MeBeBot's Beth White on Why HR and IT Should be Friends

[00:00:00] Welcome to PeopleTech, the podcast of WorkforceAI.News. I'm Mark Pfeffer. Beth White is my guest today. She's the founder and CEO of MeBeBot, an AI assistant that streamlines self-service so HR can focus on other work.

[00:00:28] We're going to look at a relationship that doesn't get a lot of attention but should, the one between HR and IT, why HR should give it special attention, and thoughts on how they can best work together. That and more on this edition of PeopleTech. Hey Beth, it's good to see you.

[00:00:45] I wanted to talk about AI and HR, but spend some time looking at sort of the technology area and the work with IT. AI is changing a lot of dynamics in HR. I'm wondering, how has it impacted the relationship between IT and HR?

[00:01:09] You know, it's interesting that all the years I spent in HR and now working with companies that are HR individuals as well as their IT team, there's always been a great relationship between those two teams.

[00:01:23] They work together a lot to onboard, bring employees into the organization, and to help support them along the way. They're both focused on the same customer, which is the employee, right, at the end of the day.

[00:01:35] What's really changing now in the era of AI is that, frankly, HR has been sort of left behind a little bit because IT teams started to get wind that AI is coming.

[00:01:48] They started to do more experimentation with it themselves.

[00:01:51] And now what's happening and I'm seeing in companies is that IT is making buying decisions for employee-centric solutions in behalf of HR when sometimes HR is not even aware of that happening.

[00:02:05] And so my kind of verbiage that I put out there to the market is HR, get involved, be part of decisions that are being incorporated with inside all aspects of the business that impact employees.

[00:02:21] Make sure your voices are heard because the requirements that HR has and can be leveraged beneficially from AI is often very unique.

[00:02:33] And these are requirements that often other people in the business don't understand.

[00:02:37] And I'll give you a brief example.

[00:02:39] It's things like employees have different benefits in different countries.

[00:02:44] They may be on different payroll systems.

[00:02:46] Labor laws differ.

[00:02:48] Even in the U.S., that can be different in states.

[00:02:51] And when you look at the IT lens on an equation of employee support, for example, they may be thinking of questions they ask employees ask of IT, which I call more black and white.

[00:03:05] And when you look at the kinds of questions and needs that employees have from the HR, benefits, payroll side of things, they are often very gray and they are very much specific based on where a person lives and what's particular to that individual.

[00:03:21] And so these are some of these types of requirements that IT may not be aware of if they're given free reign to make decisions in the company to purchase solutions that benefit the employees.

[00:03:32] So HR, get involved, be part of your steering committees if they're happening with inside your organizations, or just start experimenting with AI so that your company understands that you have needs and that there may be different requirements that they're not aware of.

[00:03:51] Is that really a new dynamic?

[00:03:53] I mean, wasn't IT going off and buying their own solutions before and then telling HR about it later?

[00:04:00] They were, but I do think there was a turning point when more of the cloud-based HR products came into market.

[00:04:09] You know, things like rewards and recognition systems, applicant tracking tools, and even human capital tools.

[00:04:16] These were never things that IT bought for themselves.

[00:04:20] A lot of times they're buying their own IT support ticketing system.

[00:04:24] Sure, they may have purchased that, but when you're looking at tools that HR used, I know in my role when I was in HR years ago, you know, I created my own requirements document, and I made sure that IT was a part of some of those meetings in vetting vendors.

[00:04:41] You know, I did want them to be part of, you know, seeing solutions, especially if they had to support them.

[00:04:48] But I do feel like there was a lot of control being given to HR to make purchasing and buying decisions for technology for many years.

[00:04:56] But with AI, it's starting to change a little bit.

[00:05:00] Now, what about within HR itself?

[00:05:03] Has AR really changed HR's work itself?

[00:05:08] I mean, it has.

[00:05:10] I mean, there's a lot of solutions that HR teams have been using that have embedded AI in them today that sometimes they were not even aware of was there.

[00:05:21] So examples are different ways that potential products that they had purchased were helping them do analytics, surfacing insights and information of things that are happening at their business, or even in assisting in report generation.

[00:05:36] So there's a couple different areas.

[00:05:38] A lot of the areas of hiring and recruiting and sourcing talent, you know, even the beginnings of, you know, parsing technology and ATS solutions was the beginnings of AI starting to take over levels of automation.

[00:05:52] So they have been leveraging this technology.

