HR's Evolution: Beyond Service to Strategic Impact with Augmented Intelligence

Welcome 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. Hi, I'd like to welcome José Koch

to the Built By People podcast. José, it's great having you on the show. Thanks so much for joining us. And I'd love to start off by having you share a little bit more about your career journey. How did you get started in HR and what were the pivotal moments in your career that led you to where you are today?

Pleasure to be here. I'm grateful for the invitation and excited. Let's see. I used to love answering this question, but now that I have gotten older, it definitely ages me. I've been in the industry for about 25 years, and I used to also describe it as I fell into it or happen to discover it by luck. The reality is that it takes away from the value of what HR is and talent. So now I have pivoted to say that I was grateful to have discovered the opportunity to participate in this particular function of industry 25 years ago, purely by chance. Started my career in recruiting. Started my career in executive recruiting, to be exact, in the late '90s. I had a multitude of companies that I was helping scale and grow. Probably the best known company today from that era was NVIDIA. I had a chance to work with NVIDIA before they were NVIDIA, prior to the company going IPO. From there, I went through a few other companies. Probably the most pivotal experience of my career was when I was hired into Apple to help to create the special project group, the one that was responsible for the iPod, a bunch of accessories, but ultimately the iPhone, where I was one of the earliest employees assigned to it. The reasons why I say that that was a pivotal point in my career was the fact that it was the exposure in terms of the ability to create impact. I had access to top executives, had the ability to earn a seat at the table and had a chance to prove that being strategic from a talent perspective, from a people perspective, can really, you know, supercharge a roadmap. And as they say, the rest is history, right? Apple and the iPhone program are paramount in terms of what has been accomplished. From there, I went back to my startup roots and followed Tony Fadell to Nest Labs. Where I helped to get the company from a garage all the way through a $3.2 billion acquisition by Google. After spending about a year and a half at Google, I decided to leave, started my own adventure myself where I created and co-founded an HR system to utilize machine learning and to help to, you know, track and and measure engagement with employees. Did that for about 3.5 years. At the end, the company turned out to be a better consulting firm than it was a technology firm. And not being a consultant, I decided to shut it down. Took a couple of years off and did some other things outside of technology. And in 2020, I was lured back by a company called Humane, initially to lead the talent efforts. But now for a little bit over a year, I have taken over and become the chief people officer.

That was a great introduction. Curious to get your perspective on what the responsibilities are of the HR function today and how you envision that evolving over time. You've obviously been a part of some amazing organizations at the early stage. Starting from the '90s to today. So you've got a lot of experience with, with evolution and seeing how things like technology can really change the game. What does that function look like for you now? And what are some of the pivotal changes you foresee happening in the near term? Great question.

Let's see. Fortunate enough to have seen the transition from being part of a service organization where we were waiting, right, for orders and, you know, operated in a very reactive manner to now witnessing and experiencing the opportunity to really make a difference. I think today in heading into the future, I think that we have to look at ourselves, right, in HR leadership as strategic members of the business organization. Our impact is not necessarily limited to hiring and, you know, onboarding and keeping, you know, people happy. I think it goes beyond that. I think there is a— there has been a tremendous shift where we have the ability now to have a seat at the main table, right? And to help out with strategic decisions. Right early on, it could be as critical as helping companies to understand how we can build an assessment of the skill sets and the gaps in particular that we have, and how do we translate that into a strategic opportunity to invest ahead of those opportunities manifesting themselves. Many a times in earlier in my career, I would get a phone call and it was panic. We need to hire this person. We need to hire this person immediately, right? When you put yourselves against the wall, you end up limiting the potential impact of those individuals that are being brought in, right? If panic sets in, there might be a lowering of the bar, right? A settling of hiring anyone who may be available versus what I do today and what, you know, a lot of other organizations do. Which is plan ahead, get a sense, right? Start the search 2 to 3 months ahead, analyze the market, figure it out what it is that you have internally, and make sure that you're giving yourself ample of opportunity to look at every available talent that is out there, right? And make most logical decision without the pressure of timing. And it could be as simple as that. It could evolve and it should evolve into an opportunity of understanding who it is that we're searching, right? How do we optimize their impact by understanding who that person is, right? Is this individual that was hired as good as we expected? If so, what are the things that we can do to set them up for success, right? And ramp them up and immediately put them in a position to create impact. Maybe not as good as we hoped, but with the right training, we can get them on board. Again, what is the strategy to do that? Maybe this person is better than we expected. Fantastic. How does that affect the strategy moving forward for that organization? And how can we empower more responsibilities for that individual? And how does that affect the rest of the openings that are there? And the fourth one is we made a mistake. How can we rectify that mistake? And move forward? And how do we take information, right, from the assessment through the onboarding, through the ramping, and allow us to continue to ask those questions? How is this employee performing with the opportunity to, A, make sure that we are promoting individuals and giving them more responsibility as they get to critical points in their careers where they can take on more and therefore extending the tenure with the company by maintaining growth, keeping the challenges, and making them feel engaged. Two, what are the things that we

have to invest on in terms of

understanding how do we uplevel our individuals? And three, understanding also that there is an arc to every employee. We all have one, right? And trying to anticipate or forecast when that arc is going to culminate in and that employee is most likely to depart so that we can, A, start working on making sure that there's gonna be a smooth transition, right? That we're documenting the responsibilities and retaining as much information as possible, celebrating the individual and utilizing the individual and all that information to make sure that we are either promoting or hiring the right replacement ahead of time. And with the, you know, With, with the era of intelligence being upon us, I think that we have a fantastic opportunity to be able to build tools that would allow us to have access to information at scale that can give us the confidence where we can make those calls. I'm not talking about AI taking over. I'm not talking about AI making decisions for us. I'm talking about not artificial intelligence, but augmented intelligence of our people in HR.

