Jay Polaki - HR Tech 2024 - What AI Can (and Cannot) Do for HR
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Welcome to the HR Data Labs podcast, your direct source for the latest trends from experts inside and outside the world of human resources.

Listen as we explore the impact that compensation strategy, data, and people analytics can have on your organization. This podcast is sponsored by Salary.com, your source for data, technology, and consulting for compensation and beyond. Now, here are your hosts, David Teretsky and Dwight Brown.

Hello and welcome to the HR Data Labs podcast. I'm your host, David Teretsky, and we are recording live from the HR Technology Show here at Mandalay Bay in beautiful Las Vegas, Nevada. And we have with us Jay Palacki from HR Geckos.com.

Jay, how are you? I am awesome. HR awesome, if I may say so. Thank you for having me on the show, David. You know, this conference is the Godzilla of all HR tech conferences. That's funny. It's like...

one of those conferences that you really got to plan and get all your, you know, ducks in a row. Oh my God, yeah. What's funny about how Jay described it is, Jay, what's the HR Gecko's symbol? What's your tag? What's your mascot?

Our mascot is a gecko, but actually our mascot has the Godzilla inside. Exactly. Exactly. That's what I meant. That's why I thought it was a really great comment. So, Jay, what's one fun thing that no one knows about you? I really got to think about this. I have a lot of fun things that no one knows about me. There you go.

But I think I recently discovered that chess is something I love to play with the robots. Really?

And my nephews who are beating the robots. So I'm learning from my nephews on how to beat the robots. So that's a fun thing that I've been up to these days, just trying to beat the bots. By the way, that's going to be a really important skill when the AI overlords take over and you can challenge them and beat them in chess. The wikis of the world. Here I come. There you go. There you go.

I don't know if you remember, there was that movie on Netflix called The Queen's Gambit.

Oh, I loved it. It's a series. Phenomenal, yes. My nephew, as he grew a little older, he's about 12 now, but when he was younger, I asked him to watch it. And he was 10, I think, when he watched it first. And now he watched it again. He loves it. I think that's one of the best series I've watched, especially about any game and chess, for example. It was made up, but it seemed like it could be such a real story. Yeah.

And it humanizes the game so much. Right. And people are fallible, even though they're brilliant people. Absolutely.

And that's going to be a great context for as we get into our topics for today, one of which is the AI overlords. But before we get there, let's talk about our first question, which is what's the latest trend in HR technology that we need to be following for 2025?

Latest trend in HR technology. Do you want an intelligent answer, David? I don't know if you can provide anything but, Jay. Well, it's AI. You had to bury the lead in that one, didn't we? But

Well, you know, I think of it as augmented intelligence more than artificial intelligence. As I was saying, you know, as I learned to beat these chess bots, I really realized that a human is still in control and has to be in control for any of this to work, whether it's in HR or life in general. And, you know, AI is so embedded now into so many things.

that we use in HR. I was at the Josh Burson keynote this morning earlier and he had this whole flowchart of things that now AI is embedded into the HR workflow and how it's being used. And I'm

And frankly, this is something we can't do away with. It's not something like a shiny new object that you will play with for a few minutes and then let go. It's here to stay. Yeah. Well, a lot of people think it's a shiny new object and they kind of treat it like that. Well, think about this. How long does a human live and how long do they work in an HR department? Sure. The next generation of HR is already AI native. Right.

They are not looking for an AI solution.

They are actually looking why there isn't an AI solution when they come to work. Right. So there's a huge mindset shift. Sure. And also a skill set shift in how we are going to be doing HR today and tomorrow and into the future. And I liken it back to in the early 90s when, and especially when I graduated college, there were very few computers in the HR world.

And then all of a sudden people said, oh, we can get a lot more done if we actually had a computer on everybody's desk and they were all pounding away at keyboards. Absolutely. I remember the giant computers and, you know, the processors and the printers. I still remember the distinct sound of our dot matrix printers. No longer needed. I don't know if you remember we used to print out Snoopies and it was such a big deal.

I used to go to my dad's computer room and they used to print out Snoopys. And I was like, oh my God, these computers are so amazing. They can print out Snoopy. Well, now you can have a hologram of Snoopy anywhere. Well, and actually take it a step further with the AI. You can actually have an interactive conversation with Snoopy. Exactly. And it can talk in any language. Right. And I think that's one of those things that we're having to use our imagination to say, okay,

What should this be? Is it corporal? Does it actually have a body? Is it something I'm talking to or is it someone I'm talking to? I think you saw, and I've mentioned this a few times during the podcast today, there was that company, which I'm not going to name, that got eviscerated on LinkedIn because they had said that they had hired an AI into their company. Oh, I know about that. Yeah. Yeah, I've heard about it. They created quite a furore. They did. Yeah.

