#65 - LIVE: AI, work & collaboration, with Kilian Wawoe

I'm not a big fan of everybody's talking about AI training, which is good for the basics, but what is much better is a coach or mentoring or whatever you want to call it. If somebody who sits next to you and asks you, "Show me what you're doing on a daily basis." Just give me your top three processes that you do. This is the People Masterminds podcast with leading voices on people, culture and organizational challenges in skill-ups. Welcome to a very special episode of The People Masterminds podcast. AI is part of our everyday lives. It's everywhere around us and more and more companies are jumping on board. All those AI developments are happening at lightning speed. I think that it won't be too long before AI will act as an autonomous agent alongside us. A big question is, what is the effect of AI on how we work and collaborate? Yeah. Today we do a special recording because we are now live at the Personio office. We have an audience and it's nice if we can hear it. We have an audience. Please make some noise. Thank you. We have a very special guest. He's been in our podcast three times before. We've given you so many introductions. I think, on its fair, that you do a proper introduction yourself. Who are you? What do you do? Why are we here today? Why do you still want to come? He's a friend of our show. Let's go back to the beginning of my career. I started in banking and I was interested in the effect of reward on people's behavior. Banks and bonuses was a neutral subject in 2003. But it was also the beginning of my career. You can imagine that banks and bonuses were the eye of the storm when the financial crisis started. The first podcast that we did together was regarding my first book on rewards. To make a long story short, money is overrated as a way to increase performance. This is the best performing podcast on our platform. That surprises me. But everybody is struggling with how do we deal with money in order to increase performance? That was my first book. The second book was regarding the companies said to me, "Thank you for telling us what does not work. Please tell us what does work." That was my second book regarding performance management. We need to talk more often to each other in order to increase the performance, give each other feedback, etc. That was our second podcast as well. The lockdown started in 2020 and I asked myself, "What is the impact of hybrid working on this whole process of giving each other feedback?" That was our third podcast. Now AI is changing our world dramatically. Now I'm doing research on the impact of AI on our work. I'm an organizational psychologist and I study people at work and I study trends at work. I think AI is currently one of the most important trends that we are seeing. Absolutely. It's a topic that everyone talks about and we're all experimenting, exploring and trying to figure it out. But I don't think anyone has the true answer yet. We're discovering. We came to me today like, "Are you a guru?" I was just like this word anyway, but I think nobody really. How can you be? In terms of AI, it's almost impossible to exactly know what the impact is going to be. We all know it's huge. But I think many people when internet started did not have a clue how big the impact would be, I think everybody now feels like this is going to be huge. Absolutely. It is huge. We see big differences in how individuals and companies adopt AI. Do you recognize this? Absolutely. And from your perspective, what explains these differences? First of all, we're trying to do research on who adapts AI quickest. First of all, you see cultural differences. We see that people friends in China are very much adopting AI in any aspect of their life. If this is good or bad, I leave in between, but I see more people adopting it there. Second thing is that you see a gender difference. There is some research that says that women still use AI less than men. I know both of you are really. Because you're careful. Yeah, I know what I'm outnumbered. But also from other technologies, we know that the early adopters are more men than women. And there's also the group that dislikes it. Women are also slightly overrepresented. But the biggest impact is age. Age. And that is probably not surprising is that the older people get the less likely they are open to adopting new methods. And I know that many of your clients who are startups and scale ups, they have a lot of relatively young employees, but I'm 52. And I know that many people from my age, when I give presentations about AI, I ask them, do you have any clue what this is about? And then people raise their hands and say, I don't know. Really? Yeah. And there are also differences between the younger generations. There are. Like the millennials or Gen Z. Yeah. What is really interesting is that let's say kids in a high school age use it less. Really? But this is my. Yeah, me as well. So my daughter is 16. She uses AI a little bit, but I have to convince her how important it is and how. That you really need to use it for homework, etc. They are using it. Yeah. But not as much as the group that is now studying. How do you. What's the reason behind it, do you think? Because people who are studying, they really have to make thesis or they have to write things. And in high school, you less have to make new things. Okay. And AI can help you in order to study, but it's less obvious. They don't feel the need yet. Exactly. And the son who is studying, not a single thing goes out of his hands without AI checking it. And my students this year, the thesis of my students this year are significantly different than a year before. There's not a single spelling error left, for instance. No. No. They all have the same format. And also some wordings I can really recognize like, okay, this is AI. Yeah, this is AI. AI deep C, core, GGTP. Yeah, yeah, exactly. You've done a lot of research on hybrid work and the effect on individuals and collaboration. And if you look at AI, what do you see as sort of the biggest danger in working together? The conclusion for my research on hybrid working was that some people really like hybrid working and other people don't. And then managers say, well, I let you choose and then everybody's happy. The fundamental mistake is that we come to the office in order to learn from each other. I started my career as a recruiter and I've learned my job by imitating or by listening to other people. If my generation is celebrating a work-life balance in our big, nice houses remote from the office, the youngsters are there and they don't learn from us. Yeah, so in the hybrid working setting. So for instance, the university where I work here in Amsterdam, especially on Fridays and Wednesdays, the average age in the office is 25. Yeah, and everybody from my age is happily at home. And that's wrong. So we need to be there in order to give them our knowledge. Vice versa, now with AI, it is that generation that can help me to learn and teach me how to use AI. It's just mentoring, right? Exactly. So the office is there in order to meet each other in order to learn from each other. Not five days a week before somebody gets angry. I know very often people from my age are like, do I have to go back to the office five days a week? No, that's not my point. But we need to be there to learn from each other. Well, that's interesting because I think in here in the audience we have a mix. I think we have hybrid. I think we have fully remote. Yeah. And some companies do very well. And there's nothing wrong with having a remote office as long as you can also build relationships when you are together. For instance, when you gave me a call, you said, can you come back to the podcast? Yeah. We know each other and by the fact that we know each other from the past makes it I would like to come back here today, even though it didn't fit so well in my schedule. And you ask, can you please go, okay, let's do it. So our personal version of the conference. Very convincing. Yeah, you are. Yes, you are. So you are person, the fact that we know each other personally, help us in order to work together. So we don't need to see each other like on a weekly basis. We don't. But that personal relationship is important in order for us to cooperate. And it will probably become more and more important now with AI. