• Oracle
    Josh Bersin:AI最终会连通整个企业界吗?问问ServiceNow,他们的回答是肯定的。 本周,ServiceNow在其年度用户大会上迎来了超过22,000名IT和技术专业人士,同时公布了几项对其战略的重大增强。ServiceNow的目标是通过一个全新的工作流软件层整合企业资源,使之能够实现全面连接,进而让员工、顾客以及企业领导通过一个统一的界面访问信息和系统。 历史上,ServiceNow主要通过一系列案例管理和服务交付工具来实现这一目标,这些工具主要服务于IT部门。这个平台极大地帮助IT服务团队自动化和优化了他们日常面临的各种IT请求和问题处理。但随着公司的发展及其野心的扩大,尤其是在Bill McDermott这位我所见过的最杰出领导者的带领下,ServiceNow的发展已经远远超出了原有范畴。 在员工服务领域,ServiceNow即将推出一系列雄心勃勃的产品。首先,原名为HR的员工工作流服务现已扩展到包括工作场所管理、员工入职、调查问卷以及技能分析工具等,还包括从Hitch收购的人才智能平台、内部职位调动与招聘等功能。公司正在开发专门的招聘工作流程,以帮助企业简化面试安排、候选人管理以及内外部候选人关系协调等复杂问题。这个看似小众的领域实际上正变得越来越重要,因为越来越多的公司开始重视内部职位流动和动态。 但在我本周参加这次会议时,我注意到ServiceNow的战略叙述发生了显著变化。Bill McDermott花了近一个小时重申他之前的讲话,但这次他将重点从工作流转移到了人工智能。他基本上将原本的工作流引擎战略替换为了“商业转型的AI平台”,显然,他们不再仅仅关注“数字化转型”。 ServiceNow的商业转型AI平台 他们强调的一个非常重要的信息是,AI将成为企业变革的技术,这与数字化变革的影响相似。 几个月前我们还在讨论数字化转型,现在,这已成为过去式:未来的变革将借助AI实现。没错,从某种意义上来说,每种技术都能成为业务变革的工具,但AI带来的变革程度将远超过互联网本身。这一点我稍后将进一步解释。 ServiceNow将其视为一个集成了异构系统的集合,中心是一个AI引擎。会议上的一个关键案例是一家面包店,因应不同地点的天气变化而调整各种烘焙产品的生产。中心的AI系统能够感知这些变化,预测接下来的行动,并指导工厂调整生产策略,从而满足市场需求,提升销售额。这是一个非常吸引人的案例。 ServiceNow的AI架构 有趣的是,像SAP在20世纪80年代推广集成供应链管理,Qualtrics推广客户体验管理时讲的故事,似乎都在用不同的方法解决相似的问题。Bill McDermott凭借丰富的经验,将这一叙事应用于ServiceNow,展现了他作为CEO的卓越远见和沟通能力。 那么,AI真的能成为未来的企业协调系统吗,将各种遗留平台联系起来,提供解决方案吗? 我确信这将成为现实。虽然这不会一夜之间实现,但最终会发生。这种变革同样适用于我们的消费者生活。 我们日常工作中的效率之所以低下,往往是因为在寻找信息、处理文档、查询库存等活动中分心。如果能直接通过AI查询并获取答案,无疑会极大提升工作效率。(正如我尝试让Siri帮忙却发现它做不到的那样。) 正如我在本周的播客中讨论的,通过语音或文本提出问题比在Workday、Oracle、SAP等系统中四处查找要简单得多。我们曾努力使这些系统更加用户友好,现在,生成式AI的出现将为这些努力带来新的变革。 ServiceNow之所以能够很好地定位自己,有两个主要原因。 首先,他们长期以来一直在开发工作流工具,很多系统都设计得非常用户友好,即便是普通用户也能轻松使用。这就是为什么有这么多IT开发者选择使用ServiceNow的原因。(我在这周的大会上亲眼见证了这一点。) 其次,他们对这些后端系统的工作原理非常熟悉。ServiceNow的工程和产品团队对SAP、Oracle、Workday等系统进行的工作流程和交易处理有深入了解。 我与HR产品团队有过深入的交流,他们向我展示了如何将员工交易集成到ServiceNow平台中,以便构建生成式AI解决方案,与公司内部的系统进行交互。这一过程需要时间,也不会十全十美,但他们已经在正确的道路上迈出了坚实的步伐。这也引出了一个问题:我们是否应该将所有企业系统整合到这种新的界面下。 ServiceNow的HR产品 然而,这种架构也有潜在的缺点。 首先,成本较高。你现在不仅要购买ServiceNow这一复杂的企业平台,还要维护你现有的复杂企业平台。Oracle、SAP、Workday、Salesforce和Hubspot等都在尝试提供类似服务。你已经为他们的建设付出了巨大的成本,现在又要为ServiceNow付费。ServiceNow的产品不便宜,这从他们的收入就可以看出。 其次,这可能会造成系统的脆弱性。ServiceNow的工作流本身可能会因为业务规则的嵌入而变得过时,你必须管理许多小型应用程序,这些应用程序位于你的其他应用程序之上。当这些应用程序更新或被替换时(很多软件公司被收购后,其产品线会发生变化),作为客户的你需要重新配置在ServiceNow中所做的设置。 这让我回想起我在IBM的日子,当时我在主机世界工作,我们的应用程序都是定制开发的,我们有大量的COBOL程序员在构建这些系统。我曾与数据处理部门合作,探讨他们是如何在公司内部整合所有这些系统的。现在,你可能需要在ServiceNow基础设施中构建类似的工具。 如果我现在能与Bill McDermott面对面交谈,我相信他会说:“这是一种更有效的运营方式,我们ServiceNow将为你自动化这一切。”我相信这将随着时间的推移逐渐成为现实。但这也引出了一个问题:你希望将多少组织功能和经验整合进ServiceNow,而不是选择其他核心系统? 每当我们需要构建新功能时,我们都必须决定将其部署在何处。我们是应该将职业管理平台部署在Workday、Eightfold、Degreed还是Cornerstone?你的决定将决定你依赖于哪个供应商及其发展路线图。 考虑到ServiceNow已经取得了巨大的成功,许多公司都在说:“既然我们已经为此付出了代价,那就让我们继续吧。” 生成式AI能否实现这一承诺?例如,在天气变暖时,它能否提前告诉你需要烘焙更多的面包圈? 根据我们通过Galileo®获得的AI经验,我认为答案是肯定的。 这项技术的重要性堪比电力的发明。虽然这听起来有些夸张,但我是认真的。我从未见过如此自我发展、强大并且发展迅速的技术。我们正处于生成式AI进入市场的初期阶段。 在未来几年内,生成式AI很可能会改善这些连接,开发代码,并优化这些端到端的“单一视窗系统”。Google正在消费者领域推进此类工作,Microsoft则在办公生产力领域努力。如果ServiceNow能成为企业级应用中的佼佼者,那将不足为奇。
    Oracle
    2024年05月10日
  • Oracle
    BetterUp Manage: Pioneering AI-Powered Platform For Leaders BetterUp公司最近在其Uplift大会上推出了一个名为BetterUp Manage的领导力发展平台,这一平台采用人工智能驱动的评估和个性化学习方案,彻底改变了专业发展的途径。该平台具有高度的可扩展性和可定制性,能够与Workday、Oracle和SAP等主要系统无缝连接。BetterUp Manage不仅为领导者提供服务,也支持任何寻求发展专业能力的个人。通过整合最新的人工智能技术,BetterUp Manage为传统的领导力培训行业带来了革命性的变革。 这次大会中,BetterUp还邀请了英国的哈里王子Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex 和亚当·格兰特,哈里王子是BetterUp的首席影响官。。。 This week I attended the BetterUp Uplift conference and I really was impressed. This is a company that exploded into the market with an innovative coaching and employee wellbeing network built around an assessment called the “whole person model.” Through a set of shrewd marketing and sales strategies BetterUp established a leadership position in this market, growing to a billion dollar+ valuation. This success encouraged many competitors to form and now the market for AI-enabled, targeted coaching is large and crowded (vendors include Torch, CoachHub, Growthspace, Sounding Board, Bravely, and a new breed of AI systems). Essentially what BetterUp did was democratize business and professional coaching. Before this trend coaching was a rarified, expensive offering reserved for under-performing leaders or high-potential executives. Today, with