Mindful Monday’s

Transcript

Michelle

Hi, welcome to Mindful Mondays. My name is Michelle Precourt. It's a pleasure to be with you here today. Thanks so much for joining us on this Monday morning or Monday afternoon depending on where you're calling in from. Before we get started before we, before I introduce our guest, John here today, I'd invite you, John, I invite all of our viewers joining into to reflect and consider on which indigenous communities they live, work and play on. I am very grateful and humbled to be living on the lands of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh people otherwise known as Squamish, British Columbia. I'd also like to introduce to anyone who might be new to Mindful Mondays, welcome, if this is your very first time, what Mindful Mondays is really all about. It is about sharing collective knowledge, wisdom, so that we can all move and grow with maybe with a little less hiccups in life. I don't know, maybe this is a far fetched thing, or me and my rose colored glasses, perhaps. But there's lots of things happening in the world of work in human resources. And so Mindful Mondays is really about sharing information for us to create healthier humans, sustainable workplace environments. We've had guests talk about workplace wellness strategies, career related stress, and conflict in the workplace. And today, we're talking about technology, which I do think helps us with a little bit of ease. I think so John. I'm hoping you're going tell us about that today. So welcome to Mindful Mondays.

John

Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Michelle

You bet, of course, we've had many conversations, just not like this. And so I'm very happy to have you here today. For to our viewers out there, I'd like to tell you a little bit about John. So John, is one of two partners with a company called AI Guides. And what they saw was that artificial intelligence was becoming more available more accessible to even small business. The challenge that they saw was that those business leaders and owners were struggling to find the right solution for the environments and AI Guides, provides independent advice on what might be best for organizations. So John works with his partner, Jen, and John is on the strategy side, and Jen is a data scientists. So happy to have you here today, John, I'd really like to jump right into things into our questions. But before we do that, I'm going to take a peek at what's happening here on LinkedIn. So just give me a second here. I'd encourage our viewers to say hello in the chat if you haven't already done so. And please tell us where you're calling in from and any AI questions you may have. I have a lot, because I feel like I know nothing about this. So I'm very happy to have a colleague and friend like you, John, who knows a lot about this sort of stuff. So while we're waiting for our viewers to chime in here today, let's dive into our conversation. First, very simply, John, can you tell us what AI is?

John

Sure. And think of it as technology that makes computers smarter. That's it. It's a kind of intelligence that's different from human intelligence. But it allows computers to do things that they couldn't do before, like, read, or automate tasks, or make forecasts about what's going to happen. But it's really just a way to make computers smarter. That's it.

Michelle

So smarter computers. And I know we're going to get into this, but I think that the idea behind this intelligence is that efficiency comes to mind for sure. Yeah, and there's probably more to it, a whole lot more. I don't even know how, the people that work on these things, because there are people behind the AI right, John?

John

Oh, for sure. Yeah, right. Tonnes of people behind it. And there's like all of this data out there. Another way to think about it, is like any organization has lots of data, or there's data available on the internet. And when we as people look at that data, you know, we can make some connections. But the AI is really good at connecting things that you, you never would. And then it can do so many more connections. It can try millions or billions of things to see, like, how do they relate? What sort of interesting conclusion can I draw from that? And it's stuff that a human can never do, but machine is perfectly suited.

Michelle

Amazing. I want to take a moment. We've got a few comments in the chat here. So Youssef is calling in from Ottawa. It's also where we're you're calling in from John. Thanks for joining us. Youssef. Danielle, calling in from Texas. Hello, welcome. We've heard we're crossing countries here today. We've also got Evan calling in from Poland. A couple of other BC folks calling in from Victoria, one of my neighbors. I think somewhere around here in Squamish I know. Chicago. Barb is joining us from Tampa, and Gabrielle calling in from, she says here she's calling in from Toronto slash Edmonton. What is that? Excellent. Thanks so much for chiming in the chat. Of course, we have, up until about 930 pacific time to talk with John. So we've got some specific questions for John, please share those in the chat. Petra Mayer is also joining and she says he are interested in this topic to understand how this helps my clients and learning and development. Absolutely. Petra, I think AI could be very valuable in that front. And I also want to bring up this comment here. Kevin, calling in from Chicago interested in understanding what data is being used to understand how efficient and effective our HR teams are doing. I'm sure that there's a lot more that we could talk about on on this. I don't know if you have any initial comments on on that. John, before we jump into our structured questions.

John

I mean, it's a great question in order for AI to work you can think of like it's the AI, as an engine, like it'll do something for you  it'll like an engine will make a car move. The AI engine can drive your organization in a number of ways. But the fuel for that is the the data that you have. So I mean, it would depend on the organization. But the hardest part of an AI project, about 80% of it is getting data that's useful. That's for most like most AI projects. But what's increasingly becoming the case is that you can get more out of the box solution, so you can worry less about that. The vendors can take care of some of those problems for you. So I don't know about that particular company. But focusing on data is a really key aspect to concentrate on.

Michelle

Yeah, absolutely. Because you spend the time and money on investing in some sort of automation. But are you leveraging the information or the right way? Yeah. Yeah. So John, there's a lot of talk about a specific AI out there called ChatGPT. I know nothing, I even just struggle with saying those words. Okay. Can you tell us about this, John?

John

Sure. So ChatGPT is very exciting. And it's probably the most famous example people would have heard of over certainly the last three or four months. And it's, it's a chatbot. That's really, really smart. And if you go to the site, so it's chat dot open ai dot com. And you'll see it looks like a regular chat bot interface. It's got a little text box where you can ask a question, and it'll reply. The difference is, you can ask it a question about anything, and it will give you an answer. And the reason is that the company spent a lot of time training it on essentially reading about 10% of the internet and millions and millions of books. So you can think of it as a junior employee of yours that you can ask questions to, but that junior has read a lot on every conceivable topic in the world. So whatever question you have, ChatGPT is almost certain to have a response to it. And not only can you ask him questions, you can give it tasks to do. So if you're a small business person, and you are preparing for a meeting, and like doing an interview, maybe, and you want some sample interview questions, just say ChatGPT, please prepare me 10 questions for this upcoming interview. And it will do it for you instantly. And all of this for now, is free.

Michelle

Amazing, amazing. Yeah. And that's a really, that's a really good example, John, because I commonly bring on HR interns. And with my last intern, she did an amazing job. She's looking for work, I don't know Deepika if you're online today but she is looking for work. And that was one of her tasks. I asked her to take a look at this job description and tell me what you what you see is important that the employer would want to ask in an interview. So what you're saying, John, is that, you know, maybe I don't know maybe she did use this AI, she went there? 

John

If she didn't, I guarantee that some of the people that are that are online now are are using it. And if they're not using it now, in a month or two, they will be because that's another thing you can do with ChatGPT is you can upload documents and ask for a summary. So you could upload someone's resume and ask for chat to summarize what the key experiences were. So it's, it's a really versatile tool.

Michelle

Yeah. There's a there is a question in here more of a comment from Daniela and I'm going to pull this out. So Daniella says brand new to this topic, don't know anything about AI in HR interested in general information and examples of AI utilized specifically for HR. I'd love any resources that you too, can provide me to follow up with any initial thoughts, John?

John

Sure so depending on the size of the team, there's different HR tools that would be useful for organizations. So it might be on the recruitment side, like how do you find the people that you're looking for? To? How do you onboard people once you've decided to hire them? Or if you have them in your organization, and there are routine questions that keep coming up, that take up a lot of time of your HR team, you can create smart chat bots that will answer those recurring questions. And then to make sure your employees are engaged, there are substitutes for the traditional employee survey, you can measure engagement of your employees and do it more in real time. So you don't have to wait for that end of year snapshot. You can hear from them regularly. So it's everything from finding the employees to making sure that they don't leave. And a lot of these tools are available. The expression is software as a service. So you don't have to build the infrastructure. It's just like you're buying a software tool. And some of these can be as little as a few $100 a month a year or two a few $100 a month.

Michelle

Thanks. Thanks for that. Danielle, I know is a really big question that you had there. I do encourage you to just connect with John on LinkedIn, because there's probably even some more tangible examples that he might might be able to share. And those might come up as we continue this conversation. I'd like to pull up another question here because I think this is a real concern? Here it is. So Youssef says here many sees many see AI as a threat. I think that it is complimentary intelligence to human one. The question is how do we use it intelligently?

John

Right. So I think this point is one of the major concerns that organizations would have about AI and I completely understand it. So, there are definitely companies out there who look at their work, and they don't have a very positive attitude towards their workforce, it's just employees are at a major expense, we want to get rid of them. And so, we're going to automate as many tasks as possible. And employees aren't fools, they can see that this could happen to them. And so, they would understandably be concerned about that. So, our recommendation is that's not a good way to proceed. Instead, if you go to employees, and you ask them, what is it? That's the hard part about your job? Are there tasks that you are not getting to? Are there things that are chewing up your day that you wish weren't doing, especially manual, repetitive tasks that you don't like? And you get the employees to suggest? Well, these are the problems that I'm dealing with. If you show up with an AI solution that says, well, what if we can automate some of those tasks for you, and it would free you up? I think you get a much different response from the employee, it's not a threat, it's a solution to a problem that the employees themselves have identified. And then, in terms of like, how does it work together, I totally agree with your point, the expression we sometimes use is augmented intelligence, people augmented by the technology so that your organization is able to do something that the technology or the people wouldn't be able to do on their own. So, look for ways that technology can add to the people almost being like a member of the team, and a coworker, and how are those coworkers going to cooperate? People in HR have a good mindset for that, like, how do you build a team? It's just that the team has some human members and some digital members.

