The Leadership Alignment Required to Turn AI Into Enterprise Value - with Guillaume Lardeux and Eva Majercsik of Genesys

[Music] Welcome everyone to the image AI and financial services podcast. Today's guests are Guillermo Lador, head of transformation and office of the CEO and Eva Moyer-Chiq, Chief People Officer. Guillermo and Eva join us on today's episode to explore a shift that mirrors what financial services leaders are seeing in their own AI initiatives. Technology and people leadership can no longer operate separately when AI begins reshaping our work is structured. They explain that enterprise value comes from redesigning work flows into end, mapping our work happens today, finding the friction points, and rebuilding executions so humans and AI operate together with cultural alignment and iterative experimentation enabling those gains to scale. Getting in front of enterprise AI buyers is not about impressions, it's about trust. Adding may to we help AI vendors engage decision makers through research driven content and conversations that actually matter in the buying process. To lend the exact strategies we use to help leading AI brands and startups connect with the idol enterprise AI buyers, visit image.com/ab2. That's emeorj.com/ab2. Now the conversation with Eva and Guillermo. [Music] Eva Guillermo, welcome to the show. Thank you for having us. Thanks for having us. So across enterprise AI seems to be changing something more foundational than just technology adoption. We think technology decisions start to shape how workforce is structured and workforce on the island is increasingly shaping decisions around how AI gets used in practice. That's raising a question from both sides of the organization and we rearing it from other conversations as well. The traditional separation between technology leadership and people leadership does that still reflect the way it actually works. So let's start from the why is AI blurring the boundaries between technology leadership and people leadership inside enterprises? Yeah, I really appreciate that question because when we started thinking about our journeys in AI transformation and Genesis, we actually were thinking about these two elements and what we landed is that and you said it right, technology is shaping how we do work, which is why agenesis were approaching this as a cultural transformation versus simply a new technology that's coming along. And this is important because AI is not only another tool, but it really drives us to think differently, to look at how our existing processes work and then think about how we can do things differently more effectively. So the focus shifts from deploying technology to focus on just full-out efficiency to actually value creation. So putting the employee as a center, making sure that this is a cultural transformation versus a tool eliminates that layer of potential fears, skepticism, weariness than any employee may have. And that way you ensure that everyone can dive in wherever they are in their journey towards adopting AI. Perfect. What are you seeing on your side? Yeah, just to be alone, if I shared, like our journey has been to go from sort of experimentation and going now with full enterprise transformation at scale. So in the early days, it was all about providing tools access to employees, providing sort of initial training, literacy. We came up with the initial guidelines, you know, responsibility AI and how to use these tools. And it was very much about letting a thousand flowers bloom and just see what happens. And we've seen tremendous amount of sort of innovation, people leaning in, teams leaning in, with very creative use cases. And we've seen early reserves from this. The only sort of limitation or downside of this early phase was that it is very siloed, very fragmented and somewhat difficult to gain value at scale. So in addition to this initial phase, in partnership with the HR team, but also with others across the organization, we really took sort of an enterprise transformation approach. And we've looked at it from people's standpoint, technology, but also processes, really focusing on business process and workflow redesign. And so the unit economy of our transformation now is really around workflow, which ties, like I said, to business processes, to the technology and most importantly to the people's side. And that's definitely what we're hearing across industries and across enterprises that it's even to Ava's point more than just use cases. It's really looking at how this is going to change it for the people working with it. And it gives you every enterprise the possibility to completely rework a workflow and make it so much more efficient. So to that point, if I've got the picture correct in the post, you would have IT or solutions on the one side, being implemented. And then there's a training, of course, and getting the workforce to adopt it in a certain way. This is not the way it's looking like anymore. It's completely different. So for those people who argue that this is just beta collaboration, not a structural shift, what makes it fundamentally different than what we saw before and again, to your point, the silos that really did exist before. I mean, this transformation with the eyes in some ways, like the model of all transformations. And it takes the whole village to really transform and go beyond just identifying a few use cases and see marginal results. It takes the close collaboration between these core functions. And I would say it started the top of the organization, so to have the right governance in place, the right strategy, the right alignment between the leadership team on what success looks like. It also takes alignment on prioritization and what to focus on. There are lots of things we could transform. There are lots of enterprise workflows. And it is important to have that alignment between the people's side of the house, the technical, the technology side of the house, the rest of the leadership team in terms of what we're going to be prioritizing and transforming first, first of the things that maybe sort of coming later on in time. Eva, anything from Yosa, what you've seen as this fundamental difference, the way you worked before? I think that the biggest thing is how do we, it has fundamentally changed how people think, work, make decisions. And this gives you the ability to be on the driver's seat to inform how your job is going to look like leveraging technology. So right now, it's literally, if I have to put it in historical words, it's like learning on the fly and deploying because we're all learning. So if I were to look at our own company and Genesis, probably many business units are in different levels of maturity of their adoption and deployment of AI. And that's perfectly okay. That's actually reasonable. And that's probably true for every other company like that. This will allow