• Productivity
    Josh Bersin: With Thoughtful Design And Culture, Dropbox Proves Remote Work Is A Winner Dropbox, a company with a $7 billion market cap and over $2.5 billion in revenue, has adopted a "Virtual First" strategy in response to the pandemic, transforming its work model from lavish San Francisco offices to a remote-first approach. This shift was led by CEO Drew Houston and Chief People Officer Melanie Rosenwasser, moving away from an office-centric culture to enhance productivity and teamwork through remote work. The strategy includes home office stipends, Dropbox Studios for face-to-face interactions, and innovative meeting management services. Despite initial challenges, this approach has led to high employee satisfaction and a strong talent strategy, allowing Dropbox to thrive in a competitive tech landscape. One of the most interesting tech companies we’ve studied is Dropbox, a $7 billion market cap rocket ship generating more than $2.5 billion in revenue. This kind of company, which sells a platform that competes with Microsoft, Google, and other major players, lives in a world of brutal competition: competition for product leadership, sales deals, and talent. And today, as AI engineers are in short supply, Dropbox has to attract the best and brightest to continue its growth. In its early days, Dropbox was a typical San Francisco-based tech company with gourmet food, gorgeous offices, and a culture of lavish benefits. In the pre-pandemic 2010s this was the rage, and Dropbox became a hot place to work. The pandemic upset that applecart. Not only did “work at home” obsolete the company’s real estate and gourmet investments, it forced the company to rethink its culture. The Chief People Officer, Melanie Rosenwasser, told me that the first few months of the pandemic were traumatic. Employees were upset by working at home and weren’t sure what the company stood for. She and Drew Houston, the CEO, had to rethink the whole operating model. As Melanie described it to me, they took a risky, irreversible move. They decided to totally shift their operating model from that of “San Francisco gourmet offices” to “energized, empowered, team-based, remote work.” Not an easy decision. Note that just this week Eric Schmidt, the ex-CEO and board member at Google, blamed Sundar Pichai for “remote work laziness” as cause for Google’s “falling behind in AI.” So the debate about remote work continues, and some of the most successful leaders still haven’t figured it out. Well Drew, Melanie, and the Dropbox team placed a bet. Knowing that the pandemic had interrupted their campus investments, they dramatically shifted to a “Virtual First” strategy. And they told the company “we are moving away from an office-centric culture” and going to a model of remote-first work. And this included converting offices to Dropbox Studios as well as a carefully architected approach to teamwork, collaboration, and periodic face-to-face activity. Rather than ask people to “come in 3 days a week” (this kind of policy bugs people because they drag themselves into the office just to zoom with others at home), they designed one of the most sophisticated approaches I’ve seen. Employees receive a generous stipend for home office improvements and the company now offers a series of programs, services, and tools to make team and personal productivity thrive. While it seemed risky it worked exceedingly well. By holistically thinking about culture, management, teamwork, and productivity, the company developed a set of innovations that empower people to work at their best, meet with their teams at least one week per quarter, and come together when and where it makes sense. And this model, which looks like an HR innovation, became a business innovation that helps the company thrive. While Dropbox lost a significant number of employees at first, now the company has one of the highest Glassdoor ratings in its industry (4.3, 85% recommend CEO, higher than Google). Dropbox wins awards for employment brand. And not only does Virtual First create productive operations, it helps the company build “tools for the new world of work,” which is where every company is going. Work at home is complicated. In between dogs, kids, gardeners and delivery people we’re futzing with MS Teams, Zoom, Webex, Google Docs, and dozens of other tools. Most of them work well but they’re each different and inconsistent. Dropbox, as a “system designed for remote work” simplifies this enormously. Virtual First helps Dropbox test its products on itself. Why has Virtual First succeeded? As Melanie and the team explains, the shift turbo-charged its talent strategy. Now Dropbox can hire people from any geography in the world (reducing labor cost) and they look for high-energy, passionate, high-performers (not employees who like the offices). Teamwork is stronger than ever. I know, from our company, that this works well. We have 40+ people in our organization and we rely on frequent face-to-face meetings, an open culture, and tremendous amounts of training and communication to grow. Back when I ran our company in an office we hardly talked with each other unless we had a meeting. Things are much more collaborative and productive now. Dropbox has proven this at scale. You can read about Virtual First on the Dropbox website, but one of the innovations I want to point out is the company’s “concierge service” for meetings. (The Offsite Planning Team.) When you as a leader want to have a meeting, this team helps you decide your objectives, reviews the outcomes you want to achieve, and then puts together a detailed plan (location, logistics, agenda, tools) to help you make it work. This removes enormous amounts of wasted time from managers and helps the company operate productively. I cannot tell you how much time I’ve wasted “managing offsite meetings.” To have a seasoned, professional group that helps with this entire strategy in process is a godsend. For Dropbox, this team now knows precisely how the teams work and can continuously improve its consulting services to make sure face-to-face meetings are impactful. A “new manager introduction” meeting, for example, is different from a “get product ready for launch meeting” as you can imagine. How does this apply to your company? Regardless of industry, I guarantee you have remote work teams. Many companies have front line workers (healthcare, retail, manufacturing, transportation) who have to locate with customers. But think about finance teams, IT teams, scientific teams, and HR. We all need productive remote work practices, and Dropbox has proven that a strategic focus on this area will pay off. Melanie and I will be doing a webcast in the near future and she is joining us at our Irresistible 2025 Conference as well. Dropbox has taken the lead in this new world, and they want to share their learnings with all of us.