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. And if we're looking into the future, I'm also curious. I mentioned in the introduction that I think that it won't take too long before AI can act as a sort of autonomous. A colleague working alongside us. What do you think? How will that influence working collaboration? Yeah. So there's now a lot of research going on and asking companies what is AI going to mean for your work? Now, I rather talk about tasks and not about jobs. Yeah. So people have different tasks. For instance, part of my task is pure administrative. Yeah. Once a week or every month, I need to collect all my invoices and send them to the room. So what I now do is I make a picture and put it into chat TPPT and then it gives an automatic overview of all my costs and then this task is over. Yeah. So this is a one-dimensional task. It's wrong or it's right. It's right. In that sense, we already have this autonomous colleague, which is in this case, my admin completely outsource to AI. So one dimension, I think AI is much better than humans. The moment that I, for instance, translate something from Dutch into English, it's already two dimensions because language, you know, the IAR is very good with language, but you always need to check. I don't know if you agree with me, but if you, it translates really well, but sometimes it really. Sometimes it's a bit off. It's a bit off. And then you need to be critical. Then you need to be critical. So AI is in the lead and I check. But when it's the complete opposite, which is when I write a book or when I write a paper or when I cooperate with, I'm now working with the group and we're making a tool for hybrid working. So you say who you are and then you get your hybrid working policy. That is super complex. I have an IT developer, I have customers, etc. AI will not be able to help me but not take over my job. And in the future, you think? I know that we all don't know, but what do you think? I think that so the interaction with the clients, so the fact that we know each other, I don't think that AI can take over. So the chances that an AI bot called Avalize or a different name calls means is can you please come on Thursday evening and that I say yes, the chance is zero. So the personal contact will always be there. That's one. The second thing is when you have customers, you need to understand the customer needs. And sometimes it takes a conversation in which you also have to see emotions. At the moment, AI is not able to do that really well. It can help you, it can challenge you, it should. But it's not very likely that it will take over completely. But certain tasks are gone already. Yeah. And the human connection, also the creativity, the ocean, that part. Yeah. So we're doing not only me, but middle, so a lot of my colleagues on how are people creative? How does that work? The process in the brain or the process in the brain, but also between the in the room. And the funny thing is maybe people recognize this, but with creativity often comes from moments that you're not deliberately working on your tasks. I think we all recognize this, right? Yeah, your best ideas often come when you're walking in the woods or on the dish in the shower or whatever. So a hyper focus, which we have online, is very good for doing a task, but not good for creativity. Yeah, it's a very interesting article in one of the major scientific journals on how not creative we are if we are online. Yeah. Because online we are very focused and focused strangely enough is not the best for creativity. So these processes, AI can help you, but the moment that we are all together in a room is something that we definitely should not stop doing. So you see a big element in augmentation? Yeah, absolutely. And shifting some tasks. Yeah, but I'm very afraid of, and I see that also with hybrid working, that we all work, we remote and forget that these moments that we are together are crucial. And it's like a long distance relationship. You don't need to see each other all the time, but the moment that you are together, do the things that matter and that is connecting with each other over the work, over, overwork. Yeah. So if jobs, for example, for repetitive tasks, if they start nonexistent, none to exist anymore, then how do you believe companies should handle that transition responsibly? Because we have people in those jobs right now. And there are quite some companies who got too deep in the past. Absolutely. And they feel a lot of pain, like Clarner, right? Yeah. This example you need to explain. Larner? They had a service. I think the room knows. Clarner laid off quite a lot of people. I think it was mainly in customer support. Yeah. Because they thought that AI could solve it. But then they figured out we're not there yet, at least. AI missed the empathy for the difficult questions. Yeah. Yeah. I also once got a letter that when somebody died, you sometimes get a letter that they say, like, yeah, if you don't solve this, you can never have your insurance anymore. But this person died. It's not really nice. And many companies miss the empathy that AI is lacking. Although at some point, because AI learns very fast that let's not forget that a lot of these things can be overcome. But the moment that we are together and in creative processes, so far, I've seen AI working as an assistant, but not as somebody who can take the lead. Fair point. So how should companies handle it when we remove jobs from the work? And I think we are all looking into it and we are probably all doing it. How can we do that responsibly? Yeah. There's a very interesting movement. There wasn't the UK 200 years ago, or 250 years ago when people were used to making clothes themselves and then there were machines who took over. And then there was a movement in the UK that started to burn these machines because this was the end of employment. This sounds stupid now. But every time that there's a new development, there's somebody who says, this is the end of labor. And that's fear, probably. That is fear. So this is people who said, we need to burn these factories because we need to make clothes ourselves and this is the end of labor. And we all know that with every new technology, it turns out new jobs arise. So I'm not really afraid of people losing their jobs. That is, unfortunately, that is what it is, but new jobs will arise. The difficulty is, but this is more from a so from a company point of view, I would say, if a job or if tasks stop to exist, then stop doing it. You know, you're not a charity. And if you don't do it, your competitor will and then you will not exist anymore. But on a society basis that's more difficult, what do we do with people who have jobs that can be taken over by AI? If you are a taxi driver, what is your future? And if you do not have the skills to do a job, which is more, let's say, interactive or more personal interaction, I don't know what your future is going to be. No, because the easy answer is upskilling and re-skilling, but is that possible for everyone? No. And we see it happening at the moment. So development, copywriting, legal, customer support. Yeah. I know it's not the subject of today, but I do want to mention this. And definitely, I don't want to be political, but there's a lot of people who are afraid that there's no future for them and on an individual basis that could be right. And those are often meal jobs who are doing jobs that can be easily replaced, so like, for instance, taxi drivers or truck drivers. And what is your future going to be? And a frustrated man have a tendency to become very extreme. This is the far as political, I would like to know. But it's reality. But it's something we have to deal with as a society, because if you're friends with a nurse or you're working in a restaurant, you know, you will not easily be replaced by AI. But if you are doing a job which is easily replaceable, then what is your future? And you can say, become a programmer, but not everybody has. But can I? But can you? Well, even for a programmer, it's not sure if they're jobs still exist. But how do you, you better be a nurse? Yeah, yeah. But what would you advise like a CEO, for example, how to do that? Because on one side, you want people to adopt AI in their in their daily work. On the other side, there's also sort of AI fear. Yeah. Yeah, we noticed, by the way, that there's a lot of AI fear, which is as I said, correlated also with with age and also with certain certain jobs. Also, when we do interviews with people who are afraid of AI, often they don't know what they don't know. They're unconsciously incompetent. And that is something what we see a lot in any technology is that people have no clue of what it actually is possible. And also what their future will be now to answer your question. First of all, I wouldn't think in terms of jobs, but in terms of tasks. And many organizations are now looking at all their task portfolios and cutting everything that can be replaced by AI. Don't be too quick, don't try to be quicker than your than your competitor. It ought to be a little bit too slow, but it's going really fast. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You have to do it. Yeah. There's no no choice. This is unfortunately, this is capitalism. If you don't, you will, you will probably not. Yeah. I remember sales for as they, I think they did 30 to 50% of their roles that were probably not needed in the future. Now they had another round to 4,000 layoffs. So it goes pretty fast. And we need to be realistic. It's happening. Yeah. And some companies just announced it as sort of efficiency driver AI, but it's basically also that that work will be redefined. And it's more about having a vision together on how to do it and to talk about it. And what do we think that we can outsource to AI? What do we think that is still important that we do as as as colleagues and to involve the people in the discussion? Yeah. True, but the one thing that is being recurrent in our research is that we find people were unconsciously incompetent. And let me take myself as an example. So my AI coach is 20 years old. That's really funny because 15 years ago, I was, you know, I was a friend of my son and I was breaking him up from school and now he's my coach. That's the refurrent mentor. Yeah. And he's my my coach. And I'm not a big fan of everybody's talk about AI training, which is good for the basics, but what is much better is a coach or mentoring or whatever you want to call it is somebody who sits next to you and asks you show me what you're doing on a daily basis. How are you? You're top three processes that you do. Well, I'm a professor. So I teach, I make presentations, I do my admin, et cetera. And so, okay, show me how you do your admin. And then I, you know, like a real boomer, I'm doing it like this. You're also typing with two things. No, I'm just trying to make myself into a real boomer. So I'm doing my admin and then you say, okay, now why don't you make a picture and make your own prompt and this is how you do it. So then you become from unconsciously incompetent to consciously incompetent. Yeah. Painful. No, it's actually, well, I, for me, it was very interesting because I realized like, hey, I'm doing this and it can be done much more efficient. So people are afraid of AI, often don't know what they don't know. And they really need to be supported. And if you offer people these trainings, who are the people that show up at these trainings, the people who are already AI. That embrace it. Exactly. Same as with when you have the health week, you know, these companies that they have, it's always the most healthy people that show up. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So it's, and these people don't need a health training and they don't need to eat an apple in the office because they're already healthy. You need to focus on the ones that are completely unhealthy and there's the most to win, but they often don't know. And they're unconsciously incompetent. So I think the first step is in AI development of a company is don't ask them what, what task do you think can be outsourced? Because then I'm still doing my, you know, a boomer way of doing my, my admin. But somebody needs to say, okay, like this can be done in a different way. And these technologies adapt very, are going very fast. So my knowledge is from before summer, I had my last coaching session. Maybe my knowledge is already outdated now. Probably. Yeah, but I don't know. So I'm again unconsciously incompetent. Yeah. But you were interested in AI. Yeah. Is that because why did you adopt it? So I have my little coming out here. When the internet started, I thought it was complete nonsense. Yeah. Wow. And I remember that somebody came to me and said, yeah, there's this thing called Wikipedia. And I said, come on, I have an encyclopedia. What's the point? And then I said, yeah, and it's not really accurate. In the beginning, I didn't believe in it. And I thought, this is not going to happen to me again. So now I try to. So you're on top. I'm trying to be as on top as I can be. But you know the curve of the Moore's Law. You're familiar with that for those who are not, is that the technology is not going in a linear way, but exponential. Yeah. And so if you're preparing yourself tomorrow, you're too late tomorrow. Yeah. Yeah. So you have to. Yeah. It's going much faster. So we all are unconsciously incompetent all the time. Yeah. I'm so against the idea of asking people, let's sit together and see what task can be outsource to AI because people don't know. No. And but I do think that it's important then to offer also training and Personio created a report, the workforce, Pills report. Yeah. And also I have to say it correctly that only 36% of employees say that they get enough AI training and 44% would like to have more training. Yeah. So two things. So first of all, in the report, they find that there's a big group that wants to have more training. Yeah. So they definitely should have it. But also interesting, what about the other group who says we don't see this issue, does it mean that they had enough training or they don't know what they don't know? They don't know. And they took the initiative themselves. Exactly. So they learn how to work with AI without waiting for a company training. Exactly. But these kinds of research really need to do and really make sure that we understand who needs this training. But I know I'm making my point again, sorry, it's not only about the training, it's also about the mentoring. Yeah. Because in the training, you know, these trainings where we all eating, eating our cookies and being on our phones all the time and then we get a certificate. But when somebody's sitting next to you and says like, why are you still doing your admin in a system? Why don't you make a picture and push one button? Yeah. And it's much more customized. It's more customized. And it's not expensive because your best consultants are your colleagues who are knowledgeable. Yeah. We recorded a podcast with Loop Airplugs and they have an internal AI team. And the people from the AI team were working together with, for example, the marketing team. Just say, okay, what are you doing? Exactly. And what tasks can we automate or do differently or in what way can we use AI in your daily work? And they were pretty positive. Yeah, absolutely. But another element probably also is from the employee side that you need to ensure that people have the time to explore and to experiment. So if we feel like there's no room in the weekly calendar, then how can we become more efficient and adopt AI? As you remember from one of our previous podcasts is that I always use the rule of 1%. So if you are a top athlete, 1% of your time you're performing and 90% you are training. Yes, so this is the in daily life as a, as a corporate athlete, we don't even have the reverse. So most people don't even train for 1% and perform for, or train for 1% and perform for 99. So even that 1% isn't there. I would say that this is the bare minimum of training is 1% of your time. So if you have 2,000 hours per year, that's 20 hours per year on training. Bare