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AI is reshaping leadership, strategy, and the very role of HR. In each episode, the host Barb Bidan explores how AI drives innovation and leadership in HR with actionable insights for the future of work.
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The Human Element - L. David Kingsley
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INTRO: [00:00:00] Welcome to The Human Element, presented by Wisq. I'm your host, Barb Bidan, and in each episode, I sit down with CHROs and senior HR leaders to explore how AI, innovation, and human insight are reshaping the future of HR. We'll explore how technology is reshaping leadership, strategy, and the role of HR by sharing candid stories, practical ideas, and strategic perspectives to help you shape the future.
The Human Element is brought to you by Wisq, the leader in agentic HR and creator of Harper, the world's first AI HR generalist. Learn how Harper can resolve up to 80% of routine HR tasks autonomously. Learn more about Wisq at wisq.com.
Barb Bidan: Today my guest is L. David Kingsley, chief people officer at Illumio. David is not a people leader who arrived at technology from the outside. His career started with the hard version of technology change in large [00:01:00] organizations with complex systems, messy adoption, and the real work of getting people to operate differently when the tools, processes, and expectations around them have changed.
That foundation runs throughout the rest of his career. David has led people functions at MuleSoft, Velocity, Alteryx, Intercom, and now Illumio, also having held senior HR leadership roles at significant scale while at Salesforce. So it's a pretty remarkable run of companies that David has been in where growth, product, automation, and organizational change were not side topics, they were the focus.
That makes David a very good person to talk to right now and I am so excited to have you on the show, David. Thank you for joining me.
L. David Kingsley: Barb, thanks for having me. It's an honor and a pleasure, and I'm just excited to be able to connect with your audience, your listeners, of whom I am one of other chief people officers and people practitioners as all of us kind of share ideas and insights and stories. I really believe that our job as people is to help each other up the mountain.
And folks like you [00:02:00] and the Human Element podcast they're helping us do that, so thank you for that.
Barb Bidan: Of course, and you giving your time helps us to do the same. Our peers like it when we keep it real on the show keep it practical share sort of the good, the bad, and the ugly. So I appreciate your willingness to do that. I know David, that you came to HR through leading technology change at the earlier stages of your career, right?
I'm guessing that in that you would've watched organizations struggle, right? To adopt new systems absorb change, that kind of thing. When you look at the transitions that we're going through now with AI transformation, what feels genuinely new and what feels like basically the things that you've seen throughout your career whenever organizations are trying to adopt something new?
L. David Kingsley: Yeah when I think back on my career, I still describe myself as an analyst who got old and lost his hair. I still think that I'm like, 23 years old, early in my career, just starting out. And the advantage of having been doing this for a few years is I've seen a number of the evolutions and the shifts and the [00:03:00] changes.
One of the things I think that is a key takeaway for me is that there's never been a time of no change. And so no matter how change-y it feels at the given moment, and it certainly feels very change-y right now we've been through these evolutions before. And I'll rewind the clock back to the late '90s when I was getting my start, and I was with Accenture.
I was an SI. We were implementing PeopleSoft systems. And back then, when we were getting clients on these new systems coming off of mainframes, literally mainframes and that kind of thing, the architecture was still two-tier. You were still having to load... I was loading CD-ROMs on client computers to get the software created and booted up from an execution file, right?
And while the internet was, there, it was still nascent. And then we moved to this three-tier architecture, which is what we know today, where it's you open a browser window and you do all of your work. That was not then. I do remember working with clients back then, though, and the look on their faces.
They were saying to me "Oh my gosh, how am I [00:04:00] gonna survive? This is nothing like I've ever done before. What do you mean this all happens in real time? What do you mean the inventory's gonna change without me knowing?" The trepidation that many people, many of us felt in those first waves of change, early days of the internet, and call the mid, mid-'90s to as we got into the 2000s and the dot-com, et cetera this is another of those waves that we're in right now in terms of AI.
Now, I think it is a little turbocharged. This change wave ate its Wheaties. This one's on high. So I'm very aware of that and my heart goes out to everybody who's going through this change journey right now to include my own colleagues and myself to some extent as well.
Barb Bidan: 100%, right? The reminder, though, that we have done things like this before and while this feels a little different, there are things that feel the same. So you've led in technology-based organizations, right? Five tech companies in a row. What has being in that environment taught you about how transformation actually shows up inside a [00:05:00] business?
Even with respect maybe to some of our colleagues who maybe are not working in tech-first companies and maybe feeling this more more acutely. What has being in those environments taught you?
