From Cyber Warfare to Chief People Officer with Seagate's Patricia Frost

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Our people, all the creatives of our product, the connectors to our customer, our people are everything. This is Talk Talent to me. Podcast Land's number one destination for in-depth conversations with the most elite professionals in talent in HR. I'm your host, Rob Stevenson, and I'm bringing in VPs of talent, Chief People Officers, CEOs, and everyone in between. They all come on the show to do one thing. Talk Talent to me. It's real, it's honest, it's off the cuff. It's happening right now. Welcome to Talk Talent to me. Welcome back to Talk Talent to me. It's me, Rob, back at the helm, and I am so glad. You are all back with me here today for our episode because we have a certified banger and absolute doozy. I'm so sure we're going to have a great time here today. Let me bring our guest in and not, you know, subject you to any further jiggery pokery or a doo at the top here. She has a long, fantastic career in the United States Army, where she ended up as the director of cyber, electronic warfare, and information operations, and then made that classic transition to being an executive vice president, Chief People and Places Officer for a legend in the tech industry, Dgate Technology, Patricia Frost. Welcome to the podcast. How are you today? I'm wonderful and so glad to be here. I'm so glad to have you just because I know what I'm noticing. I've had a bunch of Chief People Officers on the show lately, and they all have these really unique backgrounds, but the more I learn that they're all unique, I guess none of them are unique. It's just like a characteristic of the Chief People Officer role. Does not appear to be this like ladder-based move through the HR function. It was what I'm kind of learning, and you are such a great example of that. You had a quarter century in the US Army. Thank you for your service, obviously. And your final role in the US Army is like, it's like something out of a sci-fi novel, director of cyber, electronic warfare, information ops. I would just love to hear a little bit about that role, and then we'll maybe hear more about how you wound it up in the people function after that. Yeah, well first, thank you for having me. And yes, 32 years in the US Army, and something that I hold very dear to my heart, because it was 32 years of taking care of soldiers and the mission. And I did get this incredible opportunity, because I started out as an intelligence officer, and then as, you know, our fields change and cyber became actually a discipline in the US Army, I had the opportunity to transition for my last five years into the cyber space domain. So you could think about that, and everyone knows all the terms and the buzzwords today, which actually did originate with our US government, with the Department of Defense. We wrote those playbooks and share them with our partners and allies. But really is about securing our most critical infrastructure in the United States. And we had both offensive and defensive capabilities. And now every company, every business has to look at that discipline, because you do have to secure your infrastructure, because it's the basis of how we run businesses, how we run our communities, and it's even how we run our homes. So it's a great transition to come to Seagate, which is that the core of Seagate is where our data is stored. And so that is also critical. But I really was able to be part of the beginning of that journey for the Department of Defense, and particularly in the US Army, and then now see how that gets applied in corporate world. Moving from the army into the corporate world, did you experience a general like, I can let my shoulders down a little bit, maybe the blood pressure can come down. The stakes aren't quite as high. Well, absolutely. And I would say yes and no. So in the military, we, and in officers and listed, we take in oath to serve the Constitution of the United States. Take that oath very seriously. And then as an officer, the welfare of our soldiers and our civilians and our contractors is foremost in having successful missions. So yes, that day-to-day of it can be a life or death situation is something that you take very seriously. A little bit different coming into the corporate world. But I will tell you, you know, I live 32 years of taking care of soldiers and the mission. And I say that in that priority order, because I truly believe, and it's probably the tenant of my leadership, that if you take care of the people, they will actually take care of the mission. And that doesn't change when you take off your uniform. And I think that's really important, because at C-Gate, I want to show up for everyone in the workforce and my team that works for me is making sure their resource trained and know that the work they do matters. And when I think about even more seriously for C-Gate technology, is that the data that we help store holds people's most important information, their family photos, their medical records, the systems for the businesses in the communities, every drive that leaves our hands is a promise of reliability and quality to someone I've never met. And I find real purpose in that. So very purpose-driven in the fact that I got to transition to C-Gate technology and know the impact that we're having on everyone's lives. Yeah, just a quick aside for the folks at home, if you are not familiar with C-Gate technology, actually yes you are, because if you use any sort of data storage in your life, which I'm sure you have, C-Gate's perhaps behind it, huge name and of course like external