[00:05:56] Now they just want to know more how it works, which I think is very awesome and very beneficial to learn what's exactly happening behind the scenes so that they understand how to control the potential algorithms that they may be able to impact in order to, for example, surface candidates that are actually what they're looking for within a particular process.

[00:06:22] And how do you think that's going to play out over time?

[00:06:26] I mean, you know, right now, most of the emphasis about AI is on efficiency and doing more with less, basically.

[00:06:36] Do you think that's going to change?

[00:06:39] And is that going to further evolve HR's role and HR's work?

[00:06:45] Absolutely.

[00:06:46] Absolutely.

[00:06:46] I do think that HR's work is going to change dramatically over the years.

[00:06:51] There have been a lot of factors within the role of HR that have been very manual and administrative and, frankly, deserved a little disruption in the areas of automating and creating operational efficiencies.

[00:07:05] What really needs to happen is a mentality shift in HR to understand without spending time, for example, manually reminding new hires to complete paperwork or to collect information in different ways from individuals.

[00:07:23] If it's more automated with the usage of new technologies that help you do actual tasks and complete work processes, there's going to be more time to focus on other aspects that HR, frankly, always put on the back burner.

[00:07:40] Things like how do you help career develop the individuals with inside the organization?

[00:07:45] What's the process of mapping people for different types of opportunities within organizations?

[00:07:52] Even embracing concepts of skills and where different applicable needs are within the organization and having more fluidity there.

[00:08:03] That's one huge area of opportunity, as well as learning and development.

[00:08:07] I mean, we always want to do more to develop our people, but yet there's been a lot of friction in that process to do so.

[00:08:15] So these are just a few examples of where more time will be spent.

[00:08:20] And then even in those areas, that's where AI can even impact the areas of even like, say, learning and development and sending employees automatically micro trainings based on them completing other types of trainings in the past, for example.

[00:08:36] Now, do you think that HR is approaching this the right way?

[00:08:43] I look at a lot of articles and talk to people, and it seems that HR is trying to tailor their needs and what they do to the capabilities of AI, as opposed to looking at the capabilities of AI and saying, oh, we can do this better.

[00:09:03] Which do you think is the driving force there?

[00:09:07] I mean, that's a good question because I don't, it's almost a little bit of a, I have a different philosophy, which is, I think people just need to look at themselves and the roles with inside the company and start to analyze what they do and how much time they spend on different things.

[00:09:22] And the opportunity cost to things that weren't getting done.

[00:09:26] Because there's a combination of both technology and just how we do things.

[00:09:32] And if you have North Stars, I always call it North Stars, like where's the department of HR within your organization headed?

[00:09:39] What do you want to accomplish?

[00:09:40] If it is your goal to attract better talent into the organization so you can get people in and retain them for longer, which is always one major goal of many companies.

[00:09:52] Then starting to dissect that and starting to look at what do you do today?

[00:09:58] What about what you're doing today is working?

[00:10:00] What's not working?

[00:10:01] What aspects of that are time consuming?

[00:10:04] What's more streamlined to figuring out, you know, is this an opportunity for an AI technology to come in?

[00:10:11] Or is this just an opportunity to improve a process?

[00:10:13] So I think it's about rethinking work.

[00:10:17] It's rethinking the work that we do with inside our roles within HR and, again, not losing sight of the North Star, which is we're providing, you know, we're providing the people power within organizations.

[00:10:31] And these people are brought in to perform certain tasks.

[00:10:36] And when everyone works in unison together, the company ultimately succeeds.

[00:10:42] So if that's one of the ultimate goals of HR teams, it's how do you deconstruct that a bit in order to understand how you can leverage different aspects of AI and automation to help you along the way?

[00:10:55] And if you're HR, how do you factor the employees in?

[00:10:59] Because obviously they have a role in all this, too.

[00:11:02] But are you listening to their demands or are you trying to map out better processes for them?

[00:11:09] Or is it a combination?

[00:11:11] I think it's a combination.

[00:11:13] I think it's absolutely an opportunity to listen to employees because just like, you know, there is some fear with HR on AI and how to leverage it within their roles.

[00:11:23] Employees are also concerned.

[00:11:25] You know, what, how am I utilizing this AI product that you're enabling for me?

[00:11:32] What's the benefit gain to me?

[00:11:34] And then again, they also are looking for if this is something that's making my job easier, what's my opportunity to do something different?

[00:11:43] And so that's a big piece that's very hard to get hands around right now because a lot of companies haven't quite thought through.

[00:11:54] What does an org chart of the future look like at their organization two, three years from now?

