How NatWest Group Gave Back One Million Hours With AI - Future of Work Podcast

Each year, thousands of leaders, innovators, and forward thinkers gather at Workday Rising to explore what's next in the changing world of work. We've unlocked the vaults on our most impactful conversations, and we're bringing them directly to you. We dove deep into the strategies and insights shaping our collective future, so prepare to be inspired, challenged, and empowered to make a change. This is the future of Workday Cast, recorded live at Workday Rising. Welcome back to Workday Rising Amia. I'm Ashley Goldsmith, Chief People Officer at Workday. We're here at Workday Rising in Barcelona and I'm excited to welcome Eleanor Presley, Group COO Capabilities Lead at Nat West Group. We'll be diving into the critical role of HR leadership and fostering a successful human AI partnership and how it's shaping enterprise-wide transformation. Eleanor, thank you so much for joining us. Before we dive in, I'd love to hear a little bit about how this show is going for you, and I just had a chance to go see the fun show floor activation that you all have here, and I'd love to know what are you most excited about with Rising this year? Yeah, I'm just super excited about the participation that we have at Rising this year. So it's the first time that we've had a Nat West Group stall. We went live with our Workday implementation in 2019 and the partnerships really gone from strengths to strengths. So it just kind of shows the collaboration that we've had, and particularly in the last 12 months, the team have worked so hard to pull it all together. It talks a lot about our relationship with team GB and the Paralympics team, which is part of our winning together strategy. How do we win for customers? And there are some massive synergies between that and the Workday relationship that we have as our strategic partner. How do you support us to win for our customers? So yeah, super cool stall, lots of skiing and fun things to do. So definitely encourage people to come along and have a look. Well, I loved it. I got a selfie over there. It looks just terrific, and we're so appreciative of the partnership. All right, let me ask you a few questions. I have heard that you've been at Nat West Group for 24 years, so you have seen an awful lot of change over those years, I'm sure. I'd love to hear a little bit about the story of Nat West from origin to where it is now. Yeah, so thank you for making me sound so ancient, but Nat West Group began almost 300 years ago, back in 1727, as a Royal Bank of Scotland, up in Edinburgh, Scotland, and over time it has grown beyond that, so we merged with Nat West in the year 2000, which took us to be one of the biggest banks in Europe, and in 2020 we became Nat West Group PLC, so the big purple stall over there that you see, that is the brand that most people, certainly in the UK, no one loved today. Nowadays we look after the finances of around 19 million customers. We've got 65,000 employees, and we're really focused on making sure that we're delivering financial sustainability for those customers, and by becoming a simpler, more digital bank, and that's where we're at, that comes in. Yeah, loves that. Now you had a great career transition recently. You were leading HR transformation, and you had responsibility for all those capabilities, and now you're leading Nat West Group cheap operating office, and I'm really curious to hear how your experience as the HR transformation leader helped prepare you for this role, and what that means for what you're doing. Yeah, so our HR transformation lasted around two years. It was a huge undertaking, and there were some massive learnings from that work. I would say that there were kind of three key learnings that were taking forward into the broader functional transformation. So the first one is around the transition of our operating model, and actually sat at the KPMG work that they did earlier, the stall that they did earlier, they were talking about this, how we have moved from a kind of a siloed individual processes to looking at end-to-end journeys, so we completely turned our operating model on its head. We put goal and journey teams in place, who are dedicated at owning that end-to-end journey, looking at it from the way that a colleague would experience it, rather than looking at those individual processes. They then have full accountability for those journeys. They have done a load of blue-clinning printing around what the current journey looks like, really understood what the pain points are, what the opportunities are associated with them. How do we eliminate the rubbish and simplify where we can and also kind of lastly automate? We don't want to automate the bad stuff, and from that work we've really identified where the value is, how we then prioritise the changes that we need to make, so that's definitely that journey perspective is definitely something that we want to scale up across our other functions. We're already starting to look at that in areas like supply chain and legal. Secondly, we redefined our measures of success and how we actually quantify value, so as part of the HR transformation, we had a target of delivering a million hours, giving a million hours back to colleagues every year, which we smashed the target, and if you look at the stall and some of the speeches that are happening today, our performance team are here at Rising, talking about how they contributed to that, and that meant that they have eliminated much of the manual performance process and used what data really focus in on that value add activity, for managers to upskill and coach their teams, rather than just kind of writing down what performance process looks like. And then finally, technology has been a massive part of our transformation, as well, so we have removed multiple steps from our business processes. For example, in the recruitment space, we made our recruitment end-to-end process 1.7 times faster by just taking out non-value add steps in word day. We've also done things like launch a non-boarding journey, which we've seen massive improvements in customer satisfaction. It was all manual, previously, but we've got MPS scores of kind of 85% plus now. And I'd say lastly, in the technology space, we've really started to understand what our broader ecosystem looks like and how we deliver a seamless colleague experience digitally. So all of these things we can definitely take and scale across to the group co-area. Wow, congratulations. What an incredible bunch of accomplishments. I bet when you throw out that million hours stat that gets everybody's attention. Yeah, there was a lot of counting if I was. I bet there was. That's really impressive. Congratulations. You lead in a world that's moving fast. Your time is limited, but your need for real insight isn't. That's why we're excited to introduce the Workday Podcast Network, bringing every Workday show you follow into one streamlined location. The