employees and leaders to be on the driver's seat to really question, hey, whatever worked for me in the past may not be the best way to work in the future. So working in tandem and really make sure that we're building those capabilities and learning as we go and making people comfortable with that because that's very, very important. That will enable us to scale much faster. If there's one thing that we need to get used to is that as as humans, we have this tendency of thinking linearly because that's how we are wired. With AI, we have to go exponential. And the only way to do that is to continue to build off each other and learning and sharing and again, learning as we go. And two of us point, we've consistently heard from employees of the one thing that really enjoy and appreciate listening to and getting his feedback from other employees or their teams. So the information sharing, the shared experience around learning AI and experimenting and making progress is essential. And we jointly, we've been sort of a shared communications strategy to share the progress that we're making. And that's actually very exciting in the sense where everybody's excited about breaking down the silos. It doesn't feel like an extra job to break this down. Everybody's excited and learning. And we've seen it in our own business and everywhere else where you can really learn from other departments even if they're completely different, just strategies or this type of workforce does open up to that. So enterprises aren't just managing employees supported by software anymore as in the past. They're managing hybrid execution systems where humans and AI operate inside the same workflow. What does that require from infrastructure and operations? They'll have what it takes. It takes first understanding so the current state of the business, meaning really understanding the current state of your existing processes, your existing workflows, which sounds simple, but the reality is, in some ways, not everything is necessarily documented to evast find previously that all organization has the same level of maturity in terms of understanding their processes and having documented their processes. So step one is like understand the starting point how you operate today and that means you know what are the steps along the way, who are the people, you know, what are the roles involved, what type of skills are involved, you know, in the existing way of operating. And then it takes and this is where I think the magic is, right, it takes a redesign exercise to define how the work will be done with the help of AI, whether it's augmentation or automation or different types of solutions, different technologies, just to be able to invent sort of a new way of working and sort of defining these new, you know, these new workflows where humans and AI will be operating, you know, as teammates essentially. We have this expression inside the company, you know, we're going from tools really to teammates and that's how we envision it. And there's a paradigm shift and if I want to open up to you, but I'm actually extremely interested in exactly what Gyeong just described, does that literally look like the leadership from the organizational slash technology side and the people side sitting around the table and working through these together? Or is it more efficient for each side to work on their own processes mapping that out and then coming together? Or are you guys sitting around a wardrobe table and discussing this as often as you can together? Yeah, well, as I said earlier, this is a massive cultural transformation, not only a technology shift. So the short answer to your question is probably it depends. So there are elements that are going to go cross company or you're better off just sitting down together and figure out where the hands off are and really blowing up and redefining processes. In other cases, you will need a business expertise to inform those workflows, which is not easy by the way. It's very easy for us to say we're going to go off the workflows and create new workflows. We have been using some of these workflows for decades. So it's not easy to let that go, but it's important that we push that to the level that people are comfortable with and then as we help people think differently and move differently, they get more comfortable with technology and that way you increase adoption because that's the important piece. We can have the best technology, but if you don't have people with you along the way, then you risk adoption and success. So I would say it's all a journey and then when people see success, it starts amplifying. Like only yesterday or the day before yesterday, we have our newsletter and they just put out another AI, GPD chatbot for design thinking and I think half of the company went in just to check it out and what we can do about it. So it just becomes an amplifier, but it also requires leaders to think differently, to lead differently and to give this sense of comfort and allow people to do these experiences, maybe along with the answer. But what we hear often is small iterations, get those successes and then bold on those successes. So let's take one workflow and walk me through how you literally look at it when you map it out. Is it as a team member? Let's let's take a business unit, let's take customer success and you sitting with your customer success team. Is it literally starting from the agent to usually would be working to the to the clients and then working through the process and finding the friction points, finding the hand of points we I know I do about 20 and some of them all off hanging fruit like your post with changes, etc. But is it literally as granular as sitting with from the first person touching the client and then working it all the way up within your business unit and just working through those until you've got a process that at least gets you to a point where you feel like you can deploy AI into it. That's that's that's exactly the way to to think about it. Just to give you an example. So the way we've done it from our own product support was to really map out from sort of the very touch points when a customer reaches out to us all the way through a case being resolved and identifying sort of all the different steps that we need to to happen along the way. And again which walls would be involved, you know, a type of skills, you know, would be required. And doing this exercise we've identified sort of 18 distinct points of optimization through the process. And with the use of technology we've been able to and the use of technology just to make it concrete or things like applying, you know, real-time transcription, you know, when a customer interacts with, you know, with our own agents or introducing, you know, next next best action based on how the conversation is going, a coup pilot type application. By introducing these technologies