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The WorkOps Podcast is your weekly conversation with HR leaders and People Ops practitioners doing the real work.
In every episode we dig into one story. A process that went sideways, a system that just didn't work, and what someone actually did about it. Packed with practical lessons you'll want to bring back to your team. Whether you're supporting 500 employees or 5,000, this is how the best People leaders are building for what comes next.
The WorkOps Podcast - Jason Desentz
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Jason Desentz: [00:00:00] we're in our brainstorming session, which means throw it up on the wall. Throw it up on the wall. If it sticks, great. If it doesn't, okay, it fell off.
Welcome to the Work Ops podcast. In every episode, we dig into one story, a process that went sideways, a system that just didn't work, and what someone actually did about it. It's packed with practical lessons that you'll want to bring straight back to your team. This podcast is brought to you by Kinfolk, the AI service desk built for HR.
I'm your host, Jeet Mukherjee, and with that, let's dive in.
Jeet Mukerji: Hey everyone. Today I am joined by Jason Decent, who's the CHRO at Toshiba America. Jason, very excited to have you here. Thank you for joining us
Jason Desentz: Thank you for having me. Pleased to be here
Jeet Mukerji: Yeah. And, before we kind of jump into the bones of this, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and how did you choose, , HR?
Jason Desentz: Yeah, I have the privilege of giving this story a couple times, not too, oft in the distant, past here. But, I actually kind of [00:01:00] fell into HR, is really the way I like to say it. , originally I went through undergrad school to be a police officer, and, I made the switch thinking, "You know, I'm probably...
It's probably not for me." And, at the time I was engaged, and my wife was, was encouraging me not to, just from obviously safety reasons. But, , my mom's side of the family I had police officers, and I always thought it was cool, and I wanted to be this really cool detective and, , figure things out and, , solve crimes. But, That really fell through, and then, and then I really was kind of at a loss for a while, and then I tried law school just thinking, "Oh, let me stay with the law theme here." Went to law school for a short bit, didn't care for it. Left that, and then I'm like, "Fred, I am about to get married here in a couple months."
I'm 22 at the time. I have no career, no nothing. What do I do? And at that time, my sister worked at Ford Motor Company here in Detroit. And I said to her, I said, "Are they hiring?" And she said, "Well, yeah, actually, they're looking for trainers. Do you think you can teach?" And I'm like, "Sure." I had no clue.
I'd never done it, never, you know. So luckily they took a chance on me, and they taught me everything I [00:02:00] needed to do, and then I became a trainer. All things, you know, everything from computer-based training to, like, Microsoft products to DEI training, cultural training, and then, training to build my HR in tradition, and then I got into the L&D space. And then I, progressed, and then I got, started my career off in L&D from an automotive perspective. I left at some point, went to Chrysler, and I spent most of my career in the autos, and then worked my way into other companies. And then I did other jobs, of course.~ I... Once..~ i spent a lot of time in the beginning in L&D, learning and development, and then I moved into HRIS, so I had kind of a tech bend to my background, which at one point I had another identity crisis.
Do I ~s-~ stay with tech and go IT, or do I stick with HR? At that point, I had some great mentors who said, "Look, you're in HR." Maybe selfishly they wanted to keep me too probably, but... And I'm very grateful for that, of course. Still friends to this day and mentors. But, I then jumped around and became a high potential, and I would rotate every 18 months.
So I sat in the business partner chair, or generalist at that time. We didn't have business partners. And then I moved into another COE when I went into [00:03:00] compensation, organization planning. That was in OD, organizational development, organizational effectiveness. Then I got to manage groups in the space of field HR, supporting every other parts of the division of the business, and then worked my way up to the CHRO. And by the time I was 40 years old, I had the privilege of leading a publicly traded company globally as the chief human resource officer, and I've been kinda doing that for the last 10 years. And, , I've actually had a stint in consultancy as well, so I've had a chance not only to work at big companies, but I also worked at a lot of startups. was really intriguing to me to see everything from the very beginning, and I mean start up in a condo to all the way to publicly traded, stock exchange. ~So you-~ I've gotten to see these evolutions and also been part of the bigs where I learned a lot of my process development because they teach everybody in the automotive industry to be Lean Six Sigma. So a lot of the way I think of things is very methodical. I look for waste. I look for continuous improvement. So that's kinda my career at a very high level. And of course, along the way though, I went [00:04:00] back to school by the way. I said, I need a master's. So do I get a..." And at that time there really was just starting HR really, and I'm like I don't know." So I chose business 'cause I thought if I'm gonna be a good HR person, I need to know the business side so that I can speak their language. So I have an MBA, and then I went on and got my doctorate in business as well
Jeet Mukerji: That's quite a trajectory, Jason, all the way from potentially joining the police force all the way ~to,~ to where you are now. ~That's,~ that, ~that's amazing.~
And it's interesting you mentioned about the rotations and, I'm curious to get your thoughts. With AI these days, what we're seeing is that actually, HR and tech are merging more,
And it seems that some of those capabilities are coming in-house and we may not need to make that shift.
