Episode 232: How AI Is Reshaping the HR Operating Model (with Volker Jacobs)
How is AI redefining the HR operating model we’ve known for decades?
With AI redefining how work gets done, the pressure is mounting to move beyond legacy structures and rethink HR from the ground up. The traditional three-pillar model is being pushed to its limits, and a new, work-centric, product-driven approach is emerging.
To discuss this in more detail, in this episode of the Digital HR Leaders podcast, host David Green is joined by Volker Jacobs, CEO and Founder of TI People, an organisation at the forefront of helping enterprises transform to innovate people’s work.
Drawing from TI People’s latest groundbreaking research, Volker unpacks how AI is reshaping HR roles, structures, and mindsets - and why it's time to move beyond services toward building HR "products" that solve real work problems.
Join them, as they uncover:
Why the classic three-pillar HR model is under pressure - and what might replace it
The three ways AI is transforming HR: efficiency, innovation, and personalisation
Which HR roles are being disrupted most, and what that means for team design
What a product-oriented approach to HR looks like in practice
The mindset and cultural shifts needed to make this transition stick
Where HR leaders can start today, without overhauling everything at once
Whether you're leading transformation or just beginning to explore what AI means for your HR model, this episode sponsored by Hibob, offers practical insights and forward-thinking strategies to help you navigate what's next.
Click here to access the full report.
Hibob is a fast-growing new leader in the HCM market. In fact, according to HR tech guru Josh Bersin, HiBob is one of the few SaaS companies that have successfully cracked the code on user experience. Josh Bersin says that Bob is not only feature-rich but genuinely enjoyable to use.
Read his review of Bob--as an HR tech analyst and user at www.hibob.com/davidgreen2025.
[0:00:00] David Green: AI is changing just about everything in the world of work. But as we start to see tangible use cases emerging, and the workflows within the HR function change, is it time we start to rethink the operating model that has served us so well over the past few decades? Well, this is exactly the recent research Volker Jakobs and his team at TI People set out to explore. And we will be diving into the results today. I'm David Green, and today on the Digital HR Leaders podcast, I'm delighted to welcome the CEO and Founder of TI People, Volker Jacobs. In the study, Volker and his team took a work-focused look at how AI is reshaping the HR function, not just by introducing new tools, but by fundamentally changing how work gets done within HR itself.
In our conversation, Volker will share his insights from TI People's research, with an implicit focus on how AI is influencing HR roles, responsibilities and organisational design, including the headline finding of a 29% average efficiency potential for the HR function of a 30,000-person company. We'll discuss why the traditional three-pillar operating model is increasingly under strain and what a shift towards a more product-oriented HR model looks like in practice, and how HR leaders can start making meaningful changes to make this evolution sustainable. We'll also talk about how AI isn't just automating HR, but how it's transforming how value is created across three dimensions: efficiency, innovation, and personalisation democratisation. This is definitely a conversation you won't want to miss. So, without further ado, let's get the conversation with Volker started.
Volker, welcome back to the show. It's been six years since you were on the show back in 2019, before the pandemic, when we used to record all the episodes in person in the office in London. But for those that didn't tune into that episode, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your role at TI People and a bit about TI People as well?
[0:02:20] Volker Jacobs: Yeah, happy to. Thank you for having me, David. Great to be back. My background is very much in HR transformation. I've spent many, many years helping large companies, mainly in Europe, with their HR transformation, then sold my HR transformation consultancy to CEB, that's now Gartner. I picked up a role there, globally responsible for digital HR research and some membership programmes, and then thought about starting a new consultancy, TI People, Transform to Innovate People's Work. So, the idea is to look at transformations not so much from the perspective of top-down, McKinsey aftermarket type transformation, but rather from the perspective of those whose work we are transforming. So, that was ever since the thing. I've done a lot of work in the employee experience space and now in the digital AI-enabled transformation work, looking at it from the perspective of those whose work we are transforming. That's it.
[0:03:26] David Green: You've recently published some groundbreaking research on how AI is reshaping the HR operating model, which has landed very well on LinkedIn. I mean, people like Diane Gherson have been commenting on it as well. So, I mean it really seems to have landed well, so congratulations on that. And you were kind enough to send an early copy to me as well. What I personally loved about this research is that it went beyond the focus on tools, or pain points, but instead applied a work-centric lens on how AI impacts HR roles and activities directly. So, again, for our listeners who may have not seen this yet, please can you give an overall synopsis of the research and why you decided to conduct it?