hard drives. But one of the first movers in the data storage space, I believe C-Gate invented the first solid state drive, the current personal computer market simply does not exist without C-Gate's technology. So that promise of storage and security is a longstanding thing in the culture. This story of C-Gate is a story of tech in America, frankly. Absolutely, and we don't exist without the data to run our lives personally and professionally. And it is so invisible I think for everyone, but every every click that you do, every transaction you make, it's sitting somewhere in data storage. Every breath you take, every move you make, C-Gate will be helping you. We will be there and we take that that quality and that reliability so seriously. Yeah, you must certainly. And I know when you were explaining how you take care of your people and people take care of the mission, I'm just seeing this very clear dot to connect between that approach and what HR, what people opts is. You know, what is the chain of command, the chain of command is an org chart, right? We are familiar with these structures and just because one has an olive drive, you know, when one doesn't, perhaps they're not so different. Oh, they're not different at all. And I think anyone that's really in the people business leading people, you recognize that your people are going are and should be always what you focus on as the engine that drives innovation. So I always say people are the engine that drive your innovation. The people are going to be behind your results, the outcomes you're trying to achieve. You will be assisted by technology, but at the end of the day, it's your people that are going to drive those results and that are going to continue to improve and make your business more profitable. Certainly. And another sort of connection trend for lack of a better word I'm noticing here is just this sort of merging of HR, people opts and IT. And increasingly, I'm seeing IT live underneath HR. I'm seeing things like AI deployments that you would expect to come from the technology department instead come from the people department. And you are such a glaring example of that because your role in the army and information operations position. And now in a people position, you are just merging the two. I'm just curious to hear how that shakes out at C gate. Yeah. And I probably fall back a lot on my military career and whether I realize that or not or subconscious that I'm pulling it forward. So if I think back in the army, we never fielded new equipment by just handing it out and go, oh, the soldiers are going to figure it out. We trained every soldier on it. We built our confidence in using that new platform. And we change how we operated with new systems and procedures. So someone has to own the redesign of roles, the re-skilling of the world. workforce and help leaders manage their teams differently. That squarely sits in HR responsibility, and we own, and I hate to use the word own, but we are truly responsible for the employee experience. When I look at AI, coming to the forefront, and remember, we're a 50-year-old company, we were using AI, machine learning, but now you have Gen AI that really impacts every role in the company. When I looked at it, I said the AI transformation isn't a technology problem, it's actually a people problem. The technology will keep improving. Look at what we've just seen in the last few weeks. Muse, Grock, Dot, Instinct AI, all of these things coming at us at an individual level, let alone what's coming at us, we're an SAP Microsoft company, what's happening in those worlds, so the technology is going to keep improving no matter what we do. So the real question is how do you bring your people along to be successful? And I don't see that as it's one or the other between HR and the people experience alongside IT and the business, and it becomes something we do with them. So our people don't see us that this technology is coming at them, this is going to be a journey that we're all going to be on together. And Rob, there's a trust piece, really large trust piece with AI right now, right? Because people are worried about what it means to their jobs. And so if you said the transformation is going to be led by the technologists in the company, again, if I'm an employee, it may feel like something's being done to me. Making sure HR is loud and very prominent alongside IT and the business that it's something we're trying to do with them and be very honest about what is changing and be clear about the investment that we're going to make to train them and resource them and then be serious working with legal about how we're going to use it fairly and ethically. So I just see, I charge all HR professionals, be the seat at the table, get your voice heard because the employees need to know that their voices are heard. Yeah, be the seat of the table, be the adult in the room. You put that so well that there's this trust consideration and perhaps there is a little bit of fear and reluctance that there's this runaway technology that is just move fast and break things, ship first, ask questions later, that people are afraid of, that people have gotten burned by. And so when a people function is making decisions, there's this idea that, okay, the technology is not just a runaway train, there's a conductor too. There's someone who's doing the speed checks of the terms. And how I guess deployed and that there's a rationale to its deployment and how it will impact our workforce, we have to be talking about this. How would this technology impact our workforce or culture, because it does impact culture. And the journey we're asking