HR Tech 2024: Exploring Major Themes in AI and HR Technology

HR Tech 2024: Exploring Major Themes in AI and HR Technology

Hosts: Steve Boese & Trish Steed

Guests: Mervyn Dinnen, Principal Analyst of Two Heads Consulting and Host of HR Means Business

Today, Steve and Trish were at the 2024 HR Technology Conference in Las Vegas. They met with Mervyn Dinnen to catch up on current trends and topics that are top of mind.

– Impact of AI on Retention and Recruitment

– Challenges and Opportunities of AI in HR

– Global Adoption of AI in HR

– Future plans and reflections

Thank you for your continued support of the show and make sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts!

This episode of At Work in America is sponsored by Paychex, one of the leading providers of HR, payroll, retirement, and insurance solutions for businesses of all sizes. Want to be the workplace everyone dreams of joining? Then you need to get your hands on this new guide to employee wellbeing from our friends at Paychex: It’s not just about physical health anymore. This guide looks at the big picture, taking a holistic approach to employee wellbeing by thinking about mental and financial health, as well. It’s filled with expert advice that will have your employees performing at their best and staying with your business for the long haul. Ready to make a meaningful change for your team? Visit paychex.com/awia. 

Transcript follows:

Steve 0:13
Welcome to the HR Happy Hour Show, the longest running, most downloaded HR podcast for 15 years. Trish. What is happening. We are here at HR Tech. I’m super excited.

Trish 0:24
I’m super excited too. We have made it through. Is this officially day two? I guess it’s day two.

Steve 0:30
Yes, day two, right?

Trish 0:31
And we’re halfway through. I’m not quite exhausted yet. I’m feeling good. I feel like the mood is good too. I mean, we say this every year, but I’m being sincere. This is like the best yet.

Steve 0:41
It’s a great vibe here. Wonderful technology, great people, great sessions, I must mention also Trish. This podcast episode is sponsored by Paychex, one of the leading providers of HR, payroll, retirement and insurance solutions for businesses of all sizes, and winner of a Top Products of the Year Award, which I gave out last night, which is exciting, very exciting.

Trish 1:01
I spoke with Tom Hammond and our friends over there in the booth. They’re super excited about it, and I think it’s just such a nice recognition. Everyone takes that award very, very seriously. They work very hard. The product teams work hard, and it was really good to see them get that.

Steve 1:16
Yeah, great stuff. And so rest of them, and to all the winners, Trish, we are going to take a few minutes. We’re joined by our friend Mervyn Dinnen. Mervyn is the Principal Analyst of Two Heads Consulting and maybe more notably, far as I’m concerned, the host of the HR Means Business podcast on the HR Happy Hour media network. Mervyn, welcome. Welcome to the USA.

Mervyn Dinnen 1:40
Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here. I seem to be spending more time in the US at the moment than I do in the UK, so I feel I might apply for citizenship.

Trish 1:48
Right? You should.

Steve 1:49
Well, thank you absolutely.

Trish 1:51
I mean, you’ve been here like so much in this year in totality, right? This is such a busy time. Yeah. I mean, we’re here at HR tech. Obviously, the vibe is really good. The intensity is high. What are you what are you seeing? I mean, you’ve been to several of these before, so how does it compare?

Mervyn Dinnen 2:09
For me, I think at the moment, this is the best one. I’m not just saying it because we’re here today. No, no, right? I first came over in 2013 and I’ve been to everyone, obviously, by the covid, years since, and this just seems to have a real positive, upbeat kind of feel about it. The I think that there are a lot of new, new tech players in the market. So just doing briefings in the analyst room, there’s a lot of energy about what people are talking about. There’s a lot of passion in there. And they’re actually specifically, I found it interesting because people are getting are giving briefings to me because they want me to do some kind of, like marketing around it, amplification, message and, you know, some really interesting things happening. My overall theme, I suppose, this year, has been about looking at employee engagement, retention, with the theme being, retention is the new recruitment. And everybody I talk to about it agrees, yeah, that there is a big shift at the moment to investment in kind of employee experience, employee engagement, supporting people, whether it’s it’s well being and mental health, whether it’s in their work, getting better tech in to make their life easier, there’s a definite positive vibe about that.

