Perspectives on Talent | AI's implications on employees and skills

Christy Harper:

Hi, I'm Christy Harper. I'm the partner and Founder of Archway Advisors, previously working with Wilson at Konica Minolta.

Amy Brookshire:

My name is Amy Brookshire, Vice President of Talent Operations here at Wilson. Really excited to be speaking with our guest today, Christy Harper.

Christy and I have worked together over the years and really excited to talk with her a little bit about some of the insights that she has around the talent acquisition space. So as far as I'll kind of start with you first, if you want to tell me a little bit about just who you are, your background.

Christy Harper:

Absolutely. So I've had a winding 30 plus year career. I've worked with Fortune 100 Consumer Packaged Goods companies all the way to family owned and run technology companies.

We have worked in brand and product marketing to HR and HR leadership. So today, I'm now pursuing my own passions with Archway Advisors where, you know, I really just believe that businesses transform through people and I believe that an organization is only as successful and strong as the people who power it. So I'm really excited to kind of go down this new path on my journey.

Amy Brookshire:

So as we look to the future, Christy, what is what are your thoughts as far as talent leadership right now?

Like what's Christy's fresh take on what's going on in the the talent and how my position stays today?

Christy Harper:

How much time do you have? I mean, how can you talk about a fresh take on anything right now and not talk about AI?

Amy Brookshire:

Absolutely.

Christy Harper:

I've had some experiences with AI, I was very lucky at Konica Minolta. I was able to be on the AI committee for 2 1/2 years. So pretty educated in the space. By no means an expert, but pretty educated in the space and an understanding and spending a lot of time thinking about what the implications are for AI on employees and people on how work gets done.

And one of the things that really resonates with me is why I got into the space. So I didn't go from marketing to HR on a whim or by accident. It was a very deliberate choice for me because I was in a world where brand and product were everything. And I said, you know what?

These demographic trends, people are going to be what makes companies great or not, because there just aren't going to be enough people. And now we're in this age where we're taking the talent of people and amplifying it in an unimagined way 10 years ago. So what becomes the most valuable part of talent becomes our humanity. It becomes the soft skills.

It becomes how we communicate, how we build relationships with each other. Because AI is going to amplify everything we do. It's now no longer I'm building 1 relationship with one person. It's I'm building how I relate with other people.

It's no longer about can I communicate with an analyst or with an assistant so they can help me in my project. It's how well do I communicate my expectations, my needs, the parameters of what output's going to look like in order to quickly get the information that I need to be able to provide insight, to be able to provide advice to other people. And it amplifies so quickly now that those humanity skills, I call them it's, you know, lots of people for them as soft skills, lots of people will they have lots of names for them. I call them humanity skills.

But those humanity skills, what AI does is it amplifies them. So the better you are at them, the better your talent pool within your company are at those humanity skills, the more your company can achieve success, continue to multiply, continue to grow. And that's going to really be the core. So people become even more important, not less important in a world with AI.

Amy Brookshire:

That's such an interesting perspective and and one that, you know, I think, you know, when you think about AI, everybody's like, oh, I don't want to lose the human element, but thinking it from that application of it and, and it makes perfect sense, right? We're it's a technology, right? And with any technology, you put good in, you get good out, you put bad in, you're going to get bad out. And I think that's why it's so important that if any company is looking at how do we leverage AI and how do we gain those efficiencies that, you know, we all here are out there.

It really is kind of by starting small, right? Versus like a Big Bang approach of trying to do it all at once, because you're absolutely right, whether it's the human element of the people leveraging it and their impact that's going to be amplified or even just the processes themselves, anything you do is going to have that impact.

So really being able to understand what parts working well, what part's getting the result that we need by doing it in those kind of smaller steps and being very measured and how it goes. I think is going to really, it's really going to give you the best insight into what's working and how do we really manage that.

Because I mean, fundamentally you're, you're asking people to do their jobs in a different way, right? So there's going to be change management with that. So by being able to do that in very measured steps, we are being very thoughtful and looking at each of the amplifications from soft skills, like you said, the humanity skills to, you know, the impacts on those efficiencies, I think are going to be really critical.

And really for us have been what we've been kind of preaching is just taking that one step at a time and looking at the impacts because that amplification piece that AI brings is just, it's, it's enormous at times and you don't even realize it until you've gone too far through the path.

Christy Harper:

And I think the other piece that's that we have to take into account is that the skills that people are held to, they become these soft skills that we as a corporate society have not done a particularly good job of establishing how they're measured or how the the effectiveness of them are measured.

Because we've been really focused on measuring output. And that's where most of our metrics come from is output. And if our output is driven by AI, but the effectiveness of our output is driven by these humanity skills, it's going to mean a recalibration in one how we define work, how we define what good looks like, right?

Because it's not going to just be about output, because anyone who uses AI can have a lot of output, right? It's going to be more about the how than the what.