I recently heard from someone that they're hiring an engineer in the HR team so that they can do more with AI internally.
And I'm kinda curious to hear your thoughts. Do you think we're gonna shift to a, a place where like, there are gonna be more generalists who will then be using AI and those, - functional expertise of let's say L&D and tech and business partnering, are those gonna start [00:05:00] to melt away perhaps?
Or do you think they're gonna go deeper because you're gonna need that subject matter expertise?
Jason Desentz: Personally believe it's gonna go deeper. In fact, Ford Motor Company made, I don't know if you've read an article just recently, ~a couple of month-~ maybe a couple of weeks ago, just for back out. They had fired a couple people a couple of months ago. And we're gonna make all, some engineers. We're gonna do AI.
Guess what? They hired them all back, or tried to. Because they realized that, look, AI to me, this is my perspective, Jason's perspective. I believe AI it's more powerful than the internet ever was, but it's no different than when computers came into the workforce. Did it really change the job functions that well, that much?
Sure. We're, you and I are talking on a computer right now, but still have learning and development. That was always there before. You still had payroll, Now, it's going to enhance the way we work, just like the internet and just like laptops and computers did. It's gonna enhance it, which then will alter the services we provide. It'll be like, you don't hear anyone on a job description, "Do you have internet [00:06:00] experience?" Well, that sounds silly, right? Eventually, we're gonna say that about AI. "Do you have AI experience?" Like, duh, I use AI every day for everything. We're not there yet. We're talking about it as if it's like we haven't done this before.
So I try to encourage people to really go back to history and how did we get through society, things that changed our society for the good, the bad, the ugly, but so impactful. The Industrial Revolution changed society that way. Automobiles put the horse out of business. So all these major events or innovations have changed society, but the core value or roots of our society, of our inside systems is still intact. The way in which it looks or it operates, that's what changes, in my opinion, but the heart of it is still there. I don't believe it's gonna go away. Some things may get, and the reason why I say some things, I don't know , there could be some things that go away, and I think you gotta think about what are some of those examples?
Call centers would be maybe an example. And I'm not trying to call any of them out. You still need people on the call ~'cause there,~ 'cause there's dynamic, [00:07:00] but you see them all the time now. You're talking to a bot more than you're talking to a human. That's been for a while now. They've had trees that go everywhere, and they have, they've already mapped this out.
Now AI can do it faster. So this isn't a new thing, it's just an enhanced thing. So again, AI's enhancing what we're already doing, and it's gonna change then and create new jobs that we can learn and be even better. So I'm more of a glass half full than half empty
Jeet Mukerji: Love it. And, I wanna call out that, this is completely unscripted. We didn't share any notes with each other before, before we spoke. So I'm really excited about where this conversation is gonna go. I think we're gonna go in some interesting places. And I think we've already started there.
~It's,~ it's starting to get, pretty philosophical. And, it's interesting what you said there around that it's, Initially people used to put like, ~"Hey, I can,~ I can work with email," on their resumes or like, ", I can use
Jason Desentz: Word 95 Word dot. I know how to use Word and Excel, great. Who's gonna put that on there
anymore, right? No one does that. It's a given. Becomes,
Jeet Mukerji: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. But there is a [00:08:00] transition though, right? Like I... You know, ~we're,~ we're seeing a lot of HR teams who are, to your point around L&D, like they are setting up programs around AI fluency. In the same way that people set up how to train using emails, or Word, they're setting up programs around AI fluency.
And I wonder when that's gonna become something that it just becomes inherent with the, the new folks coming into the business, versus continuing to require, L&D support. 'Cause I know you've also spoken about like the generational differences and how do we account for those pieces.
Jason Desentz: I was gonna give you an example of that. I remember there was a time when it used to be told to me we're gonna do this automated. We're gonna do direct deposit. Mind-blowing. Direct deposit, right? And we were like,
"Oh, Jason, not everyone has a computer, man. Not everyone has all that automated stuff set up.
