Anthony Onesto

▶0:01HostWelcome to the Built by People podcast, where we share the stories and insights of the world's top HR leaders. Join us as we dive deep into the minds of HR executives, uncovering their strategies, challenges, and triumphs in shaping today's workforce. I'm excited to welcome Anthony to the Built By People podcast. Anthony, thank you so much for joining us. And as a starting question, I always, I love to ask if you could share a little bit more about your career journey.

▶0:55GuestYeah, I mean, I don't know if we have enough time for that, but I'll go through it fairly quickly. So I actually am a failed accountant. I studied accounting in college and realized very quickly I wasn't good at it, and that company agreed. And so I got fired from my first job ever, which was pretty frightening, but it was a career-changing opportunity for me. And so I was wondering at the time, I'm born and raised in New York, a lot of folks were saying go into finance. I didn't really love finance or even the financial services industry particularly. And so I was like, ah, you know what, I'm not sure what to do. And I went to a recruiting agency and they're like, hey, why don't you come work for us and be a recruiter? And that was my first foray into what I will call HR recruiting. And I love doing recruiting. And then at the time, I'd been around for quite a while, the dot-com boom started. And so I started actually recruiting for internet companies back in the day. And then one of them asked me to join them. As one of the early employees, which I thought was really interesting because I saw a bunch of people exit with huge exit rounds at the time. And so it was really just this sort of wonderful thing. And I love working with people that are creating something new. And so I joined as their first head of people and I got bit by the startup bug. So I got bit by the HR and recruiting bug, then the startup bug, and I've been doing it for 20 years now in mostly startups. And I've, I haven't exited to the degree that I thought I would be exiting. So I've closed a bunch of companies, I've exited a couple companies. And so it's been really exciting for me, especially at a time where no one knew what startups were or this whole technology and startup space, uh, where now it's cool actually to be in one of those startup companies and those tech companies. And I've been doing HR, currently CPO at a company called Suzy. We do, uh, consumer insights. We're a B2B platform that allows some of the largest brands in the world to connect directly to consumers in almost real-time basis. So The world's changing, the speed of culture is moving fast, and so we allow that connection really, really quickly.

▶2:54HostAnd then I'm curious to get your perspective on how you see AI reshaping organizational structures to enable companies to scale faster with fewer employees.

▶3:06GuestYeah, I mean, I think we're at another watershed moment. If I think of the history of technology, specifically in in the business space, we, there was a time where we had mailrooms and IT rooms and then cloud computing changed all of that and we have more digital. I mean, maybe there's still some mailrooms still out there and some IT rooms, but you see fewer and fewer of those things. And you saw companies that traditionally needed hundreds of thousands of employees don't need that many. If you think about the value of Facebook or Google compared to, let's say, a Kodak or a GE during those times, they're significantly smaller. Perfect example of this is Instagram sold for $1 billion to Facebook. They had 13 employees, right? So this idea of the acceleration of the internet and where we're going today with AI is nothing new, and it's just going to continue. If you think of AI specifically and how it can augment certain services and certain tasks, if you think of the Gentic AI, that's all the craze right now and starting to, even though again, much like AI, a little bit is overpromised, underdelivered, but you can see the potential of if things can be automated and you could do digital tasks that the idea that, and I think Sam Altman actually expressed this, that we're probably going to see more companies with fewer employees. In fact, you might even find, you know, billion-dollar companies that have 10 employees or 5 employees or things like that because you'll have a lot of this AI supplementing a lot of the tactical works. And what remains there is the human piece of it. And so you're still going to be driven by relationships. Relationships are going to be absolutely critical in these, but it's going to be augmented a lot of, a lot with AI. AI. So if you take that all the way through to fruition, like the organization changes, you don't, you know, middle management is gonna be augmented. So you, you might have middle managers that have traditionally in HR, we kind of say 6 to 7-ish, you know, reporting structures is ideal. That might be 30, it might be 40 if you have augmented AI next to that manager, or even in some very aggressive and optimistic folks are saying that, that that could be, you know, you might have an AI manager. I think that's a bit futuristic to where we are, but I think that's a possibility in the longer term. I think it's always going to have that human connection where you're going to have an AI, and then if you need to talk to a real human, you're going to be able to get access to that person. So you can see that's going to dynamically change. For the first few adopters, it's going to accelerate them and grab market share, and then eventually it just becomes commonplace. And structures are absolutely going to change. And again, you can see that's going to filter down to HR teams, right? And what the needs are from the HR teams and, and the different structures there.

