In my recent post I was talking about Workday Illuminate – the (Gen) AI product of Workday. Wait, already going wrong there. It is not a product – it is a feature. And this is what I want to write about today, and get your view and opinion, please.
Probably 80%+ of us had their first contact with Gen AI as a product: ChatGPT. A fabulous and impressive product to this day that can by itself do so much, as well as can be used to drive other products (e.g. MSFT Copilot). And many other Gen AI products followed – may it be from Anthropic (Claude) or Google (Bard, Gemini) or Meta (Lama). This is great and exciting and it definitely is a lot of fun to play around with these products. But more as a hobby or for personal productivity. With regards to HR Technology and Employee Experience I have a different view.
What is your product?
As I have mentioned above, these products are general purpose, swiss army knife kind of tools. You can do many interesting and exciting things with them – but they don’t have one true purpose or use-case. They are not in the business to solve a very specific problem. In HR and Employee Experience though we are in the business of solving very specific problem statements. I would say 90%+ of these are common across all of us HR and EX practitioners and a bit less than 10% are company specific. In any case, these are HR and EX centric problem statements or use cases.
The general purpose (Gen) AI tools off-the-shelf cannot help solve most of your use-cases. They are not trained in these use-cases, they don’t have access to the data needed – nor do they have the right level of security and privacy. But these tools are damn good and can be adjusted to fit your use-case: You can move them into a secure environment, set them up to comply with privacy standards and then train them with your data so that their outputs are relevant. Once you have done this you should integrate them closer into your current tech stack – not only at the backend, but especially on the front-end. We want our end-users to have seamless access and improved experience. And once you have done that you have a good chance of having a state-of-the-art, use-case centric Gen AI tool available for your HR and Experience use-cases. Fab – but wait? Let’s rewind a bit. Is this the business we are in? Is this the business our companies are in? – if you are not by coincidence working for one of the big tech firms I would say the answer is “No”. This is not the business our companies are in nor is it the business we are in – that is the software business.
As much as I am enjoying playing around with Gen AI products, like me, most of us are not in the business of Technology Solution development. We are in the business of providing Employee Experience and HR Technology Services and I don’t think we should be in the business of developing our own Gen AI products, but utilize what is out there, built by specialized companies and trusted partners.
Think about Gen AI as a feature and not a product
I am very certain that 90%+ of your use-cases are common across all HR functions regardless which company. And in the past we always found off-the-shelf products to fulfill our requirements. Why should this be different with Gen AI? And going one step further then, the next question is if you should adopt a (Gen) AI product to make it work for you? – what is the alternative? I think also here my above argumentation comes into play. We are experts when it comes to Employee Experience and providing HR Technology services – but are we experts in developing HR Technology solutions E2E or tightly integrating and overlaying a Gen AI into our tech stack?
I don’t think we are and I don’t believe we need to be or should be – as long as we are not working for the ServiceNow’s or Workday’s of this world. Instead, we should think of Gen AI as a feature, one (very powerful) feature of a technology that was built by experts to address our specific HR use-cases. And I am glad and happy that most of the big tech firms see it similar and are providing great Gen AI features, tightly integrated into their products, ready to be used off-the-shelf in order to improve efficiency and effectiveness of our HR use-cases. Some of these firms are marketing the hell out of Gen AI – in these cases, be careful. Again, Gen AI is not the product you are looking for. It is a feature within a product, and so evaluate the product including the Gen AI features, but don’t choose because of Gen AI. However, a product today without the power of Gen AI isn’t up-to-date either.
Make use of such Gen AI infused products and power-charge your HR department with the help of these – and if you have a great relationship and are expressing your interest still early in the game, you might even have the chance to co-design with these firms to get the best for you out of Gen AI still.
(Gen) AI is the next enabler and foundational change catalyst in Technology – and also in HR Technology and Employee Experience. But it is not a stand-alone product when it comes to HR Tech and Experience. It is rather a feature than a product. A feature that you need to get from your partners and vendors. A feature that supports the core functionalities of your HR Tech stack. Don’t fall for the exciting experience to build your own Gen AI in HR, but make sure you are in a strong position to adopt the (Gen) AI features your vendors are offering. This will still set you apart and provide a superior experience to your employees.