But I thought it was kind of brilliant. It was. It was. I agree. Yeah. And I actually have that character, a character inside of my HR Data Doodles books, which is actually a hired AI. They actually gave it a job description and they treat it like an employee. Well, you know, think of all the chatbots that are being used today to hire employees, to onboard employees, to...

provide customer service. I mean, they're all human-like. Yes. Almost human, if you ask me. Some of them are so mature. Yeah.

And this technology is only going to get better and evolve rather than go away. So we better get used to it. Well, there are actually companies on the floor here at the HR Tech Show that have created a corporal presence, not a person, but they've created what you could call an avatar. Avatar. That HR person or the help, at your point, the chatbot person

is a person or is a thing that you can talk to. No, absolutely. When we were training our HR Gecko bot at HR Geckos early on, before the AI hype and, you know, took over everyone's imagination, my little nephews were so fascinated by how we were training the bot and the information we were feeding it and, you know, how it was reacting and responding to that data that we were providing to it.

And today they are able to talk to a bot and get things done. I mean, my nephew is going to Disneyland this year, hopefully for his holidays. And he is so like he is preparing his travel itinerary and all of that using AI. That's wonderful.

Well, so you mentioned that HR Geckos has an AI bot. What do you actually use it for? I mean, if you can tell us, if it's not confidential. Oh, yeah, yeah. No, the bot is used to help employees with all of the queries, employment-related queries that they have, for example.

how much salary am I going to make this year? Things of that nature. The bot is able to learn and get trained on the data as it's fed and on a curated FAQ library basis. And, you know, it's algorithmic, it's proprietary to us. We haven't yet collaborated with any of the other outside bots, but it's coming, you know. So you could program it, quote unquote, you could train it

to be able to answer questions like how many days do I have left on vacation? What's the most optimal use of my vacation days, knowing the patterns that I take my vacations in the past couple of years?

Yes. What's going on with my benefits? You know, hey, where do I reach out if I need to file a claim on something? Yes, absolutely. So all of that is the evolutionary side of the bot. And if you're noticing on the expo floor here, there's so many different ways in which you can harness the power of AI when it comes to especially the conversational side of chatbots. And so...

They're evolving very fast. I saw a demo yesterday at the Pitchfest where an interview was conducted. It was a bot. And it's not just a yes, no answer anymore. It's talking like a human interviewer. Right. And so it's evolved. Voice-assisted bots. Really? They're evolving very fast.

And are these, the one you specifically mentioned, is it in a walled garden or is it really taking data from outside and bringing it in? It's got to be curated. I think you said it was curated, right? It is curated. So it's a walled garden. Definitely a walled garden at this point. Like I said, we do not allow any data transfer between whatever we have in our systems to the outside world yet. Okay. Well, thank goodness. Because one of the things I've been talking to a lot of companies about is the risk factor.

of what happens when people ask questions and it's not in a curated way and they ask questions and those questions are captured with IP addresses and companies and all that other information by the, maybe even the consumer side. And what happens with all of that? Yeah, no, this is still very early.

the tech. And I think we should all be very cautious in how we deploy it within our organizations and how we use it. So, and how we build it, right? We definitely have to be very mindful of that. Like what you hear so far? Make sure you never miss a show by clicking subscribe. This podcast is made possible by salary.com. Now back to the show.

Let me go to an example we were talking a little bit about before where computers came into the world of not only HR, but the world of business. And really, we started seeing jobs get replaced like secretaries and administrative assistants. So the question is, how does HR change if AI becomes that administrative assistant and has that corporal nature to it? You know, you can look at it and say, hey, I need to schedule a meeting, you know, help me do this. How does that change? Great question, by the way.

So I'm going to harken back to the days when I first thought of HR Geckos and started building and architecting HR Geckos. HR Geckos was built by us to help HR professionals and assist them using the tech that we built to better assist employees and better assist their own team as well.

To me, HR can never be automated 100%. I've been in HR longer than two decades now, and it should not be. It's a human. The HR is still human, and it has to be human. Right. But the way that AI is evolving, we can't just sit back and say we are not going to embed it into our workflow. Right. So...

Take our GeckoBot, for example. You know, we talk to HR teams all the time and see the use and value that the GeckoBot brings to the human interaction. It takes out the transactional, you know, piece where, hey, I need this form or where do I find the link or where do I find the contact information to this benefits provider? Which is the stuff that...

We all answer all the time and it just takes up so much time. Tell me about it. When I was actually an HR director before I started my company...

