Tell us about yourself. How did you get to where you are now?

I worked in HR for 25 years and I have seen quite a bit of the transition of technology and tools in the world of work for quite a long time. In July 2022, I left my most last in-house role to start my own business, which was a culture consulting company. When I started to get into building my own website and marketing my culture-building business, I found generative AI and got fixated on the way that artificial intelligence was going to start to shape and mold the world of work. In concert with that, I also started thinking about the HR leaders that I know that really want to do great work on culture building, creating community within their organizations, aligning talent with roles and finding the right talent and supporting the strategy of the business, but are struggling with the time to do so because of all the facets of role [HR leaders] have to fill. I started really thinking about how AI would have helped me when I was in-house. That pivoted me into creating peoplepower.ai, where I support and educate HR leaders and help them integrate AI into their organizations.

When was your first encounter with AI?

In December of 2022, the very first thing I ever did was I asked ChatGPT to write a haiku about organizational culture. It wrote such a cool little witty haiku. Then I went back to it a month or so later. I was getting ready to think about what I was going to put out for International Women's Day, and helping one of my clients, and I asked [ChatGPT] to come up with a list of 25 quotes from women that were highly influential throughout history on the idea of culture and impact. It spit that out in an amazing chart and that really kicked me off.

How do you continue to use AI at work?

I started using generative AI for my own business. I do a lot of support and promotion within my business, so I use it to write blog posts and articles. I work with some of my clients to help them use it to assess engagement surveys. There's so much heavy data and analytics that go into [engagement surveys], and AI can streamline that data and do it in record speed. I use it to build up business plans, I use it for marketing. I've created a few different custom chat bots or GPTs to help support new managers in their roles, to help support coaching of new HR team leaders, to help HR leaders in general. I spend every day either learning or educating and training other people and HR teams on how to use AI.  

Do you have any tips you could share?

I think anybody can get information out of ChatGPT or a generative AI tool in the same way that you get anything out of Google. The difference is that while Google is parsing through a library of books, generative AI is actually creating whole new books. I think it’s important to remember that the more specific you can be with your prompts, the more useful AI is. I have a six point prompting method that I have up on my website—that's a free resource—and it’s a method that I've found to help me get the better results out of my prompts. 

The reality is the more that you're in it, the better you get at it and the more excited you get by it. [It can be] as simple as scheduling yourself on your lightest day of the week for just 20 to 30 minutes and exploring and playing in AI. It could be, “My cousin's birthday is coming up. What are some creative ideas for writing a song for her birthday?” Or “What are some fun ways to get people excited about a party?” Whatever it might be, wherever you can embroil yourself in a little bit of practice and play, that will inspire a lot more intuitive learning. 

Wherever you can embroil yourself in a little bit of practice and play, that will inspire a lot more intuitive learning.

I do a free AI Quick Clinic every three weeks for 30 minutes. These quick clinics are for people that don't have a ton of time to devote because they're not yet that sure of the impact, but they need some education. 

Lastly, I would say if your company is not talking about it, then you are the right person to ask the questions [and] get involved in how your company is planning for generative AI and other AI tools.

How will AI impact HR?

I'll be honest, I don't think we are as ready, particularly small and mid-sized businesses, to talk about what the five-year approach to HR is going to look like with generative AI. But I do think that there are two main pillars of opportunity that HR teams can leverage, and that is insights and efficiencies. HR has this umbrella of responsibility in a lot of companies where there are a few people managing all of those responsibilities. There are HR teams of one or HR teams of three, and they're responsible for all those different facets. Within every one of those facets, which I don't think people appreciate unless you've actually worked in HR, is a ton of administration and manual work.

I think where we're going to see some real magic is the development of customized tools to support specific HR administration. One example of that is a company called Harriet that does some really amazing work in being sort of a concierge for employees that come to HR with the same questions that they can find in handbooks or they could find on the website, but don't necessarily take the time to do that. Where it gets really magical is that it's not just your old fashioned bot that gives you a link. It is really interacting with documents, interacting with your technology, so that an employee could go in and say, “Hey, how many PTO days do I have?” [and] Harriet can actually create that request, put those days through, send the notice to the manager for approval. All of that can happen without needing to talk to your HR person. That's not me saying, “Let's remove HR from the equation,” but “Let's focus HR teams on building the strategy on how to create better, greater ROI for the company through reduced turnover or whatever it might be, and using predictive analytics for that.” Or it might [mean an] entry-level HR person, instead of answering those questions, is going around and meeting with employees and helping them upskill and really curating an experience that employees need in order to feel connected. Especially today, many employees are feeling disconnected and unattached. That's the heavy lifting that I think HR leaders and their teams need to be doing.

What projects are you excited about this year?

I get my greatest charge [from] standing in front of a room or talking on a webinar or talking to people that need to learn and need to experience. Getting past the education part and into the real heavy lift of [exploring] the tools that you're actually using [and seeing] if that's actually valuable. Every HR tech company is starting to put their AI-forward element of their system in place. But having seen what I've seen, in my opinion a lot of those aren't optimal for actually leveraging the power of AI. For a while it’s going to be more like the way we use our iPhone with different apps and different tools and things. But I think going through the experience of the education and getting into the real heavy lift of integrating and enabling our employees with AI tools and how they can be used, and we're upskilling and reskilling. We're creating plans for those people.

Do you have a hot take on generative AI?

My hot take is that AI is going to allow HR leaders and people ops teams to finally dig into the meaningful work that we are so well equipped for and so ready to do in ways that we haven't been able to do before. I imagine a future where companies look much different, not based on location or anything like that, but create[ing] a really curated personal experience, which is, at their core, what people want.