for these 18 different sort of opportunities that we've identified in the process, you know, we've been able to drive more than 25% of productivity gain across sort of the whole product support flow. And we've increased customer satisfaction by more than 20 points. So these are some of the early, like very tangible points that and results that we've seen by just doing this work around the workflow redesigns. And ever from your side, it sounds like a very big one. Now you want the entire company to understand this, but you've got some people who don't sit in customer success and 20 points, they mean a lot to them. They're like, okay, but what does this mean? How does that communicating to the entire enterprise, what what successes are, so that everybody tangibly feels it and then gets excited? Have you found some ways that is a good way to roll out those successes and get excitement going? I would answer it in a number of ways. Number one, again, I'm going to say this over and over again because it's so important in my view. This notion of cultural transformation has been our anchor. And when our employees heard that, we stopped that layer of fear, so people started to feel more free to experiment. We did some other things like we set up contests. So we had a one person who actually got a trip to a formula one race. So people are excited about doing this. And at the end of the day, it's really many of them see this as an opportunity to reinvent things. I can use another example that we are building currently, so I don't have metrics. So to your earlier point, not only not everything is going to be able to be measured on points of satisfaction. Other things are going to be measured by either velocity or how things can be done about how fast can you scale without adding heads? How fast can you increase your employee satisfaction? On the latter, for example, we're working on and really designing our entire onboarding process. And you may think that that's only a chart, but it's not really a chart. It's an element. And how we're approaching that is like we're trying to identify with those moments that matter. And it's going to be around those moments that matter versus you get your offer, you get back, you get on board it. No, it's okay. Let's look at the moments that matter. What are those things that we're doing? We should keep doing and what are those? So we will see that measure and employee satisfaction and how fast an employee can get on board it, etc. etc. So value realization can look very differently. It can be dollar saved. It can be our save. It can be employee experience. It can be customer experiencing can be reduction in time of doing things or your ability to do more with the same. And I guess that's where you really get employees excited as well is when they they might have been sitting on an idea for a long time, but there was no opportunity to bring it to the front and this offers that opportunity. So I'm just thinking to myself and we've been hearing this and I'm putting myself in the shoes of someone that needs to report to the board. They said, "Guys, AI needs to happen right now." And you coming back to them with small iterations and that's not exactly what they had in mind. They were expecting this entire new system with clear metrics and KPIs for leaders listening either on the people side or on the operational or on the technology side. How do they actually sell these small iterations to a board to senior leadership in a way that if they are satisfied with what they asked for without seeing the big, big win from the start? I'd say you know you really want to take sort of the bottom up and top down a porch. The bottom up being the cells and flowers blooming, like all these use cases, the experimentation and the early results. And you want to promote this internally, you want to identify your early successes, you want to promote them and sort of invest and see how far you can take these early wins. So to answer your question, I would identify these early wins, communicate, amplify, show value or extrapolate potentially what the value could be from these. And at the same time, build like more people, process, technology, enterprise, transformation strategy where you're going to be identifying what you need to do from a cultural transformation, technology transformation, business process, workflow transformation, which takes a little more time, right? These are sort of the bigger bodies of work that needs to be done. But these also is essential because this is ultimately the value is going to come from. I would actually offer two additional perspectives, very kind of very different. The first one is giving your organization comfort that you can also fail and that you're learning from that. And I think that is super, super important because we can do something and it didn't work but you will learn from it. And that takes me to the second topic which is the other thing that employees and leaders and everyone else is how do I lead in the air of AI, how do I further my career. If you look at employee service across the world, I think career development always comes back. Call always comes up. And right now what you can do is even whether you succeed or fail whatever your building skills. That's another important anchor that we are using at that Genesis people say, oh my god, the jobs are going to change. Yes, but it's the skills that the employees starting to gain that are going to inform the job change not the other way around. At least that's my point of view and that's how we're handling it. So making it skills based gives that win win to the employee himself and it gave or herself and informs how slowly the workforce is going to shift. That makes sense. And I think that is a big sell especially when it comes to fear because people are slightly worried that they might be using the jobs but it is as the system is changing and you as an employee you're changing as well you're upskilling through that process. And I guess focusing on that maybe there's been a bit too little emphasis on the fact that you are learning even if you're failing you are actually learning. But from we talked about silos before we've got technology and people coming together in a room sitting down speaking different languages because it's been different KPIs. Can you give me some insight on how it's looked when you get these two or these different sides of the company in a room. Has it been smooth or the tips and tricks of how to facilitate those conversations because I'm pretty sure that people do take quite big ownership for the business units and some people might feel like the other business unit is now coming in and sort of scratching on the tip. Have you seen that always at mostly not even an issue at all or have people basically been waiting for this and this is now just the opportunity to break down their silos. I think that this is