BetterUp, anyone can go through a meaningful assessment, get assigned a relevant coach, and start a coaching session in minutes. The system is well designed and easy to use and BetterUp’s coaches are all trained (most of the coaching vendors use a lot of the same certified coaches – they are not BetterUp employees). As a corporate solution, BetterUp goes much further. The data collected through assessments is available for analysis (anonymized) so companies can find pockets of stress in the organization. You can look at assessments by team (minimum of 10 people), tenure, level, and other factors. This lets companies like Chevron or Cisco understand the issues new employees or new managers have, for example. In the last few years the company moved into wellbeing by offering a solution called BetterUp Care, which targets benefits buyers. But the more strategic and interesting offering is the new platform I saw this week, now named BetterUp Manage (it was originally called Connect). BetterUp Manage is the first highly personalized, scalable management development platform I’ve seen. It brings together AI-enabled assessment, personalized learning, coaching, and AI-driven narrative support. It’s quite an impressive product, much of it was developed by the team at Motive, who was acquired by BetterUp in 2021. BetterUp Manage is an out of the box personalized leadership development solution. And you don’t need to be a “leader” to use it. The system steps you through the Whole Person assessment, then asks you questions about the types of soft-skills issues you face (many specific scenarios), and then gives you a customized learning path, week by week, along with a professional coach. Since it’s built on an AI platform there is very little manual work behind the scenes so it’s enormously scalable. Large companies will want to customize it and BetterUp is prepared for some of these requests. And the system connects to Workday, Oracle, SAP to automatically understand your role and level. The reason I’m so excited is this: the management training industry is a confusing, messy, red ocean. There are thousands of consultants, coaches, books, courses, and executive education programs. L&D executives have to constantly build custom solutions, evaluate vendors, and hope that an offering will stick. This pure complexity, coupled with the fact that every company is unique, has led to many specialized leadership development firms (and some big ones like Franklin Covey). So what most companies do is mix, match, and custom-build leadership solutions. And they’re not simple: we developed a model we call the 4-E’s to understand this: Education (courses), Experience (developmental assignments), Exposure (mentoring and coaching from leaders), and Environment (a company-wide focus on leadership values and behaviors). All these elements play a role in developing leadership skills. Companies like IBM, Cisco, and Marriot can afford to custom build these solutions, but many companies don’t have the focus. BetterUp Manage is a way to personalize, scale, and democratize this solution and leverage the increasingly important role of AI. I met Alexi Robichaux almost a decade ago and his passion and energy still drives the company. While BetterUp is a bigger company going through the growing pains of any $billion valued growth business, the culture and passion for clients is clear. Remember that buying L&D solutions is not as simple as buying a product and turning it on. Every training solution, platform, or program you buy must be carefully aligned with your company’s culture and rolled out with care. Otherwise people simply say “another training program from corporate I can ignore.” BetterUp, for all its startup-like innovations, has overcome this problem. Customers value the system, they get strong adoption from employees, and the company works hard to advise and consult. It has always been interesting to me that very few content companies ever become very big (Skillsoft is the only one that never seems to stop). And the reason for this is simply the nichey, highly diversified needs of many industries and companies. BetterUp, as a platform-centered company delivering a high-touch solution, has the potential to break this paradigm. It has enormous potential, given the rapid acceleration of AI behind the scenes. I consider BetterUp one of the “Trailblazers” I talk about with clients, and BetterUp Manage is definitely something to watch.