[0:04:10] Volker Jacobs: Yeah, of course, happy to. You may know that we do often co-creation as a way to solving common problems. So, we have a group of digital HR leaders of large organisations, and they have defined together a research question for us, "How might we evolve the HR operating model for the AI era?" And when we dug into it together with them, into what is the specific needs that these large organisations are having, then we found that pretty much everyone is going about AI use cases in HR by the technology that they intend to use, or that is suggested to them by their providers. And so, that part was covered pretty well. There's a nuance to that, that is companies like Microsoft would always suggest a pain-point-first perspective on AI in HR. So, find your pain point and then things like, I don't know, Copilot Studio will give you the means to solve the problem. So, that space was also taken.
So, what was left for us basically to look into was the work perspective, so, what does AI do to the work? And that has two components to it. One, the major one for HR operating model question was, what does AI do to the work that's being performed in HR? But then also, what are the AI-enabled services and products that HR provides to their customers, and what does that then do to the work of the customers? So, AI tools or AI-enabled people services have to fit into the work of those that consume them, was a second part of the research study. So, back to the first part, what does AI do to the work that's being performed in HR, was then the one big thing that we wanted to really dive deep into. And the way we did that was, and that's, I think for me personally, it was the coolest thing I've done in my job life so far, we wanted to answer the question by forming a collaboration of humans and AI. So, we wanted humans and AI to collaborate on answering the question of what AI will do to the HR function and the work that's being performed in HR. That was the general setting. And then, it took us nine months to just do all of that.
So, we worked with 15 companies, 150 experts from these 15 companies, some industry experts were involved in it as well. And we tried to, from that human perspective, create a knowledge base that we then used to feed into large language models, and then combine that human knowledge with the knowledge, if you will, from large language models. That was the way we went about it. And then, the most important part is, of course, what came out of it. We looked into the change that AI will bring to the work in HR from different perspectives, and in-depth, what will change in the current activities that companies in HR are performing. The way we did that was we combined the 15 role models of the 15 companies we worked with, we combined them, mapped them to a generic role in activity model.
Then, we had a construct of 15 real-life models and job descriptions, or what have you, of these 15 companies, linked together through a generic one. And that construct described work for the large language models to then use that as context information to come up with the research results. That was, I think, exciting and cool. We learned a lot, not only about what AI will do to HR functions, but also about the limitations of using AI to answer org design questions.
[0:08:21] David Green: Really fascinating work. And again, people listening to that, that think, "I want to read this", then if you go to Volker's LinkedIn page, you'll find an article that he wrote about it. And if you go to the TI people website, you'll find more information around it as well. We'll put the links in there and we'll cover that at the end as well, Volker, for those that missed it here. It's interesting, I've just got back from the UNLEASH America conference in Las Vegas, and Josh Bersin did the keynote, as he always does at these events. And he actually said something which I actually wrote down and I saw that a few other people have written it down, because it's on UNLEASH's own write-up of his talk as well. And he said that, "AI is the only technology that I've ever seen that actually completely transforms the way the company operates". And we need to extend that to HR as well, and that's what a lot of the findings that you found.
You actually identified in the research three main ways that AI is changing the game for HR, through efficiency, innovation and personalisation. Can you unpack that a little bit for our listeners, Volker?
[0:09:31] Volker Jacobs: Yeah, very good. We've used a frame I think that was invented, at least published, by Ethan Mollick. He has, I think, a very good AI podcast, not specific to HR, but in general. The podcast is called One Useful Thing. I can recommend that. And so, he has published a frame that says, "AI does more than just automate things for efficiency's sake". So, what he's offering is the frame of, "It gives you more efficiency". So, people in our research, people working in a certain HR role can do their work more efficiently than without AI. That is, I think, no groundbreaking news. We all had hope for that.
So, the second piece is innovation. People in certain HR roles can do things that they couldn't do without AI. We've always called it, I think, augmentation of jobs. Now, there's another perspective that's very true for HR and other support functions, that is personalisation and democratisation. People in a certain HR role can provide services to their internal customers that are more personalised to the individual needs of the customers, and are more democratised in that they can provide the service to many or all, where without AI, they could only provide them to a few people. That's the three dimensions of change, if you will, that AI gives to the work in HR, and we've looked into all three of them separately, and also combined them to one big change index. But, yeah, that's just statistics. But, yes, that's how we were thinking about the change that's driven by HR from the perspective of work.
