Below is a transcript from the recent session at Forward. Prefer to watch the recording? Click here.
Rea Rotholz; VP, Solutions at Hone: Everyone. Welcome, welcome.
We are going to kick off our keynote, the six mission critical archetypes for AI transformation. And we’re going to kick off with a quote.
This quote is by Ethan Molik, a professor at Wharton and one of the foremost thought leaders in AI. He said,
if AI development stopped today, we’d still have a couple decades of work ahead of us figuring out how to integrate it into work, education, and life.
And we know that AI development is not stopping. If anything, it’s getting faster and faster and more impressive. So the AI transformation constraints that we might be facing in our organizations aren’t about technology.
They are about the people who are using the technology.
Most organization efforts aren’t stalling because of access. I mentioned last year, we were talking to organizations that were still trying to get buy-in and approval for AI tools. Now, pretty much everyone has some sort of access to AI, if not many different AI tools and models at their disposal. So transformation efforts are often not stalling because of the technology. It’s stalling because we’re struggling to turn all of the excitement, experimentation, piloting into true change into how we’re getting work done. We’re here today at Forward because learning from our own experiences is frankly not enough. It’s moving so fast that we need to capitalize on learning from each other.
When we can learn from each other, as well as we still need to learn it ourselves, but when we can learn from each other, we have a better chance of keeping up with the pace of change.
Tom Griffiths; Co-Founder and CEO at Hone: That’s right, Rea. Thank you and welcome everybody. It’s fantastic to be hosting FORWARD today. A year since we did our last event is a long time. It feels like a decade in AI just given the amount that’s happened and we’re here today with the viewpoint that as Rea said the tools are racing ahead so really the bottleneck today is people transformation, really AI transformation is people transformation.
So we’re going to talk about where we’re going and how we get there but in order to do that first we need to talk about where we’re starting and Hone has the privilege of a lot of data on this as we work with hundreds of different partners and companies to understand where their people are at on the AI fluency spectrum. We have an AI that will interview everybody in the company to understand are they AI aware, just not really using the tools, AI enabled, using it as a basic level for things like email or an elevated Google search? Are they fluent in using the tools to their full capabilities for their roles or are they actually AI native, reimagining workflows, building new ways of working for themselves and others, and the good news is we’re off the starting blocks.
Over the last year we’ve moved people forward from AI aware to the point now where the majority of folks are AI enabled, so using it for basic drafting tasks, research and processing and really what we need to do at an individual level is keep moving people up the spectrum and we’ll talk about how we do that in a second.
Other interesting insights that we’ve seen from these interviews are around the environment that people are operating in when it comes to AI, not just their own fluency, and there’s a lot of upside potential here as well. Two thirds of people actually don’t know what is expected of them when it comes to AI usage in their workplace. Everybody’s been given tools and told to use them but what are their concrete expectations?
Managers play a huge role in that and that’s going to be a recurring theme in our presentation today and the rest of FORWARD itself and most managers eighty six percent are really encouraging AI use but only twenty six percent of them have given a concrete goal again to set those clear expectations.
Finally, one of the big themes I think in AI that’s going to differentiate the AI native organizations from the rest in the second half of twenty twenty six is going to be the multiplayer mode of AI as opposed to single player and that’s where people are building and sharing and working with agents together and we’re seeing a gap here where most people are building things at some level but they’re largely keeping those things to themselves and so we want to encourage more sharing and more multiplayer use cases for AI that are really going to unlock new capabilities.
So that’s where we’re starting. Where are we going? Well, today we wanted to talk about AI transformation and this big mission that we all have through a fun space metaphor of getting to a new place for our company where we are more transformed with AI and more AI native but the way we wanted to do it is a little bit different. I see a lot of AI transformation conversations happening around the process or the technology that’s necessary but as we just saw really the bottleneck now is people and so we wanted to take a look at AI transformation through the lens of the different personas or archetypes of people involved and then secondly how do we develop and cultivate those personas to be as powerful as they can be for this broad AI transformation moment. So we’ll go one by one talk about the mission of each of these folks in the picture and then how we can upskill them to be where we need them to be.
The first of our six are astronauts in our space metaphor as we kind of blast off and think about how we get to a new destination in AI transformation and really all employees means all employees, everyone from the CEO to the executive suite all the way through the org chart. Everyone needs a baseline of fluency as we were just saying and I think one of the tried and true L and D metaphors that’s useful here is mindsets, skill sets and tool sets. Everybody’s rushed to get everyone the tool sets and now we’re trying to catch up with the skill sets but actually what we’ve learned at home is that you need to start really with mindsets to help people understand that this is a new way of working to cultivate curiosity, experimentation, openness to change and then understanding when AI can be helpful and when it’s not, then we get into the fluency skill sets of using tools to their full extent and ultimately redesigning personal workflows and role specific workflows on an individual basis using the latest and greatest AI tools.
The shadow side of this or the thing not to do in the all employee sense is to wait for someone to tell you what to do or wait for permission or be fearful of experimentation. I know there is a lot of fear out there in the world at the moment but really I think it serves us all and our organizations to embrace this new world and experiment.
The way that we at home have seen development work the best here is actually baselining everybody first because there is such a difference across the org in people’s level of fluency. So we use an analysis like the one we saw a couple of slides ago to understand where people start and then we map workshops to those different levels where it’s live and interactive with an expert to really help people level up. There are of course a lot of other online resources around that could help people level up in their own way and we want to encourage that curiosity whether it’s through traditional learning materials or interacting with AI itself and then for reinforcement we’re seeing a lot of success with AI coaching across the all employee spectrum as well.
So these are astronauts as we go on our mission to this new destination of a transformed AI company.