    Oracle
    2024年04月12日
  • Oracle
    Will Chatbots Take Over HR Tech? Paradox Sets The Pace. 在快速发展的人力资源技术领域,Paradox.ai 已成为领跑者,其先进的对话式人工智能平台彻底改变了招聘流程。通过利用自然语言处理和人工智能,Paradox.ai 提供了一个全面的解决方案,涵盖了从最初的职位申请到入职的整个招聘过程。该平台不仅简化了筛选和面试安排等繁琐流程,还提升了应聘者的整体体验,显著改善了招聘时间和招聘质量指标。 Paradox.ai 由亚伦-马托斯(Aaron Matos)于 2016 年创立,目前为联合利华、CVS Health 和通用汽车等大客户提供服务,实现了 90% 以上的招聘流程自动化。 Paradox.ai 凭借其强大的集成能力和大幅缩短招聘时间、降低招聘成本的能力,在人力资源技术领域充分体现了对话式人工智能的变革力量。 Chatbots used to be tinker-toys. You type, try to get help, but usually result in “please call support.” Well all this has changed. Thanks to advanced NLP (natural language processing) and AI (retrieval-augmented generation) chatbots are entire applications. They can answer complex questions, search databases, and invoke transactions on your behalf. Pretty soon we’ll be able to ask our phones “please find me a flight to Los Angeles next Tuesday morning” and the system will check your location and calendar, look at flights, and book you a seat. Where is this going in HR? Well the leader in this space is Paradox.ai, a company that pioneered the application of conversational AI in recruiting. And their system “defines the category.” Let me explain. Recruiting Is The Perfect Market For Conversational AI Recruiting is a goldmine for automation. When you post a job, applicants want to ask many predictable things: “How much does it pay?” “What are the hours?” or “What uniform do I need” or “What are the benefits?” The recruiter, a person devoted to filling positions, has to answer all these questions and more. They have to screen candidates, schedule interviews, check for qualifications, and look at credentials, experience, and more. It’s time-consuming, error-prone, and filled with wasted time. (That’s why talent acquisition teams have many “scheduler” and admins.) The average “time to hire” is over 45 days and often the process goes on for months. And throughout the experience the job seeker is left wondering “when will they call back” or “what else do I need to know?” (CEOs cite hiring as the third most time-wasting process in companies, following emails and meetings, estimated at “40% wasted time.”) Paradox uses Conversational AI to solve this problem. And because this is a “narrow but deep” space, the system does many things we can learn from in all our AI efforts. Paradox was founded by Aaron Matos in 2016. Aaron’s vision was to transform the candidate experience, revolutionizing the way candidates apply to jobs. Today Paradox has become a complete Conversational AI Recruitment Platform (chat to apply, scheduling, candidate support, ATS, assessments, onboarding, career site, and more), serving clients like Unilever, CVS Health, Pfizer, L’Oreal, Nestle, McDonald’s FedEx, Compass Group, Disney, and General Motors. The platform automates tasks such as screening for requirements, interview scheduling, reminders, offers, and new hire onboarding. And because it’s so easy to use, it helps companies radically improves time-to-hire and quality of hire. Based on my conversations with clients, Paradox can automate more than 90% of the end-to-end hiring process, saving hiring managers hours every week and increasing candidate conversion by more than 10 times. But this innovation did not happen overnight. As you know, going to a candidate website and looking for a job is a frustrating process. There are often hundreds of jobs listed, a complex scrolling website and very hard to even determine what job to apply for. You might argue that the website paradigm for job applications was never really a good idea in the first place. People don’t want to browse for jobs: they want to apply for a job that’s best for them. So the first thing Paradox did was create an easy to use assistant (Olivia) so candidates could ask questions and schedule interviews. And this meant that Paradox had to build integrations with every ATS and personal