Michelle

Yeah, and it's interesting, you talk about the pieces of our work that take a lot of time, but aren't necessarily rewarding, right? That's what comes to mind for me. You know, that’s a common thing. In my world of work, it's like, how can how can I, you know, after having an amazing conversation with a client who's like, yes, I want to use your services, Michelle, fantastic, then I go write these contracts. So maybe, maybe AI can help me with that.

John

Sure, and, and so you can, you can do that. And it's another example we have is, like organizations who have a lot of repetitive tasks. And you can think of the, you know, if it's in HR, is it processing something related to payroll, or invoices, or maybe around the on-boarding process, if there's a lot of work that people have to do to go and like, click on an Excel file, or go to a website and save it here, if you've got a very defined workflow, you follow the same steps each time. And it takes up a lot of time, your day, you could train a little AI bot, to do that for you. And so save a minute, save five minutes, over and over and over again.

Michelle

Yeah, I am all about efficiency, and finding faster ways of doing things where, again, I go back to this depends on the approach. So, I'll summarize, and correct me if I'm wrong, John here, but what you're saying is that employers need to approach AI in such a way where it's not a threat, it's like you are valuable, we highly respect the work that you're doing. And in fact, we want to make your job a little bit easier. Tell us where your pain points are. And in those pain points, the ones where it's repetitive, it's maybe something that that technology can support in, we can minimize the amount of time that you're doing that piece of it so that here's the other thing that you can do, which is going to be more fulfilling, more rewarding, and ultimately contributing to engagement and retention in the workplace. Is that a fair summary, John?

John

It's a perfect summary. And then the business can think about like how we grow, how do we serve our customers better? And with like, it might be with the same size team, but it's the team plus the AI. So like driving more revenue, not about just reducing salary costs.

Michelle

Yeah, yeah, for sure. John, I'm wondering if you have a success story, something that might be able to put all of this talk into something really tangible for our viewers.

John

For sure. So, for example, you know, we worked with someone who was an insurance broker, and she was getting hundreds, sometimes 1000s of calls per day. And with every single call that would happen, there was a very defined workflow that they had to go through going and finding the client interaction and checking a few different databases and pulling it up and seeing what quotes had been provided to the client in the past, and so forth. And so, imagine a call center, the call comes in. And as soon as they get the name, there's these 16 or 17 steps that they have to go through, the client is waiting on the line while this information is gathered, and the person has to go through all of these steps, we just figured out a way that a lot of these steps, a bot could do it. So just pulling this information, so that they had it quickly. And that gave better customer service to the person who's online. And it saves the staff going through just this very mechanical process over and over again. And then that's the, that's the first step. But then, if you learn, then what you can start to do is then, well, I did it in this one area, how can we get this snowball rolling down the hill? Like what are other parts of my business that are similar? How can we take away those repetitive tasks and get the bot to do that as well? And then you start to think about, like, how can I build my business in a new way? So that I'm thinking about not just what people can bring to the table, but the skills of AI can as well.

Michelle

Fantastic, thanks. Thanks, John. I think that's a really good real example, real client example, because this is, in short, this is what you do John, you try and find the right solutions for organizations. You don't you don't have any bias towards any one tool?

John

No, exactly. So, we're not affiliated with any particular company. So, if people come to us, and we just try to say, well, look, what's the problem that you're trying to solve? Here are the types of things that it can do, what's your biggest pain point? And then we help them find something that works for them.

Michelle

Yeah, that's great. I think you're on the right track. Because there's lots of folks out there like me, who are really quite intimidated by AI and unsure where to start. So maybe this is a good lead in to, to our next question here. So for those listening, or viewers today, anyone who might come back after and watch this, we have typically a lot of senior HR leaders, we have small business owners, we have consultants. So where have you seen the most success with AI John?

John

I've seen it with the earliest thing is with those recurring tasks, that's a great place to start. And you can think about it if it's something that you're doing on your screen with your mouse, the simplest place to begin is by teaching a bot how to do that work. And it's not something that's easy to do, it will take you, you know, a few weeks to get this up and running. But once you do, you've effectively created a digital worker for your team. And instead of paying a full-time salary for someone to do this, you free that person up, and you get the bot to do that work for them. So, the cost can be about 10 or $15,000 a year. But in terms of the return on the investment to the organization, it's really clear instead of paying someone to do that work full time, you pay a bot to do it. And they're able to work 24 hours a day, seven days a week and free up the employee to do other steps.

Michelle

When I opened Mindful Mondays, I talked about sustainability and I think that's where this ties in really nicely. John, what you're talking about is the tactical, the day to day tasks versus strategy. So, you can then focus on hiring folks who can support the strategy of the business? Yes. And then have AI deal with some of the smaller repetitive than the smaller tasks that you know, any one of us can do. But it is a distraction. It's a distraction from the strategy of the business.

John

Yeah. Or serving your customers as well. Like if you're instead of taking, wasting a lot of time on sort of these routine, repetitive tasks, could you be dealing more with your customers talking with them on the phone, that's something that an AI can't do, like understanding what their needs are and solving their problems. Think about what humans are good at connecting with people, having emotions, showing empathy, these are things that are going to be really valuable to your customers. And you want to look after them.

Michelle

Absolutely. All great points. I agree with that wholeheartedly. The emotions, the empathy, the, you know, AI, doesn't demonstrate kindness. It's blunt. It's fast. It's, you know, swift, but there's no kindness in it. There's a lot of great commentary in the chat. Zahid actually went into ChatGPT, and really quickly found some suggestions on how that AI can be used for HR. So, it's quite a long excerpt in the chat. So, I won't display it on screen here, but encourage you to take a look. Or even try it out yourself. Just go to what was that site again, John?

John

It's chat, Chat dot open ai dot com. Open AI is the company that built it.

Michelle

Awesome. Thank you. We're coming towards the end of our time here. What sort of resources would you suggest for folks to tap into to learn more about how they might consider AI in their world of work?

John

For sure. So, one thing that we've done is we've started to build a little bit of a directory on our own website. So you can go in and see some of the tools that are available for HR or for law firms. And it'll give you an idea of like, what's available. So, we're at aiguides.co. And the other thing is, particularly for Canadian companies, if you're wondering, is AI a good fit for our organization, and you're not sure, then there's a new federal government grant available, and it can cover up to 90% of the cost of getting a digital strategy in place. So you can register for the grant and go on and choose from a marketplace of hundreds of different vendors who provide services to Canadian companies. So whatever part of your digital maturity that you're interested in, you can find someone to help you out. So, we are one of those approved vendors. So if you have AI questions apply for the grant. It's called the Canada Digital Adoption Program. It doesn't take long, I've seen people get approved in a day or in two weeks, you go to the marketplace, and then you can pick a company to work with. So, get independent advice on whatever digital maturity question that you want. If it's an AI one reached out to us, please. And we'll see if we can help you. And I think that's a great place to start. Because it gives you a roadmap to figure out what would work for me in my business. And for a very small investment, most of the investment is covered by the Government of Canada.

Michelle

Excellent. I just popped that up on screen. So, anyone who's curious to learn a little bit more about this grant, you can find that information here. I also saw here that thank you to one of our viewers today, they shared the link chat dot open ai dot com. So, thanks so much for that if you just want to play, so to speak. And with that, I see that we're at time. I want to thank you so much, John, for your time, your energy and for sharing your knowledge today.

John

Thank you very welcome. And thanks to everyone who had those questions. They're great questions.

Michelle

Yeah. I really appreciate viewers that showed up as well. I think we could continue this conversation for the rest of the day. I know I feel like just a little bit smarter, John. So, thank you. Thank you for that. I do want to close with our next Mindful Monday, which is coming up on March the 20th. So typically, the third Monday of every month but because next Monday is Family Day we wanted to respect that, and I hope you all enjoy your Family day. But March 20, is the third Monday of every month and we're going to be talking with someone who has a legal background, someone who helps with conflict resolution, who's a mediator, her name is Cherolyn Knapp. She's of Knapp Resolutions. And we're going to talk about engaging workplace conflict, whether we decide to fight, and trench destroy, or collaborate, create and innovate. I think that's going to be a really fantastic conversation. So that is on March the 20th at 9am Pacific. Thank you again to all of our viewers, Petra, Greg, John, Gabrielle, Vraya, all of you from around the world. Poland, Texas, Florida. Thanks so much for showing up today. And to you, John, thank you again.

John

Thanks to you.

Michelle

Until next time, everyone, be well.