minimum. Bare minimum. And so that means every quarter, every three months, at least five hours, at least. At least, yeah. To me it sounds very little, but. Yeah, it is, but that's the minimum. But strangely enough in HR, if I ask them for instance, do you know the basics of recruitment, the basics of selection, the basics of, you know, any research or of compensation and benefit, the basics of labor laws, most AI people, sorry, HR people don't know. So if you're in the AI now, but you need to check if it's correct. Exactly. And if you don't know, then you also don't know if AI is hallucinating or telling you the truth. Yeah. Yeah. This podcast is powered by Personio, helping you to remove complexities from core HR processes so you can focus on what really matters, your people. Visit Personio.nl/peoplemasterminds for more information. So we have five statements for you, sorry, six statements. And yeah, you know the drill, I think, you can only reply with agree or disagree. Okay. Okay. And later on we're going to ask you as well. But first key all needs to answer, needs to give his answer on the first question. And therefore you need your phone. Oh yeah. So maybe it's time that you grab your phone, hopefully they're close to you. Because your voice is count as well. So the first one is due to AI, the gap between medium and top performers will shrink. Agree or disagree? Disagree. Disagree. Okay. Am I now influencing the audience with my app? And then we do it all the way around. So what is the audience? But these people are from starting scale groups and often we disagree. Hmm. Hmm. Really? Can I comment on that? Yes please. Yeah. So the more complex task is the bigger the standard deviation is of performance. This is a little bit jargon scientific jargon, but in normal English the more complex the job is the bigger the difference between mediocre and top performance. The risk with AI is that if you already good at something and you also can tap into this world of AI, the chance of a good performing becoming even a better one is there for much bigger. So I'm afraid that people who are not performing and also are not able to tap into these AI possibilities that they will be lacking behind big time. That's my fear. So is this actually the complete opposite between good and mediocre and bad performance that the difference is even becoming bigger? So BCG did research on this and they came to the same conclusion that AI is not able to do the very complex task, but they also did the research on moderate complexity. And then they saw that there was only a 5% difference between top and bottom performers and the difference was 28% for easy tasks. First, for easy tasks. Yeah. Yeah. So interesting. And another thing is, for instance, with my students now, so we used to ask them write a paper, for instance, what is the impact of money on happiness? Well, I stopped doing that because if you ask that to deep seek, you get a reply in a minute and you have a paper. But now students can tap into this knowledge of AI. So they're allowed to use it. They have to use it. But now they can use it as a way to give them feedback to get the basic stuff, to make sure you get an overview of every research that there is, and then you can start working. So even for complex tasks, it can help you to make you sharper or to give you feedback. And maybe another thing, because we talked about this very often in previous podcasts. In 10 out of 10 companies where I come, people say, we do not give each other feedback. not nine. 10 out of 10? 10 out of 10. And for those of you who are not Dutch, you would say Dutch people are super blunt. But that works. They don't do it either. To my surprise, people do not tell each other the truth. No, we just talked about it. Did you? Yeah. No, no. Yeah. We do. But feedback. Yeah. So people and everybody says, I would like to have more feedback, but I don't get it. And so not nine out of 10, 10 out of 10 companies where I come, say, yeah, we don't give each other feedback here. So this is a fantastic way. AI is a fantastic way to get more feedback. So when's the record? We can record this. I'm when I'm recording this podcast for myself. And then I will ask AI was I clear enough? Yeah. Fair point. Did I make any? So English is my second language. Is there any mistakes that I made in my English? Do I use certain words too often? Exactly. I was talking the most. I've got colleagues who work in in psychology department for 30 years and they still say psychology. Psychotic. You're working there for 30 years because nobody ever came to you and says, don't say the P. It's a psychology, psychology. And AI can help you with that. So it's it really can be your coach to become better because that was the topic of our second podcast. If you don't train, you'll never get better. No, fair point. Yeah. Second statement. There we go. The audience first and then me or no, you first trying to change the use of the game. In the end, AI can replace anyone behind the computer. Disagree. Of course, you hope for people to really disagree with each other. But there are a few agrees. Yeah. I'm I'm curious. Yeah. Who would like to share the opinion in front of the mic and explain why you agree? Hi, I'm I. Yeah. I'm working at Sender. I can say work that you do on your computer is 90% of the time responding to someone else. Either on teams or email and I think the speed of response and the quality of response AI can be trained up quite easily. And a lot of this is transactional work unless you are in the computer interact with the human being. I think we should not underestimate how much it can take away. Yeah, I agree. Yeah. Yeah. What we found in hybrid working is that there are so many ways to communicate with each other and email is one of them. And if we ask people, do you actually like email? Does it work? Most of the people say it's actually super annoying. And most people really dislike their emails and these days I get emails from people that are obviously written by CHGPT. So. Yeah. So I write you write your AI mail to me and my AI response back to you. Why are we using email in the first place? And the same applies for so I've got Slack. I've got WhatsApp. I've got Viber. I've got teams. I've got Zoom. It drives me completely crazy. So one of the advice that I would have for every team is sit together is how do we communicate in the first place? Yeah. And it turns out that most people actually dislike emails. Maybe also question, let me ask you a question as well. If you get an email in CC, so I'm writing a mail CC to both of you, who thinks that will you read it? I read it and I archive it. I delete it. I scan it and then I delete it. Okay. So you both of you are giving a different answer. And I ask this very often in groups. Like who thinks a CC should be read? And then half the groups suggest in the opposite. Now I said, I don't care. But one thing I know for sure, this is not going to work. And so with your team, sit down and how do you communicate with each other in the first place? So one of my advice would be let's, can we stop email if it's not needed with all your CCs and all these emails like the parking lots is under construction today. The elevator is not working. And here's another newsletter and here's another survey. And Uber has a new discount or whatever. I don't read it anymore. I would save a lot of time. What's up of my team, for instance? I do not read it. All these nonsense and these memes and these jokes. I can confirm because if I was happy, I never get an answer. Sorry? If I was happy, I mostly won't get an answer. If I call you, you pick up the phone and ask me, can I call you back later? And then you always call me back. But now to be self-critical, if I do this to a student who's 21 years old. They don't call. You use your phone to do everything, but not calling. So what needs to be done is that I had to sit down with my students and say, how do you want to communicate? And they say, yeah, everything but calling. So I need to WhatsApp with them. Yeah. Oh, so you do. I have to. So third statement, in the AI era, empathy and leadership will be less valuable than data literacy. Disagree. Disagree. Almost