Workday Podcast Network is your singular destination for the conversations shaping how work gets done directly from forward thinking leaders and industry experts. Whether you're a business leader, a practitioner or a developer, we have a show for you. You'll find the full spectrum of leadership, technology and strategy curated across functions so you can move from idea to action without losing a minute. The Workday Podcast Network is coming early in 2026. It is such an exciting time for you to make that kind of transition and given how much AI is changing every aspect of business and I'm sure yours is no different because you have worn these two different hats. Where do you see the greatest potential for AI to really move business forward? Yeah, it is a really interesting time. There's so much work going on in this space and my team who made me super proud on the day-to-day basis have recently completed a proof of concept where they have taken an experiment and over seven weeks they have tested their hypothesis that agente AI can orchestrate across multiple manual processes, systems and tools to deliver a really simple and smart conversation which brings contextual understanding. So that has been a really impressive piece of work to look at. We know that our colleagues spend a huge amount of time doing non-value ad min activities. We did a lot of interviewing with colleagues to say how can we actually use agente AI to help you to make life simpler for you. Through that we landed on one of our key, heaviest burden activities which is booking time off work. So the team built an experiment around that which they can now scale. They've identified that not only can they use agente AI to book time off work but they can also extend that out to relationship managers for example so that they can reschedule their appointments to other relationship managers where they're out on holiday. So while we started looking solely at colleague we've been able to expand that out and start to look at customers and really give value back to our front facing businesses. So I think through the proof of concept we've proven that agente AI can really reduce friction, it can save valuable time and it can just create a space for more meaningful work. I love that and I love your experimentation mindset. That's great, I'm sure with things like taking on agente AI and where it can contribute that really makes a difference in your business. Yeah, wonderful. RCEO Carl, he often talks about it's not the technology that drives change people do and I think you're saying the same thing. I'd love for you to talk a little bit about what you're doing to help your employees navigate this big transformation with AI. I completely agree with Carl and we've spent so much time this year on the change management aspect of it. So in that West Group level we've looked at it kind of bang wide but also taken it into the functions and franchises and people have come up with their own local ways of managing that adoption and driving adoption individually. And really what we've encouraged people to do is just to play around with the technology and start to build their own trust and confidence with it so that they don't have this fear that is some bad thing that's going to come and happen to them and then they can start to deploy in there in their everyday work. I think specifically within the functional areas we have done a huge amount of upskills. We have spent tens of upskills, I would say, looking at the different tools that we have in the bang, be it copilot or KEC or something that we've developed internally, looking at different skills that might be required like prompting or summarisation and also different themes like ethical, ethical side of things and data and what it means just to really make sure that people understand it and they take away that fear factor. I also think that the leadership team absolutely led from the top on this which has been really critical. So they have been fully committed to setting aside time in all team calls making sure that they are really really talking about this to their people and they've made it fun as well which has been really important. There's been lots of gamification, we have had let's write songs together, let's paint pictures together, doing it as a prompt along. The feedback from that has been incredible. The data speaks for itself after all of every all team call that we've done. We've just seen a huge peak in the amount of usage of the tools and it's not tailed off either. It's really started to just reach that steady state so it's been really good. We've had loads of people reach out off the back of it to say come and speed towards, come do a deep dive with us and help us just get that deeper understanding. So we've definitely peaked people's interest. Yeah, wonderful. I love it. That's a great story. So for any of the leaders that are out listening to us today who are just getting started on their own AI journey, what advice do you have for them and what are the one or two most important things you think they could do to really drive success in their business? Yeah, so I think I'm going to say three. I know you said one or two, I'm going to give you three. We talked earlier about experimentation. I think that's absolutely keys. Get your hands dirty, don't be afraid, don't think that you can get things wrong. You'll learn along the way and you'll alter as you go, so I think experimentation is absolutely key. As a leader, I think my second tip would be to find the people who are really passionate about AI and encourage them to get involved. So I do just want to do a special mention. I talked about colleague digital assistant earlier, but I've got a fantastic young lady in my team, Jess Booth, who that was her absolute brain child. She came up with it. She wanted to solve a problem and she did all the ideation. She got the investment and she has seen the whole thing through to delivery. So that's been incredible from that enthusiasm. She's just pulled people in like 90 people who really want to get involved and that's just part collaboration and co-creation. It's just been really great to watch. I think my third tip would just be storytelling. So a lot about storytelling today. Easy to talk about that. They were really good. Storytelling I think is absolutely kink. The reason that Jess and team were able to secure the investment was because they just took people along on the journey. They taught really passionately and had a really clear vision for what they wanted to achieve through the work and they brought that to life through just kind of short snappy videos. Easy for everybody to understand and access. And yeah, I think being able to tell that very, very clear narrative has secured investment and brought people into the work. That's great. Thank you so much. Your advice, your tips. Thank you for being here today. I know I definitely took a couple of things away from it and I know everyone else will, too. I'm kink.