    Productivity
    2024年08月30日
  • Productivity
    Josh Bersin: When Will The Trillions Invested In AI Pay Off? Sooner Than You Think. 近年来,生成式人工智能(GenAI)的投资已达数万亿美元,但围绕其回报问题的争论不断升级。一些分析师,如麻省理工学院教授达隆·阿西莫格鲁(Daron Acemoglu)和纽约大学心理学与神经科学教授加里·马库斯(Gary Marcus),对AI的经济影响持悲观态度,认为其对美国生产力和GDP增长的推动作用有限,甚至可能导致市场崩溃。相反,另一派如高盛的全球经济学家则乐观地认为,AI有望在未来十年内大幅提高生产力。然而,文章指出,生成式AI的真正价值在于其特定领域的应用。例如,Paradox和Galileo等HR技术平台通过高度专业化的解决方案,显著提升了招聘和人才管理的效率。最终,文章强调,AI行业仍处于早期阶段,成功的关键在于找到具有专注性和精确性的创新解决方案。 In the last few weeks there has been a lot of concern that Gen AI is a “bubble” and companies may never see the return on the $Trillion being spent on infrastructure. Let me cite four analyst’s opinions. Will Today’s Massive AI Investments Pay Off? MIT professor Daron Acemoglu estimates that over the next ten years AI will impact less than 5% of all tasks, concluding that AI will only increase US productivity by .5% and GDP growth by .9% over the next decade. As he puts it, the impact of AI is not “a law of nature.” On a similar vein, Gary Marcus, professor emeritus of psychology and neural science at New York University, believes Gen AI is soon to collapse, and the trillions spent will largely result in a loss of privacy, increase in cyber terror, and a lack of differentiation between providers. The result: a market with low profits and big losses. Goldman Sachs Head of Equity Research Jim Covello is similarly pessimistic, arguing simply that the $1 Trillion spent on AI is focused on tech that cannot truly automate complex tasks, and that vendors’ over-focus on “human-like features” will miss the boat in delivering business productivity.  (He studies stocks, not the economy.) And Goldman Sachs Global Economist, who is a fan, estimates that AI could automate 25% of work tasks and raise US productivity by 9T and GDP by 6.1% over the next decade. He follows the traditional business meme that “AI changes everything” for the better. What’s going on? Quite simply this new technology is very expensive to build, so we’re all unsure where the payoffs will be. Buyers Are Looking For A Return Soon If we discount the work going on at Google, Meta, Perplexity, and Microsoft to build AI-based search businesses, which make money on advertising (Zuckerberg essentially just said that in a few years AI will guarantee your ad spend pays off), corporate IT managers are asking questions. An article in Business Insider pointed to a large Pharma company that cancelled their Microsoft Copilot licenses because the tool was not adding any significant value (Chevron’s CIO was quoted similarly in The Information). Another quoted a Chief Marketing Officer who stated Google Gemini’s email marketing tool and the new AI-powered ad-buying tool performed worse than the human workers it was intended to replace (or support). Given that these tools almost double the “price per user” for the productivity suites, I think it’s fair that CIOs, CMOs, to expect them to pay for themselves fairly quickly. What’s Going On?  The Big Wins Will Be Domain Specific As with all new technologies that enter the market quickly, “the blush on the rose” is over. We’ve been dazzled by the power of ChatGPT and now we’re searching for real solutions to problems. And unlike the internet, where research was funded by the government, there’s going to be a lag (and some risk) between the trillions we spend and the trillions we save. Given that ChatGPT is less than two years old and OpenAI has morphed from a research company into a product company, it’s easy to see what’s happening. Every vendor and tool provider is narrowing its AI “strategy” and not just pasting little AI “stars” on their websites, looking for useful things to do. And this process may take a few years. In the world of HR, I think we can all agree that a “push the button job description generator” is a bit of a commodity. However if the AI analyzes the job title, identifies the skills needed through a large skills engine, and tunes the job description by company size, industry, and role, then it’s a fantastic solution.  (Galileo does this, as does SeekOut, SAP, and some other vendors.) The more “specific” and “narrow” the AI is, the more useful it becomes. Generic LLMs that aren’t highly trained, optimized, and tuned to your company, business, and job are simply not going to command high prices. So while we all thought ChatGPT was Nirvana, we’re now figuring out that highly specialized solutions are the answer. Let me give you some examples. The first is the platform built by Paradox, a pioneering company that started work on AI-based recruiting agents in 2016. Paradox, now valued at around $2 Billion, delivers an end-to-end recruitment platform that automates the entire process of candidate marketing, candidate experience, assessment, selection, interview scheduling, hiring, and onboarding. Most people believe its a “Chatbot” but in reality it’s an AI-powered end-to-end system that radically simplifies and speeds the recruitment process in a groundbreaking way. Companies like 7-11, FedEx, GM, and others see massive improvements in operational efficiency and both candidates, managers, and recruiter adore it. It took Paradox eight years to build this level of integrated solution. The second is our platform Galileo. Galileo, which is now licensed by more than 10,000 HR professionals, is a highly tuned AI agent specifically designed to help HR professionals (leaders, business partners, consultants, recruiters, and other roles) do the “complex work” HR professionals do. It’s not a generic LLM: it’s a highly specialized solution designed specifically for HR professionals, and we’ve added specialized content partners and are building special integrations with other HR platforms. Our clients tell us it’s saving them 1-2 hours a day. The third is the platform HiredScore, that was recently acquired by Workday. Founded in 2012, the HiredScore team built tools to help identify “fit” between individuals and jobs, and tuned its AI to be highly explainable, unbiased, and very easy to use. It took Athena Karp and the team a few years to nail down the use-cases and user interface but now HiredScore is considered one of the most powerful recruitment “orchestration” tools in the market, and is also used for internal hiring and many other applications. Every customer I talk with tells me it’s essential and saves them months of manual, error-prone effort. The fourth is the platform Eightfold, which was invented in 2016 as a way to build “Google-scale” matching between job seekers and jobs. Through many years of engineering, product management, and ongoing sales process the company has become the leader in a new space called “Talent Intelligence,” now a billion dollar rapid-growing category. The company is about ten years old and now has some of the world’s largest companies building their hiring, career management, and talent management processes using AI. Companies like EY, Bayer, and Chevron now use it for all their strategic talent programs. Each of these vendors, including others like Gloat, Sana, Arist, Lightcast, Draup, Uplimit, Firstup, and hundreds of others have patiently taken the power of Generative AI and applied it with laser precision to their solutions. Each of these companies is different, and as we work with them we see lightning bolts of innovation: not in AI itself, but in finding new ways to solve problems and do what I call “crawling up the value curve.” This is the path for AI in the coming years. As with all new technologies, the “trough of disappointment” is always followed by the “bowling pin” of hitting the nail on the head. Innovators, entrepreneurs, and startup founders are the ones who will take GenAI and apply it in unique ways to solve problems. And soon enough, “AI-powered” will be a phrase we barely even need to say. The Best Solutions Will Be Narrow Not Wide GenAI solutions require a large “platform” of data, infrastructure, and software. That alone is not where the value resides. Rather, the big productivity advantages come after years of effort, focusing the data sets and working with customers to find the features, UI designs, and data sets that add enormous value. And we are still in the early stages. If you want to learn more about HR Technology and AI, join me at the HR Technology Conference on September 24-25 in Vegas, or at Unleash in Paris in October 16-17. While I can’t predict who will win the core AI platform game (Microsoft, OpenAI, Google, Meta, Amazon will fight it out), I can predicts this: Generative AI will deliver massive improvements in business productivity. You just have to shop around a bit and wait for just the right solutions to arrive.