Steve 3:23
I love that angle of retention being the new recruitment. Because I felt like for a long time when I think we just talked about this yesterday, how this show, and maybe a lot of other tech shows, are a little bit over indexed on recruitment. Yeah, right. Lots of the vendors in the Expo Hall will be recruitment vendors, way more than in any other sub domain of HR, and that’s natural, right? It’s just a ripe area for innovation and experimentation, perhaps even, but still, yeah, we need to focus just as much, if not more, I think. And I think maybe you agree with me, Mervyn, yeah, on the people we already have in the organization, yeah, what they need and how they want to develop.

Mervyn Dinnen 3:59
That’s it. It’s upskilling, it’s supporting enablement, it’s, it’s being able to, I suppose, allow people to be that their best selves. Yeah, and I think that, and maybe it’s to do with external factors, you know, kind of, you know, economies and stuff are in a difficult time. There’s something like 60% plus of the globe of have voted or are voting in the elections this year. So there’s, there’s, there is this kind of flux, I suppose, and people look to their organizations, I suppose, as a kind of, you know, steady the ship to be something they can believe in and belong to.

Trish 4:35
I think you’re right on that, especially Mervynn, because, you know, especially when there’s chaos somewhere else. You almost want at least one part of your life to be stable, secure, and if you’re, if you’re with an employer, you’ve made that selection for a reason, right? You would hate to get into that job and then feel like you were delivered something that wasn’t what you were promised in the recruitment phase. So that’s why I think, too. You know, we all go through recruitment once, right? In the company, but then it’s staying because of all of those other factors you mentioned. Are they upskilling me? Are they giving me opportunities? Are they, you know, giving me the training I need, and the everything? Right? It seems like more than ever, especially with AI. Like AI has been such a big topic last year. I feel like, for me personally, AI has finally gotten like where the rubber hits the road. There’s actual metrics of how you can use it for impact. What are you seeing in terms of both retention, recruitment, as far as AI goes? Because I know you talk to a lot of different companies.

Mervyn Dinnen 5:32
I think there’s a lot of prompting going on. I think that managers, leaders can get a lot more through the AI can get a lot more about how people are feeling, what the mood is, just by sentiment analysis and things like that. So I think there’s, there’s, there’s a lot more of using AI for that. I mean, obviously there is, I suppose some concerns over you know, you will get content. You will get stuff which is very similar all the way through the AI might repeat stuff, you know, it’s already done, but I think that a lot of people use it as a support a lot of people use it to gain insight. Certainly, if I look, you know, a lot of the time I’m speaking to people who are in kind of marketing and messaging, and obviously it’s a huge use there. And the other thing is, we can fact check stuff. So it’s kind of, you know, you can just if you hear something you’re not sure it used to be going on on Google, but now you can just go straight to AI on the phone and say, What is this? You can you can download a conversation and say, give me the five things they talked about, and it’s there in an instant. And there is a kind of, I think, an over reliance on that. So I think we have to be careful that we’re not talking bullet points all the time, but there is some understanding and some depth behind it. But yeah, I think it’s a great tool.

Steve 6:59
Yeah, I’m slightly the concerns we’re hearing about it are data security, data privacy, and not for nothing. We haven’t talked about this much at this conference, but the actual cost of this right thinking about the massive amounts of data, the massive computational resources required right to generate the outputs that we’re talking about, and how that’s going to be sustainable and affordable, right? Because I think I read somewhere that, you know, having chat GPT write, you like, a 500 word essay or something like that requires, like, I don’t know, 80 gallons water and enough power to, like, you know, keep your house lit up for three days something like that. I’m making that up a little bit, right? Those are some things. I think they’re going to start falling out, though, right? Because they’re not, they’re not insignificant considerations, and maybe perhaps a little bit down the line, folks in these kinds of roles of HR, who are making decisions around that, along with their CIO, are going to have to start reckoning some of that too.