email and calendar tools out there. Then, as companies started to use Paradox for scheduling, the company added more. Today Olivia, the chatbot, can integrate with background check vendors, schedule interviews, deliver assessments (Paradox acquired a conversational assessment Traitify designed for this), and function as an ATS … all from a mobile phone. In many ways Paradox can be “the integration platform” for candidates and recruiters, stitching together the messy systems behind the scenes. This turned into a massive opportunity. Just as the Google Assistant or Siri hopes to be our single contact with the internet, Paradox partners with systems of record like Workday, SAP, and Oracle to bring conversational AI to any company. The company’s revenues have grown 11 times in the last four years, and are now nearly doubling each year. For customers Paradox has been amazing. As the candidate pipeline speeds up (by an order of magnitude), clients get higher quality candidates with dramatically reduced staff. (Staffing administrators can almost go away.) Consider high-volume hiring companies. These businesses (McDonald’s, Compass Group, Neighborly, FedEx, Disney) hire service-related workers on a regular basis. Their revenue is dependent on having enough people. With Paradox they can set up a “continuous recruitment process,” one that even hires people the same day they apply. Paradox has become essential to these companies growth, often paying for itself in less than a year (through reduced hiring staff, reduced spend on job ads, and reduced turnover.) Today, as Paradox built out its ATS, customers can rely on the platform to integrate front end tool (job portals and candidate support) to back end tools scheduling, ATS, onboarding) most of which are legacy. One of our clients has 27 recruiting tools and they anticipate replacing more than half of them with a platform like Paradox. What about higher level white collar roles? Paradox works here too. General Motors uses Paradox along with Workday (ATS), (branded Evie) to redesign the process. Interview Scheduling: Evie automates scheduling of phone screens and interviews between recruiters, candidates, and internal teams. This has reduced the time taken for interview scheduling from an average of five days to 29 minutes. Candidate Experience: Evie interacts with candidates from the moment they land on GM’s career site until the completion of their interview. Candidates appreciate the immediate communication from Evie after they apply or complete an interview, and enjoy the autonomy to select and change interview times. Efficiency and Cost Savings: The automation of interview scheduling has led to a major reduction in the cost of external contractors for coordination. Career Site Interaction: Evie sits on GM’s career site, answering questions from potential candidates about jobs, benefits, and company culture. This interaction enhances the candidate’s experience and provides them with immediate responses to their queries. Where Is Paradox Going The company is perfectly positioned to continue its growth as companies look for AI solutions to improve the productivity and effectiveness of recruiting. And demand is high: the 2024 PwC CEO survey found that recruiting was considered the #3 “most bureaucratic process” by CEOs (following email and meetings). The impact on recruiters? All positive. Clients tell us they can redeploy hiring staff to help recruiters focus on the most important part of their job: talking with candidates. But there’s a much bigger story. When a job candidate is handled efficiently and effectively the process becomes a brand-builder for the candidate, improving quality of hire. Ambitious job seekers will not put up with (or wait for) a messy, confusing hiring process. So not only is the process faster and more efficient, the quality of hire goes up. Companies are desperately looking for AI solutions that work. As Paradox has proven, when you focus deeply on the problem, conversational AI can be transformational. Listen to my conversation with Adam Godson (CEO) and you’ll hear the details. This is where the HR Tech market is going.
    Oracle
    2024年04月04日