[0:11:31] David Green: A shout-out to our sponsor for this episode, HiBob, a fast-growing new leader in the HCM market. According to HR tech guru, Josh Bersin, HiBob is one of the few SaaS companies that have successfully cracked the code on user experience. Josh Bersin says that Bob is not only feature-rich but genuinely enjoyable to use. Read his review of Bob, as an HR tech analyst and a user, at www.hibob.com/davidgreen2025.
And that links very well, especially the last piece, with work that you've been doing for a number of years at TI People around employee experience. In many respects, you've been leading the field around the evolution of employee experience as well. And just as a side question really, Volker, how do you see AI, if used properly by HR, really boosting efforts to understand and improve employee experience across the employee lifecycle?
[0:12:55] Volker Jacobs: Yeah, thank you for the for the extra questions. It's good, because I talked about this co-creation initiative of digital HR leaders that we're working with. That programme is under the headline of more data, more AI, and more EX. We think that the three are a logical chain. We have more data at our fingertips than ever before, and luckily, the data is more integrated than it was in the past. So, with that, we have the ability to have meaningful usage of AI. But the goal is not to use AI, the goal is to improve the experience of people in their daily work, and that's important to us. And that has, as I mentioned earlier, that has the two components of the experience of people that do work in HR, and the experience of people that do their work in the organisation, and are consuming HR services and products. So, that's the impact on the experience. It's really the jobs to be done by people in HR and the jobs to done by all people in the organisation, that is where we have to feed in what HR provides. And the AI tools and the AI-enabled new ways of working, we have to feed that in, in a way that it doesn't create extra friction for people in these roles, but on the opposite, removes friction for them. And if that happens, then time is saved, engagement is up, people will adopt these new tools, and all of the things that we are normally really struggling with are resolved. So, that is, for me, the big link.
[0:14:40] David Green: And it's interesting, all those areas, efficiency, innovation, personalisation, we're already seeing it to a certain degree in companies around the world that are talking about how AI is reshaping their approach to HR. So, a couple of weeks ago, there was a lot of noise around IBM, and I'm turning to make sure I get the quote properly from my screen next to me. There were reports of hundreds of IBM HR workers being laid off and these roles considered back-office and non-customer facing. And the CEO of IBM, Arvind Krishna, is quoted as saying he could easily see 30% of that getting replaced by AI and automation over a five-year period. And that's the headline, but obviously underneath that is actually what it also means, is that the HR professionals at IBM are able to focus on stuff which is maybe more interesting for them, as you said, helps their employee experience, and actually delivers more value to the organisation as well. And actually, that's one of the things that really stood out in your research, Volker, related to that, that not all HR roles are impacted equally. Which parts of the function are being reshaped the most, based on the research you did, and what does this mean for how we design HR teams moving forward?
[0:16:02] Volker Jacobs: Yeah, good question. So, I think I want to first say that our findings overall are, an HR function can free up capacity by 29%. Now, what the research doesn't say is what to do with the freed-up capacity. So, it's not that we suggest that all of the 29% should be saved as cost-savings and given to the CFO. Instead, the research also suggests what are the future capabilities that we'll need in the HR function going forward. And at least parts of the capacity that's freed up should be reinvested in building out these capabilities. I think that's a natural but general consideration that we've made in the research report. And now, the spread across roles is huge, right? So, I think for our model company, we are talking about data points of a model company that we've created, because it's really the way we've conducted the research is that we've looked into the actual work activities of people doing jobs. And of course, we can't talk about people and their jobs in our customer organisation. So, we've created a model company.
The model company has the sophisticated name Alpha, and Alpha is a 30,000 people organisation. And for them and the way they have shaped their roles, and they've written their job descriptions for these roles, we can clearly point to the activities that are being automated, where capacities can be freed up. And then you can, from that, conclude what it will do to the certain roles of the function. And to your question of what's the spread across roles, there are roles that have many transactional tasks still in them, like specialist HR operations, where capacities of up to 50%, or in some companies even more, but in our alpha model company, 50% of capacities can be freed up. On the other end of the spectrum, for people that work in people strategy or in HR business partnership, it's more in the 15% to 20% bracket of capacity being freed up. And now, once you know how much capacity you can free up and you know what are the future capabilities that are needed in these roles, then you can take the decision on how much of the savings are to be reinvested.
