Category: Editorial

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The Halloween Edition: Scary AI… not what you think

A first of its kind halloween edition on my blog and I thought I theme it a bit that way.

Now, talking about AI there are many things that seem scary to some and others. Mostly such feelings are around how it might impact employment or changes in the workplace, but also how it might impact our public discourse. I am not necessarily disagreeing with some of the fears – as well as the opportunities. Today though I don’t want to write about this, but a different scary AI topic.

ChatGPT – almost one year in

We are arriving soon at the 12 months mark when ChatGPT was released to the public. Last November 30th it was brought to public release and started a hype that since has not really stopped. It was the “App” with the fastest growing user numbers ever with reaching 1 Million users after 5 days and 100 million active users by January 2023. No other App ever managed that. But that wasn’t it. ChatGPT with the help of Microsoft made it quickly into the enterprise market and many of us are experimenting with it or other Gen AI solutions since. Also in the enterprise market this AI revolution has taken offices by storm – may it be IT professionals or functional professionals across all functions – Sales, Marketing, Finance, others – and of course Human Resources. The ideas and applications are universal and exponential. This is also what makes AI so different from the Metaverse or Blockchain. As I already wrote here, Metaverse and Blockchain were interesting new ideas and technologies…in search of a business problem to solve. And they are still in this same position years after they saw the light of day. (Gen) AI came with a set of addressable business problems and has identified many more to solve.

The potential of (Gen) AI

I am sure many of you have experimented with (Gen) AI in the last 12 months as I have and have seen the potential it has and the immediate applicability. We have also seen the flaws and over-hypes. But at its core it was and is a revolutionary technology that transforms the way we do business, the way we do HR. May it be in the Experience space where Gen AI significantly improves the way regular users can interact with HR technologies, even if they only need to use it once or twice a year. AI has solved this issue by “taking users by the hand”. May it be in the skills space where it not only can identify skills you most likely have based on your CV and previous positions, but also has a superior matching quality to find the right job, the right opportunity for you – or helps you with understanding what skills and experiences you need to gain before you have a chance of getting your dream-job. 

Sometimes it felt like (Gen) AI is the solution to almost all issues we have in today’s HR world. Of course that is not true and of course as much as I did, many of you saw some of our test & learn concepts fail or underdeliver against our expectations. But we carried on to identify new ones – especially motivated and cheered by all the Tech companies that had AI technology readily available. And who had not started to get ready. It was a hectic gold-rush for solutions and ideas in the last 12 months – and slowly but surely we wake up to a scary AI reality. A reality that quite frankly we should have seen coming – and for sure some of us saw coming. Question though is if you expected that level of scaring potential.

Scary AI

What am I referring to? – while most of the vendors and partners did let you experiment and even pushed for new ideas for experimentation heavily these last 12 months at either no costs or very low costs, the boomerang now comes back. AI is expensive – especially Gen AI. Each training run for a Large-Language Model (LLM) can cost between $2-$12 Million. It took OpenAI more than $1.4 Billion to get to ChatGPT public release. And the actual usage costs of these models once ready are not cheap either. There is a good reason why NVIDIA’s share price performed +205% over the last year. NVIDIA is the main supplier of the GPU chips necessary to train and run LLMs. But not only NVIDIAs share price performed well – look at Microsoft with an increase of 45%, closing to Apple as being the most valuable company in the world. And of course these investments and expectations are asking for “re-financing” or in other terms, the costs of using (Gen) AI models in regular production applications will cost a scary amount of $$$ in order for these companies to get their investment back and to confirm their promises to the stock market. And guess who should pay that price? – yes, you and me🙂

(Gen) AI is here to stay – there is no doubt about it and there will be some adoption happening. The question is how much and how fast will it grow. We are still in our hype-cycle with (Gen) AI and I believe the costs of (Gen) AI will send us into the trough of disillusionment. How long we stay there depends on two things really

(1) how high the price will be that the (Gen) AI vendors will settle for and if they are willing to defer their returns a bit longer – and yeah, I get it, even the high prices have often not too high margins as costs need to get under control first and

(2) if the price to pay is at least equal, but better lower compared to the additional value or cost efficiency that companies are able to realize. 

We are on the down-turn of the hype-cycle, but how long we will stay there and how deep we will go is an interesting question. I have no doubt that we will reach a rather high plateau of productivity – but when? What do you think?