L. David Kingsley: Yeah, I think one of the things that I always try and apply, a lens I always try and apply is who is the end customer of our company or organization? And that doesn't matter if you're a SaaS company, a cybersecurity company like we are here at Illumio, or you're a manufacturing, high tech, bio, pharma, you name it.
At the end of the day, all of us have customers. Or if you're in a government or a nonprofit organization, you have stakeholders or constituents or shareholders. When we think about what is the end customer expecting today and then work backwards from that, I think that really helps to frame and give us a sense of where we are in the movie inside the organization.
And so in these technology companies, most of the time I'm in enterprise SaaS, most of our customers are other enterprise companies. Starting with what are they asking from us, and then what is the degree of change required in our business to meet [00:06:00] or exceed those new expectations? I think sometimes we get really introverted inside an organization looking at our own selves saying "We need to do this because it's happening in the organization."
And then we take a pause and we go back and we say "What does the end customer need? Is that really driving the change that's required?" And sometimes I think what that helps with is to just give us all a brief moment of pause to say, "Is this thing that we're doing truly critical or is it something that someone baked up over the weekend?"
Executives are famous for this, right? We come in Monday morning, we say, "Okay, folks, I got this great idea I had over the weekend." And the whole team goes, "Do what?" They're like, "What? Why are we doing this, boss?" And it's because
Barb Bidan: why now? All
of
L. David Kingsley: baking this up in my own head over a cup of coffee on Saturday morning.
We come in to the office on Monday and we all get together and we put this what does this mean for the customer lens on it, and all of a sudden it contextualizes a lot of things. And so I think that's the first thing I try and keep in mind is anytime we're going through any type of evolution or change, whether it's something as simple as, a policy inside an organization that HR people know and [00:07:00] love or it's a broad technology change in how we run the company, it all comes back to how does this drive value for the end customer?
And in our case at Illumio, it's how are we helping our customers stop breaches from becoming cyber disasters? If what we're doing is in service to that, then that's a good thing. If it's not in service to that, it's probably in service to something internal and we probably should rethink it.
Barb Bidan: Could not agree more. Now I, this one might, I feel like this question might be a bit of a stumper, so we'll see. But my-- I was thinking that Salesforce might be a great example here, right? What I would picture as you were leading HR operations at scale, right? But the business was still obviously growing significantly at that time, and you would've been thinking about automation at that time, maybe not AI in the sense we're thinking about it now.
But I feel like this is maybe, a story that relates to where we are now. Are there any places where in those days of like, how do we automate at scale, where you thought that automation would be helpful, but it actually [00:08:00] created work that people didn't expect, and maybe you reverted on it?
I don't know if that... are you feeling that moment in the, in AI where we're like, we're trying it on in places, and we're like, "Oh, helped there, didn't help there," right? That kind of thing. And I'm curious if there's some old lessons from the earlier days of like just automating for scale that we could like maybe learn from.
L. David Kingsley: Yeah I think there are definitely some of those lessons. And I did a little bit of research before you and I jumped on, Barb, and I'm no anthropologist, but I can tell you this, that the Homo sapiens, we in our current manifestation of human beings, we've been around in this way for about 300,000 years, give or take, right?
The human brain last I checked, in the last nine months did not change as much as we maybe think it did. We've been roughly the same kind of brain physiological manifestation for about 300,000 years. So the idea that all of a sudden human beings overnight, or what feels like overnight in the face of obviously this AI explosion, have changed that dramatically, I think is inaccurate.
I think we are still the same [00:09:00] human beings that we were a year ago or two years ago when AI was still machine learning. And we've been talking about machine learning for a number of years, and we've had the principles of it. Now obviously it's applied at a new massive scale. I think sometimes, especially with these technologies that are now at our hands, and some of them are free or low cost in these organizations, we all of a sudden think we're gonna automate our way out of our humanity And at the end of the day, I think human beings, people, still want to interact with other human beings and people for some of the most critical things.
Now, when I wanna know the pair of sunglasses I bought on Gilt Groupe last week, don't tell my wife they were on sale, it was like 80% off, but I need some new sunnies. If I wanna know the status of that shipment, I don't need to call someone in a call center and say, "Where's my shipment?" I want to interact with a chatbot or, an automated tool.
That's a simple transactional thing. If I wanna talk about my career journey and how I'm growing as a [00:10:00] leader, I probably want to talk to a person, a human being. Now, there are some really cool, interesting technologies out there that are doing automated coaching as well, and I love those also, that they can kinda help you almost like thinking about going to the gym, right?
I don't need someone to hand me the weights at the gym every single time. I can grab onto a machine, move the weights, exercise my body, that's great. But sometimes I want a trainer there who's saying, "David, make sure you hold your back this way or you've got a late 40-year-old back, you're gonna throw it out."
I need someone to be there to coach me. I need that human element. And so I think it's that moment for us to look at what is able to be automated that doesn't take away from the human experience, and then what are those things that truly are human that allow us to be our fullest manifestations of ourselves to pull back from our ancient Greek our teleology, what helps us to really flourish?
We gotta make sure that we're being thoughtful about that, and it's possible that we in HR could over-automate everything. And there have been some pretty spicy takes [00:11:00] out there where I can't remember the name of the company, I'm glad I forgot it, the CEO just fired all the HR people. He's like, "We don't need them anymore.
We're just gonna use these AI things." Now, I don't know where that company is today. I can certainly tell you they're not above the fold in The Wall Street Journal for the right reasons. We still need people to interact with human beings to identify, is this person right for our company? Are they gonna be a culture add for our team?
How are they doing at setting their goals? Are they feeling like they're thriving? Again, 300,000 years of Homo sapiens did not change overnight, and we've gotta be mindful of that.
Barb Bidan: Completely. And so I'm guessing that some of these practicalities are things that you are working through with your team at Illumio right now. So what does AI adoption look like right now inside your people function? And how are you making those distinctions between what stays human and what must be human, and where are the AI or automation opportunities?
L. David Kingsley: I'll rewind the clock back to September, October last year. I asked our people team, everybody on the team to [00:12:00] go ahead and we use Microsoft, we have Microsoft Copilot Cowork, and I asked everybody to create their own agent. And this was pretty early days in, in doing this in terms of the technology just being released, and it was not perfect.
It still hallucinated a good bit. It wasn't always giving you exactly what you thought you were gonna get out of it. But I said, "I want everybody to create an agent, and you have to give your agent a name." And they all looked at me like, "What?" And I said, "And it has to be a cheeky name." And I said, "And I am the arbiter of cheekiness, so I'll decide if your name is cheeky enough and if it's creative enough."
And so I had people coming up with these creative names for their agents, and I'll spill the tea on one of them, my-- one of my favorite ones. Our head of compensation, Ronnie, his agent is called LL Coolpay, and it looks like LL Cool J with the
Barb Bidan: I
L. David Kingsley: chain and the hat and the whole thing, and he's LL Coolpay.
And the reason I did that, I asked everybody to give their agent a name, is because I wanted to personalize that, and I wanted to instantiate in our minds that these tools ultimately work for us. Now, that was before, the [00:13:00] Workdays of the world came out and said we can put these agents, into Workday as having a persona, et cetera.
So I think our team did a really nice job of being on the front end of that, where we gave these agents a name. We were very descriptive about what they were going to do for us and the parameters we were gonna use for their roles in our team. So I give all credit to the people team here at Illumio that we've been doing that now for, gonna be going on a year here in the fall, that we've been thinking very thoughtfully about what are we gonna use these agents for?
What do they do for us? What will they not do for us? And let's make sure we're taking into account the voice of the customer, who in our case is our employee, and what do they want from us? If someone wants to talk about their maternity leave, they probably don't wanna talk to an agent, to a chatbot. They probably wanna talk to a human being, especially if it's someone who's gonna be a first-time expectant parent.
That person has a lot of things going through their head, their heart, their mind, that they're thinking about, "What's this gonna be like for me?" That is not a moment where I [00:14:00] wanna take that down to a pennies per interaction, rationalized cost. At that moment, I wanna be there for that Illumineer, that employee, for them to talk about what's going on in their world and how we're gonna support them through this massive point in their life, their, the change journey they're gonna be going through.
So we defined very carefully what are those things that are in scope and what are those things that are out of scope, and as we're deploying more and more of this technology, we're being really thoughtful about that and taking input and feedback from our customers, from our stakeholders, to say, "How's this working for you?
Is this making your life easier or harder?" Now, Barb, no one wakes up in the morning and says, "You know what? I hope I spend eight hours today just talking to HR. It's my best part of my day." Nobody gets up and says that. Generally, when they need something from the people team, they have a need, they wanna get their answer, they wanna get back to work, and so our job is to be responsive to that.