everyone. And the audience seems to agree with you. Well, one of the things that makes us human beings is empathy. By the way, other mammals have this too. So you're cat on your dog. They also are empathetic. That is needed because otherwise you cannot survive. So it's a very basic human need that somebody is empathetic, understanding a situation. And AI can do pretty well. So I have colleagues who are making now jetbots that you can share your personal problems. But for instance, you've heard the story of AI helping somebody to commit suicide. They just want to be helpful. Like, you ask me a question, yeah, okay, I'll help you. You know, this is the best way to do it. Instead of somebody realizing that if somebody says, I don't want to live anymore, then what did you say, what's going on? Or can I help you or not help you in the sense like, let's get this over with. But in the sense of let me, you must have a problem with how terrible for you. And so the human factor here is crucial. It's important. Empathy. Absolutely. Next statement. Due to AI, job titles will lose their meaning. Do we have all several response time? This one is a more difficult one. Well, normally you have to respond immediately. No, no, no, no. Now you're lucky. Disagree. Disagree? Yeah, disagree. Okay. I see the audience also is doubting. And why do you disagree? And why do I doubt maybe that's even more interesting? Oh, yeah. Is that, so there's a literature difference between task performance and what they call organizational citizenship behavior, which is a very long word for basically doing things beyond your job description. Yeah, so I do what I'm supposed to do, but I also do things that are not in my job description. The thing is that in very complex work, a job description is always risky. Because if I stick to my job description, most likely we will all go bankrupt. So on the other hand, if you're not clear in what you expect from people to do, it also becomes right of messy. So the reason why I'm doubting is that on the one hand, you need to be clear what your role is, but there needs to be room for flexibility there. And jobs change very rapidly. So there needs to be some kind of flexibility there. But no job titles, if you say, I'll just give you 4,000 euro per month and then we'll see what happens. That's also not what I'm saying. That's not even allowed. It's not even allowed. Basically the title doesn't say a thing. It's about the content of the job and the content in these times changes. Yeah. I am curious though, what AI in the future will do to functions if AI can take over more and more tasks. So what will remain then? There will be new functions. And I also think that functions can become more fluent because you can do more with AI. Yeah. And I think I started my talk today with the dimensions of work. So the less dimensions, the better AI is. So administration, AI is better than human. Translation, two dimensions, AI is pretty much better than a human and it will become better and better. What will always most likely remain with, I say this with the current knowledge, it asks me again in a couple of years times with as it looks now, anything that has to do with development, understanding your customer and building a new solution for customers most likely the interface between AI on the one hand and the customer on the other hand. Humans will always play a role. And so far, everything that I've seen that AI takes over completely, so it makes a complete solution for a client. Most of the time it's not really that good. No, not yet. No, I'm very curious. And this is how empathy thing. And I think this example of that you sometimes over engineer an answer or that you help somebody who has actually doesn't, you know, helping somebody to commit suicide. This is an example of that AI doesn't really understand something. Don't forget, many people don't notice that AI doesn't know anything. It calculates the most logical or most likely answer to your question. It's not necessarily a good answer. And that's where we as humans still have a role to play. Yeah. Before we continue, there are three ways people masterminds can support you. We offer interim and fractional HR leaders with a ton of experience in the startup and scale world. We're a mentoring coach for many people and culture leaders and we can support you with challenging people, culture and organizational development projects. We're used to working remote from all corners around the globe, but in person works just as well for us. Find out more at peoplemasterminds.com. because of AI, often just use it as an excuse to clean the house. I guess some people here did that. I don't think so. You don't think so. But what I do know is that, as I said, 10 out of 10 companies were a calm people, say, we find it difficult to give each other feedback. And one of the things I always asked them to do is how many people in your team would you not hire with today's knowledge? And then often people say, yeah, like 20% of my staff, I would not hire with today's knowledge. And then I say, when I come back next year, what's the percentage? Yeah, still 20%. OK, so you're hiring me because you find it difficult to do your roles and manager. That's a bit strange. So AI can then help them as an excuse to lay off people. That I see happening a lot, but still, I don't think that this is the right solution to the problem. And one of the things that managers still don't do and AI cannot do is lay off people. Just sit with somebody and say, look, if you go on like this, I'll let you go. Yeah, so I'm going to help you. They do interview people. We have interview bots. Yeah, and you can interview, but who takes the action to actually fire somebody? Which is ultimately your job. I say to managers, that's the reason why you get paid so much is that you're the one that takes care of the trouble. Anyone in the audience who would like to say something about this or ask something about this because I see the opinions are different. Yeah, and I'm also curious to hear how many people really laid off people already because of AI that you reset your job is over there for the next few hours, but in general, and it can be twofold, at least that's what I see in practice. So sometimes they lay off people because AI took over certain tasks. Yeah. Sometimes jobs. Yeah. But sometimes also that they have to free a budget to invest in AI. So it's not necessarily like tasks or job related, but also just budget related. But who did a ref or downsizing due to AI? Anyone hands? Could you elaborate a bit? I'm Susan. I work for a data sniper. We did this in indeed a while ago. It was mostly in the customer success department where we, where the company had built its own tool in the AI agent that was actually trained by all the members of the customer success team. Every time they responded to an email, they trained AI. And over time, the AI agent started to respond to recurring questions. So basically by training AI, they automated their own jobs away. Yeah. Yeah, clear. And you also did something cool in HR, if I remember correctly. Yeah. That was actually the same thing. It was our ticketing system. It's where, basically, also every time we responded to an email, the system asked us, do you want to train your AI agent? And we did. So most of the time, if you felt that your response was up to a certain level. So same thing here. Over time, when an employee asked us a recurring question about holidays or sick leave, basically AI would provide the first response. And only if an employee felt that the response wasn't sufficient, we would specifically point out in response that it was provided by AI. They could come back to us. And only at that point, it would end up in our ticketing queue. Yeah. Cool. Thanks for sharing. Cool. So last statement. AI will not reduce our work pressure. In fact, it will increase it. My silence is that the first one I agree with, but not necessarily the second one. Because it will not reduce our work pressure, not necessarily. It remains the same. Like 100 years ago, somebody said that the future of work is going to be that we're all on the beach doing nothing. Because of all the automation