We can't do that." So we got... So we were forced to still do two ways until finally that fizzled out, and then we had the one way, right? But we got there. We got there. Almost every company does direct deposit to this day. You only do paper checks in emergencies. Obviously, we also have the payroll printer [00:09:00] 'cause that's still gonna be needed, but it's just we shifted, eventually we got there, right?
But it took time. I believe it'll happen faster here, and this is just me philosophically thinking about that because what you're saying you're taking a technological innovation already to a tech-savvy society to some degree, right? Or generation. Older generations like boomers, some use it, but very rarely. Some have embraced it. Some are like, "You know what? I'm, I'm old enough now. I'm, I'm good. I've learned enough. We'll let that go with the younger generation." And I think that trickles down generation by generation till you get to the current generation in the workforce, the newest one. So. and even myself I'm embracing it, but. i have to force myself to use it, where I think is some of the Gen Zs have been using it every day. This is yeah, no-brainer. 98% of it's still my term papers are helping me go through this, right? And I get it, and I would do the same thing, too. But I think that generation although you're seeing a little bit of a resentment right now, and you see the boos at colleges when they were graduating AI because, not because of its utilization, 'cause they [00:10:00] all used it. It's because their potential job market m- may have gone down because people have decided to get rid of that role, whatever it may be that they were gonna go towards, like coder.
If you're a coder, that's gonna be a tough role to be in, man. I don't know.
Jeet Mukerji: Yeah, I mean, it sounds like you're, actually pretty optimistic about
the future talent because they're gonna figure it out. They're gonna be AI native. But I'd be curious to hear your thoughts 'cause it seems like ~th-there~ is a slowdown in hiring and there is a slowdown in the number of roles, and there's all these these discussions around like we're only gonna hire mid-level or senior because we need that subject matter expertise, and they can then leverage AI to 10X themselves.
But then what happens to junior talent? How do you square those two things that's happening right now?
Jason Desentz: I think there's dual pressure. I think what you're seeing is you've got maybe the senior leadership is being influenced by outside resources, and that could be anything from media, it could be from board of directors, it could be, w- what have you. They're like, "Oh my gosh, this [00:11:00] AI thing's huge."
It's the buzzword, and everyone's like, "Oh wait, we can cut SG&A and just bring in a robot?" Again, not new, by the way. Not new. Because this happened in the factories when all my dad could remember, the boomers, they were gonna bring all these robots in to replace all these humans like The Jetsons. I don't even know if you know what that cartoon is. But the fact
Is everything was au- you know, oh, it's gonna be automated. Guess what? Didn't happen. But did some things are robots? Yes, of course. Are robot welders? Of course. But what it created was these newer jobs to fix the machines now, and then you had to program the machine, right?
So it actually almost was a one-to-one. So we did lose some, we did innovate, and we actually created new ones which created new skill sets, and one might argue that's actually an upskilling in our, society. We're less reliant on mundane task and actually be thinking at a completely different hierarchical level as our brains function. And maybe it takes us to a whole 'nother level of conscious. I don't know. I'm just thinking there's so much more... if you had extra time because you didn't have to do something, wouldn't that be [00:12:00] great? But ~so-~ but
Jeet Mukerji: I agree
Jason Desentz: If I was a recruiter, you know how many resumes and your eyes start to get droopy when you're reading so many?
But if AI could spit out the top 30 and then I can focus, I'd be so much better with my time
Jeet Mukerji: I agree. But it's interesting 'cause I think if you have free time I don't think in our society we are set up to use that free time for leisure. I think we're just gonna fill it with more work.
Jason Desentz: Yeah, being a workaholic is probably, I'm probably the worst person to talk to about this. But I did just take two PTO days and I'm still thinking about all this. Yes. Yes, I do think so. I just think it's but it could be fun work
Jeet Mukerji: the shape of the role
Jason Desentz: It could be more strategic work. It could be less "Oh, your password is wrong.
Let me go change that." That's... Is that really rewarding work? Maybe it turns into rewarding work even though it is something different. I don't disagree with that. I think it's, we don't know how to relax either. I think that's an American thing mostly. Although I think think we can learn from our other folks overseas 'cause they know how to take a holiday and we don't.
Jeet Mukerji: On full shutdown holiday mode right [00:13:00] now as we're heading into August.