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Exciting roadmaps and ideas – and wrong turns (a weekend read)

During my recent trip to Silicon Valley, I had the pleasure to meet up with three fascinating companies in the space of enterprise and HR technology. It was my usual visit to reconnect F2F but also understand the direction these companies are going, their roadmaps their strategies. And of course, this year more than ever, it is about understanding how they see (Gen) AI in their products. I met up with Workday, ServiceNow and Microsoft – and they all have (Gen) AI identified to be at the core of their products, but each in their own different ways. That makes it exciting to listen and to understand – and after the in person meetings, I must say that it makes sense to me which direction and adaption they have all taken. All three go different routes, but they have good reasoning behind. If these are correct though and will bring them into the future of HR technology is a question to be answered by the future. As I wrote a few posts back, I believe that we are at a cross-roads when it comes to HR technology. We are at a junction where either the current main players need to reinvent themselves completely or be overtaken by new players. It is a great time to watch and an exciting time to be in the market – however, I hope you are currently not shopping for a new HR core system. It is a difficult time to decide what the future-proof decision will be. I don’t envy you if you are in this position.

Microsoft

But now let’s look at what I have learned. Let me start with Microsoft. They are currently one of the biggest and most active players in the space of (Gen) AI. Their usual surface event this year was more about Gen AI and Co-pilot than anything else (I think they turned to surface devices 40 mins in only). And that speaks to the “all in” that I have also experienced during my visit. Microsoft is bullish about Gen AI and its opportunities. But they have also already learned a lot since the beginning of the year – I believe this is truly contributed by them being in this game early on, but with their open mindset and closeness to the enterprise market. This is what makes the position of Microsoft so interesting. They have not only the technology (OpenAI) but it is paired with an amazing set of enterprise-partnerships and an internal, company-wide growth mindset. You can clearly see how Satya has transformed the thinking and approach of Microsoft and how fundamental this is to their agility in this space.

Now, when I mean they learned, I mean that they are not only focused on Gen AI but at the same time bring in their other strenghts. They know that their customers are worried about data privacy and data security and they know that data, which is at the heart of any successful Gen AI application, is not readily available to be ingested and made use of for Gen AI within companies. And knowing that and being as agile as they are, they made this a product feature as well as new additions to existing products. Data privacy and data security are now at the heart of their enterprise Gen AI applications so that you don’t have to be worried anymore where your data goes and where it might get exposed – or how and where the LLM uses it for their own learning. This is truly a key function in the enterprise market. And in addition, they are deploying additional tools to manage and clean data in your enterprise network and intranet so that it can be used for Gen AI applications. And at the heart of everything lies the MS Graph. In the good and in the bad, because Microsoft is at the heart of the tech infrastructure for most companies, they are in a pole position.

However, of course there is a “but” – and the but is that specifically in the HR space, Microsoft doesn’t really have an idea what use cases make sense or how to apply and integrate Gen AI into the processes and routines. As often in technology: They have a solution and are in need of a problem they can apply it to. Again though, Microsoft being Microsoft, they understand this and are actively engaging with companies to learn and identify the right use cases. It has been great to watch how Microsoft revolutionizes this market with their speed and agility – and I am looking forward to the next few months. Let’s see where we stand in just 6 months from now.

ServiceNow

Let’s then turn to ServiceNow. I had shared my impressions of their K23 conference here, and meeting them in their HQ, my impressions got confirmed. ServiceNow is highly active on Gen AI and this in a truly “platform of platforms” fashion. You can either “bring your own” LLM and connect it to your ServiceNow implementation – or subscribe to their LLM which is more customized and focused on the actual use-cases you might have. And this is also their strength and a differentiator. They have a clear picture of how their customers use their platform and what use cases there are, what use cases bring the most value and how to apply Gen AI to lift that value. This is fascinating to see and amazing how focused and targeted they go after this. I cannot wait till Vancouver is out and the full breadth of their first generation Gen AI application will be available to the wider audience. Being able to test & learn with them on this journey has been a fabulous experience. 