    Productivity
    2024年08月10日
  • Productivity
    Josh Bersin: 随着经济放缓,关注未来的技能:改变的能力 本周,我们看到美国失业率“上升”到 4.3%,经济学家开始呼吁降低利率。对于那些每天与公司和领导者交流的人来说,我会说我们正经历一个正常的经济周期。 上一次重大衰退(不包括疫情,因为那不是需求放缓)是在2008年和2009年。这意味着我们已经有近16年没有经历严重的经济周期了,几乎是通常周期的两倍。虽然疫情确实让公司放慢了脚步,但我们迅速恢复了。所以从失业率来看,它大致是这样的。 在经历了50年的失业率变化后,目前的失业率比五十年前降低了12%,这让我得出结论,我们正生活在“长期劳动力短缺”中。同时,美国的GDP在此期间增长了1500%。 虽然我们目前的GDP增长可能有所放缓(我认为这是由消费者价格使我们耗尽了支出引起的),但实际上我们只是看到从“工业化、高劳动密集型企业”向所谓的“后工业化”公司的长期转型,这些公司往往需要更少的“工人”和更多高技能员工。(阅读我们的后工业时代研究。) 仍然有大量的小时工工作:护理、医疗、交通、建筑、零售、娱乐、能源和许多其他行业依赖各种类型的“劳动”工人。这些工作随着时间的推移变得越来越自动化,导致工资提高和技能升级,但美国仍有约63%的工人没有大学学位,其中大多数人找到了工作。 虽然每个人似乎对英特尔、UKG, Intuit或其他“与AI相关”的裁员感到有些恐慌,但美国经济的反应良好。我知道许多公司正在试验AI和其他技术,每个公司都担心失去有价值的人才,因为劳动力市场依然竞争激烈。 是的,一些公司会进行裁员。通常这是由糟糕的领导、糟糕的规划或只是对投资者的本能反应引起的。最终,随着出生率保持在低水平,我们仍将面临劳动力短缺,人的价值将继续上升(正如我过去指出的,裁员并非不可避免)。 在过去的三周里,我与欧洲超过20家大公司会面,每家公司都在投资于员工发展、技能再培训、内部流动性和提高生产力的项目。在欧洲,裁员既困难又昂贵,因此公司感受到劳动力短缺的压力,他们仍在投资员工。 至于消费者需求开始下降,我们正面临一个“长期结束”阶段,这是由高价格的延续引起的。消费者对过去五年的高价格感到厌倦,而在此之前,我们经历了近十年的零利率时期,房价和大多数资本品价格持续上涨。现在这两个因素都结束了,我们只是回到了更正常的经济状态。 换句话说,如果你因为“可以”而提高价格,最终你将付出代价,当消费者反抗时。如果你停止投资于员工,他们会“悄然离职”或另寻他处。这些是我认为的“正常商业经济”,我认为我们正看到这种正常性的发生。 作为一个动态组织运营 当然,最大的“趋势”是各行业的数字化和AI革命。汽车制造商被“虚假”引导进入电动车领域,发现混合动力发动机、数字相机和电子产品以及新的购车方式非常具有破坏性。出版商正在找出如何应对AI平台,这次他们保留了自己的知识产权并协商了许可协议。能源公司正在慢慢转向新来源,其他公司都在找出如何实现数字化、AI赋能,并进一步简化我们生产和销售的产品。 这都是商业的“激动人心的工作”,一切都与成为一个动态组织有关。我们的研究指出,以动态方式运营完全是关于人。 经济,通常以周期性变化(通常由过度兴奋和随之而来的疲惫引起)为特征,只是需要应对的事情。对于我这样经历了许多这种高峰和低谷的人来说,当事情不再上升并且我们看到一些冷却期时,我总是感到有点“解脱”。 是的,股市可能会暴跌。它总会在某个时候发生。但那实际上是“众包”效应,通常与我们的公司无关。如果你照顾好你的客户,投资未来,迅速学习AI和所有新技术,你将顺利过渡。正如许多HR领导本月与我谈到的,你的成功很大程度上取决于人。 未来的技能很明确:推动变革的能力 今天我与一群我们每隔几周就交流的HR领导进行了一次有趣的会议。每一位CHRO和其他领导都告诉我们,他们正在投资于员工的“变革管理”和“业务转型”技能。这意味着什么? 这意味着这样。虽然我们都希望公司有更多的工程师、制造专家、科学家和销售与营销专家,但我们最需要的“技能”是“推动变革的能力”。这种特定的技能非常复杂,需要时间来学习,并且在当前尤为重要。这引出了我的最后一点。 如果你是图凡·厄金比尔吉,劳斯莱斯的首席执行官,你正处于业务转型的过程中,旨在推动工程效率和卓越,你不仅要担心工程师。你要担心那些能够推动、领导、激励和创造变革的人。我相信,这些就是大家常谈的“未来技能”。如果你作为一个专业人士、经理或领导者真正知道如何“推动和执行变革”,这些经济周期在你的职业生涯中只是“一个小波折”。 在与HR领导交谈超过30年并在许多周期中经营我们自己的业务后,我敦促你“不要过于担心”这些大的经济数据。我们正生活在一个每个公司中每个人的经济价值飙升的时期。投资于你的员工和自己,随着经济的变化,你会做得很好。   https://joshbersin.com/2024/08/as-the-economy-changes-focus-on-the-real-skills-of-the-future/
    Productivity
    2024年08月03日
  • Productivity
    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.”
    Productivity
    2024年06月24日
  • Productivity
    Josh Bersin谈首席人力资源官 (CHRO) 职责的扩展 推荐介绍:这是Josh Bersin最新的一篇文章,谈到了CHRO角色的问题,这确实是一个好问题!在当今快速变化的商业环境中,首席人力资源官(CHRO)的角色变得尤为重要。随着人工智能变革、全球劳工实践和组织重组等挑战,CHRO的职责显著扩大。企业面临广泛的人事问题,包括混合工作带来的压力、劳动力短缺以及需要提高生产力和内部流动性。CHRO在重新设计传统人力资源实践和整合全球及技术进步方面至关重要。 在劳动力短缺的背景下,CHRO需要将旧的“雇用以增长”模式转变为“提高生产力和内部流动性”的模式,这比看起来更难。全球化也是一个挑战,CHRO必须引领公司进行全球化领导力和薪酬实践的调整。此外,行业整合使得大多数CHRO都在处理收购或被收购的前景,带来裁员和组织整合等问题。 领导力的发展同样是CHRO的重要职责。随着组织趋向扁平化,公司需要在各个层面培养领导技能,这是所有人力资源投资中最重要的。 技术也是一个复杂的问题,CHRO必须整理遗留的人力资源系统,并应对技术带来的挑战。 优秀的CHRO不仅是聪明、有创造力的变革领导者,还是精明的商业人士。他们展示了在我们的领域内进行业务转型的能力。我们的CHRO研究计划将为CHRO的专业发展提供支持。   我们一起来看正文: 随着时代变迁,曾被认为是C级高管中地位较低的职位,如今CHRO可能是最重要的职位之一。随着AI不断改变我们的业务,CHRO的职责每天都在增加。(Jack Welch经常说 CHRO是公司中第二重要的职位,甚至比CFO更重要。) 公司面临着各处的人力挑战 首先显而易见的是:公司在各个方面都面临人力问题。大多数公司仍在努力适应混合办公模式,经理和员工压力巨大,员工幸福感处于历史最低点。疫情的创伤切断了公司与员工之间的联系,使各类员工能够自主做出许多决定。 应对劳动力短缺 在这种背景下,我们还面临着持续的劳动力短缺。低生育率和退休的婴儿潮一代将失业率推至50年来的最低点,这个问题在几十年内都不会消失。旧的“雇佣增长”模式正在失效,我们在快速增长的科技公司中看到了“雇佣,然后裁员”的循环。 CHRO们必须将这种模式转变为“提高生产力和内部流动性”,这个转变比看起来要困难得多。 重新设计组织 此外,在过去几年里,公司终于决定废除职能层级结构。我们交谈的大多数公司都在扁平化,取消中层管理人员,并以更跨职能的方式运营。前瞻性组织(如Bayer、ING Bank、Telstra、Mastercard、Netflix)正在采用我们称之为“动态组织 (Dynamic Organization)”的运营模式,创造新的敏捷性和市场响应时间。CHRO必须领导这一努力,并找出如何重新设计工作设计、薪酬、绩效管理和职业发展的传统实践。 每家公司现在都是全球性的 随着远程工作的普及,每家公司现在都具有全球性。这意味着我们必须了解全球劳工实践、不同的人才市场以及如何领导远程团队。CHRO必须领导决策,例如在哪里雇佣、在哪里设立设施,以及如何全球化领导力、薪酬实践、雇佣政策和劳资关系。 并购 我们也处于一个整合的周期。媒体、零售、医疗和科技等行业正在整合。这意味着大多数CHRO都在处理并购或被收购的前景。这些交易带来了裁员、组织整合和高级领导团队对齐的问题。许多人将波音的问题归咎于1997年收购McDonnell Douglas,这次收购创造了一种新的文化。我觉得我们都在成为收购新公司的专家,这迫使CHRO领导不断的整合和变革。 改变领导力培养路径 CHRO还有另一个棘手的角色:领导力模型已经发生了变化。我们不仅需要培养总经理,领导者现在无处不在。扁平化的组织迫使公司在各个层面建立领导技能。当做得好时(如我在下面讨论的Marriott和Delta),领导力发展是至关重要的。在我们所有的HR投资中,领导力发展带来的价值最大。这也落在了CHRO的肩上。 更新传统HR技术 HR技术有些混乱。公司拥有几十甚至上百个传统的HR系统,这些系统充斥着招聘、培训、排班、入职、调查和合规的工具。AI有望提供帮助,但即使是Workday的客户也对他们的系统感到厌倦,(阅读“为什么每个人都讨厌Workday”)。CHRO不能再忽视技术:他们必须解决这些问题。 重新设计HR职能 最后是运行HR这一极其复杂的工作。CHRO领导着公司中最复杂的职能之一,通常被认为是成本中心。CHRO必须改造自己的团队,建立一个敏捷、智能和咨询型的组织。这意味着创建一个系统性HR运营模型 (Systemic HR operating model),简化员工体验,并培养能够与高级运营领导者咨询和建议的HR领导者。 高绩效的CHRO是什么样的? 我们每年与数百位CHRO交谈,有许多衡量成功的方法。优秀的CHRO不仅是聪明、有创意的变革领导者,他们也是精明的商业人士。 这些个人帮助领导他们的消费导向公司渡过了疫情,达到了有史以来最大的增长。Delta现在是美国排名第一的航空公司,Marriott现在是世界上排名第一的酒店公司。在这两种情况下,正如我们的HR Hero奖所指出的,这些人展示了创意、商业头脑和我们领域的广泛技能。 介绍我们的CHRO研究计划:CHRO Insights™ 我们正在启动一个以CHRO为导向的大型研究计划,研究CHRO的角色。该计划包括研究、教育、工具和信息。我们已经发现了一些重要的事情(我们查看了47000名全球CHRO的数据,并将他们的职业与许多业务结果进行了比较)。 首先,我们看到CHRO角色在C级高管中的重要性大幅增加。 CHRO的薪酬迅速增加,越来越多的公司告诉我们,HR正在领导公司的AI计划、生产力计划和文化变革。 其次,CHRO的工作比看起来要难。 大多数公司没有为CHRO提供良好的继任计划(84%的高影响力CHRO职位是外部填补的),这告诉我们需要关注这个角色。这激励我们在这里集中精力,您将在接下来的几个月中看到我们关于CHRO职业发展的更多内容。 第三,CHRO角色必须融合对业务、技术、文化和多种HR领域的深刻理解。 我们的全球HR能力模型涵盖了94个不同的领域,超过11000名HR专业人士的平均信心水平约为3分(满分5分)。想象一下CHRO必须面对的各种问题:从AI战略到全球文化、员工体验、薪酬、多样性等等。 第四,CHRO角色正在扩展。 我交谈的许多CHRO现在负责设施战略(因为设施影响混合工作、福利和工作体验)、整体员工体验战略(包括健康和福祉)、员工沟通战略,以及公司中的所有合规、培训、招聘、薪酬和绩效计划。 最后,强大的CHRO正在改造他们的HR职能。 公司正在使用我们的系统性HR模型来整合HR中的职能孤岛,创建新的产品和解决方案团队,并对HR团队进行交叉培训,以应对AI和这些新问题。优秀的CHRO不仅是出色的领导者和高级HR从业者,他们还是商业变革专家。 今年夏天晚些时候,我们将发布我们的第一份CHRO角色研究,并详细描述我们的CHRO Insights计划。 与此同时,我想庆祝那些承担这些角色或渴望承担这些角色的人,并告诉你们我们正在准备一些令人兴奋的事情。
    Productivity
    2024年06月22日
  • Productivity
    利用组织网络分析(ONA) - 衡量员工绩效并优化战略 作者: Maya Bodan, Don Miller, Sue Cantrell, Gary Parilis, 和 Carissa Kilgour 在快速变化的工作环境中,传统的办公室、工作时间和组织结构已逐渐失效,组织需要新的洞察力来理解、衡量和评估员工的绩效。特别是现在,了解人们如何互动、互动模式如何影响业务结果以及如何调整行为以改善这些结果变得更加重要。数据分析和人工智能 (AI) 的创新使这一切成为可能。 组织网络分析利用网络科学和特定指标来分析和可视化组织内部的沟通和信息流动。通过收集和分析调查和工作应用中的数据,组织可以利用数据、分析和 AI 的力量。组织网络分析揭示了传统组织结构图中没有的洞察力,例如人们如何协作、谁在决策中起到关键作用或者独立工作,以及关于信任和影响的情感。组织网络分析可以帮助领导者理解人际关系、可视化关系并找出成功的潜在障碍(图1)。 图1: 组织网络分析可以帮助发现组织内部的协作 衡量员工绩效 业务结果可以通过多种方式衡量。有时具体的定量指标是适用的;例如,一个专注于生产力的网络营销团队可能会强调点击次数、下载次数或发布的社交媒体帖子数量。改进指标,如“将网络流量增加X%”,使团队能够创新实现这一目标的方法。其他业务结果包括质量率和客户保留率的衡量。 然而,仅靠容易衡量的关键绩效指标并不能完整地呈现员工的生产力和业务影响。推动关系、发展和其他非量化人类结果的软性目标的结果对业务至关重要,尽管难以衡量。 雇主需要创造员工重视的工作场所。德勤研究显示,79%的领导者认识到他们有责任为员工创造价值,但只有27%的员工认为他们的雇主正在取得有意义的进展。在当前质疑面对面工作价值的环境中,量化人类结果带来了挑战。组织网络分析为领导者提供了分析洞察,优先考虑以人为本的指标,优化工作场所策略以提升整体员工体验。 理解个人员工绩效 组织网络分析 (ONA) 的洞察力在结合评估个人和团队绩效时尤其有用,这些绩效衡量会影响业务结果或生产力。 组织网络分析通过衡量与生产力相关的行为模式来评估生产力(需要对不同团队、职能和业务的生产力进行客观定义)。这些定义可以通过专家判断、焦点小组和访谈确定,或者通过数据分析进行量化。哪种模式是最优的取决于业务情况和需求。例如,有时,广泛的网络互动(与团队外部合作)是必要的,而在其他情况下,这可能会分散注意力——与直接同事合作是最好的(孤立的团队也可以是好的)。 