:44] We manage a very broad set of partnerships across different categories like background checks, assessments,

[00:02:52] work-art opportunity tax credits and others.

[00:02:56] This is a new category that we opened up, which is what we're calling direct apply where candidates,

[00:03:03] if they're in LinkedIn or Indeed or you know, and these are well known names across the globe,

[00:03:09] but they're also regional names like bait in the Middle East and for healthcare Vivian.

[00:03:14] So if candidates are on those platforms and, you know, they're interacting, they're browsing opportunities,

[00:03:21] they're engaged, you know, for various reasons.

[00:03:25] If they see an opportunity that gets pushed to them or referred to them,

[00:03:29] they can directly apply from that experience so that they don't need to navigate to the career sites,

[00:03:36] go through the whole process.

[00:03:38] Customers can quickly capture that information so it allows them to build, you know, broader talent pool

[00:03:44] that expands the addressable talent for customers and it's a great experience for candidates.

[00:03:50] So those are the two announcements that we made broadly.

[00:03:56] Now when I was reading the announcements, I kept thinking about journeys which you introduced a few years ago.

[00:04:02] They seem to be following a similar path of helping shepherd users down the path that they need to go.

[00:04:12] Do I have that right? I mean, is that something you're looking at doing across the platform?

[00:04:17] Absolutely. Journeys is, you know, it's a way to guide an end user to a variety of activities.

[00:04:23] It could be a journey that launches an employee to, it could be a pre-boarding journey to take a candidate

[00:04:31] and, you know, convert them to an employee. There's a set of things, activities that they undertake.

[00:04:37] Likewise, you know, it could be a learning and development journey.

[00:04:40] So for distinct users, allowing them to navigate and, you know, have an easier path,

[00:04:47] much easier way to understand the set of things they need to do.

[00:04:50] So from that perspective, it's absolutely complementary.

[00:04:55] You know, as an employee, what do I need to act on on a regular basis?

[00:04:58] Information that I typically seek as a team manager, what are the things I need to be monitoring

[00:05:05] and, you know, things I need to undertake.

[00:05:07] And of course, there's the specialist roles, recruiters and payroll specialists.

[00:05:12] So it is along those lines, absolutely.

[00:05:17] How does this fit?

[00:05:20] And when I say this, I mean the Fusion Cloud HCM most.

[00:05:24] Excuse me. How do these fit with Oracle broadly?

[00:05:30] As a general rule of thumb, you know, if you think about some of the investments,

[00:05:36] Mark, you know, I hope you've heard of the investments we're making across FA,

[00:05:43] not just cloud HCM but across Fusion applications from a user experience perspective.

[00:05:49] There's a Redwood design system that we've invested in over the last few years.

[00:05:54] Functionalities are being made available and, you know, all the activity centers, by the way,

[00:05:58] are part of that Redwood design system to enhance productivity and to improve the experiences for various users.

[00:06:05] So, broadly it fits into that.

[00:06:07] There's also aspects of automation, AI and other elements that are being woven into this,

[00:06:14] you know, both classic and now generative AI capabilities.

[00:06:20] So I wanted to step back and ask you about AI in general.

[00:06:24] But thinking about AI, what do you think it's bringing to HR technology right now?

[00:06:30] I mean, is it being oversold or are there really new capabilities coming in?

[00:06:36] It is reshaping the experiences for various users and how things get done in many different ways.

[00:06:44] It's real. It's happening as we speak.

[00:06:48] You know, it's in the consumer world when we, you know, you go to Google and you write an email

[00:06:55] or even now in the corporate world, you know, it's part of whether it's Microsoft

[00:07:00] or other technologies that you use, Office 365 suggestions, you know,

[00:07:05] assisted authoring these capabilities are now part of the day-to-day experiences we have.

[00:07:11] So if you think about AI, both classic and generative, you know, these are,

[00:07:18] some of the classic capabilities are already part of the rhythm with which we work today.

[00:07:25] And generative is enhancing the experience even further.

[00:07:28] So whether it's prediction suggestions, assisted authoring, summarization,

[00:07:34] these are all capabilities users experience today that they're getting better and better

[00:07:40] with the advent of, you know, generative AI and LLMs.

[00:07:44] And were these capabilities being requested by customers?

[00:07:52] Or did you see the capabilities when you saw the technology and decided to build products around that?

[00:07:58] In other words, are these new capabilities based on AI?

[00:08:02] Are they customer-driven or technology-driven?

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[00:09:04] I think it's a combination of both.

[00:09:06] If you think about enterprise automation, take a step back.

[00:09:10] There were rules driven automation initially. These were qualified rules.

[00:09:15] If you think about, I'll use a recruiting example.

[00:09:20] I'll use as an example something that happens in recruiting.