Trish 7:54
Yeah. I mean, you’ve been in the industry a long time, Steve, I think it’s no different than the years we talked about mobile, mobile first, right? That was a big thing, or big data, or, you know, you name any of these things we’ve gone through in terms of the phases of HR technology. There’s always skepticism. There’s always sort of, I mean, you need to be careful. You need to make sure everything is secure and as risk free as you can make it. But I think ultimately, like terms of AI, it’s been around a long time. These vendors have been having it embedded in their solutions for a very long time. It’s the generative AI piece that I think people are still a little bit on the fence about. And there’s a little bit of a, I guess, a dilemma of, how do you know which vendor is actually doing what they say they’re doing and protecting my data? Yeah, what do you think about that?

Steve 8:38
I think it’s really important. I think it’s going to be important to choose your partners carefully. We just did a recording with our friends at workday a couple of hours ago, of course, as you’d imagine, remember one of the topics came up, which was, AI, yeah, we were talking about payroll as well. And I kind of said, I always advise companies to don’t really trust your payroll to a very small startup company, maybe with no track record. And, you know, that’s payroll so important, right? And, yeah, and I said, Maybe we might need to think about AI that same way too. You know, maybe soon, maybe now, like you’d be very careful who you partner with when deploying these kinds of models for simple security, but also reliability, trust, some of those factors I’d imagine report.

Mervyn Dinnen 9:22
Definitely. I think one of the areas I’ve looked at this year is the impact of AI on engagement. And I suppose there is a feeling that some of the stuff that we’re getting AI to do is actually some of the stuff that our people enjoy doing. Okay, there is this chance that, you know, there is this, this counter side that AI could be an engagement killer, because it’s we’re taking away some very straightforward stuff that the AI can do within a second or two. But people actually enjoy doing that. They like being creative. It’s part of what they gives them happiness about their job. I like it because I can be a bit creative. I can do. I can do that. So if we take that away, although there is quite a bit of research that says, AI’s not not negatively impacting productivity, but actually boosting it, but this my my only concern is, if it takes away the, I suppose, the enjoyment, and then if you take away the stuff people really enjoy doing, then are you leaving them with the stuff they don’t enjoy doing, or are you leaving them with enough of the things they like to do.

Trish 10:25
That puts some pressure on the leadership, then you have to come up with new, exciting projects or things they can work on, and that’s that’s going to be a big challenge.

Steve 10:34
Well, I’ve seen some interesting lines out there, and the sort of popular culture about AI where it’s like, boy, this is great. AI is coming. And wait a minute, AI is going to be doing creative writing and design and creating art and creating music, and it’s going to lead for the humans like service jobs and working in the fast food industry and doing the manual labor, right? Because it can’t do that. Boy, that stinks. That’s not a great deal, right for humanity, if that’s really what happens, right? As you said, doing the things people like to do, yeah, whether it’s creative things or even sometimes, hey, there’s something to be said for towards the end of the day, like knocking off some very simple things on your task list, yeah, just to cross them off, right? Satisfied?

Trish 11:12
I think it can go either way, and that’s probably what we’ll see very shortly, right? Because I know in the women in tech keynote yesterday, we’re talking about culture and the impact of AI and culture. And Opal wagneck from isolved actually was talking about the length of time that something like electricity being invented to where, you know, it took almost 100 years for that to be adopted by everyone. Then you look at something like the internet, and that’s a much shorter adoption period with AI and generative AI, it’s going to be a very quick window of when we’re actually it’s so embedded already, I think, in so many ways we’re not even aware of.

Steve 11:48
So, Mervyn, you do the HR Means Business podcast, sort of our emissary to UK and broader Europe is entire European nation. Are the folks you talk to you out there? Are they on this AI wave to are they coming along? Is it a global phenomenon, from your perspective?

Mervyn Dinnen 12:07
From my perspective, is a global phenomenon because I’m, although I’m based in the UK, so a lot of the conversations I have a UK based, I’m also plugged into this global network, so I probably see more. I mean, if I think about, if I say ordinary people, I don’t mean that people I know, people I come across back home. Those who are working in our kind of sector are talking about it for the ordinary person, they don’t really, you know, it’s, it’s something that it’s not so much. They don’t trust. They don’t see it impacting their lives. So it, it is, but they don’t realize that. Yeah, so I think that for a lot of people who don’t work in kind of any tech related field, it probably they won’t even notice it. They might notice things get a bit easier for them on some things, they certainly notice if they go into place and order a McDonald’s and they have to talk to a screen and kind of it suddenly comes out in front of them. They notice something like that, but in the main, they probably don’t notice much.