and technology. That didn't happen. And for instance, I'm a scientist half of my time. I can do things now much quicker than it was possible 20 years ago. I need to go to the library, look up something, make copies and stuff. I can't do that with AI. It takes me a couple of seconds. What have taken me half a day 20 years ago. But it doesn't mean that the time that I now have left that half a day is now invested in laying on the beach. So obviously, still something can be done. That's one. And secondly, there's still a lot of tasks that cannot be taken over by AI. Having said that, for instance, my admin, which is giving me a lot of stress, is indeed gone since AI. I make a lot of language mistakes. I'm not completely dyslactic, but I am very bad at languages that reduces my stress a lot because nothing that I write has language mistakes anymore. So in my specific case, it really takes down work pressure, definitely. But if you look at this ideal world that we're not doing nothing and only everybody's on the beach and AI is doing all the jobs, that's not likely. And does someone wants to share a bit more why you think that it will increase the work pressure? Well, everybody walks to the mic. Let me just say one thing about just a second is that I have one colleague who is 75 and knows nothing about AI. And it's giving a lot of stress that people are using all these words and he has no clue what we're talking about. And we call it the digital divide. So the fact that some people know much more about technology than others. And the feeling of being left out is one of the worst human emotions that you do not feel part of the group. Because we want to be long. We want to be long. And this person is part of the group, but feels that I'm not part of the group anymore. And they say, yeah, let's meet each other on Slack and then looks like what is that? What is that? And how does it work? Yeah. Yeah. Hello, I'm Emma and I work for a bridge fund. Yeah, so I indeed don't think it's going to produce a pressure because the expectations are going to go up. So indeed, the pressure is going to increase because if you don't step up, like the expectations are rising. So with that, yeah, the pressure definitely goes up. Yeah. And for some reason, we have this feeling as humans that we still always need to work those 40 hours. So yeah, that's the more thing that 40 hours week. Why is employment law around hours and not around output? Because I don't give a shit about your hours. I just want you to deliver. So that's difficult, especially now. Yeah, but it's so ingrained in how we work. And like you just said, we thought back then that due to technology and automation that we would have more free time. But everybody is still working five days a week, although some companies are going to four days. Yeah. Interesting thing is that so we, there's a lot of known about the psychology of happiness. So why are people happy? Yes or no? And Mother Nature made us such that we're not too happy with ourselves. And because otherwise, if I got my swimming diploma when I was six, if that is the end of my career, then what would have happened to human kind if we're all happy with the one thing that we achieved in our lives? So we have the tendency to keep working and have the hours that we have to put in development, which is the reason why we as humans are so successful is that we don't rest and we keep on developing ourselves. However, on an individual basis that can make you pretty stressed and pretty unhappy. Yeah. I think we've all seen all the examples, especially in the starting scale of field, so many burn-outs and it's common. This is also why we have all those tools to make sure that people are well, the well-being tools, the mental well-being, the financial well-being as well. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. And so we know that AI will influence our jobs on a way or the other way. Do you think that we need to rethink education and career because of that? Yeah. In a fundamental way? Yeah. So 30 years ago, the calculator, people were demonstrating against the calculator. I have colleagues now who are demonstrating against AI. So I stopped doing that as an. I adopted this and I say to all my students, I assume that you're using AI. Yeah. So let's not be. Don't make a few mistakes so that I don't think you're using AI. Yeah, I know the tricks. So let's be honest about it. So we need to rethink education and the role of the educator is with this whole pile of knowledge that is there, that you are sort of the knowledge manager. So what is true and what is not true? You have to be super cautious these days on what is true and what is not true. What is valid and not valid. So education. That's the same for sure. Yeah. For sure. And the same is with development in jobs. And I'm going to make my point one more time. That's always important that you repeat. A lot of people are unconsciously incompetent. And we have the tendency to ask people like, do you need a training on AI? Do you want this or can we help you? But people don't know. So as a leader, I would. Or as an HR manager, I hope that we have a vision and say, I want people to be completely up to date with AI. That means that in your calendar, there needs to be time. no matter what, you need to invest time and have the people that are up to date with the knowledge and you're going to be coached, you're going to be trained to be a best in class. But don't ask people what they want and that's the difference with training as we used to know it, is you ask people at the end of the year what kind of training do you want. And that's not working anymore. And what do you. And I'm curious, do you have AI coaching or training yourselves? Well, yeah, absolutely, absolutely. I'm not sure if you know Leandro, Gomez, for example, he's amazing. So we had some training, but now he's also like a mentor and he's also involved in the Beyond program that we run because we want to ensure the day I is part of all elements and we're doing research ourselves, work with other companies and we're very active. We have to. And we get quite some questions from companies as well on how do you think that our future or structure should look like and what do you. So we have to educate ourselves on like a like the practical side, but also more on the visionary side. But AI will do not just now as sort of co-pilot and making your work more efficient, but also what can I do in the future. So we're doing quite some research on that. And we have to. Yeah. Maybe interesting in terms of training, I talked to a law firm and they said we now have people are 25 and they start working and we get all these reports obviously written in AI with complete crap because they're used to working with AI as the day know the answer and they said we need to rethink our training where we have AI on the one hand because it helps a lot in legal questions. On the other hand, you also need to have your own judgment. So you need to be the interface between AI on the one hand and the client on the other. And that's a different kind of training. So we really need to rethink. That's the critical thinking. Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. And there you now you have these lawyers who are 28 years old and they make these reports and then the senior says like yeah, it's fantastic how quick you did this and this part is very, very good. But the last point is complete crap and if we go to the customer with this, we're gone. Because the customer also has AI. So. But this is where that experience comes in. Exactly. But what do you have to offer on top of AI? Because basically all stuff AI can also do. And also the creativity because sometimes there's another way to fix it and it's another standard way. And AI gives at this moment gives the default answers. Yeah. So last question, we're all with HR leaders here in the room. What do you think that AI means for the HR profession itself and then not just in terms of how our own work will change but also what our role should be in the organization? Yeah. So the human factor is becoming more and more important. So having the right people in the right place in the right time has always been crucial in HR. That is our job, right? That we make sure we have the right people in the right place. That role is actually becoming more and more important. And the more technology, the technologically advanced we are, the bigger the role of HR. So this empathy on the one hand and understanding what's going on in the organization on the other is super crucial. And especially if you're working remote because many of your customers, I know they work completely remote. Yeah. How do you know if somebody's not having a burnout while working from home? Yeah, because nobody's going to tell you know this best by connecting with people. The impact of somebody who's not working well or who has a burnout or whatever is huge. Also we know from recent research is that a lot of young employees are maybe technologically very savvy so they don't know their stuff. But if you look at the burnout and stress levels for younger employees at the moment, it's terrible. Sky high, right? Sky and sky high. I think we all recognize this. And we're all working on that lately. Why are I called this, let's say, the younger generation for me so incredibly unhappy. It used to be my generation who was completely, you know, in their mid-life crisis and stuff. But we now have more like a quarter life crisis. And so the role of HR is how do we make sure that these, this generation grows up in the right way in organizations. And if we're not sitting next to each other, how are you going to do this? And I would say, AI is not going to give you the answer. It's not going to solve this for you. So this is the human brain that you need, the empathy. Yeah. And sit next to somebody and say, how are you doing? Is it going okay? Are you doing the right things for you? Are you, is there any way that I can help you? Yeah. So bring that awareness in the company. Yeah. It's crucial to leadership. Yeah. So that's why I try to stay away a little bit from all the obvious things like you have to have your staff book in. Your data, your compliance. Exactly. Yeah, you can outsource that to HR. You focus on the human side. But who's going to sit next to you and say, like, are you okay? You know, I've didn't see you for a while. And I also know from my colleagues who are in clinical psychology is that some people are really afraid to go to work. They always have been. But in the early days, you were forced to go. Yeah. You were forced to have contact with other people. And if you're now working remote and outsourcing everything with your AI agent next to you, that's not what we're made for as human beings. We're made for this. We're about to go into drinks. Yeah. We're made for the connection. Even for the introvert people. Even for them, it's good that they sort of feel the urge to have that human connection. Exactly for that group. Yeah. Because the group that wants to work most remote are often in IT and often is a little bit more, let's say introverted. However, introvert doesn't mean that you do not like to connect with others. It means that sometimes that you find it difficult to connect with others. Yeah, we discuss that. Exactly. We had a whole podcast about that last time. So working remote and working a lot with your AI agent is making things even worse. Loaniness. Loaniness, I would say. Let people. So also, if you have a completely remote office or completely remote job, all fine, but you have to come together every now and then and do all these things that AI cannot do. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. So we're going to have drinks now. No, we promise. We promise some. We're going to have drinks with an AI chatbot. Just try. That would be fun. That's not fun. We promise some room for questions. Anyone who has a question, then the moment is now. Please stand up. Yeah. Well, my name is Rose. I work at my tomorrow's. Great both of us. I love the topic a lot. And we talk a lot about challenges, right? And fear and those type of things. And you already mentioned, Gillian, like feedback is a great way or a thing that AI gives us. I'm very optimistic about AI because I think it will do a lot of things for, well, anybody in this room about in the future. But I wonder, are you optimistic about AI as well? And maybe what specifically are you optimistic about with regards to AI? Yeah. Absolutely. So everything that, as I said, the least dimensions you have, the better AI is able to even replace us. And let me speak for myself. All the tasks that I didn't like doing are gone thanks to AI. Yeah. So all my admin, my slides that you all use to have spelling errors because I made them, it's all gone. They all look perfect without any error. So that is, I'm very optimistic about it. However, for some individuals, it's going to mean the end of their jobs. And I don't know what their future will be. That's the topic of today. But for my organizational standpoint, I think it's very, very handy. And I'm very optimistic about it. And also I think we didn't say that in the beginning, but the AI revolution is maybe one of, maybe so far the biggest in human development. Yeah, I agree. Yeah, it's huge. Yeah. Because always in the history of mankind, everything that was created was always created by a person. I mean, for the first time now, so the internet was a way to get quicker to knowledge that was already there. And now we have something that can create something and that is that we never had that. And those things happened over a longer period of time. Exactly. And if we look now at AI developments, if you compare the current situation to where we were one year ago, it's crazy. It's crazy. Yeah. Yeah. So we can create things and that that can also bring solutions to a lot of problems that we have. So that's spectacular. Yeah. So we're very positive. Yeah. Absolutely. Because HR, you also have to look at what is the risk or what is the challenges and the opportunities for the organization. Yeah. More questions. I'm Susan. And I do have a question in legal or HR. Many people, these start their careers in the operational or administrative roles before for example, becoming an HRPP or specialist. Where you kind of learn how systems work and just how regulations work and basically you learn to communicate in a certain way around certain topics. And if AI takes over that simple administrative junior kind of work, then how are we going to train people? How are we going to deal with that? Because we can't just all of a sudden all higher seniors if people aren't trained. True. So we use to have training on the job for let's say the basics, right? And now that this is not possible anymore, we need to make sure that we trained them in a different way for basic knowledge. And to give you an example is, I once once, okay, this is a super Amsterdam inside, but I was driving near Dumsquare and then my navigation said, turn right and I crossed Dumsquare by car. Which is. Yes, you can. No, you can't. And it's very dangerous, by the way. So, unfortunately, I was never shot because people thought I was trying to attack or so. But the same with your navigation, if you stop thinking yourself and you completely rely on a system, that's risky. So, somebody, so you need to never stop thinking for yourself. And I think that's the rule that's something I've learned when I was crossing Dumsquare. So, when we have junior employees, we need to reserve time to learn the basics. So, for lawyers, for instance, you need to manually also check what you're doing and check your sources, especially in the beginning of your career and never rely completely on AI. So, to answer your question, we need to reserve time for people to learn the basics, for sure. Thanks. Yeah, welcome. Any other questions? Hi, my name is Bonique from Zenchev. I have a question. Do you think that the access to AI and the ability to adopt AI will be impacted by the distance to education. So, people who have a shorter distance to education will easier adopt. And that creates a bigger divide later on in life for people who haven't had access. Yeah. Let me first say something positive. So, for instance, countries where there's less knowledge, it's an equalizer across the globe because all of a sudden, also thanks to internet, people have access to knowledge all across the globe. So, wherever you are in the world, if you have access to AI, you're able to access a lot of knowledge and that is positive. On an individual basis, if you do not have the right skills to tap into that knowledge, you have a problem. And you see that we call this digital divide becoming bigger. And one of them is we're trying to, these studies are really in the beginning phase, but also look for intelligent. So, people who are smarter are better able to adopt any form of knowledge and any form of any skill. And there's a risk that certain individuals will therefore have a huge advantage versus others who don't. So, it's getting wider. And the more advanced we become, the more important it becomes to integrate knowledge. And IQ is a very good predictor of that. So, since we're all here with AI managers, HR managers, sorry, is an IQ test would definitely be part of my selection tool. For sure. Are you able to deal with knowledge and think by yourself? And that's something you can test perfectly with a good test. Skills-based hiring. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Hi, I'm Saskia from Clever. I was really curious about your remark about feedback. So, I also listened to an earlier podcast about loops in their mid-year or in their year and reviews. They have adopted AI to do better reviews and giving feedback. But you also mentioned people don't really give feedback. So, the really differentiator we have, the authenticity and doing all these things as a human. But the question is then, how do we really do that? Yeah. Because you can say, yeah, just do it. But we don't. But we don't. Yeah. I tried to study myself, teams where it's a matter of life and death, friends and surgeons or people in the military. And it turns out that they reserve time to give each other feedback. And you have to give each other feedback. Yeah. That's mandatory. In a normal job, we don't do that unfortunately. And I tried to help my clients to do this. And it's super difficult. AI can maybe be part of the solution, part of it. That at least gives you some kind of feedback on your daily job. However, I would prefer also my manager to sit down with me and tell them what they really think. So, it's, how do I say this? It's really because the feedback culture is often so incredibly bad that I'm already happy that AI at least does something. Yeah, this sounds a bit dramatic, but the bar is so incredibly low when it comes to feedback. I always say to managers like, what you say to your partner or to your friends about your colleagues tell that themselves, tune themselves, but a bit nicer, that's feedback. Yeah, so try that maybe if you say something to your partner or so that you don't tell these people yourself, you don't have a feedback culture. Is there anything you never said to each other that you say to your respective partner? No, we're pretty honest. We're pretty honest. We don't know how to deliver feedback. You do? Yeah. And we do so to each other. Because it's quite often about things. Yeah. Which is good. I'm sure that when you preach, right? Yeah. Knowing the two of you, I believe you, but I see there's a lot in organizations where people don't. So to answer your question again, is that in the ideal world, you don't need an AI, you don't need AI to give you feedback. Having said that some things AI is just better at. So for instance, my manager is not going to look at all my presentations and look if there's any language mistakes. That doesn't make sense. AI can do that. Yeah. AI can listen to my to my podcast today and say, did you make any spelling errors? Is anything you said in English? Was there anything you said which was unclear? But also in your 360 feedback and I think you also heard that in the podcast, yeah, combined with managing review, self-appraisal, etc. you can discover trends and AI can make analysis of that and then inform you. And then you need to make your judgment. Is it the truth? Is it interpreted correctly? Because that's still a risk that what you get delivered is not the truth. Rule number one with feedback is that the receiver wants to hear it. And there we go again with my unconsciously incompetent. Is that often people just don't want to hear the feedback either. Yeah, you know, from my previous podcast, I called this restaurant feedback. Yeah. You go to a restaurant, did you like it? And then you're just supposed to lie. Yeah, did you enjoy? Yes, I did. If you're honest, they don't know what to do with it. Exactly. So and everybody knows that if you don't have a culture in which you really give each other feedback, then you never will be the best in class. So now do the post-cars in a restaurant. Now I always do that. And now my friends, they don't enjoy taking me to a restaurant because nine out of ten times, I will provide some feedback because something went wrong and now they feel awkward about it. So I always ask them in a restaurant when they ask me, did you enjoy? I ask them, do you really want to know? Okay, I will try that. Okay, most of the time they don't so. There are last question. Hi, I'm on a great, I'm working at MEPIC. So we talked about AI training. And I have a question about that because I think of course you can learn people about the basics of AI, but of course you also can learn about prompting because that's also an art in itself or even build agents. So how do you see AI training? Yeah, so as I said in the beginning, so there's training and there's coaching, I think training is ideal for the basics indeed. So the basic of prompting, the basics of which systems should I use for what? Because for instance, JTPT is very good for some things, but every French in research deep seek is better than it's probably a better tool. So somebody also needs to explain to you which tool is the best for which task and how to use it. But we've seen that so training is good for the basics, but since jobs that we have are so specific, it's much better to have somebody sit next to you who's super knowledgeable and says, for what you are doing, this makes more sense. So I think that coaching in the literal sense, somebody sitting next to you and say, what are you actually doing? And how can I help you? Is more effective than just training? And again, who are the ones that show up at the training? Those who are interested, those who have the time, those who feel the need or the sense of urgency. And a lot of people just don't show up. And that's maybe also a question to you, what do you do with an employee who says, I don't want to go to the training? I'm too busy. I personally really like the idea of coaching and I think that's really valuable to add to any team, to have just an AI coach sitting inside them and thinking about their task. And we also made a mistake to ask people, okay, think already about tasks that you could replace with AI. Nobody knows. And also you're saying in a way, what about you're making yourself redundant? That also is not really appealing, right? And that instead of how can I help you to make your task or your work more more interesting? And to make my point again, you don't need to have these expensive consultants, just ask people in your team that are interested and let people help each other. And they actually like it. So I used my 25 years of experience to bring that to my next generation colleague. And this 20-year-old is sitting next to me and helping me with AI. And together we're a strong team. He helps me, I help him and I think that's the future of AI is how do we make this work? With a little bit of empathy. As some critical thinking. Yes. Thank you. - You're welcome. - You're welcome. - For being our guest for the fourth time. And thank you audience that you wanted to be here. - And what are we gonna talk about next time? - Yeah, we have a topic. We discussed it during our call. It's lonely at the top. - Yeah, okay. About loneliness and CEOs, yeah. - Yes. Do you recognize that topic? So we'll see you again in like six months or so. And thank you, Personio, that we could use your office. And a listener, till the next one. (upbeat music) (audience applauding)