HR, We have a Problem: Live from the Cornerstone Rooftop at HR Tech

[00:00:01] [SPEAKER_00] Welcome to the The HR Huddle, presented by Sapient Insights Group, the ultimate resource for all things HR. It's time to get in the huddle.

[00:00:21] [SPEAKER_03] Thank you and welcome to a very special episode of HR We Have a Problem. No problem at all though when we talk about Cornerstone. I will admit to behind the scenes, we knew a little bit about this going in, but we were very excited. I believe we're breaking this new, various developments that we have. We have Bruna and Minnie from Cornerstone to talk to us about this.

[00:00:45] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah. Why don't we have... So, hi everyone. This is on the floor, on the go. On the rooftop.

[00:00:53] [SPEAKER_01] On the rooftop. That's right. You guys have a double-decker and it's the only one on the show floor. Yes. Yes. You know, we can... To quote Lion King, it's like, our kingdom extends as far as the eye is where the sun reaches.

[00:01:07] [SPEAKER_02] Exactly. And for everyone who may not get the chance to know everybody, so Minnie heads up all of marketing for Cornerstone and Guna heads up all of product, strategy, technology. He's really the brains behind a lot of the stuff that's going to be announced today. So, we were excited to be able to get both of them to talk about what's happening over at the Cornerstone environment. Can both of you maybe tell us a little bit more about both your roles and then a little bit about Sneak Peek? And then we're going to ask you some questions about what's launching this week.

[00:01:33] [SPEAKER_01] Sure. I'll start. I'm going to ask you some questions about Minnie as Chief Marketing Officer for Cornerstone. The human pieces that we work on and that we create to help organizations elevate their people, unlock all of the human potential in that workforce, now very much in the era of AI.

[00:01:55] [SPEAKER_04] Guna, and my role is very similar to your roles. Like, it is just unleash the potential with the AI for Cornerstone, what we can do, get our people ready, and deliver the best for the customers.

[00:02:08] [SPEAKER_02] If you want to start off with a few questions about what the product is that they're launching right now?

[00:02:12] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah, I assume we're able to talk about this, right? That's why we're here. That's right. You know, you guys showed up very well in the Voice of the Customer Awards this year in the rankings. You've seen things across the board in a number of different areas, clearly showing you're kind of tapped into solving the problems that are out there.

[00:02:32] [SPEAKER_03] Anything really involving AI has gone from being, wow, the big promise to, okay, we need to kind of understand it a little better, know what's going on. That is sort of the problem you are solving here, right? You're sort of in that business of helping people solve problems. So, what is sort of the approach that you've taken here? And what was it you saw that made you want to take on this pretty ambitious endeavor, I'll say?

[00:02:58] [SPEAKER_01] So, maybe I'll start and then Guna can go into the details of what we added. So, in May, we unveiled Cornerstone Workforce AI. That really gave us all of the foundations with the People Graph in particular was a big piece of the work that Guna has done coming into the organization. And it underpins everything that we can now unlock for our customers. Today, breaking at the show, we added to that.

[00:03:25] [SPEAKER_01] So, that includes the Cornerstone Workforce AI overall built, took our Learning Foundation. It took our Talent Development Foundation. It added workforce intelligence and a lot of what we call readiness agents. In between are how do you plan for workforce strategy? So, what we have built is the work planning. And then the other important piece, getting in really Guna's credit, this has been a passion project for him. Not to take the words out of his mouth, but is around governance.

[00:03:54] [SPEAKER_01] And so, the other piece we announced something we call agent. Look at all of the multiple agents in the organization and they hold them to the same standard. What is the conduct that you expect the agents to operate within, which is an important piece of any organization's go-forward AI strategy.

[00:04:12] [SPEAKER_03] Absolutely. I know that, Stacey, you've mentioned this on our other program before. What is HR's role in the world of AI? You've got to still think of that. And what HR does best, right, is understanding your workforce. And you've made big strides in that.

[00:04:28] [SPEAKER_04] And Cliff, I mean, I'll wear the customer hat and say, like, what is undisputable today is work is changing. There is order the possible, which is an opportunity for everybody, as well as a mandate. And I don't think that opportunity sits with select few. Everybody in the HR, every individual contributor of their teams have a seat at the table to actually shape it. And what we didn't do, again, it's not just me, it's a whole team's credit.

[00:04:52] [SPEAKER_04] We didn't decide to go slap agents on top of everything that we are already doing and say, this is the innovation. We went with the conviction that technology is a commodity. You throw money, people are going to show up for vendors and multiple models, and that's going to get more better and better. Ultimately, the winning recipe is people. What do you need for people? And then how do you re-engineer?