[00:12:00] Right.

[00:12:00] How do those roles that they once hired, how are they changing?

[00:12:05] What do you want out of the people that are in those current roles today?

[00:12:09] And how can you get employees excited about leveraging some AI, even if it may mean that there are fewer of those individuals in those roles in the future, which may mean the organization just chooses not to replace attrition headcount, for example.

[00:12:26] And, you know, some other organizations I know are looking at reductions and that can't be not talked about because it's happening.

[00:12:34] And CEOs at the top are looking at that along with their boards and their CFOs.

[00:12:40] I mean, that's what they want to do is reduce labor costs, frankly.

[00:12:44] But where's the balance?

[00:12:46] And I think there's a huge opportunity for balance in developing people to do what we're always going to need people to do, more of the true cognitive skills that are required within organizations that won't go away.

[00:12:59] But then there's also this huge opportunity to upskill people with inside companies for the future of work, which will likely be working alongside AI technologies, whether it's an assistant, chatbot, agent, whatever you want to call it.

[00:13:16] We will all have these partners that we will team up with to do our work in the future.

[00:13:24] And how is that impacting the working relationship between employers and in the workforce or HR in the workforce?

[00:13:35] You know, I believe, you know, and again, I'm just one individual, one opinion.

[00:13:41] I think there's some tense, tense aspects out there.

[00:13:44] And I don't I I see that I hear it from people.

[00:13:47] You know, my job's going to get replaced by AI and how should I why should I even want to help this?

[00:13:54] And it's not unlike and many futurists have described the same phenomenon happening in the age of the industrial revolution and machinery and and eras of different of all evolution, even the Internet coming about and and doing things to change jobs.

[00:14:14] So this is a very major moment that we're in time.

[00:14:17] And so I do think that there's there's tense, you know, tense conversations happening between, you know, the employees and the employers these days and the more forthcoming everyone can be but also be grounded in reality.

[00:14:33] Yes, you can look at Gartner or other research and supposedly, you know, two, two years from now, every one of us will be working alongside an AI agent.

[00:14:45] Well, they also said that years ago about AI chatbots.

[00:14:48] Right. So we have to kind of temper the excitement against the reality.

[00:14:53] And if we can get more education out there, I do think individuals with inside companies would be able to see that their employer is going to be providing new opportunities with them that may be different than what they do.

[00:15:07] But hopefully get them excited about where their job and their transformation is shaping.

[00:15:14] But again, right now we're in a still a moment of what is this?

[00:15:18] How is this going to work and how does it impact me personally, which is always fundamental in human kind of nature?

[00:15:26] You know, I want to double back to HR and IT for a second.

[00:15:31] The question just occurs to me, how I asked you how the relationship is changing between IT and HR.

[00:15:40] But I want to dig a little deeper and ask about the personal aspects of it, the team aspects.

[00:15:47] In other words, are HR folks working more closely with IT folks now because this is so fundamental, an effort, you know, a technology effort that really is going to impact the way that HR works?

[00:16:05] I do not see that.

[00:16:07] I do not see them working in tandem with each other as much as I think they should.

[00:16:11] In fact, I've had conversations with individuals where they'll be very excited about the solution of Mebebot in HR.

[00:16:21] And then when they talk to their IT counterparts, they've found that they're, you know, behind, meaning that IT may have moved forward with something else without even conferring with them.

[00:16:32] And so this is the problem that I'm seeing happening with inside organizations.

[00:16:38] I don't know where the root cause of that is today.

[00:16:43] I don't know if it's because many companies have started to centralize budgets on IT, you know, in IT for all AI purchases.

[00:16:54] In fact, due to the needs for InfoSec reviews on products, as well as the role of chief information security officer, they've become the gateway to start to source and vet a lot of the AI technologies that are being used with inside companies, primarily because many of them don't fit the cut, don't make the cut.

[00:17:19] They don't make the cut because they haven't built a solution that's mindful to the security needs the company has.

[00:17:26] And instead of wasting people's time, I think IT just believes that they can vet people or companies out before they even surface to other individuals and they spend cycles on it.

[00:17:38] So I do hear from the IT folks as well saying they're not quite happy with that either because their workload has dramatically increased and they've become this gatekeeper for the rest of the company, which is not always the best place for them to be.

[00:17:55] But they do have the budget. So the companies are always mindful that they're not doubling down on two different solutions like finance buying a solution and HR buying a solution that really do the same thing.