[00:09:24] You can apply rules to, you're taking thousands of applications.

[00:09:27] You can apply rules where candidates can be scored based on pre-screening questions

[00:09:34] or other types of questions.

[00:09:36] And if customers historically have used some codified rules that each organization has

[00:09:46] to determine who they want to proceed with or who they don't want to proceed ahead with,

[00:09:50] to the next stage, maybe a phone call, maybe an interview, et cetera.

[00:09:54] It started with that. And that applies in workflow as well, right?

[00:09:59] Various workflows then moved to classic AI where certain models were created, handcrafted,

[00:10:06] such as your prediction that says if you create a rack, how much time does it take

[00:10:14] or predictive models about attrition and other things.

[00:10:18] These were based on algorithms.

[00:10:20] Models were created and they were applied.

[00:10:22] Now with LLMs, assisted authoring.

[00:10:25] So the natural evolution, there are in our customer base and in any case,

[00:10:33] take a step back and look at the spectrum.

[00:10:35] There's always leading organizations, thinkers and leading organizations that ideate with us.

[00:10:41] But there's also technology that enables us to do things.

[00:10:44] For example, the bots that enabled interaction still recently,

[00:10:50] they had to be codified.

[00:10:53] There was learning that was introduced into the bots,

[00:10:57] but with LLMs that goes away, it becomes a lot more easier interaction

[00:11:01] because the LLMs understand the human interactions much easier.

[00:11:07] So some of it is technology, some of it is definitely customer driven,

[00:11:11] but from our perspective, we're always looking at how do we continue to evolve

[00:11:17] and deliver a better experience for the end users that interact with a cloud at CM

[00:11:21] and a feign general.

[00:11:23] So then you get to the cost of all of this.

[00:11:26] I mean, this is very heavy duty development that you're talking about here.

[00:11:32] So Microsoft treats a lot of its AI products as premiums in Office 365, for example.

[00:11:42] How does Oracle view it?

[00:11:44] Are these changes, are they premium changes or are they just making the underlying system better?

[00:11:51] They're making the underlying system better.

[00:11:55] In a nutshell, that's how we view this.

[00:11:58] What do you think of...

[00:12:00] It strikes me that if we were back in the 80s or 90s in the PC era

[00:12:06] and Dell was out there saying, by our computers it runs on MS-DOS or has MS-DOS.

[00:12:16] That's kind of what we're doing today with AI, isn't it?

[00:12:20] We're sort of talking about an underlying system but talking about it as a product

[00:12:24] or am I being too simplistic?

[00:12:27] Maybe perhaps a little bit of both.

[00:12:30] I think if you again take a step back, the rules-based automation that was introduced

[00:12:36] it got into our DNA as end users and nobody talks about that anymore.

[00:12:42] I think because it's top of mind more recently with LLM being introduced

[00:12:46] and Genitive AI and Classic AI to a certain extent to solve discrete problems.

[00:12:53] I think it's top of mind now but fast forward three to five years

[00:12:57] when we have another conversation mark, I think it'll be part of the experience

[00:13:03] and people don't think twice about it.

[00:13:07] It's topical right now just because it's top of mind for all of us.

[00:13:12] What are your customers saying?

[00:13:14] What's the feedback that you're getting?

[00:13:17] Very positive.

[00:13:19] The feedback, the best way to solicit...

[00:13:22] The best indicator of feedback and we have not only direct interactions with customers

[00:13:29] like we are doing today but as we make these feature functionalities available to customers

[00:13:35] organically they're turning it on, they're evaluating, they're rolling the feature sets into production.

[00:13:42] To me that's a great indicator of adoption.

[00:13:45] This is with very little interaction with us, very little active engagement with them.

[00:13:54] Customers are looking for when is Oracle making these available

[00:13:57] and they're actively enabling and taking advantage of the capabilities we're delivering.

[00:14:04] Thank you very much.

[00:14:06] It was great to talk with you.

[00:14:08] I really appreciate your views and hope you'll come back once we can talk some more.

[00:14:13] Absolutely. Look forward to having a follow on conversation as technology,

[00:14:20] AI technologies get deployed by customers.

[00:14:23] We're amazed at how customers find creative ways in leveraging the capabilities we deliver

[00:14:29] so as more and more of that happens, happy to come back and share some of the success stories.

[00:14:36] Great. I look forward to it. Thank you.

[00:14:38] My guest today has been Nagraj Nadev, Senior Vice President of Product Development at Oracle

[00:14:55] and this has been People Tech, the podcast of WorkforceAI.News.

[00:15:00] We're also a part of the Work Defined Podcast Network.

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[00:15:18] Find us at www.workforceai.news.a Mark Beffer.