How do you think about the role of the people team and the HR function? 'Cause I think if anything, we just talked about the shape of roles changing,
and it becomes so much more difficult to then be like, "Hey, this is the talent that we- we're gonna need in a year, six months."
But now the tasks are changing because some of those tasks are gonna be done by AI. So doesn't it become way harder to scenario model, to plan the type of talent that you're gonna need? How do you account for that?
Jason Desentz: What people are struggling with, I think, is they're thinking about doing everything all at once. I think you gotta take a step back and say, "What, what makes sense now, and what can we start with?" And the reason we don't pe- companies don't start is because they think about the whole big picture.
"Oh my gosh, there's this." If you start thinking that way, you'll never start. So you gotta just pick something, try something, and see if it works or sticks, and then move on to the next. I think a lot of proof of concept's happening, so I think even what we're doing at Toshiba, we do a lot of proof of concept. And a lot of that has to do with [00:14:00] we're not 100% sold, so to speak, 'cause we just need to see if it, how it's gonna fit into our culture. And we know there's gonna be a learning curve. So we also have to take that into account. So we can't just give up go three months. You almost have to at a minimum give it a year anything you're kinda putting in place at this point because you need a cycle. And maybe even 18 months so you can see if after that cycle anything else kinda reverberates. So that's a way to ... Again, if you take it in bite-sized chunks, it's more manageable and you feel more confident to start and stay in this lane of trying AI versus getting so overwhelmed and going,
I don't want nothing to do with it. I don't wanna be a part of it. Let somebody else worry about that. I am so busy every day." Rather than embracing it and saying could it make what we do better, but could it also improve the business?" What we do impacts the business in many different ways
Jeet Mukerji: ~Th- there~ are a lot of I guess competing tensions in what you just said because you kinda [00:15:00] gotta make space for that experimentation to happen alongside the day job. And that space has gotta kinda continue for a year to 18 months at minimum, and you're committing to that. And you also have to bring people along in the journey across the different generations within the business to...
~I- in~ different ways. So I'm curious to hear what have you guys built? What are you guys experimenting with? And how did you get that o- over the line, and where are you with that currently?
Jason Desentz: Yeah. I've been with Toshiba about two years now, and they had started kind of this like AI champion, so something like that, so to speak, ~a coup-~ about a year or two before I joined. And they were already thinking ahead. Toshiba's an innovative company. It's what we were birthed on.
So 150 years last year was our celebration, and~ we s- ~we're built on innovation, so we're naturally trying to be at the forefront. So they've already been thinking about that. Now we're at the level of, okay, let's take chunks, little bites, and see what we get. So that's at the stage we're at. And in the HR space, one of the things that we've done is [00:16:00] create a space where we had an HR summit this past year with my team, and they all came in, flew into Houston where our headquarters is at. And we had a breakout session where we created multiple groups, and we said, "All right, we're gonna play around.
We're a Copilot shop." So we have already the capability to create agents, and we had a pre-lesson about what all different types of learning modules are and all the basics of AI, right? We did this before we went into the session. And then after... And during the session, what we said was is, "We want you to create an AI agent.
Give it a name. What's its purpose in HR? How is it gonna help people? What's the resources you're gonna need to teach it, give it so it can learn from and use as resources?" And then- Create an image, a logo using AI also. What we did was is after the summit we gave them about 30 to 60 days and then we held a Shark Tank kind of event where - we had seven different groups, and the groups came back and they basically had to get up in front of myself and a few of the HR leaders, and we did the Shark Tank thing.
And [00:17:00] So we had, for example, we had Payroll Princess that answered all your payroll needs. And it had references to all of our payroll documents. It had a So 'cause they get a lot of questions in payroll about certain things like, "When's the payday? Do I have a holiday? Do I get paid for this holiday if I'm an hourly worker?" All of that can be done now by this agent, and they can just go on Microsoft Teams and link to it, and they can It's excellent. So they can use it. We had something called Time Tamer that did the same thing around a- attendance for our hourly workforce in the factories. It could help build out schedules.