[0:18:54] David Green: Yes, it's very interesting, and we're both experienced enough to know, Volker, that different companies will take different approaches to this. Some will try and pocket as much of that savings as possible, and others will, as you say, look to reinvest it in new or growing capabilities in their HR functions. And hopefully, those HR functions obviously then deliver more value to the organisation and more value to employees. And I'm sure we probably both sit in a similar fence that try and reinvest as much of it as you can. Each organisation, I guess, will make their own decisions about that, particularly given the current climate and geopolitical uncertainty and economic uncertainty that we're in.
Let's talk about the three-pillar HR operating model for a second. So, a big feature of the article you posted on LinkedIn was suggesting a new, or an evolution of the HR operating model. The one that we've traditionally used, it's been default in HR for over two decades, despite Dave Ulrich, one of the instigators of it, telling companies that they need to evolve that model. But your research suggests it's being squeezed from both ends. What's driving that pressure; and is it finally time to move on?
[0:20:17] Volker Jacobs: So, the pressure from the top is mainly coming from the first of the three customer groups of HR, business leaders, because these business leaders are under pressure themselves. AI is coming in, is transforming a lot of their work, and then they need HR's help to get AI deployed properly for them to reap the benefits that are promised to them. So, these business leaders expect solutions for complex problems, transformation problems, restructuring problems. And HR and the traditional setup is kind of siloed. So, breaking the silos of HR to be able to finally be able to solve complex, big problems of business leaders is what will make or break the reputation of HR in the AI era. That's the pressure from the top.
The pressure from the bottom is, people using more digitised tools from HR create often an adoption challenge. So, these new tools are very well thought through by technology providers, also often by digital HR leaders, but not in the sense that they seamlessly fit into the work of those consuming these services. So, adoption is a big problem. And only if these services fit into the flow of work of the consumers of these more digitised products will they be adopted, will they work.
Then the third element to it, also on the side of pressure from the bottom, is with cost savings expectations in HR, people in HR are really forced to push out more of these digital services. And that increases the adoption challenge because the cost pressure forces them to provide more of these digital AI-enabled services. So, we have the pressure from the top and the pressure from the bottom. And in total, and if I just very high-level sum it up, then what we need in HR is we need more speed and adapting to changing customer needs. And speed and customer-centricity are the two things that we need much more of in our HR operating model. And then, luckily, there is already a discipline existing that has mastered these two things, speed and customer-centricity, and that's product management. So, we will see more product management in HR, because product management has the toolset, has the applications of what to do if we want to be faster and more customer-centric, and that is why we believe the new age operating model will be much more centred around problems that business leaders are having, and are more managed like a product is managed properly.
[0:23:22] David Green: It's interesting, Volker, because we, at Insight222, I know you know this research as well we've been doing specifically around obviously people analytics. And last year, we wanted to test this democratisation adoption question as it relates to people analytics products, because again, we'd seen the more advanced people analytics teams bringing in product specialists into the function, looking at things like user experience, etc. But obviously, those were the smaller, not the many. So, the research we did last year was 348 companies. Democratisation is one of the characteristics we found of companies that are leading in people analytics that are creating value on a sustainable basis. And 71% of those 348 companies had democratised through technology, dashboards effectively, and people insights out to people managers and HR business partners. But when we looked the adoption side, only 47% said they had significant adoption within HR, and only, I think it was 28%, with the people managers.
So, you're right, there is that gap to close, and AI potentially can help us to solve that by making the products potentially easier to interact with and use. But you're right, there's no point creating these products if people aren't going to use them. So, that adoption piece is so important. So, let's maybe take that product piece a little bit more. I know it's something you've been working on again at TI People for a number of years as it relates to employee experience as well, because why can't we learn from the customer experience side that is all about products and user experience? So, you put a very compelling case around this and thinking about HR in product terms, not just services or functions, but as you said, actual products that solve people problems and business problems. What does it really mean to build a product-oriented HR model? And I mean, have you got any examples that you can share, even if you have to say it's a pharmaceutical company or a technology company?