Trish 13:09
I think education and awareness will be where these companies are going to have to start working really hard. Yeah, just it goes back to transparency. And a lot of vendors are talking about transparency being very important, and you’re right. I think there are a lot of people who just things will change for the better, and they’ll not even think twice about it, right?

Mervyn Dinnen 13:27
It comes down to trust as well. It’s got to be the the information you get from AI has to be trust trustworthy. And I suppose we don’t, in some respects, we know how it’s collated, where it comes from, but to what extent can we actually trust it?

Steve 13:42
Yeah right. Yeah, absolutely. Last thing, Mervyn, while we just have a few minutes today. Any what’s new for you? Upcoming for 2025 anything you’re looking forward to, whether it’s work related research you might be doing, publishing any more books?

Mervyn Dinnen 13:58
I was gonna say Arsenal winning the Premier League. That’s what I’m looking forward to. No, I think we argued. I started writing the next book.

Trish 14:12
You heard it first here.

Mervyn Dinnen 14:17
I think no, just more of the same. I’m quite, you know, I’ve spent a lot of time, as I said earlier, you know, around the areas like engagement and stuff. I’m looking forward to doing more conversations on the podcast with people who are doing things, particularly around multi generational, multi skilled workforces, and how they’re helping, I suppose, support people, you know, to do their best work, to be themselves. It’s, I think it’s important because it’s, again, it’s the human side. And I wrote something, in fact, I think it was on one of the podcast conversations that you know, as AI is taking a lot of the roles away, the stuff people enjoy for human resources, it’s almost about putting the humanity back into it.

Steve 15:01
I just did a whole session here. Just finished it with Don Robertson, our friend from Northwestern Mutual CHRO there. It’s literally that conversation about this sort of that marriage, or that balance between data and technology and the human element, both in HR and also in just people management and people leadership. And we talked for 40 minutes about it. And I think that’s going to be hugely important going for important going forward. As tech gets more powerful, gets more ubiquitous, we ask it to do more, and it can do more, like we heard this morning about agents talking to agents talking to agents, yes, like agents all corresponding together and working things out sort of on their own, where? Where’s the humanity, where’s the critical thinking, the empathy, the sort of enlightened bits that AI can’t do yet, and that’s going to be, I think, maybe not next year, but in the years to come, major challenge it’s going to wrestle with.

Trish 15:54
You know, I think HR professionals, though, for as long as I’ve been in the field, which is late 90s, I think that we’ve always wanted more time to do those more empathetic, compassionate, caring parts of our job, and you get so bogged down with some of the paperwork and the mundane tasks that we really wanted this. We actually wanted Gen AI, I feel like we manifested it. So it’s here now. It’s going to take a minute to get used to it, but I do feel like ultimately, in the next few years, it’s going to be opening up the opportunity, not just for HR, but for other leaders, to truly have those deeper connections, deeper conversations that are more human.

Steve 16:29
Yeah, alright, well, let’s hope Mervyn, great to see you. Thanks today.

Mervyn Dinnen 16:34
Nice pleasure.

Steve 16:35
Safe travels back to the UK. Thank you. Go Liverpool. What did I get? No, no kidding. So, yeah, Mervyn, HR Means Business podcast. Where on the web? People can find you as well.

Mervyn Dinnen 16:48
My name Mervyn Dinnen, I’m on LinkedIn. Well, I would say, I used to say I was on Twitter, but I am on x, but I don’t do much on it these days. No, I know, I know. So it’s mainly LinkedIn. It’s mainly the kind of stuff I write. I have a regular news newsletter on LinkedIn, and I put up. I’m trying to do more video stuff as well, so I put that up. And, yeah, it’s an unusual name, so you know, I’m the only one, as far as I’m aware.

Steve 17:13
Alright, Mervyn, thank you so much. Thanks. Trish, good to see you.

Trish 17:17
Thank you. Great to see you, too. Thanks to everybody for listening.

Steve 17:19
Thanks to our friends at Paychex, of course. And course, and we listen to the hrhappyhour.net. Get all the show archives at hrhappyhour.net, and we will see you next time.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai