Josh Bersin:Digital Twins, Digital Employees, And Agents Everywhere2025 年，数字员工和人工智能助理的崛起将彻底改变人力资源运营，改变招聘、数据分析和员工管理等任务。 这些技术包括数字双胞胎和智能代理，它们将与人类专业人员一起工作，以提高生产力和优化工作流程。 随着人工智能工具成为日常业务不可或缺的一部分，人力资源领导者必须拥抱这些创新，同时继续关注技能培训、心理健康和包容性工作环境。 向人工智能的转变还将重塑团队动态，这对人力资源部门重新设计角色和流程以保持竞争力提出了挑战。
I recently heard Elon Musk predict that every citizen would have multiple Optimus robots in their homes within five years. And while I often ignore his predictions because they’re exaggerated, I think he’s on to something. We are about to witness an explosion of Digital Employees in our companies, and these may be the “robots” we’ve heard about for years.
Let me explain. This week I talked with dozens of vendors and clients at Unleash and then visited our development partner Sana Labs in Stockholm. It’s now clear that we’re going to be working with multitudes of “digital employees” in the year ahead.
(And as Dario Amodei, the founder of Anthropic explains, AI can do many more positive things in business, science, and health than we ever imagined.)
By “digital employee” I mean a software powered agent that can talk with us, answer detailed questions, solve complex analytic problems, and navigate a multitude of systems. ChatGPT and its peers, which introduced the idea of an agent, has now spawned dozens of “agentic” use cases, which I’d be willing to refer to as personalities.
Let me start with a “Digital Twin.” Imagine you have a superb customer service agent with years of experience helping your most demanding clients. If you load the last five years of their emails, coupled with all their internal documentation, and a log history of their last two years of service calls, you can essentially “create him or her” digitally with all the knowledge, style, and internal contacts this person has developed. This twin, which may look initially like an AI assistant, could then carry on this employee’s work when the real life worker is on vacation.
One of our clients, a large insurance company, has already built “digital twins” for claims processing. If you think about the complexity and workflow of processing a claim, much of it could be learned by an agent, making the “claims robot” an expert on this important process. And as you change claims rules and limits, the agent will learn new guidelines in only seconds.
Our AI assistant Galileo, a trained expert on HR (Galileo is trained on 25 years of research and thousands of conversations with clients and vendors), is essentially a “digital twin” of me and the other analysts in our firm. I’m not saying Galileo is as fun to talk with as we are, but I can assure you that he (or she) is as knowledgeable and supportive. And Galileo is even smarter than I am: he has instant knowledge of skills models, compensation benchmarks, turnover statistics, and other data bases which I can only access by looking them up on demand.
And using the Sana platform we can configure Galileo to have multiple personalities. Galileo the “Recruitment Agent” might have in-depth knowledge of screening, interviewing, and candidate skills assessment and he may have direct linkage to SeekOut, Eightfold, or any other sourcing applications. In his candidate facing personality he may be able to answer candidate questions, explain shift schedules, and “sell” the company to top job candidates. (This is what Paradox has done for years and vendors like Eightfold and LinkedIn are launching now.)
But there’s more. Imagine that this “digital twin” or “digital employee” has intimate knowledge of Workday, SuccessFactors, or a variety of other systems. Now the assistant can not only answer questions and help solve problems, he can also process transactions, look things up, and run reports against multiple system. The digital employee has turned into a “digital analyst,” who can find things and do work for you, saving you hours of effort in your daily life. (Vee from Visier is designed for this.)
Suppose you ask your digital friend to attend meetings for you, participate in conversations on certain topics, and alert you in real time when urgent issues come up for discussion. He could help you scale your time, keep you informed about decisions you need to know about, and help you manage your action items. And the list goes on and on and on.
Best of all, what if your digital twin can talk to you. Suppose he “checks in” with you about the project you asked for help with last week, so you inform him how things are going and he gets “smarter” about what you may need next. Galileo does this today, prompting you to dig into a problem and explore areas you may not have considered. And if you ask him about management or people issues, he could give you advice and coaching, based on the leadership models or even CEO interviews in your own company. (BetterUp, Valence and others are working on this.)
This is not science fiction, my friends. All this is becoming reality and will certainly be common next year.
Every vendor has a slightly different focus. The Microsoft Copilot specializes in MS Office-related activities, ServiceNow’s focuses on internal service and support, Galileo is focused on the needs of HR, and Joule is an expert on all the functions of SAP. Each of these “digital employees” needs training, feedback, and connections to stay current and relevant. So it’s doubtful that one digital employee will do everything. (Training a digital employee means managing his or her corpus of information, which will be a major new role in HR.)