Barb Bidan: Do you recall after your team finished naming their agents what some of the first ideas were in terms of things that, that various [00:15:00] folks thought that their agents, or that they would like their agents to handle for them?
L. David Kingsley: Yeah. One of the ones that we've been really using it a lot for is developing our workforce plan. And I know that there are some chief people officers right now who are maybe listening to this going, "Yep, been working on the workforce plan myself." And across whatever, six or eight companies now for me, I've never developed a perfect workforce plan because it is inherently flawed from the start because the point you push publish, it's already outdated.
The most important point is that you're doing it. You're being thoughtful with your leaders about how are we thinking about developing and growing the organization. And so our HR business partner team used their agents to help build out the framework for our workforce planning process and figuring out where can we use the agents to do a lot of the upfront work that normally would've taken time meeting with the clients, that we would start from 0% or 5%.
We can actually go to the clients and we can start with, call it 65% or 70% of a solution to say, "Hey, we've taken into account all these different inputs [00:16:00] and elements of your organization, and now we'd like you to react to it and help us build from there." So it was when you're a kid and you're getting a push down the hill on your bike, and it just-- we set it in motion that allowed us to get some velocity going that then made better use of our clients' time.
Barb Bidan: Total. And prior to that, we would've spent 85% of our time gathering and coordinating all of that information that you made the sort of starting input. We would've invested a bunch of time up front. Now we can actually have the time and the valuable discussion with the client.
Do you feel like it's improved or is starting to improve the quality of the conversations that your team's having with leaders about their workforce plan?
L. David Kingsley: I think it's qu- it's influencing the quality and the velocity. And here at Illumio, we are, are-- we have a corporate cheer. The cheer is one, two, three onwards. And the rocket emoji is our most used emoji in the company. And so we're all about this concept of speed and how we're gonna go faster.
And so thinking about what is the cycle time to be [00:17:00] able to run these various processes, I know that the internal clients appreciate that, but the teams also like it. They say, "Look, I can get through this work faster," because what we used to call at MuleSoft donkey work, just the hard grind work. And that was how MuleSoft came up with the name, that it was making the donkey work easier.
And so AI is now here to do that as well. It's to make the hard work easier, especially the stuff that just used to kinda grind through, where it was one by one working through a document. Now we got a starting point that can happen a lot faster, that makes better use of our team's time, makes better use of the client's time as well.
Barb Bidan: Yep. And so we started on some of the first things that your team touched. What about some of the harder things? The things that you or your team may know that there's an opportunity here for automation, AI, et cetera but that you're still wrestling with and trying to figure out how to really leverage AI in the ways that you would like.
Maybe like the half-solved things
L. David Kingsley: Yeah, the-- I'll even go to a meta level on that. The half solve for us, and we have a lot of these conversations about what is AI [00:18:00] in the organization and in organizations more broadly, is there's now a tendency that I produce something with AI very quickly and I put it out to the world, right?
My boss says, "Hey, I wanna see this thing," and that's 8:00 a.m. on a Monday. I publish it by 8:45 on the Monday, and then it's out in the wild. I was reading something recently somebody wrote on LinkedIn, which is my version of Instagram. And they said "The amount of time it takes to consume a work product should never be more time than it took to produce it."
So if it takes 30 minutes to read that document, but I produced it in five minutes using AI, I'm being disrespectful to my audience. And that really caught me when I read that. I thought, "That is really profound," because it's easy to produce a deliverable these days with AI, but then I'm expecting my audience to really spend time digesting it, understanding it, applying it, et cetera.
If I weren't willing to spend the time on the front end, that's disrespectful to them as an audience or as a client or as a customer. [00:19:00] And so one of the things that we're really talking with inside the people team right now is how do we help our workforce make sense of how do you use AI in a responsible way to get your work product started, to QA it, to amplify it, to accelerate it, and at the same time make sure that it's still yours?
And I'm hypothesizing that at some point we're gonna have some type of ethical use thing that's gonna come where people are going to be asked either really or figuratively to basically sign this thing and say, "I produced this product using AI. I've reviewed it, and I stand by every word, and I own it myself."
Right now, it's getting a little too easy to just, again, hear from the boss 8:00 on a Monday morning, crank something out by 8:30, and put it out to the world. And it's like you go back to it on Friday and you say, "Hey, did-- this third paragraph, I'm not really sure how this fits into this other thing." And the person goes, "Oh, yeah."