[00:05:20] [SPEAKER_04] So that's where whole skill inference, the mail launch was all about the foundation. How do you understand the work that is changing? What needs to be done in the task level? How to get people ready? Use the right learning, use the right succession, performance, rewards. Now we have taken it further with all the successful goal lives. We are seeing that the boundaries of HR systems are blurring.

[00:05:42] [SPEAKER_04] So we have gone live with a very major European highly regulated customer who have said that, bring me something that can merge learning, performance, talent, mobility, and recruiting all in one because that's how people engage. That's what people expect. So when we say agent, it's not just automating tasks. It truly brings things together. And then agent ready is my pet project.

[00:06:07] [SPEAKER_04] Like we hold people to higher standards, not because they falter. There are certain things that we cannot miss for the business continuity or the culture. So today, either we put a lid on the AI development and say nobody can launch or we let them go rogue. So none of this is the right solution. How do you build scalable governance that gives you comfort, peace of mind on what's happening, but encourages your employees to go build more and much faster?

[00:06:36] [SPEAKER_02] This is so just our brain knows when we first thought up that we were gonna do a podcast at the top of the expo hall in like the 20 minutes ahead between all the other meetings, it was because I sat and watched you to walk me through the agent ready demo. And it hadn't launched yet. We were getting an early finding and I was like, this is exactly what we need. We need to have something that evaluates those agents. There's agents all over the place right now.

[00:06:59] [SPEAKER_02] It needs to ensure that it's compliance ready, that it is handling the standards and the, not just the compliance that we have in our policies and procedures, but also the compliance that's inside of our systems around who can see things, who can't see things, where that data can be taken, how that data can be used. All those things are being checked by what you guys are doing. And it's not being checked once. It's not just the first time you're putting in place an evaluation program, right?

[00:07:24] [SPEAKER_04] Continuous pipeline. So make it a gating criteria for anything, any change to go live. Yeah. So that it happens out of the gate.

[00:07:31] [SPEAKER_02] Because my, my big thing, you guys know, you've been listening to us for a while is that I have said we would at least want to manage our agents as aggressively as we manage our human beings, our employees. We have all kinds of performance reviews and evaluations and check-ins with them. Why would we not have that with the agent environment as well? Because they're, humans are being held accountable to what the agent is doing. And we need to make sure that the human has all the backup that they need, just like we would with anything else, right?

[00:07:57] [SPEAKER_04] What makes this possible is technology used within. So that's how we are able to scale. Yeah. Minnie's list of products we have launched in six months, purely due to what's available in the state of the art possible.

[00:08:07] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah. I think the list of products was the other thing that we were so surprised by. Because usually in these kind of launches, you get one big thing a year, right? And you guys just launched in a workforce intelligence environment was a big deal for you guys. Getting all the infrastructure, all the underneath mesh. But now you guys doing the workforce planning plus the agent ready. That's another two big announcements within just like four months of each other, right? How fast do you think has development scaled and how quickly have things had to move?

[00:08:32] [SPEAKER_02] Is this the thing that you're seeing too, that just the amount of time?

[00:08:39] [SPEAKER_04] I think it's a push and pull internally as well as externally. Like I said, it's an opportunity for Cornerstone. It's a mandate. Like we have to be at the cutting edge of development because customers are expected to do for their business. So we have to keep pace. Agent ready. Every day I walk in, I see an agent talk to a human without the controls in place. Freaks me out. And I'm sure it freaks the leader, other listeners too. So it's a must have. Workforce planning is a very organic evolution of our thought process.

[00:09:09] [SPEAKER_04] Again, going back to the people at the center of the business of this transformation. AI is here to help. Understanding the work that is changing. If we have this foundation in place, there is nothing that stops us from putting this plan to action. Yeah. Tie it to your OPs. Many has been keeping us a check for like, are you goals driven? How do you tie your work to goals? You have every decision that you do in the business to the goals. So to us, the strategic workforce planning is a completely reinvented look. The reason we are able to bring it fast to the market is we didn't have the baggage.

[00:09:39] [SPEAKER_04] So we were able to invent fresh for customer needs.

[00:09:43] [SPEAKER_03] Also, there's something, a couple of things you mentioned that are pretty fascinating to me. And it's something that's pretty indicative of all research as well. You said, you're thinking about the outcomes, right? What are we trying to achieve? Not just what is possible, right? You know, we've gone through that sort of evolution. We'll do a lot of neat things with this new technology. But what is it we're really trying to get to? And when we're bringing all those things together, that's fascinating. But you're doing it in the final goal of how do we help basically businesses thrive?

[00:10:12] [SPEAKER_03] How do we help organize seed?