Now, besides Gen AI, of course ServiceNow is further refining their product and unfortunately, what I had already mentioned in my K23 post is becoming more and more true. From being the platform of platforms where you can integrate multiple systems across employee or process journeys while keeping the actual underlying systems in charge, ServiceNow is now heavily focusing on being the only platform, the only interface you see as an end-user. This means that any service is to be integrated and overlayed by ServiceNow and then brought back into the actual application where the data or process is run. I don’t think that this is the right approach and I am not sure who is able to follow such approach outside ServiceNow as a company. You would need 100s of ServiceNow developers to make this happen and to keep it going – and what is the value add? Yes, you will have one coherent UX/ UI across all of your systems for end-users. But what is the price you pay? – you have to pay for all systems anyway, you have to get more support and maintenance staff and, and this is one of my main concerns: You lose flexibility and agility. You will never be able to quickly adapt a new feature from any of your underlying systems because you always have to also update your top ServiceNow layer. 

I believe that you need to reduce the variance of UX/ UIs you expose your end users to – but I also think that in their private lives people can deal with two or three different Apps and interfaces. Of course, these interfaces must be of high quality and straight forward to be used for end-users. But the difference of approach is that if these interfaces are not where you need them to be, you attack the root-cause and work with the system partner to fix this and improve the UX/ UI. I do not believe in plasters (vs. fixing the root-cause) and placing ServiceNow as the only end-user interface on top of your other applications is a plaster and nothing else.

This is however, not where my concerns with ServiceNow end. As some of you have probably seen, ServiceNow is also entering new territory. They are offering “core” Talent territory solutions in the spaces of Learning, Performance Management, and Skills – and I have not heard any voice saying that they will stop at that. Now, if you want to have a one-platform solution only, you might soon be able to use ServiceNow for most of it in the Talent space – but where I am concerned is that this strategic direction will bring them into difficulties with the likes of SAP/ SuccessFactors or Workday and others. This will ultimately take the direction of a rivalry vs. a partnership between these companies – and the impact of this will be felt by us Experience and HR Tech leaders when suddenly Successfactors or Workday are no longer playing nice with ServiceNow and therefore your integrations deteriorate or require more customization. I understand that ServiceNow is looking to grow in new directions, but as a market observer as well as practitioner I am not confident that this is any good for their main customers.

Workday

And last but not least Workday. I have been quite critical about them and their AI journey recently and was looking forward to a more in-depth conversation in person at their HQ. I was not let down. We spent a good time with Dave Sohigian, Workday CTO, to talk about AI and how Workday thinks about it. I must say that I am encouraged after what I have learned that Workday has understood what is at stake and that they will accelerate in this space with a balanced strategy. I am sure that they will share more during their Workday rising conferences and I will wait to hear from them there. But in essence they are similarly looking into an open eco-system of OpenSource or best of breed LLMs they can use and apply them onto their data. This makes sense from the perspective that it is a controlled application and the data that is used is clean and structured – because it is the data of all Workday customers that opted into sharing as part of the innovation agreement. On the other hand, it is of course a limited set of data even for the size we talk about including 80% of Workday customers. Competitors are more open and are using data sources that might be less structured and more contaminated with bad data. So the question is – and I don’t yet know the answer but am looking forward to it being answered – what is better: Tons of data of good and questionable quality or great, clean data but less. What is better for the performance of these specific AI applications.

And with that, let me close today’s post and thoughts. I am looking forward to the announcements that will come our way from all the Techtember and Techtober conferences and see where the industry is going. 

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Techtember and Techtober are on us

After hopefully a relaxing and recharging summer break, an exciting time is starting. With last week, we are in Techtember and Techtober which will officially take off soon! No, I am not talking about Apple (Sep 12),  Microsoft (Sep 21) or Google (Oct 4th) which are this year probably more of a routine and less of a surprise. I am talking about our HR Tech events! This autumn is the first one since the Gen AI hype started with Chat GPT and since then invaded the HR Enterprise market. The events to come will be very exciting! And I cannot wait for them to happen and share my views and insights with you.

It all kicks off with Oracle Cloud World (Sep 18-21) where Oracle will bring its latest and greatest to the table. Admittedly, Oracle has not been the biggest name in HR Tech for some time, but continues to be an important player and I am keen to understand which direction they will take in HR and with AI.

The next event in line will be Workday Rising US (Sep 26-29 – and later Workday Rising EMEA in November). I am really looking forward to this one. Workday is still the leader in the HCM market and has a lot to loose if they don’t reignite their mojo and show interesting developments as well as an exciting AI roadmap. But after having the chance to deep dive with them last week in their Pleasanton HQ, including a session with Dave Sohigian, I am confident and excited about what to come. Watch closely for announcments.

Last in the line of the big established vendors is SAP with their SAP SuccessConnect (Oct. 2-4). SuccessFactors has been very busy in the recent weeks and has announced e.g. a new head of AI, a collaboration with Microsoft on Joint AI and more. So I am very curious to see what they will bring to SuccessConnect.

