Latest / Fractional Frequency / The Future of HR: Building a Better Workplace with AI | Jacob Little
Transcript
- Amy Crook: Hi everybody. Welcome back to Fractional Frequency. Jacob Little is returning. last time we talked Jacob Little: Hello, Amy. Amy Crook: hello. Last time we talked, we went down memory lane. And it's only right that this time we should talk about the future. As a reminder for everybody, Jacob has worked in leadership roles at Walmart, Levi, Glassdoor, Cornerstone, On Demand. And Jacob is now Rivian's Director of People, Operational Excellence, and AI. We're gonna explore how his role and HR has evolved over the past decade and what meaningful AI adoption actually requires. and how people leaders can redesign the work without losing that human element. Welcome, Jacob. Jacob Little: Thank you for having me, Amy. It's great to be back. Amy Crook: Yes, it's great to see you again. so let's kick off with the evolution of an HR leader. What have you seen happen over the last decade in in our world? Jacob Little: So much. I feel like the function of HR has evolved and is constantly evolving, and it that's only accelerating these days. I think if you if the Jacob of 10 years ago saw what the Jacob of today is doing, he would be shocked. your listeners may remember that we worked together at Glassdoor and we were in very people-centric roles. We were doing recruiting and we were doing L and D and We invested a lot in a culture of diversity, equity, and inclusion. And that's always been the side of the people function that I have been on. And so over the past few years making this transition into the more operational side of HR, and then with AI coming onto this scene, I think the role of an HR professional is a lot more requires a lot more technical fluency than it did before. And I think about the time that I invested in some continuing education I did at Berkeley to just upskill around AI and understand what an LLM is and the difference between you know machine learning and reinforcement learning. all that really paid off and helped me build a technical fluency that I use every day in my role. And I see The need for HR professionals across the board, even if you are in an LND or an HRBP role, that historically has been very people-centric, technical fluency is more and more a prerequisite because you're sifting through a lot more data. you are using AI tools to create tools and content that you use every day, and we're constantly being asked to scale. More of ourselves than we ever have been before. Amy Crook: Yeah. And what impact do you think that's having on the the product? And it's hard when you're in, you know, HRs, like what are you actually building? But you're creating the culture for the company and you're you're almost the guardian of of that. So how has that changed in the day to day? Jacob Little: I think the role of HR as culture guardians is more important than ever. And I think you can look across the tech landscape and see companies that have focused on efficiency, cost savings, productivity at the expense of their culture and their people. And there are a lot of companies that are led by CFO centric leadership. as opposed to chief people officer centric leadership and that shows in how organizations strike that balance. Amy Crook: Yeah, I've definitely observed both ends of this scale. obviously being in my position and going into different organizations. Companies have wildly different approaches. They all want the same thing, which is, you know, good governed AI adoption. I think everybody wants to make sure that they're creating the efficiencies that they've paid for. Cause you know, this isn't This isn't a a free exercise to create these efficiencies. you you have to invest in the tools and invest in training. And the and and the change management piece is so important. What role do you think HR should be playing in that change management? Jacob Little: HR should be the enabling function that allows leaders to be effective change leaders through this transition. Amy Crook: And how do they do that when they don't have have a technical background? I've had this this pushback previously that, you know, how is how is a non-technical person supposed to assess technical capabilities? Jacob Little: Yeah, I don't think you have to I think you have to have enough technical knowledge to speak the language. and so I think every HR professional needs to be upskilling and learning a new vocabulary and playing around with AI tools in a way that we haven't had to interact with technical platforms before. However, I think the core skills of HR are what are most needed. And but specifically organizational development skills. I think those are the really important skills for all HR professionals to learn right now. Organizational architecture, spans and layers, decision drives, process and workflows, incentives. How do you design and optimize organizations to work in a fundamentally different way? And Capture the individual productivity gains that AI is affording us and translate that into organizational productivity gains. Because Amy Crook: Yeah. Jacob Little: if you take a poll of a random sample of employees, they're probably two to ten times more productive than they were without AI. Amy Crook: Mm-hmm. Jacob Little: Are organizations two to ten times more productive as a