Jason O'Neill

▶0:00SpeakerWelcome 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.

▶0:42HostJason, thank you so much for joining us today. And as a starting question, I always love to ask if you could share a little bit more about your career journey.

▶0:48GuestWell, first, Dave, thank you for having me on your show. Like many of your listeners, I never planned to be an HR professional when I was a young kid. Early on, I knew I wanted to dedicate my life to helping people. And, um, my initial path was to become a doctor and up until the age of about 2021, I thought that's what my future held. You know, after college, you know, graduating from college, I decided to take a gap year and travel the world before going and really truly committing to medical school. And as I was traveling the world, in a great twist of fate, I ran out of money in Asia. And I ended up in Japan where I have family. I have roots in Japan. And to fund the rest of my trip, I started to look for a temporary job. And as luck would have it, I ended up landing a very interesting entry-level role at a Japanese affiliate of Disney, and specifically in the area of talent development. And I immediately fell in love with it. I saw a lot of connections to, you know, this— if the mission was to help people, whether you're a doctor in healing people or helping them return to health or, you know, helping people learn and grow and thrive in the workplaces, I saw a very strong connection between the two. And, you know, one year led to many years. And the next thing I knew, I was building a career, developing the skills within the broader spaces of talent development, talent management, organizational development. And I loved every moment of it. I eventually transitioned on into tech, serving in global, global roles at companies like Apple. Over there, I took a foray out of HR into sales or business-facing roles with sales. I was a chief of staff for a year for a region. And then ultimately I returned back home to HR and I moved into leadership roles, you know, after a decade at Apple to both Squarespace and Uber Technologies. You know, up until that point, I thought that I would be staying at these larger companies, larger tech companies, really offering global scale, helping organizations thrive at that level. But an interesting moment happened a few years ago when a small tech company, AI-first company named Pryon came calling. It was an AI-first by DNA. It had some exceptional people that I was meeting, and they got me really excited about the product and what they were trying to do in the world. The founder had this amazing story of his previous startup was they built this AI technology that was eventually sold to Amazon and acquired by Amazon, and it currently serves as some of the core technology that powers Alexa. So, you know, I found that this company was truly fascinating. You know, what they do is they're solving the AI knowledge problem, something that we call the AI memory layer. And it's a secure enterprise platform that connects the scattered organizational knowledge and makes it instantly usable both to people and to AI agents. Kind of think of it as like the company's brain. It brings together information trapped in documents, decks, Slack threads, meetings, all of the information that is very much scattered and unstructured at times within an organization and makes it instantly usable again, to the people and to the AI agents. It's about using AI to increase productivity and save organizations both time and money. So all of this got me very excited. It was also an opportunity to build from the ground up. And what I'd say is that, you know, I've always been interested in joining a company, a startup at its most early and formative stage. Having worked for several founders in the past, a lot of times they would speak nostalgically about the early days building from garages, from dorm rooms, and the opportunity with Praeyang offered just that. I'm not working out of a garage, I'm working from home, but it does feel like there's a lot of big ideas and we're going to move things forward with sheer grit and hustle. So long story short, I took a leap of faith about a year and a half ago, and I joined Pryon to lead their people function to build things from ground up. And I currently serve as the Chief People Officer.

▶4:42HostJason, based on your experience implementing AI at Pryon, can you share a specific example from your hackathon where an HR use case surprised you and how you turn that idea into a practical application?

▶4:56GuestYeah, maybe I'll, I'll preface this by saying I truly believe in this principle that someone coined called invisible HR. It's where the best work of the HR professional, our role is to create the systems, the products, and the programs that improve how people work without necessarily calling attention to us. We don't have to be the center of innovation, but we do have to create the conditions where learning, innovation, and great work thrives. Hackathons are a really good tried and tested example of a, of an easy, very simple way of activating creativity from the broader employee workforce. So in a recent hackathon, a solutions manager identified a classic challenge. So knowledge transfer with no handoff. It's a classic onboarding challenge where an employee who is new to the role or transfers into a role or a manager who inherits a new team. Is forced to ramp up. And what this typically looks like is that that new employee is going to meet with a whole bunch of people trying to extract knowledge, information, a lot of it historic. And it was a really cool solution that this manager came up with. He built a prototype leveraging our very own technology, something he coined the Institutional Knowledge Retention Agent, right? Maybe we could use some better internal branding for that. But what exactly this is, is kind of what the title describes it as, right? So it's Essentially an AI agent that can retrieve structured and unstructured data. So think again, Slack, email, documents, calendar, you name it. All of the information that the predecessor who had been sitting in that role may have had access to or may have contributed to. Okay. So isn't that cool? If you can all, it's almost like having a conversation, but a perfect conversation with the person who just vacated the role prior to you. And isn't that a powerful onboarding experience? So if you're a new sales employee, you can ask inquiry questions such as, you know, what is the status and current risks with this account that I'm, that I'm working on? Or if you're a product manager or program manager, you know, who worked on Project X and where did it leave off? If you're a new manager or inherited a new team, you could ask a question such as what's the performance history of employee Y? And not only will it return an instant answer to you, searching and querying all of this data that's accessible within the brain, but it's also going to have traceable— is fully traceable, have citations. So if you want to do a deeper dive into something that was mentioned in the generative response, you can actually click on that and find a deeper answer to it. So this, for obvious reasons, is a huge time saver. You're, you know, a lot of times employees can't find what they're looking for. So they actually recreate work that has been done in the past. In larger organizations, they have problems such as as people duplicating efforts in different parts of the org, because they simply don't know that the work exists elsewhere. This really solves for all of those issues here. And if you kind of put this at scale, you know, something that a new employee may be spending hours and hours, you know, searching for information, but you come, you multiply that by every time someone is trying to do something like this, it's saving the organization tons of time and just, you know, that's time that can be spent doing more productive things like building product.