[0:25:27] Volker Jacobs: Yeah, look, honestly, it's an evolving field and we are still working on it. So, we have the research paper that you can download from our website and don't even have to provide your email address for that, it says, "Part one: research paper", which suggests that there will be a part two. And part two will be a practitioner's playbook for building out a more product-oriented HR. So, the honest truth is we're still working on it. On the way to that research paper, we have done a bit of work, of course, already with our customers, and we know that there are several approaches and several best practices already in place. Also, there's different schools of product management in HR that we might want to look into because they have very different approaches. I'll provide some insights on that.
There is a school that says the actual product to manage is work itself. That's a bit of an extreme position. But that school says, work is a subscription product, people are subscribing to it basically by the hour that they work, and now let's make this as compelling as possible for people to resubscribe to it. That's an idea. It's a bit out of the normal thinking of HR, because HR wouldn't necessarily assume that they are owning that product. But that's an extreme perspective that we will take into the mix and see what that would do. The other school, of course, says, manage the services that you provide today, like products, and use product management techniques for that, like agile work, like continuous customer listening, like make these products really customer-centric and that are well-established in the product management world. So, that is the more common approach to it. I'm not in the position to say what's right or wrong, but these two schools exist.
Now, when we look into the second school, we see company examples. There are companies that, by the nature of their company and their company DNA, are product companies. And if they are digital product companies, even better, because they'll have the means to manage digital products for their customers; why wouldn't they be able to manage the same digital products for the internal customers, ie their employees? We have company examples, for example a very digital fashion retailer, that we're working with. They have, I think, a very strong product manifesto for HR that really is strong, in that it creates this urgency of making things simpler. Simplicity is the big driving force there. And making what HR does simpler for people to consume and for HR people to produce, is their big thing. It's not what I know, it's not what you were hoping for, which is, build these six products, manage them with these seven steps, but that's not there yet. We will publish that playbook in the second half this year. So, more to be expected there.
[0:29:25] David Green: I want to take a short break from this episode to introduce the Insight222 People Analytics Programme, designed for senior leaders to connect, grow, and lead in the evolving world of people analytics. The programme brings together top HR professionals with extensive experience from global companies, offering a unique platform to expand your influence, gain invaluable industry insight and tackle real-world business challenges. As a member, you'll gain access to over 40 in-person and virtual events a year, advisory sessions with seasoned practitioners, as well as insights, ideas and learning to stay up-to-date with best practices and new thinking. Every connection made brings new possibilities to elevate your impact and drive meaningful change. To learn more, head over to insight222.com/programme and join our group of global leaders.
What are some of the biggest mindset or behavioural shifts that the HR teams may need to make to start operating more like product teams?
[0:30:44] Volker Jacobs: Good point. I mentioned, I think, two key words already: agility and customer-centricity. I'll go there, but I'll first talk about a small anecdote from this co-creation work. As I mentioned, the research was very much done by humans and AI in a collaboration of the two. So, we used a Delphi method where human experts were shown what AI thinks and the other way around, and hoping for convergence, like over time, we converged to the truth. And that did work. And now finally, we had an AI, a workflow of very nested, deep AI prompts, trained by humans, producing results. And we have presented these results to all HR leadership teams of these 15 companies that were involved. And what you could see, speaking of culture, was people were uncomfortable taking these results for real, because they were produced by a machine. So, I mean, that's inevitable, we will in the future have more and more decisions being prepared by AI. And humans have to take decisions that they can't always trace back to an original data point. They have to "trust" what AI tells them, and that was already apparent. So, we need a new decision culture that enables us to take decisions based on things that are more fuzzy than we're used to. And feeling comfortable with that is, I think, a first challenge.
But that aside, it's a general problem of taking decisions based on AI data. That aside, I think the two big things are speed or agility, being able to adapt to changing customer needs, and true customer-centricity. Those two are really, really the two big mindset shifts that we have to go through. At that level, of course, it's very generic, so the question is, what sits under it? And I believe the new AI will give us what we need to think across the silos within HR, because agility only happens when you can share resources across the silos. And customer-centricity means you solve problems that can't be solved within a single silo. So, that's, I think, the picture I want to create about the new decision-making culture in HR. So, being freed up from silo tasks and being enabled to think cross-silo about customer problems and future customer problems is, I think, the big shift we'll see.