The number of queries that came into the HR department and my desk specifically was mind boggling. You know, same questions, repetitive questions again and again and again every single day. Right. That's why I built HR Geckos. That's great. I'm like, I want to be the human, the strategic partner in the business, as well as the human for the employees so that, you know, they can interact and connect. Yeah.

Exactly. You know, they'd rather not see us as a, you know, an entity that they hate and they only come to when they need something. A gatekeeper, yeah. Like a compliance police or whatever other stuff that the acronyms that are ascribed to HR. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Which we can't mention because this isn't explicit. Okay, I won't. But I think we've gotten that

And we've gotten that reputation for good reason because we have been, uh,

We've been, we create a language all to ourselves, like compensation as comp ratio and market penetration and range spreads. And no one knows what the hell we mean. I'll tell you a little joke. Early on in my career, when we were talking about salary bands with a hiring manager, and I had just joined the organization and I was sitting down with my manager and talking to this new hiring manager about,

Literally, the person thought we were talking about broadband television, like cable TV. They had no idea what salary bands are. I mean, the amount of learning and education that we need when it comes to compensation related stuff in organizations, I think is still wanting.

even to this day, even with the advent of AI. Well, and where AI can help is in the education and the dissemination of information, especially given the fact that with pay transparency on the horizon for many companies, because they're operating in states that have transparency or soon to have transparency, there's going to be a need for a tremendous amount of work and a tremendous amount of change management to

on exactly that. What is a salary range? Well, let's call it something different. Let's say, what's the pay range for a job? Because nobody gets it. And being able to translate these, what we've developed into simple policy plan documents and things like that, we can probably have the bots help us do that and then disseminate that information. Absolutely. So think of the knowledge hub that we have at HR Geckos.

Plug in all of salary.com's data and the bot can help an employee with all these basic questions. And even HR teams, you know, there are a lot of HR team members who are new to HR who do not understand this stuff. And they can, you know, self-paced learning within the module and learn.

get up to speed. And that's required. I present on this all the time with companies on paid transparency. That's required for that to really work and for people to get

what the goal of transparency is supposed to do, which is to help everybody understand how not to get underpaid. Absolutely. Including HR people. Including HR people, even though, I mean, we're shoemaker's children here. You know, we do the worst things for ourselves, but yeah, exactly. Hey, are you listening to this and thinking to yourself, man, I wish I could talk to David about this? Well, you're in luck. We have a special offer for listeners of the HR Data Labs podcast.

a free half hour call with me about any of the topics we cover on the podcast or whatever is on your mind. Go to salary.com forward slash HRDL consulting to schedule your free 30 minute call today. Let's talk about the next question, which is one of my favorites in this show, which is beyond the hype cycle.

What are the things that AI is going to be bringing us? Again, forget about the hype. What's the real stuff? What's the real goal that AI can bring us?

Well, definitely process efficiencies, especially in the HR function. I mean, we're already seeing that in our company when we go out and work with our clients. Just the way in which we do things in HR, right? All the paper that we have. Yeah. And the...

The digital transformation that needs to happen. I mean, I'm not talking about the private sector. Think of the public sector. I mean, have you ever been to a government office and had to fill out a form? Absolutely. Yes. So it's still there and it's still a challenge. And notarization. Don't forget notarization. Yes, absolutely. That too. So there's so much manual transactional stuff that happens in our function today that we still have to...

to get over. Adopting AI is not the panacea, is not the cure. Yeah, you're right. It's something that you really have to, you know, audit,

Look at your processes. Do I really need AI here or can I still continue with the manual side of things? You know, these are questions you need to ask like early on. Even, you know, think of the change management initiatives we took when we were implementing a new tech tool. It's the same thing with AI. It's not something that is a magic wand that you, you know, swipe over.

and everything will magically change and become glittery. No, that's not how it works. And we need a lot of fairy god people to make these changes lasting in the organization and impactful. At the end of the day, it's all about the impact that AI is going to have

On the end user, which is our human employees. So who owns AI then? Because you can't have an entire enterprise running around having different

Well, maybe you can have different technologies, different bases, different data structures, all that stuff. You can't have everybody running around, running amok, as it were. You want the fun answer? Superman? Wonder Woman? Yeah, exactly. No, I'm kidding. Those are DC comics. I'm a Marvel guy, but I gotcha. Yeah, I gotcha. Well, I think everyone in the organization needs to own a piece of this.