It could also, check in on, point system if we had that. But it could do all many things around attendance. And then we had another one, just to give you another example, around recruitment that was able to build interview guides for the job description and even take some of the notes if they were recorded from some of the phone screens and even create a better interview guide based on that saying where maybe you should focus giving it a few prompts. Again, and the images the, the teams came up with hilarious. Just the way they had fun with it. But my point is we gave [00:18:00] autonomous space to try something, and it wasn't much work. They still had their day job. They had to do this on top of their regular work, so it's not like I But I gave them, and they had to make sure stuff was done But they had time, and they had dedicated hours where they would... And we cross-pollinated it from different parts of the team. We didn't-- Like for the Payroll Princess, we didn't have just payroll people. We had some field HR people, business partners. We had other COEs in learning and development. So we had other people, and I think the best way about that is it just gives you a different visual of what its application could be like and what others might, perceive, how it
Jeet Mukerji: yeah.
Jason Desentz: at it
Jeet Mukerji: Yeah, I feel That's amazing, by the way, and I feel like to build the right kind of AI systems, you need to be more of a systems thinker these days, and therefore, building something just with your own expertise is gonna be a pretty narrow view, and therefore bringing in the users of that agent is also gonna be really important.
So that's really great to hear that you did it that way. And then it was really also great to hear that you, you mentioned the word fun. In order to drive adoption, they've gotta get to the aha moment. And a lot of times we see is [00:19:00] the way to get to the aha moment is to be in a safe environment where it's okay to fail, and then you have fun with it.
And did you see that flip in those teams where they were like, "Oh wow, it can do this," and, "Look what I've built"? And did that kind of trigger the desire to experiment more, build more agents, share more agents internally?
Jason Desentz: Yeah. Actually, some of my team has even taken it even farther. Now they're using AI, not just from the exercise. They built their own little agents to do their things, go through my emails and do this. So I'm hearing all these new agents being created from my team members now that they've experimented, and they're getting better and better at it.
And That was the purpose. I'm not saying that those agents they built are actually gonna go live on some cases. They just... It was just an experimentation with proof of concept. " Hey, we have these tools right now. I don't have to go out and buy them." Now, we need to... There are better tools that enhance things, so we need to go get those as well, because we're not experts in building them either. So it's something you have to ask yourself, build, borrow, bot, right? And [00:20:00] whether or not I'm gonna go get a bot for it or am I gonna build it myself or am I gonna borrow it from somewhere else, that's where we have to then think about what is it we really wanna do. So for example, AI coaching. We're looking at a third-party vendor to bring in for AI coaching, 'cause I'm not gonna build that out ~in, in, in,~ in Pot Copilot. And there are better tools out there that do it a lot better than I can that can integrate with all of our current tools. So with that, it means let's go buy that and, get our own bot that does it for us
Jeet Mukerji: Gotcha. And you said something interesting there around integration. ~What's,~ what do you see as like the limits a-around this experimentation? Is integrations and data access one of them? Are there other pieces?
Jason Desentz: Yes, integration it's like we just fixed this problem, and now we're going back to it. Meaning about 10, 15 years ago, if you were to- in HR as I was, you had an HRAS system that was your system of record. Now let's just use PeopleSoft as the example. It's not... It's called Oracle now 'cause they bought it, but, and then the original creators of PeopleSoft went off to create Workday.
So whatever. So I was working in PeopleSoft, but we also had Adobe for our LMS system. [00:21:00] We had ICIMS for our applicant tracking system. We actually had different systems for all those modules. Fast-forward 10, 15 years, the HRAS systems have said, "You know what? We need to be a one-stop shop."
So they went out, either developed it themselves, their own L&D LMS, or they went out and bought somebody, right? Or partnered with somebody and say, "Oh, we're gonna partner with Cornerstone. We're gonna partner with Skillsoft." And then on the ATS side, they're gonna be like, "We're either gonna enhance our own," or same thing, "We're gonna build it out." So what you saw was an average of eight systems in an HR world back in the day. You're down to three. Now here comes AI asking us to undo all that, and put all these things back on, and you're like I gotta build the API. I gotta make sure SSO is in place." And because again, you don't wanna have your user having 15 different passwords because I don't remember all mine, and I only have the...
I don't have that many compared to the average. So I think we have to be careful we're not going back and creating the same problem we just got out of. So yes, API [00:22:00] integration, SSO integration is so critical. And again, ~I think~ I think you and I have talked offline, but just to reiterate here, when I look at anything, there's two goalposts. I wanna make sure anything I put in place has little to zero disruption to the business, okay? The other goalpost is I want to improve employee experience. So if I'm gonna add all these bots on, I have to ask myself both two questions. How much of a disruption is that gonna create in the business, zero or little? And is it really gonna enhance the employee experience?