the employees to embark on using these new tools. We can't do this without IT, very critical partner and we can't do it without the business because I go back to what are the outcomes we're trying to achieve. Then you'll go find the right tools, you'll look at the training and the resources. So again, we have to do this together to safely operate and then you have to look at what risk are you bringing into your enterprise network. Right? You have to understand what are you exposing the company to. So it's not just finding a technology type, you know, a solution, a technical solution to the problem. No, no, definitely not. And the questions you're posing there are the ones that I'm typically seeing be the questions that an AI council is asking and an AI council is, you know, it's a multidisciplinary group of folks in the company that are just figuring out how, like all those questions that you rattled off, is that, do you have that kind of organization at Seagate? We do. And again, we did that in a very decisive framework as I said, it had to be a bottom-up and a top-down approach. So at the top, I think every company today has an AI leadership council and that is cross-functional business leaders that we really look at how we're going to govern AI at Seagate. And then we're lucky because we have over 400, we call it the AI Forward Collective, you know, and AI business leaders, over 400 of them that were certified early and using the AI tools and discussing, you know, how we're going to use AI at Seagate. And we call them our AI champions and it's a community and they're mentoring and they're supporting and they really understand the key tenants of our AI strategy and how that's going to impact Seagate. And we couldn't get as far along in this journey without them by having them throughout every organization, then we can really look at adoption and scale. And I think every company needs to kind of have that core of AI and I say certified because you want to know where they got their training from, how they're using AI to be impactful for every employee and to me those AI champions are really going to be what sets us apart. So they're at the very tactical edge and then the AI council is at the very strategic layer and then what we're hoping is we're all going to meet in the middle and have these great outcomes for Seagate. Yeah, yeah, interesting. That makes a ton of sense that you have, okay, how is the actual practitioner utilizing this, the expert in their own domain leveraging these new tools, that is going to, it's always new and changing and like exciting for folks to hear about, I want to hear more about the meeting in the middle. How do these two, two arms, I guess, how do these two approaches meet? So we all meet monthly at these different levels, but at the AI leadership council meeting we always ask to see best practices and so it was the continuous feedback loop. They come in and breathe that council of executives and we really talk about well where are the barriers? Where are we having obstacles in the way and where are the greatest opportunities emerging? And part of that is to also share what some of the best workflow innovations, where they are happening and can that tool or any type of Genai or prompt or agent that we're using, it can that agent be repurposed. So if legal is seeing great success, oftentimes an agent that legal is using can actually be used in HR or in finance. So sharing of that information, because we're still probably nascent on this journey just like a lot of other companies. So functionally, everyone's looking at how do they change their workflows. For me, success is really when those agents start to get deployed cross functionally and that's more of the operational strategic level. You can really look at those kind of business corporate outcomes that you're trying to achieve. And we're all still on that journey of what will that best workflow innovation be. So RCEO has challenged us that every individual change one workflow at their level. And then the functions have to look at a functional workflow change using AI. So that's where I say it should come in the middle that we can all then be moving forward together. But that continuous feedback loop is critical going forward. I love that. So it's not just, oh, you're, you practitioner are doing this cool thing with AI. Let's make sure that this function can be repeated and scaled out in your own team because that's the use case it was developed for. You're asking like, how does this scale across the entire organization? Correct. Correct. Cool. As iron sharpens, iron. So one corporate department sharpens another, I think. Absolutely. And then these champions get recognized, right? You also want to recognize this innovative work that they're doing because we're all learning along the way, right? Or use the agent this way, or we found, you know, this great use case. It's exciting. And it's exciting to see junior employees regardless of, you know, grade level, job level. They're getting recognized for some incredible work. I love that. The whole like AI natives, the people who are like, you know, in the same way as millennials or digital natives, the youngest version of talent in the workforce, they're a little more familiar and comfortable with these tools. Like they have this opportunity to really share their knowledge in a way that probably wouldn't be possible without it. How do you surface these, the AI champions, the people who are in the forward collective? So a lot of that was just self-elected, right? Because we were looking at people that had the technical enthusiasm, those native, you know, early adopters, and