And on top of these main player conferences, we also have the HR Tech conference in Las Vegas (Oct 10-13) with great sponsors and potentially interesting reveals from Josh Bersin and others. And of course the UNLEASH World conference in Paris just a week later (Oct 17-18) and let’s close it with Gartner’s ReimagineHR in Orlando (Oct. 23-25).

You see: Techtember and Techtober are fully packed and I am excited this year more than ever to see what everyone brings to the table as we are at the beginning of a big HR Tech revolution. Hope you are as excited as I am and stay tuned for updates from each of those from me in the coming weeks!

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The Return of the Metaverse?

Just about one year after we saw Facebook rename itself to Meta and betting big on the Metaverse, Meta had more to share. Last week saw the big Meta connect keynote and update from Mark Zuckerberg on the state of the Metaverse. What did we learn? – we learned that Meta still believes that this is the future and continues to bet big on it – so far Meta sunk more than $15 Billion into this idea. Ok, they have sufficient funds (but for how long?) and can continue to push it. But will it land before they run out of money? I have high hopes for everyone that bets currently against Meta on the stock exchange. I don’t think their share price will ever reach again the highs of Facebook (lost more than 62% in the last 12 months and 5% post the Meta connect announcements). I continue to believe that Mark is trying to define and create a new world that no one has asked for. I am impressed by his focus and dedication – and at the same time puzzled how he can overlook all the signs that this is a dead-end or at best a new market that is much smaller (or very different) than what he imagines. 

The Metaverse fails already

There are many clear signs for that. Two that I find especially funny are the legs-meme and that not even Meta employees utilize their Metaverse (Horizon Worlds) or know what to do with it. When Meta introduced his Metaverse, all the Avatars were missing legs and the whole net made fun of that. Finally last week Mark’s Avatar got legs and could jump – awesome! I mean, of course it is more realistic (if you can even talk about this with this rudimentary graphics design) to have legs, but it is nothing to celebrate or put out one word tweets “Legs”. If this is an achievement that Meta is proud of, good luck. And then there are indications that its own Meta staff doesn’t utilize the Metaverse as it is too complex, buggy, not helpful in getting work done. And we should not forget that Meta planned to have over 500k regular users by end of 2022 and instead now has even less users than in Q1 of this year (looks like around 200k users).

What is still missing is THE KILLER-App that makes the Metaverse useful, as well as of course a big enough crowd to have social interaction with, a reason to join and come back regularly. What is also still missing is a clear focus – for whom is it actually? Why? Is it focused on consumers that should “live” in it rather than in the real world aka “Ready Player One”? Or is it focused on companies and collaboration at work? – I am not clear. And the announcement of the new Headset or Face-Computer like many journalists call it (read here) did not make it clear either. Of course it is an impressive piece of hardware, but for the price of $1.500 who can afford it? and for what? This is cost prohibitive for the regular consumer and also prohibits a wider adoption in the enterprise market.

But then there was the announcement of Meta and Microsoft? How does this fit in? I believe that there are multiple ways you could look at this. On one hand, it could be a strong statement that THE number one enterprise-software company is now bought in and supports the Metaverse in and with its core Microsoft365 (formerly known as Office) applications; on the other hand you could say that Microsoft gave up their own metaverse efforts (Hololens) as this market did not play out how they hoped and they focus their own efforts now again on what matters (read: and let Meta play with the Metaverse and just be there…). Regardless how you read it, I think we can agree that Excel in VR is not a Killer App.

The concept though has potential

But don’t get me wrong – I still believe in a few core concepts and ideas around the metaverse, just not Meta’s version of it. I think we can all agree the metaverses in the gaming industry are already today very successful and bring high revenues and profits. These have a clear focus and purpose: They are to play a game, to meet like-minded people from across the world and you don’t need a heavy, expensive headset to make it work. But the more encompassing ones like 2nd Life are small and not really profit-generating. Then there are different ways to look at the metaverse and different interpretations of it, like the one from Scott Galloway. 

The other core-concepts I believe in are AR and VR. Both are very promising technologies which will have a big future. AR already via your smartphone is amazing and will be much stronger in the future and potentially bring up a huge new market at the intersection of online (AR) and reality. We might not like everything around it, but I see a big future for that in the commercial space – targeted, real world marketing with AR advertisements, shared experiences, immersive tourism and many more use-cases. 