Jeet Mukerji: Yeah. And I had a follow-up question to that is ~y-~ your team are starting to experiment with these different agents, and you have one for payroll and you got one for time tracking. At what point does it become too many agents? Or how do you manage that governance
Jason Desentz: I haven't yet, to be honest with you, 'cause right now what you need to do is if you think about this is we're in our brainstorming session, which means throw it up on the wall. Throw it up on the wall. If it sticks, great. If it doesn't, okay, it fell off. We're not at that point yet.
Now, we've had a couple things where yeah, that probably won't work. But right now [00:23:00] we're just experimenting and I think playing, as I like to call it, but with real application. It has to be practical. It has to be simple. The worst thing any HR person can do is add another label, layer to another process. We have enough processes already we make people do, and I just I get nervous going, "Oh man, they gotta fill what out now? Oh man, that's another page." ~A- and~ it's true. The managers need to ~s-~ to do stuff. They need to go sell. They need to make revenue. They need to... we gotta make it simpler for them and more manageable.
So as an HR professional, I'm constantly thinking about, remember that's our first goalpost, little to zero disruption to the business
Jeet Mukerji: Yeah and I really like that you've~ y- you've~ couched what you're doing in a very specific phase where this is the experimentation and brainstorming phase. And yes, to your point, things need to be practical, but we're not looking for this production-ready thing that we're ready to ship out for people.
AI is moving really fast, and expectations are also moving quite quickly to our earlier discussion that, hey, this is a change like before, but the change is just accelerating. ~So is there a--~ And this [00:24:00] may be a tough question to answer, but is there a time when you think, "Okay, we now have to move from experimentation to production-ready.
Let's get serious about this thing that we built internally"?
Jason Desentz: Yeah, you can't be in play phase forever. But you can be play phase for new things always, the way I like to say it. But yes I think at some point, I think within the next year and a half, I, like I already said, we're already looking at bringing in a vendor now for AI coaching. So I think we're already on that track where we're saying, "Okay, we're ready as a company to try bit further than just us creating it.
Let's try a vendor now." And I think that's where, at least from an HR standpoint, I can't speak to my peers and what they're doing and they're also looking at their own different types of vendors as well. But I've also engaged my C-suite peers. So I've had the chief legal officer, the CIO and I are pretty tight right now on a lot of AI stuff happening in the Americas for Toshiba.
In fact, we're having a really deep discussion right now on governance of course, I'm more out there, and of course, my legal guy's probably more conservative. We [00:25:00] have a fun little banter back and forth in a good way. And then the CIO is all about cybersecurity, so it's interesting dynamic, but it's really great because we're having these really great dialogues and actually going over real things and scenarios and asking each other, "What if? What if?" Eventually we will come up with something that suits us. But the reality of it is it's we're at least all in it to know that it's important, and we're all in it to know that we need to keep moving forward. What that looks like, who knows? Because you're seeing the stop, go, stop, go in AI too. I was all gung-ho, to be honest with you, with AI recruiting, and I'm still skeptical because there's a couple lawsuits out there. I'm not saying this, this stuff isn't resolved already. I'm just... it puts a pause on, yes, it's going fast, but I think it's gonna be more following than leading sometimes in AI and as a practical tool versus the internet.
That was a I'll follow you phase as well. I don't feel like internet was everyone was jumping on. [00:26:00] And then ~when w-~ when the cloud came up, every IT person I know was like, "Nope, absolutely not. Your data's an absolutely not. PI information will be stored." Guess what? Everything's in the cloud
Jeet Mukerji: Yeah. Yeah that's super interesting. And what you mentioned kind of the discussions that you're having, it's like it's healthy tension that should exist, right? To make sure that we choose the right thing. And I'm kinda curious to hear your thoughts around like ~how do you-- W-~ what triggered that thought of okay, we should probably go and buy rather than build or bought it?
~Are you--~ Is the end goal "Hey, we're gonna end up with a checklist where we know we've tried these things, we've built internally, we've built up that knowledge, we know the gaps, now let's go and fill those gaps because they're not in the capability." How do you make that decision?
Jason Desentz: I'll be honest, at first I thought recruitment was it, and I was already shopping for looking at vendors, talking to vendors, looking at everything, and I had several meetings actually. but then when we did the event just this past year with my... And my head of talent acquisition says actually, look what I've come up with. And I can create interview guides. I can create I, [00:27:00] I can, all the conversations I have with all the candidates and actually build things out. I can say give me the top five candidates of the, of all the jobs that went over the last, this last year that I, that you think I should hire."