whole? No. And that's because we have done so much work focusing on individual productivity, we haven't optimized our organizations to capitalize on it. And that is the new OD skill set. That is the new HR skill set. I would also offer that the relentless focus on efficiency and optimization and cost cutting is a scarcity mindset. Amy Crook: Mm. Jacob Little: You're trying to do more with less. But what if we could do exponentially more by leveraging the resources we have? Why do we have to focus on shrinking and optimizing as opposed to focus on multiplying? Amy Crook: Yes. Jacob Little: That's the mindset that I think an HR team can cultivate in an organization because left to its own devices, an organization is always going to think from a scarcity mindset. And we have Amy Crook: Yeah. Jacob Little: to come in with that abundance mindset, which I think is a lot more powerful, compelling, inspiring, and engaging for employees. Amy Crook: It a hundred percent is. You know, a and we saw this for the first half of the year, you know, as as companies were really jumping on the AI bandwagon that there was a huge like rise in burnout of employees. And it's because, hearing that same scarcity message or hearing nothing, you know, that that was also Also a challenge that I observed that you know in town halls it would be, you know, we're adopting AI, and the question would be, well, okay, what does that mean? What does that look like? And the answer was pretty quiet because the reality is that they're trying to eliminate positions and there's no nice way to to dress that up. So it's been cool to see that to you know, the second half of the year it's been more human in the loop focused and more like how can we really maximize our output so that we can grow exponentially rather than okay let's try and do let's be exactly the same as we are now but just with less. Like, Jacob Little: Mm. Amy Crook: you know, that's that's it's not an exciting message. And I I g I guess something that pops into my mind is if you don't take the steps to learn some fluency in this as an HR professional. How long do you think those people have got before they're kind of worked out of the market? Jacob Little: I think that with every technological revolution in history, it has created seismic changes in the makeup and the composition of the workforce. And this is another one of those moments. And so there are, as as our listeners have probably heard many times, there are classes of jobs that will change, that will shrink, that will go away, and there will be classes of jobs that will be created. I am in a unique position where I'm in a job that AI created recently and my team. And so I am hiring for AI Fluency. And if I'm not seeing AI on a resume, I'm not hiring that person. That is not, you know, my team is very AI focused. That's not consistent across the board. But for example, one of our L and D folks at Rivian just ran a resume by me. And it was a very traditional LND resume. And then it just had one little paragraph of also be fluent in AI skills. And my response to him was like, this is just a traditional resume with AI bolted on. It's and you're still hiring for fluency in cre in creating content using traditional tools. Amy Crook: Mm. Jacob Little: And I'm like, that is not the skill set of an LD professional in the future. It's about leveraging AI tools to create content and having the judgment and governance around it. And that was an unlock for him. And so AI is impacting every role for the most part. There may be some sectors and industries that are less touched by it, but in the world that I live in, of tech and enterprise corporations and Fortune five hundreds. it's gonna be difficult to navigate a career without building in some AI fluency. The good news is that if I can do it, you can do it. And what Amy Crook: Ha ha ha. Jacob Little: I mean by that is historically and traditionally, I am not a technically fluent or operational-minded person. Again, my skill set has always been on the people side. And one of the reasons that motivates me to do the work that I'm doing now. is so that I can be a voice in organizations reminding everyone why people should still be at the core and why people are so important and shaping the technology around people rather than optimizing organizations to do with less. and I think Amy Crook: Yeah. Yeah. It's Jacob Little: that's an important role we have. Amy Crook: Yeah, I I completely agree. it's it's interesting to see what's happening kind of conversationally around AI and it's going a little bit off topic, but the the folks who are, you know, very against it, very against, you know, data centers and and things like that, what how do you think that's going to impact the industry overall? Jacob Little: I think the AI industry, like every other industry, is on a curve. And we're in the we're in the portion where we're in rapid build-out mode. We're s we're investing in scale at the expense of profits. we're trying to get mass adoption, and then it's going to mature and become more expensive over time so that these AI companies that are spending all this money can actually return profits. As a result, it's gonna get more expensive for enterprise and for users. as a result of that, AI use is gonna be really targeted. so the market is gonna mature. I think what's different about