This is a great transition because I wanted to touch on the impact technological advancements are having on the function of HR. Can you share some specific use cases around how technology has changed the way that you run your business unit?

Yeah, we are still pretty early on in terms of defining, right, what technology can do for us. However, though, there are certain tools that exist out there that can help us, you know, to automate repetitive administrative tasks that can make the lives of our people a lot easier. But the most simple example that we use at Humane is utilizing a, you know, technology from a company called MetaView, where it basically transcribes the meetings that we have either with candidates during interview sessions, right, or panel reviews. And it allows us to have an immediate understanding of the segmentation of the information so that we can immediately recall all of the positive and negative attributes that interviewers were able to share in real time. We have the ability to manage recency bias. And being able to recall specific exact conversations when there is doubt or specific skill sets, right, between different interviewers. And to me, right, there's two perspectives from that. The first perspective is what the average, you know, company is going to assume, which is, oh my God, liability, right? All of a sudden we are annotating, transcribing, and tracking things that could create liability for us. But really, I see it as the opposite. I see it as if anybody is creating liability during the process of interviewing, it doesn't matter, right? It doesn't matter if that is being recorded or not. It's still happening, right? With this type of technology, at least I have the ability to be able to discover that and get ahead of it. And if I put that fear behind, right, because of that benefit, and then I know that I can not only help, you know, individuals be able to be present during that candidate experience by making sure that they don't have to take notes, right, on everything, but that I can actually go back and look at the exact transcript of that conversation in the past if you have any doubts in terms of what my final recommendations or thoughts are gonna be. And what I get really excited about is when we start to hit it at volume. What are the things that are happening during these interviews that can allow the company to have a better understanding of how we can improve on that candidate experience, on how we can improve on that assessment, on how we can learn from the types of interviews and the people that we're meeting in terms of reshaping and redefining the search criteria for us. So it could be as simple as that., right? And, and again, we use a tool from a company called MetaView, but we have taken it beyond that. There is a significant opportunity for pretty much anyone to build GPTs and to start to think about how to build agents. And so what we have done, given that we have access to those transcriptions, is we have started to build our own software stack that allows us to have conversations between myself and the hiring manager, right, in those intake meetings, and be able to transcribe that information and have that information be sent out to other individuals who are going to participate in that process. And we can create a job description by just having a conversation with the individual. We can have that GPT or that agent literally, literally take over the process of the automation of the administrative tasks that need to take place before we can open that approval. And what we have seen at Humane is that we have taken a process that on average would take up to a week and we can condense it to a couple of hours. And to me, that's just the beginning. And again, you're collecting information, you're collecting information for me it's pretty easy to forecast, right, all that information that if that candidate is selected and hired, there's a lot of information that could go into the potential development plan and growth plan for that individual into the future. It can go into helping to structure a, a great onboarding experience for that individual. It can go into explaining to those that didn't get to meet that individual a little bit more about how this person approaches problem solving in what areas they can bring strengths and skills and what areas they're going to need help in that ramp up.

Jose, what's been a key learning in your career that you wish you had learned earlier?

Data. Absolute data. Right. I think that had I been more appreciative of data in the first half of my career, it is scary to think of what my career could have been, and not just my career from a personal perspective, but the impact that would have to others in my organizations as well as the companies that I worked for. To me, you know, there is a, you know, there is a massive difference in I think, I feel, and according to the data, right? Here is my read. And it's the difference between making an assumption and having confidence and make that call with that assumption.

I love that. Any parting advice that you'd like to share with the HR community?

Embrace AI. I know that if we listen, if we listen to the arguments, right, there is the possibility for us to be fearful that AI is going to take over our jobs. It is absolutely not going to take over our jobs. I'm not sure who said this not too long ago, but I truly believe that this is, you know, going to be the reality. We're not going to lose our jobs through AI. We're going to lose jobs to people who know how to optimize their outputs through AI. And furthermore, right, I think that, you know, AI is going to allow us the opportunity to gain control of our schedules. By automating those repetitive administrative tasks that nobody wants to do anyways, right? And allowing us to be more present and allowing us to be more human in the experiences that we have with candidates, with employees, right? With leaders in our company. The ability to be there and the ability to have the confidence because of the data that we're tracking is going to make a tremendous difference in as AI changes, right, how we do business, how we work, there's tremendous opportunity for us to be able to prepare our companies for those changes, to figure out ways to reskill our employees, to figure out ways to uplevel them by giving them the opportunity to learn how to optimize their outputs through AI, okay? And then to really be able to position ourselves as HR leaders in a way where we can have a significant impact in the overall business, not just the people.

José, thank you so much for joining us on the Built by People podcast. It was a pleasure having you on.

Pleasure was mine.