[00:00:01] Dieser komplexe Finanzierungstalk ist ganz schön anstrengend. Ob ich mein Depot jemals angelegt kriege?
[00:00:06] Aber du hast doch schon ein Depot.
[00:00:08] Äh, nee.
[00:00:09] Doch, du hast das Vodafone Giga Depot.
[00:00:11] Ach, stimmt! Und da habe ich ja selbst in der Hand, wie groß mein Depot ist.
[00:00:15] Jetzt mit dem Vodafone Giga Depot und verbrauchtes Datenvolumen in den nächsten Monat mitnehmen.
[00:00:19] Go on im zuverlässigen 5G-Netz von Vodafone.
[00:00:22] Vodafone. Together we can.
[00:00:27] Kundenservice kontaktieren? Für viele Menschen ist das der beste Weg, einen schönen Tag zu ruinieren.
[00:00:33] Aber bei Zendesk sorgen wir für eine bessere Customer Experience.
[00:00:36] Besser für die Großmutter. Besser für die Floristin. Besser für den jungen Mann in Hausnummer 3a.
[00:00:41] Besser für sie. Besser für alle.
[00:00:43] Denn während einige behaupten, dass der Kunde immer Recht hat, sagen wir, dass KundInnen immer Menschen sind.
[00:00:48] Und da wir auch Menschen sind, wollen wir etwas Gutes für uns alle tun.
[00:00:52] Zendesk. Customer Experience mit KI für Menschen gemacht.
[00:00:56] Willkommen zu PeopleTech, die Podcast von WorkforceAI.nz.
[00:01:01] Ich bin Mark Pfeffer.
[00:01:13] Dave Bottoms ist mit mir heute.
[00:01:15] Er ist der General Manager von Upwork Marketplace.
[00:01:18] Du denkst, dass man mit einem guten Tag mit einem guten Tag mit einem guten Tag zu leverieren.
[00:01:23] Und du bist.
[00:01:25] Dave wird uns über wie Upwork ist mit AI in den Produkt- und share die lessons sie gelernt haben.
[00:01:32] All in diesem Video von PeopleTech.
[00:01:36] Hey Dave, thanks for being here.
[00:01:38] How has Upwork integrated AI into its product strategy, especially on the customer side?
[00:01:46] In other words, as you're working through AI products, what are you thinking the employers can benefit most from?
[00:01:55] Yeah, it's a great question.
[00:01:56] We've integrated AI and thinking about how to deploy generative AI in our product strategy in a couple of different places and ways.
[00:02:07] Upwork is a two-sided marketplace.
[00:02:09] We started really on the client side.
[00:02:12] The core of the market works around job posts.
[00:02:18] We first integrated AI into our job post generator to allow clients to more quickly and efficiently post a job and tag that job with the right skills for the talent that they're looking for.
[00:02:32] We've seen not only the efficiency in the ability to post a job, but also efficiencies on the matching side because the job includes more tags so that it can be discoverable in our Upwork search.
[00:02:48] It can be more thorough in terms of the job description.
[00:02:53] And you get away from sort of that blank, that blank cursor problem of trying to come in and describe a job, particularly for people that may be hiring outside of their area of domain expertise.
[00:03:08] If you're, say, a marketer who wants to hire a web developer to build a site, you may not know necessarily all of the skills that you're actually looking for.
[00:03:19] You might be thinking more about the outcome you're looking for in terms of building a site or building an app or something to that effect.
[00:03:26] So that was one place.
[00:03:28] In April, we did a Upwork updates where we introduced a number of different new places and ways that we're integrating AI into our product strategy.
[00:03:41] So it's starting to come to fruition.
[00:03:43] We're using AI in search via something we're calling best match insights.
[00:03:49] It helps clients find talent based on the skills that they have and the matching in the job description.
[00:04:00] We have helped talent with proposal tips.
[00:04:05] So a prompt that allows them to write a better proposal to clients to help them get hired more.