today's market is that these cycles come so fast. These cycles Amy Crook: Yeah. Jacob Little: are a lot faster. And I certainly can't predict what the next cycle is gonna look like. because they're coming faster and faster every time. But ultimately you you Amy Crook: Yeah, it's pretty terrifying. Jacob Little: you referenced earlier that the investment in AI eventually has to pay off. Amy Crook: Yeah. Jacob Little: And that's gonna mean generating more profit and revenue for these AI companies, which means that costs for somebody are gonna go up and that's gonna change how we use AI. Amy Crook: So talk to me a little bit about building AI into the people function at Rivian. Jacob Little: our vision at Rivian is essentially an evolution of the shared services model. And the shape of it is essentially that you document all processes, workflows, and standard operating procedures, and you categorize the work into different tiers based on complexity. The lower complexity work you group that with work in a shared services model. And so in our model we have a shared services pod for talent acquisition, we have one for rewards and data, we have one for performance and talent management. And then we try and funnel as much of that, we call it tier one and tier two cases, case work, to that shared services group. And they execute on it efficiently because it's lower complexity It's centralized and we use automation and AI to support our tier one and tier two agents in handling those cases. Then if a lot of that work is centralized, the role of the COEs changes. So COEs become less about execution and they become more about strategy, policy creation, and governance. So they're doing the higher level, higher level thinking and the more complex strategic work. And then these shared services are executing more of the day-to-day. So what you have is an expanded operations function that heavily uses technology to support its operations. You have COEs that have a leaner COE that does more of the high-level thinking work. And then you have HRBPs who are empowered with these robust operational and policy teams behind them. To do work that scales more broadly across the organization. So the HRBP to employee ratio increases. And that's kind of the shape of the model that we're building at Rivian. What that is founded on is documented workflows, standard operating procedures, and systems that enable those workflows and those procedures, not the other way around. And so a lot of the work that I do. is untangle workflows, rebuild them with a different mindset, and then work with our systems team to enable those workflows and processes to be executed efficiently. Amy Crook: That actually sounds like a lot of fun. Jacob Little: It is actually. I have been surprised Amy Crook: really did look. Jacob Little: by how much fun process design is. Amy Crook: Yeah, no, it really it really does because it's like you get this opportunity to throw out of the window everything that we've always done it this way or you know, this is the process that we've got and so this we just make it work and you just get to build it again and and make it better. I wonder though, you know, as I see teams shift into hiring more senior personnel. and relying on technology to handle some of those lower level tasks. Where will we be in, I don't know, 20 years? How do we get maintain that level of senior level talent when those lower level jobs are going away? Jacob Little: Yeah. I think it's it's Amy Crook: It's an interesting dilemma. Jacob Little: an interesting question and what I'm proud of at Rivian is that we are in we continue to invest in emerging talent. So we've kept our internship program and we intentionally Amy Crook: Wonderful. Jacob Little: build career pathways, both in our corporate spaces but also in our field and manufacturing population. In fact, There's lots of thinking right now about the re-emergence of trade skills as Amy Crook: Mm-hmm. Jacob Little: a profession. And as a auto manufacturer, we have a great opportunity to support that transition to trade-focused education because we need high skilled talent in our service centers and in our manufacturing plants. so that's something that I'm really proud of. But I think companies need to ha have some sense of a social responsibility to the next generation and keep these pathways open. And I think L and D programs become that much more important because to your point, Amy, the gap between levels is a lot higher now. You have managers that have a lot more scale. And so it just takes long it takes more seasoning for somebody at one level to get ready for a promotion at the next level. So L and D mentorship. I think is is crucial now. Amy Crook: What do you think that it takes to move from traditional programs that are more bespoke to operating systems in organizations? Jacob Little: Yeah. I whenever I'm confronted with a question of bespoke versus standardized, I always think about the eighty twenty rule. I think there's limited use cases where a hundred percent standardized is effective. Amy Crook: Yeah. Jacob Little: But when I think about a large enterprise like the one that I'm currently in, building scalable, repeatable systems becomes really important particularly for an HR team that's expected to to have an impact at an enterprise scale. And so the way that I think about systems