It just... We did some of that. So had I originally jumped on the bandwagon, which I was going to be honest with you I probably would've been happy, but I, now I'm missing on the opportunity to create something internally and just play with it ourselves. So I do think it depends is really to answer your question.
But I did know AI coaching was something that I was deeply interested in, but I needed to understand the different programs and how they all work, and they're not all the same. Some have you creating scenarios, that you think are ones people need to be coached on, and some just have thousands and thousands of data points that they've collected over the years with all these coaches that they use and then, and then it continuously learns still from you and all, all this stuff. I chose to actually abandon the, for right now, the AI coaching for recruitment in, in lieu of spending my money on potentially doing this proof of concept with AI coaching
Jeet Mukerji: Interesting. ~A-and~ we slightly [00:28:00] touched you mentioned the certain fears and there is a term that you've used before phobo.
Tell us a little bit more about that
Jason Desentz: Yes. Fear of being obsolete. I always mix it with FOMO because everyone's FOMO about AI. "Oh my gosh, I'm missing out. Oh my gosh." And I'm like, but then the other side is the employees are like, "Yeah, no thanks. . I don't wanna lose my job."
And that's a possibility, right? And then, like I said, some of these kids in college are booing because they... I actually know someone who I have a meeting with later this week is a friend of mine, and his son basically lost his job due to AI. Now, I don't know what that is yet.
I, it's a friend of mine I know through his organization, but he and I are talking later this week. And I'm curious to really find out. I'm curious how it happened, what'd they say. But again, like I just referenced the Ford Motor Company article where they recognized they made a mistake in hiring back.
Some places are even getting rid of their AI and going back to people, and just going, "You know what? This doesn't, . we didn't get the value out of it." It's like I'm not throwing names out there, but I'll throw one 'cause everyone knows it, but like Gartner. Gartner's great if you need the resources, but at some point, I got enough resources to get going.
[00:29:00] Do I really need to spend the money and keep Gartner around, or do I just rely on what I already know and just develop my folks moving forward and then bring them back when I need them? Same thing with AI. Could it be done the same way? I don't know
Jeet Mukerji: Yeah. We're living in an interesting time. And I also wanted to kinda touch on your stories around Copilot that we touched on. And I think I saw somewhere that you'd mentioned that, hey it's almost like buying a Ferrari but driving it in first gear, 'cause like you've given people these tools but then you haven't quite equipped them.
Yeah. But it sounds like you guys have gotten over that now and you're building agents and people are experimenting. What did it take to, to do that?
Jason Desentz: So we have this application called Toshiba University, which is run on an LMS system. And through that we recognized we needed to get people AI ready. What does that mean? That means we need to create base, a basic curriculum, like four or five classes I don't know, they're like 20 minutes in length each one.
Some are shorter, depends. And then we're creating new ones along the way. But we held these master classes where people could go online and take these classes. In fact, we even hired outside [00:30:00] training that could teach Microsoft Copilot, even get even deeper. But the reason we did that is we did that for all computer-based learners, so they have access to it.
Even the hourly can get online and do it. And we feel like you've gotta give instruction. It's you send your kids to driver's ed, you don't just throw them in the car and say, "Here are the keys. Good luck." That's a huge tool, right? They could damage things. They could hurt themselves. They could cause a lot more harm to others in different ways. And you could spend more money fixing your problem that you just created. So why are we not thinking about the same thing with AI? Why are we not getting our teams ready for when it is time for them to get in? And by the way, when you give someone a car, you don't give them a sports car first. You give them a four-cylinder, easy to go, easy to manage. You don't give them a car that has all these options to be more high-powered or, et cetera. Even a stick shift. That was what I was pointing about, like a Ferrari. It's when you give someone a Ferrari, can you imagine if you gave them a stick shift but never taught them how to drive a stick shift? It's comical. But anyways,
That was my point, is you gotta get people [00:31:00] ready and give them instruction before they actually start using
Jeet Mukerji: Yeah. There's a lot of steps it feels like,
With any technological change to make the most out of that technology.
Jason Desentz: doesn't have to be hard. It doesn't have to be hard. We look at this as so hard. It's not. There's so many res- go on YouTube. You can find many resources on YouTube and learn yourself. You don't have to wait for Toshiba University to come around and your company to create it on its own. I watch YouTube videos all the time, and just quick little snippets, they don't have to be too deep
Jeet Mukerji: I guess to make the most use of the tech that is around now, the AI,
it feels like more, more so than anything you need high agency curiosity, a learning mindset. Like all those things have not changed in order to progress and to be a high performer, right? So like I'm wondering kind of what are the key things that you think are like specifically different now?