Whereas previously, if I had gone to that... someone had said that, they would've said, "Oh yeah here's what I was [00:20:00] thinking when I wrote that." And it's a little bit of a tell now when people go "oh, okay."
Barb Bidan: Oh, where does it say that? I've heard that definitely
L. David Kingsley: Did you really produce this, or was this something that was generated for you and you called it yours and published it and called it good and moved on to the next thing?
So there's this tendency to almost get over our skis with the speed with this technology, 'cause it's getting really good. The hallucinations that it used to have, the weird sentence structure, bringing in odd artifacts, those are pretty much gone. All credit to these companies and these models they're building.
They're doing really well. Then the question again goes back to we're still human beings interacting with and serving other human beings. Let's make sure that we're honoring that process and that interaction. That comes with being really thoughtful and really being owners of the words and the documents and deliverables that we're putting out.
Barb Bidan: Yeah, that sounds this very thing, right? Of producing sort of a high volume of work and then essentially you're pushing your work downstream to your audience in a way that is the disrespectful piece. And it's that to me was [00:21:00] almost what I was getting at when, like thinking of the early days of automation.
Like what are the things that we thought would make us go faster and then they really didn't? And I think this is one of those things, where just like pumping out like a volume of work that like sounds good maybe, or you think it sounds good 'cause you haven't read it fully. And then kinda pushing that downstream and making it work for others, you are speeding up one part of the process to create bottlenecks elsewhere, right?
Which is let's not make that mistake. I hadn't read that comment on LinkedIn, but that's, that actually does really resonate with me as well.
L. David Kingsley: I was just gonna say that one thing I'm mindful of is, let's say I produce that document, I send it around. So it's AI produced, it gets sent around, my audience reads it with their AI readers, and then we all get in the meeting to talk about it. And
Barb Bidan: doing the work? Yeah,
L. David Kingsley: everyone goes, so the loop is then not even a loop, it's just a bleh, that we haven't actually done anything together.
We've made something, we've had our AI review something, maybe our AI's given us questions to ask about it. It's kinda like going to book club and never having read the book. [00:22:00] You can sit there and, sip your Chardonnay, but it's probably not gonna be a very good book club.
Barb Bidan: There's so much of this talk happening in recruiting spaces right now, I feel like, right? It's like candid. I-- and I'm doing a lot of e- exec and leadership coaching right now, and I'm hearing that a lot, right? Am I using AI to game the system with my resume and my application so that an AI reader can read my application and what, what exactly is happening here?
So I think we need to be thoughtful in those places. So let me shift us a little bit to something in prep for the show. I read something about your philosophy. And your people philosophy names things like human connection, operational excellence and AI-enabled innovation. So those definitely sound aligned but potentially in some form of tension with each other when you have to make real decisions.
So where do those priorities actually fight with each other or even create positive tension with
L. David Kingsley: Yeah, I think tension is the right word to use, and I think there should be a healthy tension when we're thinking about what are our priorities and how do we evaluate them. And I think what [00:23:00] it goes back to is have we set very clearly our goals in the organization? Salesforce is famous for using something called a V2MOM, which is vision, values, methods, obstacles, and measures.
And our people team here at Illumio we also use the V2MOM to help frame our thinking. And if we've not spent the time on the front end of our work or of our year or of our project to really define what does success look like for this thing, whether it's for the meeting or for the initiative or for the year, when we get to a decision we're trying to make, we may sub-optimize in terms of where we're putting our energy.
Are we putting the wood behind the right arrows? And so taking the time up front to spend, 20 minutes of the hour to say, "What does success look like?" really helps the other 40 minutes be really valuable. I think there's a tendency sometimes to jump right in and say, "Okay, let's just start going," and then you get halfway through the project or the meeting or the whatever and you're like, "Oh, [00:24:00] we're in Dubuque and we were trying to go to Chicago."
It's like yeah, you went west. You started out in New York, but you're nowhere near where you thought you were gonna be. So I think just spending the time to define that, or as leaders, are we making space for our people to define that? And then are we inspecting that? Are we saying let's talk about how you're defining success for this," for two reasons.
One, has the team spent the time investing to know what they're aiming at? And second, and maybe even more importantly, how do I as a leader in a position of service show up to that team or that organization in a way that helps them? If they've not defined success, I jump in, "Here I am, Mr. Leader Man, coming in here, duh-duh-duh-duh-duh," and I'm jumping in to help, and I'm helping in a sub-optimized way, or worse, in a way that's actually antithetical to what the team's trying to accomplish because I never took the time to ask the question.