is again going back to these like core process and workflows. Like what is the work? what is really important to be done by a human? Work that requires strong judgment, emotional intelligence, cultural competency, fluency, empathy, etc. Where can AI come alongside a human for critical thinking, for judgment, for creative ideation? And what are low complexity, low judgment tasks that AI can automate? And in rethinking a workflow and a process to get to an outcome. through the lens of new technology that is available to us, inclusive but not exclusive of AI. I think automation is also really important and often gets overlooked in the AI conversation. That is how you scale a system. you can't just scale a process of today. You have to actually rethink the underlying process, challenge assumptions, rethink the outcome. rethink about how to get to that outcome with the tools available and then scale that. Because scaling a broken process just scales the problem. Amy Crook: Yeah, you just get to the bad outcome quicker. how do Jacob Little: Yeah. Amy Crook: leaders or and yourself balance the urgency of implementation with the freedom to experiment and the responsibility of governance? Like how do you balance those three factors? Jacob Little: I think what's really important and I think often overlooked is that you have to have time on an individual level just to experiment with AI and tools that are available to you. And I mean on a very practical level. Like I have to block one day every two weeks just to play around with new Claude features that I haven't used or to try out Gemini Enterprise that I haven't used or do some research on what's new. And I think we often just forget to do that. and that's such a core part of staying innovative and up to speed as an HR professional about like just what are the tools available to me and how do I use them. the end is changing so quickly. adopting AI in a large enterprise at scale is time consuming. because of all the guardrails. So I just supported the implementation of a sort of a self-service agent that responds to employee inquiries about benefits. There are a lot of benefits questions that get asked that are highly sensitive, that require empathy, or that may surface serious issues that need to be escalated to a human. And so building the actual agent to pull from the knowledge base. and suggest an answer to an employee question around benefits was the easy part. We spent 80% of time on the agent that analyzes the request for sensitive issues, for harassment, for discrimination, for bad management, and had to build in all these governance layers just to make sure that this request was escalated to a human if it fit a certain threshold. with all the headlines about AI breaking out of its testing environments and going rogue, the conversation about governance I think is only going to get larger. And organizations that do well in AI are the ones that are gonna have that strict governance because the costs of not having governance are quickly Amy Crook: Mm-hmm. Jacob Little: gonna become higher than the costs of implementing effective governance. Amy Crook: Yeah, absolutely. And it's it's across the board. I mean, you've got bigger issues like data breaches or not, you know, containment. But you've also got pretty simple issues like who's tracking the budget for how what we're using, how are we implementing this? Who's checking adoption? You know, I think There's some of that that was an afterthought. There's a lot of interesting things to balance in this world and you know, governance is a big part of that. How do you ensure that what the work that you're doing is implemented well, it's effective, it's safe, like what steps do you take? Jacob Little: in the AI community we love to talk about layers. So for governance I like to think about the enterprise enterprise layer, the functional layer, and then the individual governance layer. So the enterprise layer, this is around just security access, data permissions, who has access to what information in systems. does the organization have effective policy and rules around where AI is used and where it's not used. Then at the functional level, like in HR, for example, what's our ethos around how AI is used in recruiting? are we comfortable with using AI to screen unqualified resumes? Are we comfortable using it to rank resumes? Are we comfortable having it do initial phone screens, for example? and if so, how do we handle human in the loop? Do we have humans review every rejection? or only some rejection. So these functional level governance decisions are super important. I think on an individual level, it's pretty similar to how HR professionals would think about data governance even without AI. we are privileged to vast amounts of sensitive employee information, and we have to be very careful with how where we access it, where we store it, how we share it, what we use it for. And the same is true for the AI use at the individual level within HR organizations. The policy that I tell my team and share broadly at Rivian is like if you have access to certain data because of your role and the enterprise governance is strong, you can use that data in an AI application safely, and you have to be super careful with where that information goes after you use it in AI. and if there's any doubt, then you escalate to