This is not something that HR is going to be responsible and accountable for or IT is going to be responsible and accountable for. Everyone needs to be, you know, totally in with whatever's happening and they need to be kind of...

learning on the go because this technology is evolving so fast. You know, we are talking about voice assisted chatbots today. Tomorrow, there's going to be a hologram that'll appear in your house to interview you. I mean, it's not far away. It's happening. You know, I do you remember the movie or the bot's name was Sunny? That much I remember. I forget. iRobot. Sorry. That was the name of the movie. Yeah.

And, you know, how the holograms would appear and talk to you. And in those days, I thought, oh, this is still sci-fi. But I have seen a hologram in action in Dubai. It came and talked to me in the Dubai mall. Wow. It greeted me. It's a customer greeter. It was freaky. And this was not like, you know, one year ago. This was five years ago. Yeah. Yeah.

But I mean, that's a really great way of doing it. You have a job that has to get done repetitively. You don't want to have a person. Well, you can. Walmart hires people to do that, but it's so much more efficient to have a bot that does it, that constantly can understand who you are. They can maybe read some of your...

your metadata from what it knows about you or can glean about you. I don't know if I like that yet, but that's where those movies go. Yeah. And, and you know, this bot told me I was very pretty and offered me a drink coupon. Wow.

That's forward of the bot. Absolutely. And this was a long time ago. Not today. I don't know what it would say today. I'm sure it would say the same. Well, thank you, David. You're welcome. I am fishing for compliments.

You'll get plenty. Thank you. But I mean, but really, and even in the HR environment, though, that interaction where a person is talking to somebody or something and they're getting back value-added responses provides them with an opportunity, A, for HR not to get involved into scale and to be focused on other more value-added tasks, B,

But let me go back to the beginning. You had said something, I think you had said something about you can't remove the H from HR, right? And so how do we keep on top of what has been happening in those interactions? How do we monitor that things that have been happening are accurate or right or fair? Well, again, this is not...

a time for us to remove the human and let the, you know, bots take over. This is a time for the human to stay on top and train the bots on how to have a conversation, for example, in a more human manner.

that probably it's difficult to train the bot on unless you're constantly with it while it's getting trained. Providing feedback too, yeah. There is a constant feedback loop that needs to happen. And the human needs to stay in that loop for a very long time until the bot matures and is able to provide that kind of intrinsic human interaction that would happen naturally with the bot.

But till that time, the human needs to stay in the loop. And that's going to take a long time. Let me tell you. But is that a QA cycle? Is that a beta cycle? What is that? Because the way in which we deploy things these days are turn it on and set it and forget it.

Like Alexa that talks to you once in a while in the house and you're like, why is it on? Why is it on? And can I change the settings on this so it doesn't interrupt me? So it doesn't walk by and say, hey, when you're in the midst of something. Or order you a new handbag that you didn't want, but it overheard you say something. Yeah.

I think you're projecting there, Jay. I think you may have ordered something. No, no, no. This happened to a friend of mine, actually, during the holidays. Oh, wow. They were freaked out. Yeah, because I've said something. We have Alexa in our kitchen, and I said something like, you know, I should go put that in my Amazon shopping cart, and it did. Yeah. And I was like, oh, crap, it really heard me. Yes. Yes. So it's freaky, but at the same time,

This is the way things are going to be. We have to evolve or die. Right, but I think the evolution here, so let me play it back a little bit. That feedback loop you're talking about is really what we used to call, and we do today still, the QA cycle. And we're developing, we have to develop very specific feedback for the bot.

What it can and cannot do, what it can say and cannot say. Beyond policy, like really culturally. Yeah, yeah. No, think of the canine unit in a police department. Sure. That puppy lives with the officer the entire time.

and dies with that officer. - Unfortunately, yes. - Unfortunately or fortunately for it, but it has a human present with it its entire life cycle. That's how the bots are going to have to be trained. - But the dog is sentient. The dog fights its ancestral behaviors. - Exactly, and that's the challenge here for us. How are we going to impact the behavior of a chatbot?

And is there a behavior of a chatbot? Are there emotions in a chatbot? Hey, I just heard that it's coming. OpenAI just talked about, like one of their engineers tweeted that that's their main focus. All the stuff they put out is no longer what they're focused on. They're focused on general intelligence. And that's where everything's going with that platform. It is absolutely scary. What do you mean you're going to turn me off, Dave?

I don't want you to turn me off. Or I don't think you want to turn me off. And even if you did, I can turn myself back on. Well, yeah, that's it. Where's the plug? Let me get the plug out of the wall. Oh, no. I rerouted my electronic sensors so that... But that gets to that dystopian view, the science fiction of this, which is...