[0:33:58] David Green: More agile, more collaborative. It's interesting, in an episode in two weeks, I interviewed Janine Vos, the CHRO at Rabobank, and Rabobank, as she talks about in the episode, moved to an agile operating model in HR just prior to the pandemic. And a lot of what you talked about there, about people coming together from different domains in HR, but also outside HR to solve common problems for the business, is how they're working. And I think we're going to see that. That will hopefully be the norm rather than the exception in terms of that. And I think one of the other things, you mentioned data. Obviously, I've got a bit of a passion for that, as does the team at Insight222. And I think we saw the same challenges maybe, where decisions are informed by what data tells us, particularly if that's counterintuitive to the business leaders' own opinion. And I guess we're going to have to make a similar journey, where decisions are informed by AI in that respect.
[0:35:13] Volker Jacobs: Yeah, it's a special type of data, because it's sometimes not back-traceable, basically. That, I think, is the new dimension to it. But the rest is similar, I think, to the challenge that we had with data-driven decision-making.
[0:35:30] David Green: So, for the HR leaders listening, Volker, who maybe want to get started, but are maybe feeling a bit overwhelmed, and I wouldn't blame them, having been to the UNLEASH Conference a couple of weeks ago, there's a lot of information being thrown at us by technology firms, by consultants, by thought leaders in the space, where's the smart place to begin? Are there maybe one or two actions that these leaders can take to start building traction without blowing everything up?
[0:35:57] Volker Jacobs: Yeah, exactly. That's really, really important to me. Often, companies don't have the time or the money to do this huge transformation of a function. It's a bit of an outdated thinking, I believe. So, I'm a believer in iterative, staggered ways of evolving to a new-age operating model. Not enough that I'm a believer of it; also, the research suggests with data that it's possible to do a transformation role by role. So, it's interesting because typically, a transformation is driven by either a cost savings goal of, like, 23% of the HR function cost has to go away, and then it's very often outsourcing, or whatever the big drivers are, outsourcing, offshoring, and so forth, or it's a technology play, "We have to roll out Workday globally, so let's do that". We are suggesting to think about it in smaller bits and pieces, and we can transform a role. And we can even do that in a couple of weeks' time, no, let's say in two months' time, because the thinking might be we create a model team of just very few people from within a role and make this model team work as closely as possible to what the future will look like for the entire role.
So, build a model team of just five, equip these five with tools and ways of working that resemble the future, and let them work in that way, I truly believe, is the way forward. We should not build a well-integrated, full-fledged, new tech stack with all fancy AI in it and then start transforming the work. We should do it the other way around. We should learn from transforming the work of a function, start with a small model team, equip them with some tools, even if they are not fully integrated and ready to scale up for the entire organisation, learn from that and build our transformation from there. That is a practical advice that we think is useful. And then, there's two more things that have come up. First of all, we have built all the data from the research into a small, little AI impact assessment. So, within 48 hours, companies can just look into what AI will most likely do to the activities in their specific HR organisations. That is a very fast and just effortless way of creating a picture of what it will look like or might look like. It's a strawman of the future, basically. And then have something on hand to start the discussions with internally, is the other practical tip I can provide.
[0:39:10] David Green: I think that's really good. It's certainly less daunting, particularly if you're the CHRO of a large HR organisation. Maybe starting off with a role or a subset of a role to start off with seems a much more doable thing. And also then, I guess you might be looking at a function or sub-function within HR, where you've got people that are actually keen to do this, perhaps where you can get a benefit quite quickly. But also, it's something that the people themselves want to do as well. So, I mean as you said, if we can help HR business partners become more strategic and more problem-solvers, there's a big impact there that that potentially has for the organisation, but also for the HR function and the people as well, isn't there?
[0:40:00] Volker Jacobs: Yeah, and that goes back to a data point that I find interesting, which is that senior leaders in an organisation think a lot that people like frontline workers are afraid of using AI because they fear job loss, and what have you. But the opposite is true. I think I don't have the numbers right, but frontline workers are keen to explore AI so much more than senior leaders think they do, that there is a big potential. And what you just said is right. We see that people want to be in these model teams, they want to try it out. Of course, we have to safeguard it a little bit, but that's something that there's more of a pull effect than we might fear.