And VR, too. VR can be a game changer in realistic enterprise learning efforts where it is important to not only read/ absorb but feel or try out/ do something specific to reach the full learning experience. We are also already there, not yet widely adopted, but the use cases are there and with reduced costs it will be even wider adopted. 

But both VR and AR and their use-cases are outside Mark’s Metaverse and will continue to be successful without it. I am sure about that.

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Refresh

After a long time and a few changes, I am back in the blogosphere. It took me quite some time, but now I am back to publish regularly again. I do recognise that the site was down, too. – this was due to server and connection changes, but should all be resolved at this stage.

I hope you find the next few posts interesting and hope you stay on my page.

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An interesting autumn coming

Dear readers,
apologies for a very quite summer on this blog. The bad news is that I was extremely busy – the good news is: with interesting stuff. So expect new and exciting PoVs and posts coming soon.
Thanks for sticking around.

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Technology Disruption in the workplace – the societal impact

In the aftermath of the US elections, but also seeing what is happening in other countries like Germany, France, Italy, Hungary, the UK, I believe that we need to reflect on what we as Human Resources Practitioners are doing every day in our workplaces and what the effects are (supporting business reorganizations, restructurings, outsourcing, as well as our own HR outsourcing or low-cost job placement, automation, etc.). I don’t believe that anyone should now complain about a single election outcome in the US or of raising right-wing parties in European countries or of Brexit. Are we and can we really be surprised about that? – maybe if we have lived in our own bubbles for the last few years, but not truly when we think about what we in HR have done, supported, paved the way for in the last years: In essence, more and more lower qualified jobs have become obsolete or moved to low-cost countries. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to say that we have done things wrong or are the sole cause of what has happened in society – and I don’t believe that we need to justify what we have done. I believe we had sufficient supportive reasons for it. However, I believe that we are an integral part of the picture – and can and need support making it right again.
Now, what I want to say is that we probably have not looked at the societal impact of what we were doing. I strongly believe that we are splitting the workforce every day. Splitting it into the ones that can participate and the ones that can’t or are even ousted. Technology is a great enabler of our every day life – also at work. It is though also an instrument to split the workforce.
Let’s take the rise of the computer as one example with which the current revolution started – slowly at first, but now more rapid than ever. With the “normal” PC coming into the workplace, more and more activities could be dealt with via Computer – and you did not need an employee for it anymore. The normal computer has taken workplaces and transformed employees into unemployment.
But it is not only about “losing” your job. Let’s take Social Collaboration as another example – Social Collaboration is how we get things done at work now, or at least when we are young and grew up with it. But what does Social Collaboration do to Baby Boomers or Generation X colleagues? – No offence, but they are truly used to different ways of working and have a hard time to adjust, if they can. Social Collaboration can in fact alienate from the workplace. If you cannot participate, you are separated and slowly lose touch with your workplace, with your work.
And there are many more of these examples where I believe that for good reasons, we in HR changed the way our company operates, but maybe did not always think about the colleagues that we leave behind. And after all, I believe that being left behind at work or even losing your job is one of the main impacts or factors that places people on the losing side of Globalisation. It is explainable – it is man-made, and now we should not complain that these former colleagues or still colleagues that have lost touch and connection are unhappy and protesting. Inclusiveness at work is not only about the usual topics, it is also about technology.
BUT, in the same way we moved these colleagues to the other side, we can and should and need to move them back onto the winning side. This is the only way to keep us all together as a strong society where everyone can participate. This is the way civilised societies deal with these kind of things. It should not be about who screams louder or who is stronger – the elite (and yes, this is us) the elite needs to be the smart party here and needs to start listening and acting. Further separation and ousting of colleagues does only further nurture the fire that is burning. Globalisation, the way we live today, the way we work today, how small the world is, what we have achieved is worth fighting for – and we should fight for it. Just not in the way that these right-wing parties are doing it, not in a way that further alienates and makes people aggressive. But in a way that brings people together again – and this needs to start at the workplace. And we as HR are the ones that are responsible for the culture at the workplace, for how we work and for how we create inclusiveness.
And with this, I will start a new series of posts around how technology has shaped our workplaces in the recent years and future years to come and what the impact on workplace culture and society have been and might be. This is a topic that I believe needs more attention and explanation as it has such a big impact on our every day lives. And only when we understand, we can change something, and we can get back on a path of an inclusive society.