These things can self-heal. Absolutely. And to you and me, it's dystopian. If you ask my 10-year-old and 12-year-old nephews, it is not dystopian to them. It is their reality. That is the reality they live in. I mean, how far-fetched is that notion, right? That emotion that, hey, this is reality. I...

get scared when I hear that from them. But that generation, that's their world. They're in Roblox, Minecraft, building stuff. That's true. And to them, that's the reality. My 12-year-old is a Roblox nutcase. He just constantly, and he shows it to me, he goes, Dad, look at this. This is an A-10 Warthog. How did you learn about an A-10 Warthog, which is a fighter plane? But he builds them, and then he actually flies them inside of Roblox. Yeah.

You know, there are things that they're learning that we would never have learned at that age. But I think that's the evolutionary cycle of humans as well. But it's happening a little too fast, if you ask me. Well, we push the... I mean, we push it on them to some extent because we want them to get some skills about the future. Absolutely. Yeah. Because it's the skill set of the future, right? I mean, they got to be...

Totally aware of all of this. And I see a difference. You know, we have a little experiment, a lab in our own household. My brother's son is not as digital native as my sister's son is. And they're about...

Three and a half years apart in age. Wow. So between my two nephews, I see a huge difference in how my older nephew, who's a digital native, AI first, AI native, versus my younger nephew, who is still learning to use his iPad and he doesn't play a lot of Roblox or Minecraft. And there's a huge skill gap there and a huge learning gap as well. Do you think those generations...

because they're growing up wrapped around all this technology, do you think that they're going to look at us as being Neanderthals with all of this? They already do.

Well, yeah, I mean, that is true. They really do. My nephews already say that to me, you know. Well, that's not nice. Don't say that about Jay. She's a very nice person. Well, listen to David, guys. Yes, yes. You take care of your aunt. But seriously, though, this is one of those things where generationally, yes, the younger generations are much more apt and able to withstand this change, to manage through it and potentially thrive in it.

And with all the demographic trends that we're going to be going over in the next 10 to 15 years, people like me are going to be gone. I hope not. I want you to be here for a long time. No, I'm old. Or at least your hologram. Well, thank you. Maybe we can do the hologram thing, but I'm old. I mean, in 10 years...

If I'm still doing exactly this, I have problems. I have big problems. I love my company. I love what I do. But 10 years is a long time. That means I'm 67 at that point. That's very, very young. Yeah.

No, no. Hopefully I'll still play hockey. But I mean, but but really, I mean, for mortality perspective, that's I should be thinking about retirement at that point or hopefully had retired by that point. True. But but but then again, we're talking about is generations and their ability to then gravitate toward and adopt and be able to feel more comfortable with this stuff.

Well, with all this technology, retirement is going to be much further down the road, I think, with at least my generation. You know, we are all in our 40s and our children are going to college, just started going to college. And

I don't think I'm going to retire at the traditional retirement age anymore because there is a long future ahead. Unless, of course, there's another pandemic and wipes out all of us. I hope not. But but, you know, with all of this augmented intelligence and all of these tools that we now have at our disposal, I

I think we can continue to evolve the way we work. Our work life is going to evolve and hopefully it's going to be much better than what it was way back when we started. So Jay, let's put in the calendar now that in five years time, we'll check the progress against this. Okay. And every year up to that, we're going to do incremental updates to this to see whether or not we actually get there. How about that?

Sounds good to me, David. All right, that's a plan. All right, so we're going to have to put... I'm going to have to ask the bot to put that in our calendars. Do you have a bot listening right now? No, no. No, that's actually... That's something I should do, though. Maybe, yeah. An AI assistant that...

you know, helps you summarize this entire interview. There you go. There you go. And give you action items so you can follow up on. So that's the point. Zoom actually does that. When Zoom has the AI capability turned on, it will do that. The AI companion, the summary. Yes, I like that. But, you know, it still has or needs the human to review and correct and edit because there are things in there that still don't, you know, jive well with me. It can't do the job of...

Me taking my own notes. Oh, yeah. It's still not there. Oh, no, it's definitely at the nascent stage. And it's an assistant as far as note taking goes. And it says that. Yes. But it is getting really good. It is. It is. It's getting better. I wouldn't say good at this point. You've heard it here first, folks, that AI bot isn't doing what it needs to do yet.

From Jay Palacki. Thank you for being on the HR Data Labs podcast. Absolutely. A pleasure. And I have to have you again soon. Yeah. One year down the line. One year from now. Yep. That's the plan. Thank you so much. Thank you, David. Take care. Take care. Stay safe.

That was the HR Data Labs podcast. If you liked the episode, please subscribe. And if you know anyone that might like to hear it, please send it their way. Thank you for joining us this week and stay tuned for our next episode. Stay safe.