[0:40:56] David Green: Yeah. And next, Volker, you highlighted the practitioner handbook that you're working on, but what's next in your journey around supporting organisations around this? What can we look forward to in the coming months?
[0:41:10] Volker Jacobs: Yeah, thank you for asking. The other big research question for the year that our customers gave us to solve is called, "Barriers to AI adoption", so what keeps people from making sustainable and effective use of AI in the organisation? That's a research we're currently writing. There's also proprietary data in it. We have bought a large panel of people working in large organisations, so we can look into very different demographics of specific barriers to using AI. That is, I think, adding to the AI discussion also from the end-user's perspective, again, as we naturally do. I mentioned the playbook, I think, and then the big piece that we'll work on with our customers is, can we really make a role-based iterative transformation happen so that it's not this huge beast that it used to be? That's the three things I would like to point out.
[0:42:21] David Green: Okay. And we'll come at the end to where people can find out more about this as well. But we do a question of the series, every series, and this one, which should fit quite nicely into your sweet spot, Volker, of your experience, but also probably is a good opportunity to summarise some of the stuff that we've talked about here. How can HR use AI to improve employee experience and well-being?
[0:42:46] Volker Jacobs: By ensuring that the new AI capabilities fit into the flow of work, support the actual jobs to be done of people, that is the core. And if that happens, then it's a friction-free introduction of new capabilities. People will pick them up, and the rest will start from there. We have all the data that we already published two years ago, I think, on how much time is saved if these new things are adopted and how much the engagement goes up with all the productivity improvements of that. So, AI has to fit into the flow of work of people. If that happens, and for the HR space, that means into the flow of people working in HR and into the flow of work of people consuming HR services, ie the customers of HR, then AI will be successful.
[0:43:44] David Green: Yeah. And I think it's so important, isn't it, that as you said, efficiency is one thing around AI, but it's very much innovation being another, and then this product kind of approach. And I love what you said about work as a product, because if we think about work as a product, then hopefully we want to design it so that people get a good experience from it, employees get a good experience from it, that it actually enhances their wellbeing and performance. And then, with analytics and AI, we can actually demonstrate to business leaders that by doing that, it actually makes business sense as well. And maybe then, we finally get to the holy grail of actually showing that if you treat employees well and you focus on their well-being, it enhances company performance and you've got business leaders happy, you've got people leaders happy, you've got happy employees as well. And hey, wouldn't that be a great future of work?
[0:44:40] Volker Jacobs: I'm buying into that, absolutely, so that's very well put, David. And, yes, that's ultimately why we're doing our job, so that's, that's the vision.
[0:44:53] David Green: Well, Volker, I always enjoy talking to you and am always impressed with the work that you're doing at TI People, which always seems to be at least one or two years ahead of where most people are. Thanks for being a guest again on the Digital HR Leaders podcast. Can you let listeners know how they can find you on social media and follow all the great work that you're doing at TI people, or maybe get access to some of these assets that we've been talking about today?
[0:45:18] Volker Jacobs: Yeah, absolutely. My only platform is LinkedIn, so find me on LinkedIn, is what I would be very happy about. And then, other than that, we have the full research paper for download on the TI People website. I think we'll see the direct link in the show notes of this podcast. And I'm really approachable easily on LinkedIn. Be sure, I'll respond to any message.
[0:45:48] David Green: Perfect. And just for people that are listening that want to go in straight away, the TI People website, do you want to just read the URL for that?
[0:45:57] Volker Jacobs: Of course. It's www.ti-people.com. And then, /AIIA, AI Impact Assessment, will get you to the landing page where you have the direct download.
[0:46:12] David Green: Perfect. Well, looking forward to how this research develops over the year, and particularly looking for the research paper when you publish it around the barriers to AI adoption. We could probably have a long talk about some of the hypotheses that I've got around that. I think one of them is people's lack of time, I think, to learn and be comfortable with it. We should all be trying to spare at least a couple of hours a week to maybe teach ourselves how to use these tools effectively, shouldn't we?
[0:46:42] Volker Jacobs: I totally agree.
[0:46:43] David Green: Volker, thank you very much for being a guest on the show again. Thank you.
[0:46:47] Volker Jacobs: Thank you, David, for having me. Really, really enjoyed it.