passionate about where the technology is going to take us. They kind of visionary, right? And then they also have to have some skills and the ability to teach others, right? And that peer trust, and that's where I say that peer trust to share best practices, that doesn't always work top-down driven. I would say it normally doesn't work top-down driven, right? And then I think in peers, when they're helping each other, they also have patients to help someone who's not a native in it, or more hesitant about using the technology, to make sure they're not feeling like they're being left. behind, and pulling those that maybe are just a little bit wary of where this is going. Yeah, yeah. I imagine it's more than just, oh, you're doing something cool with AI, like, let's get on a Zoom call and show people. There's maybe some sort of training and development for them to kind of be in a position to pass us along. How do you maybe take someone from being an early adopter into someone who can drive behavior change, introduce a new work process? So we put them through a very rigorous training program. So the 400 of them are certified AI champions, which means they went through a training program. Then they actually had to create an agent. They had to deploy the agent, be successful or failed. Like, it was failures also a way of learning, right? But what were the business cases? So we've been putting them through that training over the last year, while concurrently everyone else is taking training, maybe not at the speed in which the champions were moving. And then now we're in the workflow innovation stage of really looking across that workflow knowledge, which really is that bottoms up, right? Of what are the workflows? They understand the functions, real problems. But those that went all the way through the training every Friday, we had, you know, small collaboration sessions, I say Fridays because we always did ours on Fridays like coffee and AI, how do you use prompts? What are the best use cases to save you time at work from an individual to a team level? But these champions were critical moving forward. Now we're really focused on that workflow innovation. That's that next critical step that to me success in the future will be that teams are moving without having to have the champion on a team's call or in the room. They understand it enough that they're innovating at their own speed and scale. Yeah, that would perhaps be the mark of success of the training program. When you think of AI as a tool like writ large, when you consider, oh yeah, this is a technology that's been fantastically helpful, productive, productivity increasing for us. How are you measuring that? So we did that approach of when we first launched AI and it was probably me again pulling in my past history is you're successful if you leave no one behind. So we democratized AI and said everyone's going to have access to certain tools that were already vetted and certified in the company network and then the training went alongside it. Now, you know, as we're all learning with the co-work type applications and the cost of tokens is how are we looking at success and outcomes? Not necessarily putting a price tag on it, but you do have to watch your costs. But are you actually achieving the results going forward? And I will tell you those metrics are different, I think, for every function. And some of the metrics you actually can't measure, and I use this one because I think early on everyone was using this measure of how many minutes did you save for hours? And then what did you do with that time? And my question back is, let's say it actually saved me an hour or maybe it only saved me 10 minutes, but I feel like it saved me several hours. Isn't it more important that I'm more passionate about using the technology because I feel that it's saving me maybe more time than it actually is, which gets me more energized to do other work? Like some of those things can't be measured. Yes, that's like the qualitative quantitative approach to reporting that I really encourage everyone to do, but yeah, it's like, okay, we can boil this down to some zeros and ones about this task. You used to take 37 minutes. Now it's automated and it takes like four great, he's got 33 minutes of your day back. But like the mental toil, right? The fact that someone now is not performing a task that they used to dread doing. You have now a happier employee, regardless of whether they fill that 33 minutes with something increasingly productive, some more work. You've done a great kindness to your workforce, surely. Absolutely. And we all know that AI is not magic. It's powerful, but it's not magic. And understanding we're a manufacturing company. And we don't get to be vague about our processes, our quality or our reliability. So when I have conversations with employees about is AI helping you, and they're happy they're pleased and it's great. Or I get the stories of no, it's a big distraction and then I go, okay, well, maybe we're using it wrong. Because if it's a distraction, then we're probably not using the tools the way we should. But then when we do use it, we really have to press on every employee that you only have any outcome of that data, that result, whatever that knowledge that AI is being that partner with you, you still own that outcome because that could cause us to make growing decisions for the company. Yeah. When I hear people particularly in forums and social media being like, oh, AI is a huge red hearing. There's a bubble and it's not actually helping anyone do anything faster. I'm like, you're kind of telling on yourself, like if you're only used for it