▶8:10HostJason, how did you develop and implement an effective AI usage policy that balances innovation with security concerns, particularly when managing confidential HR information?

▶8:21GuestYeah, maybe to, to the listeners, what I'd say is that, um, first, if you don't have one, build one as soon as possible. You can always iterate on it. Don't aim for perfection. Just build one. You need one because with or without a policy in place, employees are using this as we speak. Right? So you do want to offer that guidance as soon as possible. Again, you can iterate on it as you learn more. Now, what we've done at Pryon is, you know, as with any program, any new product that you're developing, any initiative, we always want to start with the why. So it's the identification of what are your first principles that you believe in. And we centered our policy around 3 key pillars, right? And those principles being transparency. Trust and privacy, and traceability. And this, and then of course we go about building the policy, you know, those first principles guide all decision-making within the policy itself. And some of the core elements of our policy are things such as we do not allow the usage of public LLMs. So think ChatGPT, Claude, et cetera, for anything that is using our company proprietary data or information. So that is definitely off limits. So we set those guidelines in place. You know, we want— we maintain an approved list of tools that we have reviewed and we have deemed secure for the organization. And also we have a security team that we log and monitor usage and the patterns. So this also feeds us and allows us to understand how are employees currently using AI and also what can we do to further invest to help them source better tools. It also helps us to discover tools that may not be approved that are being used by employees. So these policies are framed and enabled experimentations. We've set some very safe boundaries for employees to work within. But again, it's about creating an environment where we're trusting employees to use the technology to determine the path forward without necessarily mandating it. So another example of not just invisible HR, but it's a great partnership with our IT and legal teams as well. And one last thing that I'd mention here is that being an AI-native company, Praion, all of our employees actually have a deep, deep understanding of the technology itself. Which includes both obviously the benefits, but also the risks and the security concerns. And so we didn't have to spend too much time on the education and the why of all of this. But for folks out there who are in different industries, which is likely the majority of the listeners, I would highly recommend educating employees. We shouldn't take for granted that everyone understands the inherent risk of AI and utilizing that within the workplace.

▶10:53HostJason, having worked at companies of various sizes from Disney and Apple to your current role, at Pryon, how have you adapted your approach to HR technology implementation based on organizational maturity?

▶11:06GuestThis is a, this is a great question for all HR leaders, and it's a fundamental skill for all HR leaders. And I've had the privilege, to your point, of working in different, at different companies at different stages of maturity. So at Apple and Uber, for example, it was about relatively mature. It was about integration. It was about enterprise-grade system built for scale, audit readiness. These were public companies, which come with certain requirements as well. However, at a much earlier stage, a startup such as Pryon, it's a very different environment. Not just are our processes very rudimentary at the moment and systems are rudimentary, you know, think, you know, initially we're working with spreadsheets and whiteboards, right? Which is a part of the challenge that we signed up for, but also the business, right? There's a lot of first-time managers within the workforce. We have to help the organization build its maturity and evolve in its maturity. And HR plays a lead role in that. So for an early-stage company, the opportunity there is to build things from the ground up. And for those who really understand how the different parts of HR work, there's an opportunity if you're doing it at an early-stage company to do this in an interconnected and systemic way, okay, which is oftentimes not a consideration. People are solving for immediate problems, but not necessarily thinking about how everything connects and works with one another. So I often leverage the maturity models, right? So this is— there's great source material that's out there. I often look at the Josh Berson— Josh Berson has a lot of maturity models that they publish, widely accessible. And this will give you a very good starting point to help you diagnose where does the organization currently stand, but more importantly, where does it need to head, right? The typical maturity model has 2 or 3 or 4 horizons. The idea here is not to leap leapfrog from stage 1 all the way to 4 overnight, right? The idea here is to help the organization get to the next level. Yeah. And be very mindful of you don't want to get ahead and maturing in an HR organization prior to the broader business maturity. And that's probably one of the biggest learnings that HR leaders transitioning from different companies will have. Now, one cool caveat that I would add is that things are changing right now as we speak. There's so much innovation in the field. AI is offering opportunities for folks to leapfrog in terms of what maturity looks like, and it's a current open question around what the future maturity models will look like. And everyone who spends time working within HR has a, has a role to play now in helping to define that. So it's a pretty exciting time to be in HR.