One thing is very clear: we are going to be living and working with these guys. And as we use them and see what they’re capable of, we’re going to redesign work. Little by little we’ll offload tasks, projects, and workflows. And as we do, we’ll get smarter and smarter about redesigning our teams.
I liken the process to that of a carpenter who gets a new multi-function power drill. Before the drill he may have manually drilled holes, carefully selecting the drill bit and the level of pressure based on wood density. Now he drills holes faster, more accurately, and with more precision. Soon he just speeds through the process, spending more time on cabinet fit, finish, or design.
The same thing will happen to our HR tasks, projects, and designs. And these new digital employees are programmable! So once we figure out what they’re capable of we can adjust them, customize them, and connect them together. Eventually we’ll have intelligent assistants that operate as entire applications. And that’s the threat to incumbent software companies – the agents hollow out many of our existing applications.
How Do Our Digital Employees Impact Our Own Work?
One more observation. Many a few of the clients I talked with kept asking “what about our softskills?” What work is truly human?
I think that’s the wrong question. Rather we should ask the opposite: how much can I delegate to my new friends as fast as possible!
Have you been upset that your vacuum cleaner took away the rewarding human work of sweeping a floor? How much joy do you get from washing dishes? Did your dishwasher make you feel deflated when you stopped splashing around in the soapy water?
Of course not – these tools eliminated tasks we considered to be “drudgery.”
Well today, thanks to digital assistants, creating a pivot table to do cross-tab analysis has become drudgery. You can stop getting your hands wet with that task – ask Galileo or Copilot to analyze the data, and then ask him to chart it, add more data, and try new assumptions. The more we learn to use these new digital employees the more “drudgery” we can stop doing.
And consider complex “human-centered” activities like “change management.” A client asked me “how could Galileo help me with change management for our new HCM system?”
I answered her with dozens of ideas: ask Galileo for case studies of other companies and have it build a checklist to consider based on what other companies did. Then ask Galileo to build a training plan; ask it to read the user documentation and create a table of what features are new; then ask Galileo to rewrite that change plan by role. And finally ask Galileo to write a press release about success, craft some compelling communications to employees, and ask it to compute the ROI of all the steps eliminated.
These are all “manual” human tasks we do today and they take time and ingenuity to figure out. If you went through this process in Galileo you could ask your digital employee to save these steps and prompts in a “template,” and you have just taught your digital employee how to do change management. The next time you need him he can step you through the process.
As I started to explain this to my client I stopped and said: wait a minute. I can’t possibly show you everything Galileo can do. You have to try it for yourself.
And that’s my big message. Don’t wait for a vendor to drop a finished solution in your lap. These are intelligent, trainable, digital experts. You have to get to know them so you can figure out where they fit in your job, your projects, and your company. Just like you do with any new hire.
I say it’s time to get started. No more sweeping floors or washing dishes by hand. Let’s meet our digital employees, tell them about our projects, and ask for their help. Step by step, day by day, we can redesign our jobs to be more more productive, liberating us to do greater things.
AI assistants
2024年10月19日
AI assistants
The Key to a Thriving Workforce? A Smart Approach to AI微软的最新数据强调了人工智能对员工赋权、活力和生产力的积极影响。领导者可以通过关注其员工队伍是否在“繁荣”中来促进良好表现，微软将“繁荣”定义为被赋予权力和充满活力地进行有意义的工作。员工信号调查显示，人工智能的使用能通过减少乏味工作并促进有意义的工作来提高生产力、努力和影响。人工智能工具还与更高的赋权和活力得分相关，表明员工队伍的“繁荣”。成功的关键在于将人工智能与支持性文化相结合，提供必要的培训，并使人工智能项目与公司目标保持一致。
New data reveals how access to AI can help employees feel more empowered and energized, and find more meaning in their work.
what’s the best way for leaders to foster good performance? How can they tell if their efforts are successful or not? Often, companies try to answer these questions by measuring metrics like engagement or financial results. And while those are critical to business success, at Microsoft, we also want to explore whether the workforce is thriving.
“Thriving has become the North Star for how we understand employees,” says Microsoft VP of People Analytics Dawn Klinghoffer, who leverages data to help leaders understand and improve employee’s experience. “We define thriving as being empowered and energized to do meaningful work. Are people excited to come to work every day, excited about the opportunities ahead?”
One of the ways we gauge this at Microsoft is with our Employee Signals survey, a biannual company-wide poll. The recent results not only offered insights into the tangible benefits of thriving, they also uncovered a key catalyst for fostering it: access to AI.