Yes, the change is happening faster but it feels like the core skill set is the same. But is there something else that is now net new that we have to think about that wasn't there before?
Jason Desentz: Yes. We as [00:32:00] a society have gone, and I didn't come up with this, I give this credit to a guy who works for me. He said it and I was like, "Oh, I love that. I'm writing it down." I have a board on my wall that I write down phrases either that I hear or I say and I'm like, "Oh, that's brilliant. I gotta remember that." He had this phrase once and he was in whatever context, but I loved it. It was, he went from "We've gone as a society from curious to cautious." We are so afraid take risks where once we were known for that, especially in the US. We're, heck, we were sending guys up into space not sure if they're gonna come back. That's brave. That's bold. That's courageous. Now we got so concerned over, and I'm not trying to bash on Gen Z or any lower generation 'cause I have two Gen Z boys, 23 and 21 but we gave fourth place ribbons to everybody. Why? 'Cause we didn't want them to feel left out or whatever this feeling side of things are, which is important, , that became cautious, right?
That's an example of being too cautious and letting people fail or say if you wanna be second place, third place, second place you gotta try a little harder." I even heard at one [00:33:00] point England was considering not playing because they didn't care about the bronze. I'm like, I get it. I don't know if you're a Talladega Nights guy, but I remember Ricky Bobby's dad said, "If you're not first, you're last." And it's I don't think that... but I also, we miss, there's a part of us that misses the drive, and I do believe that is part of the problem, is people are so cautious, they're like you go. No." My wife always, and I always say this a lot so she laughs but she had this T-shirt, 'cause I always talk about change.
So I saw this T-shirt the other day. It said "I love change. You go first." That's the curious to cautious mentality, right? And I like to say, and there's another phrase I say to people is like, how come we started off life as question marks but end as periods? We get boxed in. So we need to figure out a way to just reset and try. The old adage, it's better to ask for forgiveness than permission. But you need to be able to put yourself out there, and yeah, there's gonna be risk. You could fail. And if you're so afraid of failing, then you really have to ask yourself, "And are you [00:34:00] the right person to try this out? Shouldn't somebody else do it who has more confidence, at least in knowing that they'll be okay after they fail, if they do fail?"
They may win. We don't win at everything. And all of your people in life that has succeeded, ask them, "Did you always succeed from the beginning?" Every single one is gonna tell you how all about their failures
Jeet Mukerji: Totally. I love that. And I'm going to re-watch Tallia Daganites again because that's that's quite a film. It sounds like you've created a really great culture at at Toshiba Americas where people are-- people have that space to experiment.
And it's-- it feels safe and you can progress with that forward.
And it feels like the only way to progress in this is to create that space first and foremost, and then equip them.
So Jason, before we wrap up any kind of final thoughts that you wanna leave someone with who's in the middle of process optimization? You talked about Lean Six Sigma and those kind of pieces in this new world of AI
Jason Desentz: Yeah. I would say find as many groups or people who are already in this space, thinking about the space, connect with people who are already working in this space, 'cause you don't have to reinvent [00:35:00] everything from scratch. My advice that I'm learning, which is why I spend a lot of time conversing with people whether it's, "Oh, that's interesting."
I'll even do it at the grocery store if I see someone and I see something interesting. It's silly, but I'm curious. Again, I got that curious mindset. Don't be afraid. Have, have, a little bit more courage to ask questions more about it, and find mentors. Go online, read, listen to podcasts. Do whatever you can to educate yourself first and foremost to get over some of the fear, and I think a lot of the fear is just not knowing. That's it. I think once people get over that, it's like again, people were afraid to get on the internet. Now look at us. It's everywhere, all day, every day, and it's in our, we're on our phones, man. So I am more optimistic we'll get through this as a society, and it'll be just about five years from now we'll go back and laugh at these conversations
Jeet Mukerji: Yeah. We'll do another podcast in five years' time, and hopefully many more in between that time, and we'll see the change.
Jason Desentz: There we go.
Jeet Mukerji: Courage and curiosity, that's what [00:36:00] I'm taking away from this. Thank you, Jason.
Love that. Thank you for joining us on the Workhouse Podcast.
And to everyone listening, we will catch you on the next one