[00:04:11] And we introduced UMA, what we're calling Upwork's mindful AI, sort of the blanket branded term for the AI behind the covers that is really powering all of our experiences from best match insights to the job post generator and the proposal tips that I touched on.
[00:04:29] We also introduced Upwork Chat Pro, which is part of our Freelancer Plus bundle.
[00:04:35] And Chat Pro really helps freelancers get work done by leveraging some of the best experiences or best results that we've seen for writing proposals and doing work on Upwork using some of our proprietary data.
[00:04:52] So we're really weaving it across our product experience from entry points on the homepage to the job post generator to our search integrations with the best match insights and Upwork Chat Pro.
[00:05:08] Hi there, I'm Peter Zollman.
[00:05:10] I'm a co-host of the Inside Job Boards and Recruitment Marketplaces podcast.
[00:05:16] And I'm Steven Rothberg, and I guess that makes me the other co-host.
[00:05:18] Every other week, we're joined by guests from the world's leading job sites.
[00:05:22] Together, we analyze news about general niche and aggregator job board and recruitment marketplaces sites.
[00:05:29] Make sure you sign up and subscribe today.
[00:05:33] We've worked in a number of tech positions at companies like Meta and on the product side, so you know a lot about what's going on in that world and how people think in that world.
[00:05:45] From your point of view, are today's AI efforts accomplishing something new or are customers being flooded with promises that maybe they'll be kept, maybe they won't be?
[00:06:00] It's an interesting question.
[00:06:01] I mean, I think there's definitely a hype cycle around AI, and a lot of companies are trying to capitalize on something that is definitely garnering a lot of interest.
[00:06:15] I think, you know, machine learning and AI has really been around for a number of years.
[00:06:22] And we're just seeing now the proliferation of these large language models that can do generalist tasks and an interface that was really kind of a breakthrough, much like the browser was a breakthrough for the internet back in the early 90s.
[00:06:40] It made it more generally accessible.
[00:06:42] But I ran the homepage at Yahoo for a number of years.
[00:06:46] We were using ML models to rank content.
[00:06:49] I ran the ads platform team at Meta, and we used AI models, machine learning models to rank and serve better targeting of ads.
[00:07:01] And I think what we're seeing today is more and more either workflows that could be automated through the implementation of AI or greater efficiencies that can be gained on the development side in terms of productivity.
[00:07:19] Developers using things like Copilot or even ChatGPTO for development work.
[00:07:27] So the shift is not really a surprise to me, I guess, that a number of tech companies in the Valley have been using ML and AI for years.
[00:07:38] I think the mind share shift is really around how and where the applications are going.
[00:07:47] And that the infrastructure to run these really large language models and the compute is becoming available as part of the infrastructure build-outs.
[00:08:00] Now, this is kind of a under-the-hood question, but over the last two years, AI has certainly pushed a change in the way development is spoken about and thought about for a lot of people.
[00:08:16] Has it changed your views or perceptions of product development?
[00:08:22] Well, I mean, everybody's certainly looking for what is that 10x productivity enhancer that makes developers more productive and eliminates the need to do redundant tasks.
[00:08:34] And I think at least with our internal engineering teams, the feedback has been extremely positive in using tools like Copilot and ChatGPT to do their coding work.
[00:08:47] We're seeing productivity gains in terms of the velocity that teams can move and the elimination of some of the redundant tasks, the automation of things like QA engineering.
[00:08:59] All of that has been pretty dramatically accelerated, I would say, in the last 18 to 24 months.
[00:09:07] Hey, it's Bob Pulver, host Q podcast.
[00:09:10] Human-centric AI, AI-driven transformation, hiring for skills and potential, dynamic workforce ecosystems, responsible innovation.
[00:09:19] These are some of the themes my expert guests and I chat about, and we certainly geek out on the details.
[00:09:24] Nothing too technical.
[00:09:25] I hope you check it out.