as that you've replaced Google search, then yeah, I can see how you would feel that it's not that important. But because the innovation can be a little bit nebulous in terms of what is the use case and people are inventing these use cases fresh every day, because you share maybe an example of something that the AI forward collective brought up that is now being tested or rolled out across the org. I'm trying, I'm thinking back to just one of the worldwide meetings that we just had. I think one that everyone's finding so useful and this is probably just a too easy of a case is just how do you prepare for any type of customer or external business meeting? And the hours that used to be exhausted, pulling data from all these disparate places, right? And then doing the analysis on it and trying to help the key leaders who are going to be the front facing of that meeting. Do they even have enough time to read through all the data, right? And be prepared for the meeting. We're seeing, you know, a week of work, hours of work, you know, really get pushed into just minutes. And then what I like to do when people hand me this product and say this is to help you prepare for a meeting, then I get to go back into the tool and say, well, what are some of the other questions I should be asking myself? Or what are some of the risks by going forward with this customer or with this vendor? And I'm spending more time in that dialogue with AI as that thought partner. And then also I found two, I need to share that back with the team and say, well, these are some of the questions, maybe you all didn't ask in your analysis. And this is where AI brought me because it goes back to again, we all own that outcome and making sure it's correct. So that started in our sales, go to market organization. And now we're using that across the enterprise, very powerful. And then if you look at that from a compliance, all the, the employee regulations, because we operate, you know, 47 different places around the world and employee regulatory guidance is always changing, taking that same agent and then applying it to employee regulations. And then sitting down with the team and saying, well, what's that impact on Seagate's workforce in that country, in that state? And the conversations and the discussions are so much richer versus us all just going through PowerPoint slides or Word documents that are way too long. And I think having that discussion time has been really, really valuable. Yeah, and that is the real win is that now instead of spending the time sifting through called transcripts, right, to try and glean context and, oh, maybe this account was handed off, maybe the person who owned this account doesn't work here anymore. There's like institutional knowledge that would historically be lost is now there to be, to be found and also to be presented in a much more clean, organized fashion. And what it allows is not just the time save on the research, but like you said, the more interesting, frankly, human task of like strategizing in a call together on what the next move is, that is what this allows. And think about anyone who's listening in manufacturing. So we had AI and ML in our manufacturing processes. We like to call Seagate as a very robotic, intense robotic company, we lose a lot of robotics. But on the quality front, we were watching our quality teammates using Gen AI to really kind of shift, you know, sift through the noise to get to the actual signal of maybe there was an issue and then now Now sharing that with operations or with R&D to say how do we get to root cause? How do we start thinking about this differently? I think now that geometry of that tripartnership of operations, quality, and R&D, being able to use these AI tools at scale and then spend time really looking at the back end engineering, is going to help every company have more reliable and higher quality products that may have taken you in the past weeks to try to find root cause. Yeah, definitely. I'm lingering on this point, but it's because I think it's really important. I'm so pleased that you are thinking beyond the time-saved metric and thinking more about how this just affects the state. The happiness, the ability, the energy, the enthusiasm of the workforce, in a way our lives are optimized enough. There is a, as comedian, a late comedian, Mitch Hedberg has this joke, I made instant rice and then didn't do shit for an hour. Sometimes it's like, yeah, that's okay if you don't fill the 58 minutes you save with more work. It's about your ability to still put yourself in your work in this inspired enthusiasm elastic place. I'm just really pleased that that's your approach and I wanted to ask you to Patricia, because your role is so like decision-oriented, like I'm sure a lot of your time is spent in meetings being like, we should do this, this and this. And since you're not an individual contributor, I'm curious, you're making all these decisions and strategy positions on how AI ought to be used. But for you personally, how is it like when you're doing your work, how are you leveraging these tools? So I use it every day from just even the agent, the prompt that runs my email in the morning because I spend a lot of time on airplanes and half the time their internet is down. And so when I land quickly, you know, summarize the hundreds of emails that have hit my account, where do I need to focus my attention? And it's taken me a while for the agent to get to know me and kind of me working with the different prompts of how do you focus my time better on the work that matters. And that's a two-way, you know, I say conversation of me with the different agents