The Benefits of Thriving
We are focused on fostering a culture of thriving because our research suggests that doing so can boost how effective our workforce perceives itself to be. We also found that employees who are thriving are likely to have the highest scores on our indicators of high performance, like productivity, effort, and impact
Additionally, survey results suggest that employees who are thriving are more likely to go above and beyond what is expected of them. They take more pride in their work and they are less apt to look for employment elsewhere.
Recent Employee Signals survey results give us some new insights about what it means to thrive in this new era of work. We discovered that higher scores on what we’ve identified as the most important factors that support thriving—finding meaning in work, feeling empowered, and feeling energized—also translate to a measurable boost in productivity. Furthermore, access to AI seems to correlate with higher scores on each of these pillars.
Meaningfulness: According to our data, employees who find their work meaningful are 59% more likely to say they are productive at work—and 28% more likely to say they put in extra effort. Key to that is minimizing time spent on tasks that don’t feel meaningful. This is where AI comes in: AI assistants can lighten the load by generating rough drafts, sifting through piles of data, or simply acting as a sounding board and brainstorming partner to help people nail down a plan of action. Crucially, incorporating AI into the day correlated to a 20% jump in scores relating to meaningful work.
“What we find is that AI is really there to help you take friction and toil out of the system, and to remove the drudgery of work,” Klinghoffer says. “And when people are able to remove some of that drudgery, we see that they’re more productive, and they thrive more.”
Empowerment: Survey results also point to a future in which AI empowers people in their jobs. People who are empowered do not feel they have resource constraints, and they aren’t overburdened with people telling them how to do their work, Klinghoffer says, “so they have more freedom to do things the way they want and need to get the job done.” Access to AI tools and resources, we found, correlated to 34% higher scores for questions related to empowerment.
Energy: Our employees who say they feel energized are 44% more likely to say they feel proud of their work, and 22% more likely to say they take the initiative to be productive and put discretionary effort into their work. All levels of AI use— learning about it, grasping its value, incorporating it into processes and products, or simply having AI resources—correlated to higher reported energy levels. In fact, scores on energy-related questions for those using AI jumped almost 27%.
These results offer solid evidence that AI can be a catalyst for thriving and high performance. But how a company goes about making AI available will determine whether the company can reap these benefits. If employees are equipped with the right knowledge, tools, training, and resources to leverage AI in their work, they can begin to tap the full potential of an AI companion.
The key to success, Klinghoffer says, is integrating AI in a way that spans culture, learning, and people management. That way, everyone will understand how AI can help them focus on the most meaningful work.
The ABCs of Thriving with AI
Klinghoffer recommends keeping the following blueprint top of mind.
Accelerate alignment: Strengthen connections between employees, the company’s mission, and the transformative potential of AI. Clarify how AI initiatives align with the company’s goals and employees’ roles. Celebrate contributions to AI projects to highlight their impact on the company and customers.
“Employees who felt more connected to the mission and really understood how their work fits into the larger system were also the ones who were really thriving,” says Ketaki Sodhi, Senior HR Data Analyst at Microsoft. “When we looked at Copilot and employee sentiment around AI, these were also the folks who were willing to experiment and find ways to use AI to take some of the drudgery out of the day-to-day.” Smart leaders should seek out those internal champions and offer them support and encouragement.
Be inclusive: Create an environment where all employees feel equipped to engage with AI. This includes providing AI education, training, and resources, as well as fostering a culture of innovation and supporting a safe space for experimentation. Regular check-ins and feedback sessions can help employees express concerns and share ideas related to AI. Once users are encouraged and equipped to explore the possibilities of AI, our research suggests that a time savings of just 11 minutes a day is all it takes for them to start to appreciate its value.
Cultivate collective growth: Create a culture that empowers employees to decide how to do their best work, while investing in moments that matter together. Provide employees with the flexibility to plan their days and create time to meaningfully engage with AI. Encourage them to explore how AI can help them free up time for creative and strategic work. Then highlight use cases and foster collaboration among teams to encourage knowledge sharing.
Collective growth encompasses in-role experiences (how do we create time and space for employees to learn within their role?) and beyond (what comes next for me? Is there a viable career that excites me at this company?). AI can help with both—by eliminating the drudgery that keeps employees from doing more creative work, and by facilitating positive employee movement. “You see a huge boost. People get excited doing something new, growing their skills and experiences, and furthering their career,” Klinghoffer says. “A couple of months ago on my team we had people who were interested in a different role raise their hands, and we facilitated changes for about 20% of my org.”
AI assistants
AI assistants
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