So again, this is not, like super forward-leaning, innovative, world-shattering thinking. This is a lot of revisitation of what are the [00:25:00] back to basics about how do we run solid organizations that are thinking about what does the customer or the stakeholder need? Where are we today in that journey?
What are the options we can take to get there? How will we know when we've succeeded? And then who's got which roles and responsibilities to go and move out on this? This is kind of 101, and I'm letting a little bit of my consulting roots show here, that using a hypothesis-driven approach, I think humbly submitted is still a very good way to tackle these things.
Regardless of the fact that now we have some really amazing tools to use, the fundamentals of driving valuable, positive, lasting, impactful change in organizations, that has not changed.
Barb Bidan: Yeah, and ul-ultimately the, at the core, I think of what you're saying is when you get clear on the destination, right? When you take the time to get clear on the result that you are aiming for the decisions along the way are easier, right? Because you realize along the way when you've taken a wrong turn and you're in Dubuque instead of on your [00:26:00] way to Chicago, for example, right?
But if you are not clear on where you are headed, you're also not clear when you're in Dubuque that you're not supposed to be there, right? And and that's conceptually, how I would connect that. You spent a ton of time working through change as we've been talking about.
And I think you've also worked across a varied areas of tech, right? So ERP, CRM, cloud-based systems, AI. What do you think that the vendors that are operating in this space, maybe even the vendors that are selling to us as CHROs, what are they underestimating sometimes about how organizations actually absorb the change associated with like implementing new technology, let's say?
L. David Kingsley: Yeah, I think that where they are right now, and I had a meeting with a vendor the other day who shall remain nameless, and I gave them some very candid feedback about where their product is in the life cycle. And I didn't do that to be mean-spirited. I did that to say genuinely, "I don't know if y'all are getting voice of the customer back to your product teams."
I think the tendency, because of how [00:27:00] quickly we can push product out now into the market, there's this tendency to have speed over quality. And are we really stopping to ask for feedback and hear the voice of the customer? So the vendors that are doing well, I think, are taking the time to still run the plays of customer advisory boards, listening to the customers, asking for feedback, getting good betas out there to get some customer feedback on, and saying, "Not only how do you like this, but tell me how this drives value in your business." you stop to ask that question, and we try and do that in Illumio also. We talk about our core values. We have three of them. Our first value is customer first always, and that is always gonna be our North Star. We're gonna use the voice of the customer to tell us how we're doing and where we are in the movie.
So the vendors that are taking time to do that I think have a better shot at putting something out there that's gonna be lasting in value add versus just pump out as much whiz-bang stuff with as many buttons and tools and dangly bits on it as they can. There's a tendency to do that, and it's like this, "Oh, I've gotta push [00:28:00] more stuff out" race versus, "I've gotta stay focused on helping my customer be successful."
At the end of the day, those are the vendors who are going to win the day. Now, there are gonna be some that'll surge ahead because they have the new flash in the pan thing. That's great. They'll get some near-term contracts. They'll close some deals. Guess what? They won't renew or they'll attrit licenses because it doesn't actually drive value.
Those folks can have their flash in the sun. I wanna partner with vendors who are spending the time to do the work, put the work in, and listen to the voice of their customer, and ship the things that are truly adding value.
Barb Bidan: Yeah. Go figure that user-centered design still works, right? And if you're not keeping your user at the center of what you're designing, you're just designing kind of bad products faster, to be honest with you. So I think I could talk to you all day honestly, about a variety of these topics.
I'm gonna point us towards the future and kinda get your crystal ball reading a little bit as we kinda head into the home stretch here. So in three years, five years take your pick what [00:29:00] does the people function look like in a company like Illumio when we've got more of the good form of AI running some of the donkey work, even though I know I'm cross, I'm mixing my companies here.
But when the AI's doing the donkey work, what are we doing instead?
L. David Kingsley: Yeah. I think that there's been much ink spilled on the future of HR in the face of AI, and some of them go from the, as we said earlier, the extreme example to there will be no HR five years from now all the way to the other extreme that we're gonna need HR now than more than ever.
I think I would fall on the right-hand side of the middle of that spectrum, that I think HR teams are going to be of similar size and shape as they are today. We're just gonna be doing pretty significantly different work. And as I'm sure any talent acquisition professional will say right now, the use of some of the scheduling technologies, et cetera, we don't need as many recruiting coordinators as we used to need.