that I use. And I'm still working it. I'm still perfecting it, right? And then also having an agent be my honest broker to say, Patricia, this is actually where you've been spending your time. Like run a dashboard on me. Am I doing what I put the priorities for the week and did I actually get there? Because time is the resource that we don't get more of. Yeah, it's a great use case. And it's a reminder to you, you mentioned that it's a conversation, sort of like cheekily, but it totally is. Like you have to be in concert with your agent so that it knows what's important. You're training it on you, in this sense. And if someone is perhaps intimidated by like, oh, I don't even know where to start. What's nice about these tools is that since they're at their LLMs, you can talk to them. And you can ask it like, all right, what is the best way to use you? Where does some things you can do for me? Where are the tools I need to plug into in order to do that? Like the instruction manual happens in natural language. And so just spend some time just, I guess, yeah, it sounds weird to say. Spend some time talking to it, and it'll point you in the direction that can be beneficial to you. I would tell everyone though, if anyone is hesitant, the one book I would have people read, and I'm going to do a plug for him, is Jeff Woods and it's G-E-O-F-F. Jeff Woods, the AI-driven leader. And the reason is he approaches it as it is a thought partner, and you are still in control. The thought partner is in the passenger seat, you're in the driver seat. What are you trying to accomplish, give the AI the context, the role it's going to play, and have the AI agent interview you. And you do that dialogue. And I have found that to be very beneficial and how I approach AI, and then how I also build prompts. That is a great wreck. I'll make sure there is a link to buy that book in the show notes. And for the listeners out there, I know you all got professional development stipends. This is a great place to use it, to cash in like $18 on a book like this. And if you're hesitant, it just makes you really think about what it is and what it isn't. But also how would you want to use it? And I think everyone has to take a moment and say, what are my pain points? So I'll give you a real quick example. So I have a pain point that every two weeks I put out a senior leadership update of what's happening in people and places. And it's a pain point for my direct reports to get me the data. How do we present that information in a Sunday night email? And so I sat with, that was a workflow, right? And so I put it through an agent to look at that workflow and say, how do we change this into not being such a painful process? I'm still working on the result. But it has already improved just how I approach that Sunday task and then now I'm more energized to actually go get it done. And I'm actually more energized now to see how AI is going to keep evolving it for me, that agent. So again, it's just what are your pain points? And that's why I say it has to be bottom up because I don't know what the employee pain points are, where they have the most friction in their daily workload and where they see those obstacles. And the champions can help us get there by having those conversations that we can get to those outcomes and those results that again, we go to that value driven work that only humans can do. Yes. And that approach, it starts to feel a little bit more like familiar territory, like understanding your work forces needs and challenges predates AI by about 2,000 years, you know? Right. And so this is just good HR, it's just good people opposite a certain point. There's this new tool, but there is that approach is still just a vintage. So that is helpful for you to put it in such terms. Patricia, we are regrettably creeping up on optimal podcast length here. So we have to wind down. But before we go, I just wanted to ask you to share some advice for the folks out there in podcast land who wished to forge a career and wind up in a position like yours a strategic role at an amazing company. What advice would you give to folks? I and I have taught my daughters 22, just starting her journey. So I always tell her just always be comfortable in the uncomfortable because when you're uncomfortable doing your work, that means you're learning and learning should never end even with where I'm at with, you know, decades of experience. I am constantly learning every day and I want to be challenged. I want to be uncomfortable and then just keep taking different. It is a jungle gym. It's not a ladder. Take different opportunities, learn something that you aren't too sure about and just keep reaching out to mentors and sponsors, they're valuable. And the one thing my dad always told me is never turned down. Someone asking to meet you over a cup of coffee because you never know where that opportunity might take you. I love it, it's great advice Patricia. This has been really fascinating meeting you and chatting with you on the podcast today. Thanks so much for coming. Thank you for having me, everybody have a great day. Talk Talent to me is powered by LHH, a global talent solutions and HR advisory company. Committed to a beautiful working world through an organization's most valuable asset, HR people, LHH takes a holistic approach to recruitment solutions. Need to source single hires, scale entire teams or launch up a spoke executive search? As a full talent lifecycle partner, LHH ensures long term success through assessments, coaching, upskilling and career mobility. Recruitment, development, career transition, LHH, a beautiful working world. (gentle music)