非正式影响者通常不同于组织的正式领导者,他们可以提供关于如何独立于正式层级结构高效工作的宝贵视角。这些洞察力展示了员工人口在整个网络中的分布,以及职能、业务单元或地理位置等因素如何影响团队动态和生产力。在一个无边界的组织中,员工绩效超越了传统指标,突出了对非正式协作可见性的重要性。组织网络分析可以揭示隐藏的洞察力,展示信息在组织内部的真实流动方式,给领导者提供做出明智决策和优化员工绩效的洞察。 利用 ONA 优化工作场所策略 组织在平衡面对面和虚拟互动方面面临挑战。尽管许多组织鼓励员工返回办公室,期望面对面的互动能提升员工绩效和创新,但需要对人们如何实际工作的细致理解。高管希望办公室工作能激发创造力和联系,但往往面临昂贵的长期房地产承诺未得到充分利用的压力,这增加了定义办公室目的和价值的难度。通勤也会增加环境足迹,员工可能不愿失去灵活性。 通过组织网络分析,领导者可以回答一些关键问题: 有多少团队成员是共址的? 在什么情况下以及为什么需要共址? 什么工作可以或最好独立完成? 哪些工具和应用程序最能支持不同地点的工作? 一个重要因素是现场密度,它衡量一个人在办公室内近距离合作者网络的比例。更高的现场密度与更高的面对面工作的认可度相关。领导者可以利用组织网络分析的洞察来了解谁应该在一起工作以及何时在一起工作。理解这些非正式网络和影响范围可以为领导者解锁巨大的价值,以确定哪些团队应该共址以及共址时如何组织空间。通过虚拟方式沟通的独立工作者可能在办公室工作中看到的收益有限。有趣的是,新的数据显示“在松散联系网络中更可能产生创意”,这意味着与自己的直接网络外的合作可以促进创新。 结论 组织应负责任地使用数据、分析和 AI,以实时洞察员工在当今工作环境中的操作、协作和战略。这种改进的理解可以在多个组织层面支持价值创造和决策。组织网络分析提供了有关员工如何在混合工作模式和远程工作模式中跨职能和地理“边界”协作的绩效洞察,可以帮助领导层制定工作场所策略和政策。 作者 Maya Bodan Don Miller Sue Cantrell Gary Parilis Carissa Kilgour 贡献者 Yuki Iwase Shruti Kalaiselvan Ramyasri T M Brennan Conway Katherine Arriola 尾注 1 Deloitte, “Using network analysis to build an agile organization: Create organizational collaboration in a remote workplace,” 2020年10月27日。 2 Stephen Lancaster-Hall 等人, Humanizing productivity and performance: Productivity and performance in times of disruption, Deloitte, 2020; Deloitte, Beyond productivity: The journey to the quantified organization, 2023年5月。 3 Deloitte, Beyond Productivity: The journey to the quantified organization, 2023年5月。 4 Sue Cantrell 和 Corrie Commisso, “Outcomes over outputs: Why productivity is no longer the metric that matters most,” Deloitte Insights, 2023年7月19日。 5 Steve Hatfield, “Rethinking the ways we look at productivity in a Work from Anywhere world: How to evaluate remote worker productivity post-pandemic,” Deloitte’s Capital H blog, 2021年8月24日。 6 Worklytics, “12 metrics for more effective meetings,” 访问时间 2024年1月4日。 7 Deloitte Insights, New fundamentals for a boundaryless world: 2023 Global Human Capital Trends Report, 2023, 第80页。   来源:https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/blog/human-capital-blog/2024/harnessing-organization-network-analysis.html
    Productivity
    2024年06月19日
  • Productivity
    101 real-world gen AI use cases from the world's leading organizations 在过去一年半的时间里,生成式人工智能(AI)在企业领域的应用迅速发展。Google Cloud的Next活动中展示了超过300家组织如何利用AI推动企业转型。这些企业已经从简单的问答助手,发展到能够进行预测和采取行动的AI代理,进一步扩展其业务功能和提升效率。 具体来说,AI代理在以下几个关键领域表现出显著的效益:首先是客户服务,AI能够帮助企业更好地理解和满足客户需求;其次是员工赋能,通过自动化日常任务和优化工作流程,AI提升了工作效率;在创意构思和生产领域,AI助力企业快速生成创新的解决方案;数据分析方面,AI通过高效处理和解析大数据,支持决策制定;在编码创建方面,AI简化了开发流程,提高了代码质量;最后在网络安全领域,AI加强了数据保护和风险管理。 这些应用不仅提高了生产力和操作效率,还极大地改善了客户体验和企业的创新能力。AI的多模态能力,即在文本、语音、视频等多种通信模式中的应用,使其能够更全面地满足不同行业的需求。通过这些先进的技术,企业正在开创一个智能、高效和互联的新时代。 我们一起来看看,是否有参考? Since generative AI first captured the world’s attention a year and a half ago, there’s been a vigorous discussion about what, exactly, the new technology is best used for. While we all enjoyed those early funny chats and witty limericks, we’ve quickly discovered that many of the biggest AI opportunities are clearly in the enterprise. Our customers and partners at Google Cloud have found real potential for creating new processes, efficiencies, and innovations with generative AI. For proof, look no further than the 300-plus organizations who are featured at this week’s Next event in Las Vegas. In a matter of months, organizations like these have gone from AI helping answer questions, to AI making predictions, to generative AI agents. What makes AI agents unique is that they can take actions to achieve specific goals, whether that’s guiding a shopper to the perfect pair of shoes, helping an employee looking for the right health benefits, or supporting nursing staff with smoother patient hand-offs during shifts changes. In our work with customers, we keep hearing that their teams are increasingly focused on improving productivity, automating processes and modernizing the customer experience. These aims are now being achieved through the AI agents they’re developing in six key areas: customer service; employee empowerment; creative ideation and production; data analysis; code creation; and cybersecurity. These special capabilities are made possible in large part by the new multimodal capacity of generative AI and AI foundation models, which allow agents to handle tasks across a range of communications modes, including text, voice, video, audio, code, and more. With human support, agents can converse, reason, learn, and make decisions. The hundreds of customers who joined us at Next ‘24 to showcase and discuss early versions of their AI agents and gen-AI solutions have come to rely on Google Cloud technologies that include our AI infrastructure, Gemini models, Vertex AI platform, Google Workspace, and Google Distributed Cloud. We were also joined by more than 100 partners supporting the creation of AI agents and AI solutions, which you can read about in detail.Here’s a snapshot of how 101 of these industry leaders are putting AI into production today, creating real-world use cases that will transform tomorrow. Similar to great sales and service people, customer agents are able to listen carefully, understand your needs, and recommend the right products and services. They work seamlessly across channels including the web, mobile, and point of sale, and can be integrated into product experiences with voice and video. ADT is building a customer agent to help its millions of customers select, order, and set up their home security. Alaska Airlines is developing a personalized travel search experience using advanced AI techniques, creating hyper-personalized recommendations that engage customers early and foster loyalty through AI-generated content. Best Buy is using Gemini to launch a generative AI-powered virtual assistant this summer that can troubleshoot product issues, reschedule order deliveries, manage Geek Squad subscriptions, and more; in-store and digital customer-service associates are also gaining gen-AI tools to better serve customers anywhere they need help. The Central Texas Regional Mobility Authority is using Vertex AI to modernize transportation operations for a smoother, more efficient journey. Etsy uses Vertex AI training to optimize their search recommendations and ads models, delivering better listing suggestions to buyers and helping sellers grow their businesses. Golden State Warriors are using AI to improve the fan experience content in their