[00:10:14] [SPEAKER_01] And yeah, I think that has been one of the biggest shifts we've seen in how we interact with our customers. Is that they might come to us because they say, oh, I need to change my learning strategy. Then we start asking questions. It was like, what exactly is the challenge that you are trying to solve? Yeah. And look, there's a lot of data that we could take into the people graph. But then you'd be stuck in sort of data assimilation.

[00:10:40] [SPEAKER_01] Instead, the conversation we have and Guna runs workshops, he and his team, we go on site and the forward deploy engineers and Anna Goldberg, who runs our AI product management. It is very much a conversation about what is the main challenge that you have? Is it about finding new paths for your people? Or is it you have to go recruit from different areas and bring non-traditional people with non-traditional backgrounds into a role?

[00:11:07] [SPEAKER_01] So then it's about role readiness and how do you get them, you know, armed with the right information? What is that core outcome that you're trying to drive to? And then we limit the data inputs into the people graph based on that outcome that so you can really drive to success in super quick fashion. Like we've, Guna and team have done prototypes in the span of a week. And then we're operational and live with very large, highly regulated industry customers.

[00:11:36] [SPEAKER_04] We are highly regulated, 10 weeks. What is interesting, Cliff, you bring up a good point. I think we in this industry, we are so trained to think, box them into SKUs and structures. We have to unlearn. So we suggest stock for 30, trying to solve. I'm trying to bring veterans into my organization, and then I'm going to train them. So my question was, why are you bringing veterans? They bring amazing ownership, amazing leadership. I want them to bring that skill and then apply it here.

[00:12:06] [SPEAKER_04] So you need to identify that they have that skill, identify what is required here, and then get them trained. So you are a skills person, you are doing this role. We often tend to get siloed into our own functions. But I think to your earlier point, HR, anybody in the HR division has seated the table to shape this transformation journey. And to do that, we have to unlearn our constraints.

[00:12:29] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah, I mean, kind of speaking of unlearning something. So I will say a little bit of the elephant in the room. Workforce planning is a big jump for you guys. I don't know that people would say cornerstone. The learning and talent organization is a workforce planning tool. But I will say that, at least in my experience and what we're seeing in our data and what I've been doing this for a long time, workforce planning doesn't work without the skills conversation, right?

[00:12:52] [SPEAKER_02] And so I think that's the fact that you guys are announcing this amazing conversation about workforce planning at a much more global, much more enterprise level with all the things you just talked about, which is that I'm not just thinking about it as a headcount. I'm thinking about it as a capabilities conversation, a skills conversation. I mean, to me, that's what this is all about, rethinking things, understanding things differently. And so that's a great way of sort of putting it back together. I know we have just a few more moments before we're going to have to wrap up today.

[00:13:22] [SPEAKER_02] And I want to thank everyone who is joining us because I know this, again, on the fly. This is going to be a real good fun opportunity for you guys to hear what's happening right here in the environment.

[00:13:30] [SPEAKER_01] I don't know if it's surprising. Good to mind have one that's surprising. But I think just underscoring, we all knew about the HR organizations and just organizations in general are really trying to figure out this idea of people and AI coming together. The workforce is now agentic and it is human. And the intersection of those two, how does that really help you unlock the full potential of your organization?

[00:13:57] [SPEAKER_01] And you have to think about that from strategy to governance to knowledge to action. And the action part is very important because we all want to show ROI on all of these investments that we're making, right?

[00:14:10] [SPEAKER_04] Really at record speed. What I do think is we are getting caught up with agentic being automation. So we have to ask ourselves a question like, do we really want an agent to make it easy to create thousand more job requisitions if it doesn't help you find the one right candidate? So I think if we take a step back, really understand the outcome, the goalposts we are trying to go after. And I think that way. Many are thinking that way. I encourage us to challenge ourselves, challenge us. You as a customer should challenge us to think that way.

[00:14:40] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah, that's really wonderful. And really thank you both. This has been just fascinating because, you know, this is something we've talked about philosophically. Like we, this is something that we'd like to see this happen. This would be neat. This is something that kind of needs to be addressed. And to go, when we first started talking like, yeah, that's a good idea. And you're like, no, no, we're already done it. We're doing it. I was like, that is fascinating. We need to talk about this.

[00:15:01] [SPEAKER_03] So if you were not able to make it to HR tech, well, you just got VIP access to both one of the most wonderful booths on the entire floor and probably the greatest conversation you could have joined us for. Thank you so much for letting us be a part of this. Thank you for the insights and support always.

[00:15:17] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah. Thank you, Stacey and Cliff.

[00:15:19] [SPEAKER_02] Thanks guys.