Keith, with your extensive background in leading product innovation at major tech companies and now at Visier, what do you believe will be the next significant breakthrough in people analytics that will transform how organizations manage their workforce? Can you share any insights or future trends that you’re particularly excited about?
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Thanks for the question!
I am spending a lot of time thinking about GenAI, and how that will impact companies and the workforce.
Right now, most companies are producing digital assistants (like Vee) that augment employees and bring them greater efficiency. But this is just the start. If you read the latest from Andrew Ng, he’s writign a lot about Agents, and how we’ll delegate yet more of our work to Agents to find productivity.
But play that out. Great, soon I have lots of Agents (maybe 10s for each employee). How do I measure the impact of those agents (on productivity, revenue, etc.) and justify the spend on those agents. People Analytics.
And play it out even further, we’ll see the emergence of digital employees. How do we optimize a hybrid workforce of biological and digital employees? People Analytics.
Check out Kate Darling’s work (she’s at MIT) on human/robot interaction. Yes, we see robots in Japan doing exercise with their human counterparts to drive better morale and collaboration. But we also see potential abuse of robots - again see Darling’s work. Watch Jensen Huang’s keynote from Computex, using a simulation to build a factory populated by robots that build robots. It is happening now in Taiwan.
So, for me, the breakthrough I am most interested in is how work itself changes in the next 3-5 years, how People Analytics helps us keep our biological employees engaged and high performing as their new digital colleagues enter their environment, and how we maximize yield in this new world. As Gibson says, the future is here, it is simply unevenly distributed. Excited for what will likely be a material shift in work and “workers”, be they digital or biological.
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