However, we do need great talent advisors who are talking with [00:30:00] clients to understand where they're trying to take their business, and then really doing great reviews of candidates in the marketplace to say, "Are we being really precise in how we're thinking about recruiting for this talent?" I'm seeing in our business right now, we're using a lot more outbound than we had relied on before.
I think previously it was all about just put your thing out there and get a bunch of inbound, and then we have all these AI tools that can screen the resumes and they'll surface the ones to the top. I was talking with our chief product officer the other day, Mario, and as a chief product officer would, he actually has the API key for our ATS, and he's running the candidates through his own AI that he built to look for what are the candidates that maybe some of the AI screening tools missed that we didn't actually talk to.
And I love the hypothesis of that, of saying we're not always gonna be perfect. And again, that's where the human element comes in. Are we applying good human judgment to talk with the clients, understand what we're trying to build the, in the teams, and then are we looking at the talent market, and then are we going [00:31:00] out to actually prosecute that?
I think what we're gonna see is a lot more outbound recruiting in a real human way than just relying on the spray and pray resume dumps that... And we've all seen this, right? You launch a job on Monday. By Tuesday, you've got 4,000 resumes. And it's like, how on earth am I gonna sort through all of this?
So it goes a little bit back to spending the time to build the network, to nurture the network, to know who's who in that space, where the great talent is, building and managing those relationships so that when the need aligns with the availability, we can make it happen. So I think that's in the talent space.
On the HR business partner space, I'll speak to that just for a minute. I think we're gonna see a lot more of the advisory work that HR business partners get to do with their clients to talk about how's your organization doing? How are your leaders leading? How are your people showing up? And that's a very person-based conversation about how are you maximizing the utility of your organization, which means the HR business partners aren't gonna be spending time [00:32:00] pulling reports from the HRIS and running pivot tables anymore.
That stuff is gonna be served up to them automatically 8:00 a.m. Monday. They get their thing, and they can then start talking about what's going on in the data versus let me spend the first half of my week pulling the data, understanding it, making sure it makes sense, cleaning it, et cetera. They can go right into the second part, which if you talk to any HRBP, they're in this business 'cause they like working with clients, not because they like pulling spreadsheets.
Now, I do 'cause I'm a data nerd. I like talking to clients more
On the operations side, similarly, a lot of the work that had to be done operations-wise where it was one in, one out processing different forms and those kind of things, that's then gonna go away whereby we can be spending more time in the human interactions with people. Back to my example of someone's going on maternity leave.
They wanna have a live in-person conversation. It's when you go to the doctor's office. We've all been to the doctor's office where you know that doctor is back to back and they have seven minutes, and six minutes and 30 seconds hits, and they're like, "Okay, David, I hope you're well.
Thank you. Goodbye." [00:33:00] Versus, "Can you spend a half an hour and actually connect with me as your patient or connect with me as your client?" So I think operations teams are gonna get to do that more and more. And again, I think people who get into HR, into people operations, they didn't get into it because they like pushing buttons inside of an automated information system.
They got into it 'cause they want to help people do the best work of their careers and thrive in organizations.
Barb Bidan: I love that future for all of us, and I would love to see any patterns your chief product officer is noticing in missed signal from some of the early processing that ATSs are doing on candidates. 'Cause I do think that there's some advanced thinking there that people who know talent are gonna be able to ask better questions than I think some of the ATSs are asking right now.
So I'm super curious about that, so I'm, I may follow up with you on that one offline. So because our listeners will not listen to a three-hour-long podcast, I'm sadly gonna bring us to the end, 'cause I really could keep going here. But let me give you a couple of quick lightning round questions to [00:34:00] bring us to a close.
What is one sort of no-brainer agent that your team is running at Illumio that you'd recommend to a CPO who maybe hasn't really gotten started down the path to go ahead and consider deploying something like this first?
L. David Kingsley: I think that I would be remiss if I said one over the others because I think there's so many good models out there. It depends on whatever your company has chosen. I think whatever one that is, m- my answer is go use it. And just if you think about who are the people that are thriving with AI right now, they are people who embrace creativity.
And so if you as a chief people officer, as a people leader, can encourage your team to embrace their creative side in a way that you would think of someone walking into a craft room, and it's like there's buttons and sequins and fabric and everything at your disposal, go be creative. Think and ideate in a big way without constraints.
That's even more important than which tool you use right now
Barb Bidan: Agreed. So what to, next question is what do [00:35:00] 25 years of organizational change management teach you that you think a machine will never be able to learn?