▶13:40HostJason, can you walk us through a specific workflow improvement you've implemented using AI that has significantly enhanced your HR team's productivity and effectiveness?

▶13:50GuestThere's an opportunity For kind of bridging to my previous comment, there's an opportunity here to take a fresh look at every single business process throughout an organization, every single one, HR, but well beyond HR, and ask the question, how can this be improved, whether through automation or augmented in some form with AI to either make it more efficient, make it more effective, increase quality, some form of improvement. And I think that you'll find that the vast majority of workflows and processes can be improved with the leverage of technology, by leveraging technology. And HR, of course, is no exception. So let me give you a very small, simple example of a workflow that's improving within HR, kind of under that spirit. So, you know, one thing that we had noticed recently with summer holidays coming up is that a lot of folks weren't requesting PTO for their summer holidays. And weren't doing the necessary steps. If they were, even if they were requesting their PTO, they wouldn't always do the necessary next steps to prepare for the holiday. So, you know, typically the old guidance, if you will, was typically 4 or 5 manual steps, right? So log into the HRIS and request your leave, then go into Slack and change your status to, you know, the little coconut mark that indicates that you're on vacation. Set your auto, your email auto-reply, you know, update your calendar and the company calendar, so on and so forth, right? Maybe a little bit of a handover doc and letting stakeholders know that you'll be out for the week or two. Okay. So that was the old process. And, you know, the vast majority of folks weren't doing all of those things. Yeah. So what we did, and this is actually another idea that came up in the hackathon, was what if we just had a single step? Okay. And the single step was this. You go into the HRIS, you request your leave. Okay. And once that leave is approved, and by the way, for the employee, that's it, right? After that point, once it's approved, the AI agent will pick up on the approval and do all of those next steps automatically, right? And even when you're away on holiday, so say for example, if you're an engineer and a ticket was assigned to you, the system will know comprehensively that this employee is out. And it will reassign that ticket to some other engineer who's on call, right? So it's really just, and we're talking, you know, what may have taken about 15 minutes, maybe even more previously, is now accomplished within, you know, 10 to 15 seconds, right? And we're not done there yet too. I think that that's the current iteration, a future iteration. We would love for employees to be able to just go into our internal chatbot called, we call it Pioneer. And basically say, hey, I want to take a week off at the end of August, and that's it, right? The rest is taken care of. And maybe the agent even asks a question back or provides some resources back around, you know, how to— I mean, you could imagine what that would be, right? So here's some considerations while you're away, or have you thought about doing this while you're away, so on and so forth. So it's right now we're in the stage where we're thinking about that future state as well. Jason, what parting advice would you like to share with our community? So At my time at Apple, one of my— I learned a lot there, and one of my biggest takeaways was a story that I loved that Steve Jobs used to share about his father, who many of you know and may have heard of this, but he was a carpenter. And the quote is, always finish the back of the drawer. And in the world of the carpenter, what that means is that if you're a carpenter designing a beautiful chest of drawers, If you truly care about your craft, make sure you put the best quality material and wood, polish it. The back of the drawers is important as a front, even though no one's going to see it. You as the artist, as the carpenter, as an employer, as an HR leader, will know that you did, you truly finished and did your best work, even when people don't know about it. And I love this concept. It's translated throughout Apple for sure. You know, regardless of whether you're building product, whether you're in sales, whether you're working within HR. And it really speaks to the care that people give to the work that they do. And that's something that I've always tried to embody in the work that I'm most passionate about, the things that I care the most about, to really make the extra effort to finish the back of the drawer. And because the employees and the business, they may not see it, but they will feel it. And the cool thing is that when you're looking back on your career, It was those moments when you took the time, the effort, and had the care to finish the back of the drawer. Those are the things that you're going to be the most proud of. And as it turns out, those are also the things that will likely unlock new opportunity for your career ahead. Jason, always finish the back of the drawer.

▶18:45HostThanks so much for that great story from Apple. Thanks for joining us today on the Built by People podcast.

▶18:50SpeakerIt was really a pleasure to have you on.

▶18:53GuestThanks so much, David. It was a pleasure.