[00:18:09] And so IT has been stuck in the middle to mitigate double purchases of technologies.

[00:18:16] If you're an HR leader, how do you address all that? I mean, how do you sort of calm the waters of that relationship so it can be as productive as it can be?

[00:18:28] You know, one way that I've seen companies succeed when this type of, you know, frenzy is going on.

[00:18:36] It reminds me a lot of the cloud era of SaaS software and everyone could start buying small technologies that were at lower price points and flip a switch with a credit card and have a new product.

[00:18:48] It became sort of a nightmare for IT to manage after a while because everyone had such an ease of buying technology.

[00:18:57] And so with this gateway approach right now, what I believe I see being most successful is when companies create committees or steering committees or steering groups where they invite the key stakeholders from several different departments together to talk and share what their particular needs are.

[00:19:17] Like we're looking for solutions that help us solve X, Y, and Z.

[00:19:22] And so it's almost like gathering business requirements as a whole together as a company to see, is there a singular technology that will help many departments across the business?

[00:19:34] Or is the need that HR has particular, you need to just HR and yes, HR, go ahead and pursue that because none of the other groups have a need like that.

[00:19:44] So getting this collective grouping together, I think is a great approach today.

[00:19:49] And I'm seeing more and more companies do that.

[00:19:53] These aren't small transformations that we're talking about here.

[00:19:57] No, they are not.

[00:19:58] Yeah.

[00:19:59] AI is like really getting into the fundamentals of business.

[00:20:04] And I'm wondering, do you think there are hidden risks for HR in its use of AI?

[00:20:14] Well, absolutely.

[00:20:15] I mean, that's one of the things that we talk a lot about at MeBeBot is just what to be aware of.

[00:20:20] Because in learning AI solutions, it can be as easy as when ChatGPT came out and there's just a simple little prompt window.

[00:20:31] And you say, create a blog post on this topic or write a job description about this.

[00:20:38] And the next thing you know, you have something amazing.

[00:20:40] But what people are starting to do is I call it peel back the layers of an onion.

[00:20:46] They're starting to try to uncover, well, what made that simple AI solution present this job description to me in a way that was pretty good?

[00:20:57] But what could I do to make it better?

[00:20:59] And so I do think there's an opportunity to start to learn what's happening with inside the system.

[00:21:05] And when you start to learn what happens inside the system, you might also start to uncover things like, for example, ChatGPT or OpenAI solutions were trained on what they could consume from the internet up until about 2022.

[00:21:22] I believe it was 2022 timeframe.

[00:21:24] So it doesn't know a lot of things that may be unique to your business, meaning you had never had access to your policies or procedures or anything you do because that wasn't for public consumption.

[00:21:36] But by knowing that and maybe even knowing that you're writing a job description for an AI engineer or prompt engineer, that might not have existed in the past.

[00:21:45] And so it might not be so good at that.

[00:21:46] So just uncovering what's happening in it, but then also learning where the risks are in biases and things that the AI can do to make some assumptions without human supervision or guidance.

[00:22:02] And that is that whole area of learning how prompts are going to get you what you want and how prompts can deviate.

[00:22:10] You can also learn concepts about things called hallucinations.

[00:22:14] And then you can also learn concepts about things called guardrails, which helps us hone content to get it into more of a way or information that has some checks and balances in it.

[00:22:26] And coming from a background of HR, I know we're always very mindful of compliance and needs.

[00:22:33] And so to ask the good questions like, how does this AI know to do this?

[00:22:38] What if I'm not liking the results or how do I trust in it?

[00:22:41] Those are all very valid questions that people should be asking when they're leveraging any of these types of technologies.

[00:22:50] Well, Beth, thanks very much.

[00:22:52] It was great to meet you and it's great to talk to you.

[00:22:55] And I appreciate you taking the time to stop by.

[00:22:58] Thank you so much, Mark.

[00:23:00] Great to see you again.

[00:23:12] My guest today has been Beth White, the founder and CEO of Nebibot.

[00:23:16] And this has been People Tech, the podcast of WorkforceAI.news.

[00:23:21] We're a part of the Work Defined Podcast Network.

[00:23:24] Find them at www.wrkdefined.com.

[00:23:31] And to keep up with AI technology and HR, subscribe to WorkforceAI today.

[00:23:36] We're the most trusted source of news in the HR tech industry.

[00:23:40] Find us at www.workforceai.news.

[00:23:45] I'm Mark Pfeffer.

[00:23:47] Thank you.

[00:23:47] Thank you.