L. David Kingsley: Everyone absorbs and adapts to change in their own way, and if we fail to spend the time with them at the individual level, they will get left behind, whether they know they've been left behind or they tell you or not. And our job as people leaders is to bring everyone along for the journey, not only the people that get it quickly.
So spend the time, take the extra few moments to make sure everyone's on the bus with you, not dangling off the back and, hopefully gonna hang on. Bring everyone along for the ride. We hired these people for a reason. We owe it to them to help them come along this journey and give them the tools they need to make it.
If they're ready and willing and able and they've got, the will to do it, our job is then to help them with the skills and to handle the hills.
Barb Bidan: Awesome. So let me give you one more. And what is one company or person, HR leader out there, [00:36:00] this is an opportunity for you to give a shout-out to someone. One person or company whose practices, people practices and how they're talking about AI within the world or within their team or organization.
Someone that you respect what that they are doing, and you think every CHRO should be paying attention to, watching this company or person
L. David Kingsley: It's interesting. I was thinking back to the first part of my career back to Accenture when I was in consulting. There's a lot that has been said around what is the future of consulting in the face of AI, and I was listening to Julie Sweet, the CEO of Accenture, the other day.
She did a, an interview, and she was talking about how re-grounding ourselves in client value creation for her consulting firm, but also I think for all of us in the people business, of how are we driving value for our customers or our clients, our internal stakeholders? Re-grounding ourselves in that in the face of AI is super important because we can, again, produce a lot of stuff really quickly that may or may not be truly helpful for our clients.
I thought that was really [00:37:00] thoughtful of Julie to say, and she's obviously got, a multi-hundred-thousand-person global company that she's challenging all of them to make sure they're staying focused on that, even in the face of massive technology change. So I loved hearing that and all credit to my alma mater for it
Barb Bidan: Awesome. So I'm gonna try and do justice to what we just talked about for the last little bit. I admit I have more things written down than I'm gonna get to cover, so I think I had six written down by the time we were at question two. A couple of my takeaways. So that just means that listeners are gonna get a lot more from this episode than what I recap here.
The first takeaway was the reminder that we have done this before, right? And we've always felt I'm not gonna make it through, but we have 300,000 years of human history that show that we do always make it through. So I liked that reminder off the top. The idea of giving your team a cool experiment.
So I overgeneralized your idea around the agents, but I think what you did there was you made it fun at the outset. The creating your own agent, and you name it. And the idea there was, like, that tieback [00:38:00] and that reminder to we create these agents. We are the ones who give the agents their instructions, right?
I liked how that, that created that tie for your team, but also kept it fun. And so that's a great way for leaders who are thinking about getting started to kinda experiment in a fun way with your team that's a little bit sticky. And I really did love the comment about being if the amount of time that you consume to produce a work product cannot be less than the amount of time that it is going to take the reader of that work product to consume it because that is disrespectful to your audience.
And then really who's doing the work. I know you, you caught that from someone who's an influencer to you on LinkedIn, but I think re-sharing it here is something that I took away. And so I do, though David, always wanna leave our guests with the final word. For the peer of ours who has listened to this episode on their drive home and still has a few minutes left to go what do you wanna leave them with to think about for the rest of their drive?
L. David Kingsley: Yeah. Wow. I'll pivot [00:39:00] here and nothing about AI at all. I think what I would leave us with, and it's something I try and remind myself about, is that as important as our work is in the world it's even more important that we're embracing our own humanity and what makes us truly whole as people.
That the old adage that you can't pour from an empty cup, and being mindful of what is it that fills my cup. For me, it's my family my wife, Erin, our kids, Jack and Kate and Maddie. They fill my cup. And so no matter how much time I'm spending talking about AI and advancing and rocket ships and AI and SaaS and all this stuff, I know that I've gotta have a full cup when I come into work in the morning, so I'm need to make sure that I'm filling those batteries at night and on the weekends and taking the time to make sure that I'm a whole person before I go out and try and be of service to others.
So I would just maybe leave us with that, of no matter how automated and intelligent we can get, we're still humans, and to make sure to take care of ourselves first before taking care of others.
Barb Bidan: Love it. Fill your cup, charge your batteries, put your own oxygen mask on first, friends. Take care of [00:40:00] yourselves. Thank you, David for joining me today. This was a great episode. I really enjoyed it
L. David Kingsley: My pleasure, Barb. Thank you. Take care
Barb Bidan: You too