Chase Center app. IHG Hotels & Resorts is building a generative AI-powered chatbot to help guests easily plan their next vacation directly in the IHG One Rewards mobile app. ING Bank aims to offer a superior customer experience and has developed a gen-AI chatbot for workers to enhance self-service capabilities and improve answer quality on customer queries. Magalu, one of Brazil’s largest retailers, has put customer service at the center of its AI strategy, including using Vertex AI to create “Lu’s Brain” to power an interactive conversational agent for Lu, Magalu's popular brand persona (the 3D bot has more than 14 million followers between TikTok and Instagram). Mercedes Benz will infuse e-commerce capabilities into its online storefront with a gen AI-powered smart sales assistant. Mercedes also plans to expand its use of Google Cloud AI in its call centers and is using Vertex AI and Gemini to personalize marketing campaigns. Oppo/OnePlus is incorporating Gemini models and Google Cloud AI into their phones to deliver innovative customer experiences, including news and audio recording summaries, AI toolbox, and more. Samsung is deploying Gemini Pro and Imagen 2 to their Galaxy S24 smartphones so users can take advantage of amazing features like text summarization, organization, and magical image editing. The Minnesota Division of Driver and Vehicle Services helps non-English speakers get licenses and other services with two-way real-time translation. Pepperdine University has students and faculty who speak many languages, and with Gemini in Google Meet, they can benefit from real-time translated captioning and notes. Sutherland, a leading digital transformation company, is focused on bringing together human expertise and AI, including boosting its client-facing teams by automatically surfacing suggested responses and automating insights in real time. Target uses Google Cloud to power AI solutions on the Target app and Target.com, including personalized Target Circle offers and Starbucks at Drive Up, their curbside pickup solution. Tokopedia, an Indonesian ecommerce leader, is using Vertex AI to improve data quality, increasing unique products being sold by 5%. US News saw a double-digit impact in key metrics like click-through rate, time spent on page, and traffic volume to its pages after implementing Vertex AI Search. IntesaSanpaolo, Macquarie Bank, and Scotiabank are exploring the potential of gen AI to transform the way we live, work, bank, and invest — particularly how the new technology can boost productivity and operational efficiency in banking. Watch the session to learn more. Employee agents help workers be more productive and collaborate better together. These agents can streamline processes, manage repetitive tasks, answer employee questions, as well as edit and translate critical communications. Avery Dennison empowered their employees with generative AI to enable secure, flexible, and borderless collaboration for enhanced productivity to drive growth. Bank of New York Mellon built a virtual assistant to help employees find relevant information and answers to their questions. Bayer is building a radiology platform that will assist radiologists with data analysis, intelligent search, and to create documents that meet healthcare requirements needed for regulatory approval. The bioscience company is also harnessing BigQuery and Vertex AI to develop additional digital medical solutions and drugs more efficiently. Bristol Myers Squibb is transforming its document processes for clinical trials using Vertex AI and Google Workspace. Now, documentation that took scientists weeks now gets to a first draft in minutes. BenchSci develops generative AI solutions empowering scientists to understand complex connections in biological research, saving them time and financial resources and ultimately bringing new medicine to patients faster. Cintas is using Vertex AI Search to develop an internal knowledge center for customer service and sales teams to easily find key information. Covered California, the state’s healthcare marketplace, is using Document AI to help improve the consumer and employee experience by automating parts of the documentation and verification process when residents apply for coverage. Dasa, the largest medical diagnostics company in Brazil, is helping physicians detect relevant findings in test results more quickly. DaVita leverages DocAI and Healthcare NLP to transform kidney care, including analyzing medical records, uncovering critical patient insights, and reducing errors. AI enables physicians to focus on personalized care, resulting in significant improvements in healthcare delivery. Discover Financial helps their 10,000 contact center representatives to search and synthesize information across detailed policies and procedures during calls. HCA Healthcare is testing Cati, a virtual AI caregiver assistant that helps to ensure continuity of care when one caregiver shift ends and another begins. They are also using gen AI to improve workflows on time-consuming tasks, such as clinical documentation, so physicians and nurses can focus more on patient care. The Home Depot has built an application called Sidekick, which helps store associates manage inventory and keep shelves stocked; notably, vision models help associates prioritize which actions to take. Los Angeles Rams are utilizing AI across the board from content analysis to player scouting. McDonald’s will leverage data, AI, and edge technologies across its thousands of restaurants to implement innovation faster and to enhance employee and customer experiences. Pennymac, a leading US-based national mortgage lender, is using Gemini across several teams including HR, where Gemini in Docs, Sheets, Slides and Gmail is helping them accelerate recruiting, hiring, and new employee onboarding. Robert Bosch, the world's largest automotive supplier, revolutionizes marketing through gen AI-powered solutions, streamlining processes, optimizing resource allocation, and maximizing efficiency across 100+ decentralized departments. Symphony, the communications platform for the financial services industry, uses Vertex AI to help finance and trading teams collaborate across multiple asset classes. Uber is using AI agents to help employees be more productive, save time, and be even more effective at work. For customer service representatives, they’ve launched new tools that summarize communications with users and can even surface context from previous interactions, so front-line staff can be more helpful and effective The U.S. Dept. of Veterans Affairs is using AI at the edge to improve cancer detection for service members and veterans. The Augmented Reality Microscope (ARM) is deployed at remote military treatment facilities around the world. The prototype device is helping pathologists find cancer faster and with better accuracy. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has improved the quality and efficiency of their patent and trademark examination process by implementing AI-driven technologies. Verizon is using generative AI to help teams in network operations and customer experience get the answers they need faster. Victoria’s Secret is testing AI-powered agents to help their in-store associates find information about product availability, inventory, and fitting and sizing tips, so they can better tailor recommendations to customers. Vodafone uses Vertex AI to search and understand specific commercial terms and conditions across more than 10,000 contracts with more than 800 communications operators. WellSky is integrating Google Cloud's healthcare and Vertex AI capabilities to reduce the time spent completing documentation outside work hours. Woolworths, the leading retailer in Australia, boosts employees’ confidence in communications with “Help me write” across Google Workspace products for more than 10,000 administrative employees. It’s also using Gemini to create next-generation promotions, as well as for quickly assisting customer service reps in summarizing all previous customer interactions in real time. Box, Typeface, Glean, CitiBank, and Securiti AI discuss developing AI-powered apps across the enterprise, with measurable returns on investment for marketing, financial services, and HR use cases. Highmark Health and Freenome join Bristol Myers Squibb to explore how AI can improve efficiency and innovation across care delivery, drug discovery, clinical trial planning, and bringing medicines to market. Creative agents can expand your organization with the best design and production skills, working across images, slides, and exploring concepts with workers. Many organizations are building agents for their marketing teams, audio and video production teams, and all the creative people that can use a hand. With creative agents, anyone can become a designer, artist, or producer. Belk ECommerce is using generative AI to craft better product descriptions, a necessary yet time-consuming task for digital retails that has often been done manually. Canva is using Vertex AI to power its Magic Design for Video, helping users skip tedious editing steps while creating shareable and engaging videos in a matter of seconds. Carrefour used Vertex AI to deploy Carrefour Marketing Studio in just five weeks — an innovative solution to streamline the creation of dynamic campaigns across various social networks. In just a few clicks, marketers can build ultra-personalized campaigns to deliver customers advertising that they care about. Major League Baseball continues to innovate its Statcast platform, so teams, broadcasters, and fans have access to live in-game insights. Paramount currently relies on manual processes to create the essential metadata and video summaries used across its Paramount+ platform for showcasing content and creating personalized experiences for viewers. VertexAI Text Bison is now helping to streamline this process. Procter & Gamble used Imagen to develop an internal gen AI platform to accelerate the creation of photo-realistic images and creative assets, giving marketing teams more time to focus on high-level planning and delivering superior experiences for its consumers. WPP will integrate Google Cloud’s gen AI capabilities into its intelligent marketing operating system, called WPP Open, which empowers its people and clients to deliver new levels of personalization, creativity, and efficiency. This includes the use of Gemini 1.5 Pro models to supercharge both the accuracy and speed of content performance predictions. Data agents are like having knowledgeable data analysts and researchers at your fingertips. They can help answer questions about internal and external sources, synthesize research, develop new models — and, best of all, help find the questions we haven’t even thought to ask yet, and then help get the answers. AI21 Labs offers a BigQuery integration called Contextual Answers that allows users to query data conversationally and get high-quality answers quickly Anthropic has partnered with Google Cloud to offer its family of Claude 3 models on Vertex AI — providing organizations with more model options for intelligence, speed, cost-efficiency, and vision for enterprise use cases. The Asteroid Institute is using AI to discover hidden asteroids in existing astronomical data. This is a major focus for astronomers researching the evolution of the Solar System, investors and businesses hoping to fly missions to asteroids, and for all of us who want to prevent future large asteroid impacts on Earth. Contextual is working with Google Cloud to offer enterprises fully customizable, trustworthy, privacy-aware AI grounded in internal knowledge bases. Cox 2M, the commercial IoT division of Cox Communications, is able to make smarter, faster business decisions using AI-powered analytics. Essential AI, a developer of enterprise AI solutions, is using Google Cloud’s AI-optimized TPU v5p accelerator chips to train its own AI models. Generali Italia, Italy's largest insurance provider, used Vertex AI to build a model evaluation pipeline that helps ML teams quickly evaluate performance and deploy models. Globo, one of Brazil’s largest media networks, is using Service Extensions and Media CDN to fight piracy during live events by blocking pirated streams in real time. Hugging Face is collaborating with Google across open science, open source, cloud, and hardware to enable companies to build their own AI with the latest open models from Hugging Face and Google Cloud hardware and software. Kakao Brain, part of Korean technology company Kakao Group, has built a large-scale AI language model that is the largest Korean language-specific LLM in the market, with 66 billion parameters. They’ve also developed