[00:09:28] Have you ever been to a webinar where the topic was great, but there wasn't enough time to ask questions or have a dialogue to learn more?
[00:09:34] Well, welcome to HR and Payroll 2.0, the podcast where those post-webinar questions become episodes.
[00:09:39] We feature HR practitioners, leaders, and founders of HR, payroll, and workplace innovation and transformation sharing their insights and lessons learned from the trenches.
[00:09:48] We dig in to share the knowledge and tips that can help modern HR and payroll leaders navigate the challenges and opportunities ahead.
[00:09:54] So join us for highly authentic, unscripted conversations, and let's learn together.
[00:10:00] Has all of this, well, let me ask it this way.
[00:10:03] All of these changes, what's the most important thing that employers need to know about AI and its impact on talent acquisition?
[00:10:14] Are these changes really materially changing their process?
[00:10:21] Are they just making it faster?
[00:10:23] What should they be thinking about?
[00:10:26] Well, it's a really interesting question because I think there's a human element to the embrace of AI.
[00:10:33] And certain developers have ways of working that they're not likely to change.
[00:10:41] They've been efficient and they've worked for them for years.
[00:10:43] Others are going to be more aggressive in embracing the new tools and capabilities that AI kind of ushers in.
[00:10:55] And so I think it depends on the charter and it depends on the project, really, on what you're trying to accomplish, what outcome you're driving toward,
[00:11:08] and how much engineering leaders have really embraced the tools that are available and are pushing their teams to adopt the tools for better productivity.
[00:11:21] I don't know if I'm quite getting at the root of your question.
[00:11:27] No, I think you are.
[00:11:29] I mean, it's sort of an amorphous question just to see what the impact of AI is beyond the ultimate product goal, but also the goal of getting there, which actually leads me to another question.
[00:11:49] With all of the changes that AI has been making in product development, are you having to focus on different areas now than you were before?
[00:12:01] Well, I think at the end of the day, product development is about identifying what customer problems are and coming up with solutions and testing and iterating toward what is an acceptable solution and measuring the data as you go.
[00:12:17] So that hasn't changed.
[00:12:19] We're still identifying customer problems that can be solved through software or through experiences.
[00:12:26] But the ways that we're going about solving them are nuanced.
[00:12:30] For example, we have put our UMA-powered chat experience on our homepage, and that is a new way of customers coming to Upwork and searching for information.
[00:12:45] What can they get done on Upwork?
[00:12:46] Is it a general kind of query that you might post?
[00:12:49] What can I do?
[00:12:50] You might ask something very specific, like how much does it cost to do this type of project?
[00:12:57] And that would traditionally have been handled maybe by a search query.
[00:13:01] But the interface to chatting allows you to sort of lead a user to the solution that they're looking for, even if they don't know how to really frame the question.
[00:13:14] And so it's a nuanced learning.
[00:13:17] We're gathering lots and lots of signal just in terms of what people are trying to do, what they're typing into the chat box so that we can tune our back-end AI engine to be more conversational and be more helpful to get a customer to an answer or an output much faster than, say, a traditional clicking through links and browsing through our site or even a traditional search query.
[00:13:47] Well, Dave, thanks very much.
[00:13:49] It's great talking to you.
[00:13:50] I hope we can do it again.
[00:13:52] I hope so.
[00:13:54] Thanks, Mark, for having me.
[00:13:55] I appreciate it.
[00:14:07] My guest today has been Dave Bottoms, the general manager of Upwork's Marketplace.
[00:14:12] And this has been People Tech, the podcast of workforceai.news.
[00:14:17] We're also a part of the Work Defined Podcast Network.
[00:14:21] Find them at www.wrkdefined.com.
[00:14:27] And to keep up with AI technology and HR, subscribe to Workforce AI today.
[00:14:32] We're the most trusted source of news in the HR tech industry.
[00:14:36] Find us at www.workforceai.news.
[00:14:41] I'm Mark Pfeffer.
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