where I believe that our Genesis culture has played very very much in our favor we're very much anchored on our three values which are embrace empathy flying information and go big. So by definition we are we have been striving to bring the company along on anything that we have done whether forget AI even in past decisions we have which have been hard. Have been easier to deploy because of the culture that we created so with that said in gion you may see things that I don't but I do not see people not embracing this together I mean probably most of the workflows that we're working on touch other businesses and it's everyone working together on these like for example I talked about on boarding on onboarding I have to partner with IT our partnership with IT has never been stronger than that. Then then today on many many different fronts and so I personally and I haven't heard there's a lack of intent to work together. Yeah. Gion if you have a different perspective but again it's not easy it's you have to you have to I mean we're humans so but I haven't seen a massive pushback at all. It's and and without this partnership you know it cannot work you know if you have IT pushing AI tools without you know HR you know you get the tools but you don't get adoption you don't get the cultural transformation that I've talked about on the flip side you know if an HR standpoint you're pushing the re-skilling and getting the workforce ready but IT is not following then you know it everything falls flat. So you really need you need all all the key functions in the organization to be a line you know we talked about this earlier you need to have not only HR IT better so legal the business transformation so the focus on you know business business processes workflows value realization that needs to be part of it and of course the support of all the functions in the organization the leaders. And their teams right to be able to try that transformation so it takes the whole village to to drive the real results and real transformation and actually this this this actually allows AI to scale faster and in a more sustainable way because people are adopting and people are at the center and you almost already answered my my final pushback is for leaders sitting yeah and thinking okay they were the silence with the whole reason for things. So the whole reason for things to happen and to happen fast is this not slowing things down but you sort of already answered that ever for the leaders you're saying it's actually not slowing it down and to an extent that makes sense because when it's adopted across the company it's there on those bottlenecks the stops that you might have seen in the past we okay we've got this new technology but nobody's using it and IT spent some time and money on it there was investment and it's not being used any final thoughts before I wrap up that that you feel like leaders. Should understand about this of course the cultural change anything else that that you guys feel pertinent that might still be a missing element from leadership thinking I think the first thing and kind of said it earlier but it's like leaders will need to start to think about how to lead differently again providing that space for experimentation and quite frankly I think it has been proven that you can go so much faster more effectively by working together no silence. No silence itself will be successful in its own you may have a marginal success but the augmentation of that success will come with the entire company working together easier say that done but if you set the route foundation the route the right culture and tone I think that makes a whole world of difference and again it's not a perfect science it's not exact science I don't have a recipe for that but I think that that good intent really helps. And we have seen it is a team sports to wrap up the episode I would say leadership needs to step up this is a moment for them to lead by example to be adaptable and agile enough to compromise when they are failures see them as learning curves not as failures be willing to really look at your workflows your processes and decide where they even if they've been following the same framework for 20 30 years they may need to turn it up. They may need to change today in this environment and celebrate the ones in a company wide way and that could include gamification that could include competitions that's always motivating with the with the human nature and it's rather logical but take to heart the fact that if business units aren't working together you are going to sit with a that's not scaling if you cannot get adoption there is no point in the in the technology. If you've got the people and ideas but you don't have the technology to implement those ideas it's also not going to scale and game to your point it takes a village to the team sport come together and move this forward with small iterations whilst keeping the entire business goal in mind anything else that I miss anything that was that was where summarized. Well, maybe I will add is that some of this drive and culture comes from the top and one of the things that work is working for us very well is that we have something called plan of a page which are the company priorities this is part of a plan of a wage. So by definition is cross across all the company across all the businesses so setting the tone from the tongue and then leaders leading by example as we always said will make a lot of difference. Thanks so much for your time this was extremely interesting and looking forward to more conversations. Same here. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you. [Music] I'm wrapping up today's episode I think our three key takeaways from our conversation with Gioeman Ava. First, workflow redesign is becoming the core unit of AI transformation. Mapping our work happens today and rebuilding executions so humans and AI operate together. Second, treating AI as a cultural shift, remuse adoption barriers, enabling employees to experiment, learn and build the skills that ultimately reshape the world. Ultimately, reshape roles and processes. And finally cross functional alignment, people leadership, technology leadership and operations working as one is now essential for scaling AI beyond isolated use cases and into measurable enterprise value. Getting in front of enterprise AI buyers is not about impatience, it's bug trust. An emerge we help AI vendors engage decision makers through research driven content and conversations that matter in the buying process. To learn the exact strategies we use to help leading AI brands and startups connect with their ideal enterprise AI buyers, visit emerge.com/ad2. That's EMERJ.com/ad2. For further executive level analysis and to join our network of leaders delivering workflow impact with AI, visit emerge.com. On behalf of the team at emerge, we'll see you on the next episode.