a text-to-image generator called Karlo. Mayo Clinic has given thousands of its scientific researchers access to 50 petabytes worth of clinical data through Vertex AI search, accelerating information retrieval across multiple languages. McLaren Racing is using Google AI to get up-to-the-millisecond insights during races and training to gain a competitive edge. Mercado Libre is testing BigQuery and Looker to optimize capacity planning and reservations with delivery carriers and airlines to fulfill shipments faster. Mistral AI will use Google Cloud's AI-optimized infrastructure, to further test, build, and scale up its LLMs, all while benefiting from Google Cloud's security and privacy standards. MSCI uses machine learning with Vertex AI, BigQuery and Cloud Run to enrich its datasets to help our clients gain insight into around 1 million asset locations to help manage climate-related risks. NewsCorp is using Vertex AI to help search data across 30,000 sources and 2.5 billion news articles updated daily. Orange operates in 26 countries where local data must be kept in each country. They are using AI on Google Distributed Cloud to improve network performance and deliver super-responsive translation capabilities. Spotify leveraged Dataflow for large-scale generation of ML podcast previews, and they plan to keep pushing the boundaries of what’s possible with data engineering and data science to build better experiences for their customers and creators. UPS is building a digital twin of its entire distribution network, so both workers and customers can see where their packages are at any time. Workday is using natural language processing in Vertex Search and Conversation to make data insights more accessible for technical and non-technical users alike. Woven — Toyota's investment in the future of mobility — is partnering with Google to leverage vast amounts of data and AI to enable autonomous driving, supported by thousands of ML workloads on Google Cloud’s AI Hypercomputer. This has resulted in resulting in 50% total-cost-of-ownership savings to support automated driving. Broward County, Florida, and Southern California Edison are using geospatial capabilities and AI to improve infrastructure planning and monitoring, generate new insights, and create regional resilience for communities facing climate challenges today and tomorrow. Kinaxis and Dematic are building data-driven supply chains to address logistics use cases including scenario modeling, planning, operations management, and automation. NOAA and USAID are among the U.S. government agencies using Google Cloud AI to unlock critical data insights to streamline operations and improve mission outcomes — all with an emphasis on responsible AI. Watch the session to learn more. Code agents are helping developers and product teams to design, create, and operate applications faster and better, and to ramp up on new languages and code bases. Many organizations are already seeing double-digit gains in productivity, leading to faster deployment and cleaner, clearer code. Capgemini has been using Code Assist to improve software engineering productivity, quality, security, and developer experience, with early results showing workload gains for coding and more stable code quality. Commerzbank is enhancing developer efficiency through Code Assist's robust security and compliance features. Quantiphi saw developer productivity gains of more than 30% during their Code Assist pilot. Replit developers will get access to Google Cloud infrastructure, services, and foundation models via Ghostwriter, Replit's software development AI, while Google Cloud and Workspace developers will get access to Replit’s collaborative code editing platform. Seattle Children's hospital is using AI to boost data engineering productivity and accelerate development. Turing is customizing Gemini Code Assist on their private codebase, empowering their developers with highly personalized and contextually relevant coding suggestions that have increased productivity around 30 percent and made day-to-day coding more enjoyable. Wayfair piloted Code Assist, and those developers with the code agent were able to set up their environments 55 percent faster than before, there was a 48 percent increase in code performance during unit testing, and 60 percent of developers reported that they were able to focus on more satisfying work. Security agents assist security operations by radically increasing the speed of investigations, automating monitoring and response for greater vigilance and compliance controls. They can also help guard data and models from cyberattacks, such as malicious prompt injection. BBVA uses AI in Google SecOps to detect, investigate, and respond to security threats with more accuracy, speed, and scale. The platform now surfaces critical security data in seconds, when it previously took minutes or even hours, and delivers highly automated responses. Behavox is using Google Cloud technology and LLMs to provide industry leading regulatory compliance and front office solutions for financial institutions globally. Charles Schwab has integrated their own intelligence into the AI-powered Google SecOps, so analysts can better prioritize work and respond to threats. Fiserv’s security operations engineers create detections and playbooks with much less effort, while analysts get answers more quickly. Grupo Boticário, one of the largest beauty retail and cosmetics companies in Brazil, employs real-time security models to prevent fraud and to detect and respond to issues. Palo Alto Networks’ Cortex XSIAM, the AI-driven security operations platform, is built on more than a decade of expertise in machine-learning models and the most comprehensive, rich, and diverse data store in the industry. Backed by Google's advanced cloud infrastructure and advanced AI services, including BigQuery and Gemini models, the combination delivers global scale and near real-time protection across all cybersecurity offerings. Pfizer can now aggregate cybersecurity data sources, cutting analysis times from days to seconds. To find even more customers using our AI tools to build agents and solutions for their most important enterprise projects, visit the Google Cloud customer hub and watch the Next ‘24
    Productivity
    2024年04月12日
  • Productivity
    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.