our privacy and security team for additional review. this also sparks a thought around just how time-consuming it can be at times for new software or tools to go through the enterprise procurement and security and privacy review process. And I think for organizations that want to be leading the edge in AI, what I've seen is they're creating expedited processes, not to reduce the stringency with which these things are evaluated, but to accelerate the pace of innovation, recognizing that we can't afford to spend six months evaluating a new tool. We have to move these things through the process faster. So having scalable, efficient governance review processes I think is really important too. Amy Crook: since the shift has your privacy and security team grown? Jacob Little: I don't know, but I doubt it. because they are using they are Amy Crook: They're putting the same things in place. Jacob Little: using tools to scale their impact too. Amy Crook: Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. So thinking about what we talked about earlier and just in general, with folks and their career development, what has changed for the employee now in terms of what they need from their leaders. Jacob Little: A lot. I think what I'm finding myself doing as a leader more and more is evaluating AI generated materials. And they're with with the ability of anybody to generate so much output, the ability to cut through the noise, identify what is truly important, To have the judgment to recognize is there a human thought or strategy behind this, or is this just AI generated slop that I can disregard? Amy Crook: As we've seen as we've seen the shift in AI adoption in companies, what has changed for employees in terms of what they need from their leaders? Jacob Little: I'm noticing that I'm spending my time as a leader differently now. I think with the individual productivity gains that AI affords all of us, you know, I mentioned earlier that it's somewhere between double to 10% increased productivity per employee. You have a lot of activity going in a lot of different directions. And so the responsibility of a manager to align work and output with a clear strategy and goals is super important. Otherwise you have work flying everywhere with with no focus or direction. And with AI there's no shortage of output for a manager to review. And so I'm finding that my critical thinking, my judgment and my discernment skills are more important than ever. And I have had to tell folks Do not use AI to generate this until you have thought through the strategy on your own and have your point of view, and then bring in an AI tool to help you craft it. But I think the ability to spot just AI-generated slop that doesn't have a lot of human thought or intention behind it is an important manager skill set, and the ability to rein your team's output in. and focus it towards a clear objective is a really important skill set now. Amy Crook: Yeah, I agree. And how are how are leaders that y that you know supporting the workforce that might feel anxiety around AI adoption? Jacob Little: I think involving employees in the formation of an AI strategy and how it gets applied is important so that they're bought in and it mitigates a lot of the fear. So Rivian's HR team, I think like many HR teams, is super lean and so you have a very, lean number of people doing a lot of work. And so for us at least, to implement an AI or an automation or an efficiency tool for a lot of our team just feels like relief in getting to a more manageable workload or opening up space in somebody's capacity to focus on a more human side of the job or something they have been trying to get to but haven't been able to. And if I can involve that team in rethinking their workflow. And how to get to an outcome or an output in a different way that then frees them up to do more fulfilling work, that has been well received, as opposed to me handing them a solution and telling them that this will work better for them. Like for example, I just did a complete service model and process redesign session with our talent acquisition team. And we involved, I want to say, close to twenty different recruiters. In the creation of these process documents. And you better believe after a month of weekly two hour workshops that these folks have ownership and buy in of this new process. And they want to be active supporters in getting this stood up and running. because the pain of their current state is so great. They're excited to see these AI tools implemented, and they know that it will allow them to focus on what. they truly like about their job. And I love that we approach the work including them and giving them a sense of ownership and buy-in. And so replicating that at scale and taking the time to invest in the underlying process and workflow and making that a collaborative process, I think makes all the difference. It's tempting to cut corners there, but you'll pay for that later. Amy Crook: A hundred percent. It's just it's great to hear you talk about this, Jacob, because I couldn't think of a better person just with how much you care about belonging, how much you care about, you know, people in general, for you to steward this this change, I think makes makes a lot of sense. They're very lucky lucky to have you. I have Jacob Little: Thanks. Amy Crook: one last question. And