▶5:50HostAnthony, what strategies can organizations use to balance efficiency gains of AI with the need to maintain a human-centric culture?

▶6:00GuestYeah, I mean, I think, you know, the first step with AI is always going to be efficiency, right? Because it's one of the elements within business. If you think of business as a top-line revenue and bottom- online costs, the thing that you really have control over is the cost, right? It's finite. It's something that you have absolute control over and you can make decisions on. So there's always going to be an efficiency point to all of these things. What can we do? Can we do more with less? To me, what I'm really excited about on the human side is the enablement piece, the acceleration. So yes, the first step is always going to be let's reduce cost. How can AI augment some of the things? And we saw this again, I, I wanna be clear, none of this is new, right? We saw the offshoring of manufacturing decades ago into different areas for less expensive labor. We continue to see some of that existing today, although we're starting to see a little bit of that come back into the US given some of the chips and the incentives and COVID and other things, not to get into macroeconomics here, but I think there's still gonna be a human element to these things. Like I talked about, I think relationships are gonna be key and that's gonna be one of the fundamental things. And you're gonna have relationships, you might be a manager, of the future that has both human and AI kind of things reporting into you. And so you're gonna still have to maintain that humanity, that relationship. Brad Marcus wrote a book that I've been reading and he's been talking about just like, we have to also make sure that if we are replacing jobs or tasks that people are doing with AI, what are we doing with those folks? Like, are we retraining them? Do we have the right policies in place? So I think we need to be very careful in that it's just not a rush to bottom line savings that we are thinking about the elements of humanity. Because again, to get a little super geeky around economics, if you have folks that aren't working, they're not consuming. And so the equation of macroeconomics doesn't work if that's the case. So anyway, the idea of the humanity piece is just making sure that we have all these levers and we're thinking of those things, that it's just not a race to efficiency and bottom line gains.

▶8:04HostWe talk about AI in the context of serving the role of augmentation versus replacement of the human-centered workforce. Curious if you have any examples or ideas of how that is coming to shape within the workforce today and in the future.

▶8:22GuestYeah, a great example is we're partnering, and I'm a full disclosure, I'm an advisor to a company called Sprouts AI, and they are creating agents across the organization, and one of the areas is in recruiting. So a perfect example is we go into Sprouts and we put in a profile of the ideal candidate from LinkedIn, and then we also put in the job description.. And now the system will go out. Now, this was a heavily human activity done in recruiting called sourcing, right? So you'd be able to go out and most of good recruiting is sourcing. Like the inbound stuff is always very difficult. It's very noisy. The outbound efforts, and that's included in sales, are important key aspects to connect with people. So what it does is it looks at, and it's always on, it doesn't take any breaks. It's on 24/7. It's going out and trying to find profiles on various different sites. Based on that ideal profile in your job description. And then what it does is it surfaces, hey, here's the candidates. Here's the 40, 50, 60, 100 candidates we think are available. And you can thumbs up, thumbs down. You can actually have a conversation with the AI to— because thumbs down and thumbs up and thumbs down are assumed— there are assumptions around why that candidate is right or wrong. This solution allows you to have a conversation to point out what's wrong, right? What is— what's missing in this profile? So that way when it goes back out into the space, because it's always plays on, it's going to find profiles based on your feedback. Again, very human-driven function within the recruiting department that's going to be completely automated. But then once you get to those profiles, how do you qualify those profiles? And that's continuing to be a human element. And then connection. How do you connect with somebody like you and I are doing? Maybe podcasts become automated in AI at some point, but there's an element of humanity that exists when you and I are chatting, right? Same thing in recruiting. You're going to need that recruiter on the front end, and it's going to be less about qualifying, because I think the AI is gonna be able to do that with disclosure around bias and other things. But that connection, that selling, that negotiation, I think it's still gonna be a very human element. And I think that is a rare— that is happening right now. It's happening at Suzy where we're using Sprout's AI to do the sourcing and then our recruiting, head of recruiting to do that human connection piece. And I think that's gonna exist for quite a while.