    Productivity
    2024年04月04日
  • Productivity
    应对心理健康危机:42%的公司计划推出新的员工福利 根据The Conference Board的最新报告,尽管HR领导们对劳动力市场的乐观程度略有上升,但员工保留和参与度的预期与去年相比有所下降,显示出劳动力短缺的持续问题。报告揭示,随着员工心理健康问题的加剧,42%的公司计划今年提供新的福祉福利。企业承认对员工福祉负有责任,并在增加对健康项目的关注和支出方面取得了显著进展。报告强调,全面考虑员工福祉不仅可以提高员工参与度和生产力,还能保留人才。  Tackling the Mental Health Crisis: 42% of Companies Plan to Offer New Employee Well-Being Benefits NEW YORK, March 22, 2024 -- Corporate America's HR leaders continue to be more optimistic than pessimistic about the state of the workforce. The Conference Board CHRO Confidence Index ticked up to 54 in Q1, from 53 last quarter. (A reading of more than 50 points reflects more positive than negative responses.) While retention and engagement expectations improved from last quarter, the survey reveals they are down compared to this time last year, signaling ongoing concerns about labor shortages. Hiring expectations remained stable. The survey also reveals that businesses are stepping up as mental health concerns continue taking a toll on workers throughout the nation: 42% of surveyed companies plan to offer new well-being benefits this year. Indeed, 36% say businesses are responsible for the well-being of their employees, with another 62% saying they are somewhat responsible. As a result, they are ramping up their focus on employee wellness: In addition to those offering new well-being benefits, a quarter plan to increase spending on well-being initiatives. "Taking a holistic view of worker well-being can not only improve employee engagement and productivity but also retain your talent—a top focus of both CEOs and CHROs this year," said Diana Scott, Leader of The Conference Board US Human Capital Center. The Index, conducted quarterly, was launched in Q1 2023 and is comprised of three components—hiring, retention, and engagement—as well as special questions included in each survey. Nearly 150 CHROs participated in the Q1 survey, which included additional questions on employee well-being. Key findings include: Hiring The CHRO Confidence Index: Hiring component remained the same as both last quarter and YoY, at 55. CHROs' workforce expansion plans remained stable in Q1, with fewer CHROs expecting to increase or decrease hiring in the next six months: 36% of CHROs expect to increase their hiring over the next six months—down from 44% in Q4. 13% expect to decrease their hiring over the next six months—down from 19% in Q4. Retention The CHRO Confidence Index: Retention component rose to 53 in Q1 2024 from 51 in Q4 2023. But retention expectations are down YoY from 57 in Q1 2023. CHRO expectations regarding employee retention ticked up slightly in Q1: 29% of CHROs expect their employee retention levels to improve over the next six months—up slightly from 28% in Q4. 19% of CHROs expect employee retention to decrease over the next six months, down from 22% in Q4. Engagement The CHRO Confidence Index: Engagement component rose to 54 in Q1 2024 from 52 in Q4 2023. But engagement expectations are down YoY from 58 in Q1 2023. Fewer CHROs expect declines in employee engagement in Q1: 35% expect engagement levels to increase—down slightly from 37% in Q4. 20% expect engagement levels to decrease—down significantly from 31% in Q4. Special Questions for Q4: Employee Well-Being For Q1 2024, the Index also surveyed CHROs on employee well-being. CHROs overwhelmingly agree that organizations share responsibility for their employees' well-being. 62% said organizations are somewhat responsible. 36% said organizations are responsible. Only 2% said organizations are not responsible for employee well-being. A quarter of CHROs increased spending on employee well-being in 2024. 26% said their well-being budget increased for FY2024. 69% said it remained the same. Only 5% decreased spending on well-being. Nearly half of CHROs plan to offer new well-being benefits, despite most keeping spending the same. 42% plan to offer new benefits this year. 39% do not plan to offer new benefits. 19% are discussing offering new benefits. Mental and physical health are the top priorities for new well-being initiatives. Of those offering new benefits: 20% are offering mental health initiatives. 15% are offering physical health and fitness initiatives. 12% are offering financial well-being initiatives. 10% are offering work-life balance initiatives. About The Conference BoardThe Conference Board is the member-driven think tank that delivers trusted insights for what's ahead. Founded in 1916, we are a non-partisan, not-for-profit entity holding 501 (c) (3) tax-exempt status in the United States. www.conference-board.org SOURCE The Conference Board
    Productivity
    2024年03月24日
  • Productivity
    Valoir 报告显示 HR 尚未准备好迎接 AI,你呢? 研究显示,人力资源管理领导者面临的主要问题包括缺少 AI 相关的专业知识以及面临的风险和合规性问题。 弗吉尼亚州阿灵顿--Valoir 发布的一项全球新报告显示,尽管 AI 驱动的自动化似乎无法避免,但人力资源部门似乎并未做好准备。这项涵盖超过150位人力资源执行官的调查揭示了利用 AI 的巨大机会,但同时也显示出在制定政策、实施实践和进行培训方面普遍存在不足,以便安全有效地将 AI 技术应用于人力资源管理。 “虽然许多机构开始采用生成式 AI,但很少有组织建立必要的政策、准则和保障措施。作为员工数据的保护者和公司政策的制定者,人力资源领导者需要在 AI 的政策和培训方面走在前列,不仅为自己的团队,也为广大员工群体做好准备。” 以下内容需要特别注意: “AI 正在快速融入人力资源管理领域,特别是在招聘、人才发展和劳动力管理等方面。然而,引入 AI 也伴随着诸如数据泄露、误解、偏见和不当内容等风险,”Valoir 的首席执行官 Rebecca Wettemann 表示。“面对这些挑战并采取措施减少风险的人力资源部门,可以显著提升其从 AI 中获得的益处。” 人力资源的自动化与战略转型潜力 报告指出,有35%的人力资源部门员工的日常工作非常适合自动化处理。在所有人力资源管理活动中,招聘环节最有潜力应用 AI 技术,并且已成为采纳率最高的领域,近四分之一的组织已经开始利用 AI 支持的招聘流程。人才发展、劳动力管理以及培训和发展同样被视为 AI 自动化的关键领域。 生成式 AI 正在加速人力资源部门的生产力提升及风险增加 尽管到2023年中旬,超过三分之四的人力资源领域工作者已经尝试使用过某种形式的生成式 AI,但仅有16%的组织制定了关于使用生成式 AI 的具体政策。而且,真正关于其伦理使用的政策数量更是寥寥无几。人力资源领导者认为,缺乏 AI 相关技能和专业知识是采纳 AI 的最大障碍,但只有14%的组织制定了有效的 AI 使用培训政策。这些政策对于确保所有员工都能充分利用 AI 带来的好处并最小化风险是至关重要的。 “尽管生成式 AI 正被广泛采纳,但几乎没有哪些组织建立了必要的政策、准则和保护措施。作为员工数据的守护者和公司政策的制定者,人力资源领导者必须在 AI 政策和培训方面先行一步,这不仅是为了他们自己的团队,也是为了整个员工群体的利益,”Wettemann 表示。 报告的关键知识点: Integration Challenges: HR faces challenges in managing AI use due to lack of policies, practices, and training. Early Adoption vs. Preparedness: While HR has been an early adopter of AI, most organizations still lack the proper frameworks for safe and effective AI adoption. Rapid Product Release: Post-Chat GPT announcement, HR software vendors have rapidly released generative AI products with varying capabilities. AI’s Double-Edged Sword: AI offers great benefits but also poses risks of "accidents" due to immature technology, inadequate policies, and lack of training. AI Experimentation and Automation Opportunity: Over three-quarters of HR workers have experimented with generative AI. 35% of HR tasks could potentially be automated by AI. Current AI Utilization: The main opportunities for HR benefits from AI are in recruiting, learning and development, and talent management, with recruiting leading in AI adoption. Adoption Barriers: Main hurdles include lack of AI expertise (28%), fear of compliance and risk (23%), and lack of resources (21%). Policy and Training Deficiencies: Only 16% of organizations have policies on generative AI use, and less than 16% have training policies for AI usage. Risk Areas in AI: Data compromises, AI hallucinations, bias and toxicity, and recommendation bias are identified as primary risks. Future Plans for AI: Over 50% of organizations plan to apply AI in recruiting, talent management, and training within the next 24 months. Least Likely AI Adoption: Benefits management has the lowest likelihood of current or future AI adoption due to data sensitivity concerns. AI Skills and Expertise: The significant gap in AI skills and expertise impacts the adoption and effective use of AI in HR. HR’s Role in AI Adoption: HR needs to develop policies, provide training, and ensure ethical AI use aligning with organizational principles. Recommendations for HR: Suggestions include experimenting with generative AI, developing ethical AI usage policies, creating role-specific AI training, and identifying employee groups at risk from AI automation.
    Productivity
    2024年03月12日
  • 123