it just tags on to what you were saying around building to grow or building to maintain. Are we using AI to make the existing version of work go faster or to build a fundamentally better version of work? Jacob Little: efficiency asks how much less we can do with, but abundance Amy Crook: Mm-hmm. Jacob Little: asks how much more we can do. Amy Crook: Yeah. Jacob Little: Reference something I said earlier. Most companies are still answering that first question. Amy Crook: Yeah. Jacob Little: The focus is on efficiency, cutting, saving. We're gonna get to a point where with effective HR leadership, we're gonna get to a point where we can start to have the conversation about abundance. I'm excited to embrace our role as people leaders, as visionaries to build that better version of work. But without us, it's not happening yet. It's not happening yet. And I think that is our mission, that's our mandate as HR leaders in this new world. So the last thing I'll say is how an enterprise doesn't use AI. Is perhaps even more important than how an enterprise does use AI. And again, we see examples all across the tech sector and industries where the focus on efficiency is costing an organization its culture, its employees' engagement, and creating these workplaces that nobody really wants to work at. One thing that I'm doing at Rivian very intentionally is before I do any AI work with a team, is I lead a workshop called an AI ethos workshop, which is where we talk about our company's mission our company's values and how that influences where we do and where we don't use AI. And having our AI usage or our lack of AI usage be a competitive advantage and a differentiating factor for our company. and my goal is to do this workshop, I've done it a couple times. My goal is to do it at the highest level of the company. so that our organizations don't become examples of where we just relentlessly pursued the efficiency, the optimization, the cost cutting, but where we also chose not to use AI, where we chose to keep our emerging talent program, where we chose to keep in-person learning and development sessions, where we chose to build a robust mentorship program. Where we chose to have an employee relations team that meets with employees face to face to show empathy. Where employees have a human they can call in these really stressful life moments and they need support from their organization. Those decisions are where an organization's culture shines and where it's important not to outsource to an ai. So I think about where we don't use AI as just as important as where we do. And that's what I'll leave our listeners with. Amy Crook: I love it. I love it. It's always so great to hear you talk, Jacob. You're such an inspirational leader and the work that you're doing is incredible. Every company needs one of you in them, helping them get to where they need to be. I know I said that was my last question, but one fun question. Outside of work, outside of HR, outside of, corporate America, where is one place that you would love to see AI? Totally take over. Jacob Little: You know what I wanna say? I can't say it, but I wanna say government. If we could have Amy Crook: Yeah. Jacob Little: if we could have like a an impartial, non-political AI just controlling the world I feel like Amy Crook: Why can't you say that? Jacob Little: that would be No, because that gets into like that gets into AI taking over everything. Amy Crook: Well, I I agree, actually. I think that makes a lot of sense. Take the emotion out of it. Take the take Jacob Little: Yeah. Amy Crook: the self-interest out of it. I think that makes a lot of sense. Jacob Little: Where do I wanna see AI totally take over? Amy Crook: I wanna see everybody use it like Amazon does for refunds. Jacob Little: sure. Amy Crook: It's so easy to return Jacob Little: Yeah. Amy Crook: something at to Amazon. Why can't everyone be like that? Jacob Little: Yeah. Amy Crook: outside Jacob Little: Okay. Amy Crook: of outside of work, outside of HR, outside of corporate America, where's one place that you would be excited to see AI completely take over? Jacob Little: I wanna see AI completely take over some of these like sort of government services that we all don't like to interact with, like the DMV or filing taxes. Amy Crook: Yeah. Jacob Little: take that stuff off my plate. Like let me review everything before it gets done, but please take those off my plate. Amy Crook: Mm. As a European in America, the tax it's crazy. Jacob Little: It's unbelievable and it should make us all think twice. Amy Crook: It's like there's that meme where it's like, we know what you owe us, but we want you to work it out. And if you get it wrong, we're gonna penalize you. Like, why? Jacob Little: Yes, then we'll come for you. Make it make sense. Amy Crook: Great idea. Great idea. Love it. Well, as always, so great to see you, Jacob. Thank you for coming back on. And the work you're doing is incredible. I'm so excited to keep following your journey and hopefully continue to hear you. Speak your wisdom. Jacob Little: Thank you, Amy. you inspire me with the work that you do, starting your own business and running it like a boss. you are incredible and just what you've built in the past year is unbelievable. And thank you for having me on your platform. Amy Crook: Thank you. Thanks, Jacob. Bye, everyone.