▶10:41HostHow should traditional companies adapt their workforce and organizational design to remain competitive in an AI-driven world?

▶10:49GuestI can tell you what they shouldn't do, which is put their heads in the sand, right? I think most traditional larger companies are risk-averse and for reasons that are obvious and make complete sense, but you have to start taking risks or otherwise you can become a Kodak where you had the digital patent, the patent for digital photography, but you went bankrupt. So you have to be, you have to be experimental. You have to be open to these things within reason. But I really think a lot of companies need to start with the problem. And I think too often what happens is a company will jump into these things, jump into a tool, and not really understand what their problem is or what is the restriction or the friction in the business. So, and that friction could be like in my example around recruiting, we just don't have the scale to hire a bunch of recruiters to find hundreds of profiles. So we are automating that piece. Or if you want to accelerate revenue, we just can't reach out to all these different customers. So we're going to automate that piece. So I think it's about starting with the problem, the friction, or whatever restriction you have in your business that's, that's not allowing you to scale. Start with that and understand, okay, is there a way we can automate? Is there a way, what are the tasks that are involved with that workflow? And then can we automate some of those tasks? Because a lot of times you're not going to be able to use AI for everything just yet. You're gonna use it for pieces of things and then start testing and implementing, learning, being willing to draw it back if you need to, or willing to make adjustments on the fly. That to me is the, as opposed to thinking just holistically about these things, going very super tactical about it.

▶12:32HostWhat skills do you believe will become essential for employees to thrive in an augmented workforce that heavily integrates

▶12:42GuestAI? I call 'em, they were traditionally called soft skills and I call 'em power skills 'cause I think they again are going to be more and more powerful for individuals to own where I think the technical skills, and there was a book written years ago called The Race Against the Machine by two MIT economic professors where they predicted, and it was at the time, if you remember when IBM Watson went up against Ken Jennings in Jeopardy and won and everyone freaked out. So again, we're not in this space like if It's great to look at history because history repeats itself. We're back in that space where people are somewhat freaking out about this stuff. And the idea is at the end, they, it was a love story. It was AI and people. So those power skills now become super important. The idea of knowledge and being able to calculate things or know something is going to be diminished because AI is going to be able to augment those things. So those power skills are communication, It's storytelling. It's relationships. It's empathy. All of those things are going to be really, really— like in HR, we've been preaching this for decades that we need to get better at these things. What's going to happen now is the need for these things and the gap is going to be profound. It's going to be very public about the gap of these things within organizations because all of the other stuff that we usually rewarded folks for, knowledge, right? Creativity's another power skill. All of these things are actually going to be more important, more and more important as more of the technical and tactical things are done through automation and through AI.

▶14:15HostAnthony, any parting advice you'd like to share with our

▶14:20Guestaudience? Don't put your head in the sand. Like most folks are gonna, it's coming. It's like the internet. The internet did not go away, right? We, internet has created some of the most valued companies in the world, whether you think it's Apple or Google or Amazon. Facebook. Same thing's gonna happen here with AI. So do not put your head in the sand. Embrace it, but think about problem first, right? What problem are you trying to solve? And then figure out what are the things that you can potentially automate with AI.

▶14:49HostAnthony, thank you for joining us on the Built by People podcast. It was a pleasure having you involved.

▶14:53GuestThank you, David. Pleasure to be here.