Rea: I feel like we started with the most difficult archetype because it’s literally everyone in the organization.
But to dive into some more personas. So many of you, and I’m looking at the list of attendees, I know many of you are friends of Hone, and focusing specifically on people managers because we know people managers have a huge huge unlock at your organization, and we’ve labeled these as our flight directors on the spaceship metaphor. So their mission is to redesign team workflows and coach and develop employees through change. At their best, they are reexamining how work is getting done, redesigning, leveraging AI, and thinking about ways to do things that maybe weren’t even possible before AI made it a possibility. So that’s at their best. The shadow side of being a people manager in this AI transformation era would be assuming that individuals are taking advantage of AI more and experimenting more.
Maybe assuming that your direct reports will come to you if they have a challenge and they’ll be proactive about it, which isn’t always the case.
So how to develop this group is to be very intentional about the skills that your people managers need. You could deploy an AI manager analysis to understand where their personal fluency sits, help them there, and also understand how to unlock sort of the people side of AI transformation. So you can have cohort development and peer development, help them develop a systems thinking mindset, rethink how to look at their workflows a little bit differently, and of course make the right judgment call when it comes to both using AI and technology, but also being that people manager.
And then finally AI coaching as an opportunity to have that help and support throughout whatever challenges they may face can also be extremely helpful.
Tom: Thanks, Rea. Onwards up the org chart, we get to our executives who are our mission commanders.
Executives have a broader span of control and obviously a really important role here in transformation. They’re part of setting the vision, telling the story, and driving the change. They also have a span of control that’s greater than a manager and therefore the ability to reimagine or authorize at least changes to more workflows inside the organization which is what they’re doing at their best. On the shadow side they might think of AI as the solution to all problems when at least as many challenges are on the people side as we’re talking about and I think that we’ve seen a wave of bold declarations around AI and what it’s going to do for our organizations.
Obviously there is a very promising future but let’s not over promise and let’s have concrete plans that consider all angles whether it’s data, governance or skills and people transformation in order to get to the destination that we want. So levelled up in the organization I think there are levelled up development experiences, AI consultants and coaches really can go deep one on one with an executive or a department and I think just learning from peers because there really is no playbook in many senses here to see what others in your role at similar organizations are doing is a really effective way to develop the right mindset, skill sets, and tool sets at the executive level.
Rea: Absolutely and while the first three archetypes are based on actual roles in your organization right we often think about employees, people managers, executives, and their needs, The next three are a little bit more specific and might not be named, but would love for you to think about who in your organization is an AI builder.
For our metaphor here, we’ve labeled them as the technicians.
Not necessarily all engineers, because you might have AI builders who aren’t engineers, although you probably have engineers as well. But these are the people who are rolling up their sleeves and they are getting the AI work done. They are learning how to make change throughout the organization and tactically making those changes. So they’re the ones that have the mission to create AI tools and workflows beside different business needs.
At their best, they are building the actual system and tools and automations. At their shadow side, they might be creating solutions that aren’t necessarily solving an important problem. Right? We get excited about certain things, and it might be easy to automate, but maybe that’s not a priority.
But how to develop this group is to really make sure that they have the continuous learning opportunities for those technical skills. So expert workshops, and exposure there, online courses and resources to help them understand the latest technology because we know it is changing so fast. It’s hard to keep up to date on behalf of our team members.
So like I mentioned in the beginning, think about who in your organization is rolling up their sleeves and some of the changes they’ve been able to make.
Tom: Yeah, it’s a great way to put it, Rea, and I think our next persona, our AI change champions are also folks that self select and become visible and I’m sure you have these at your organization and part of the point here is to think about these as formal roles and formal development paths so you really can cultivate the right personas in the picture.
Change champions in our metaphor are both the test pilots who are trying out all the new AI models and harnesses and tools and capabilities and then evangelizing them as the astronomy enthusiasts to the rest of the organization. Any change needs champions to carry forward the change and to bring up AI as a potential solution to problems when they’re in the room with others who may be problem solving and they can also be coalesced together as a really powerful group connected to drive change or any kind of change especially AI change.
Develop them through classes and cohort experiences intentionally. I think the biggest unlock here is just recognizing them and then again finding ways to coach them either as a group individually or with AI coaching.
Rea: Yep and we have an amazing session with Progyny at the end of Forward that’s going to dive right into AI change champions. Okay. Final persona, strategy and governance. We’re labeling this our mission control.
They are responsible for responsible experimentation and managing risk.
At their best, they’re setting up systems and guardrails that make it possible for people in the organization to move quickly and safely. And their shadow side would be being overly restrictive in a way that hinders responsible experimentation.
Develop this group by giving them advisors and peers and infrastructure that they can leverage, workshops to understand the latest thinking in governance, because this is also changing very quickly, and just make sure they have that support that they need.
We wrapped all of this up into this slide so you can see the six different archetypes. If you want to take a screenshot, go ahead.
But here you can see them all and the unique roles they play in AI transformation.
Tom: Yeah, thanks, Rea and that’s a good point in the chat that sometimes you get hybrid folks, and absolutely we see that.
Think of the ones on the right at least as the hats that people can wear, and often you want your people managers to be your champions, and if your executives or your builders then even better. So these can coexist with one person.
The final point is that of course it takes the right crew and the right roles to achieve your AI mission and again you already have these people in your organizations, the point is let’s be intentional about recognizing them, cultivating them with the right communities and development experiences and then coordinating them within the broader change strategy and process to unlock all the possibilities and arrive at our ultimate mission destination of a transformed organization.
We’re going hear a lot about how folks have really gone on that journey throughout the day but just to give you a quick heads up on some of the ways that Hone has helped them or helps others in the space do this work, we have a very clear three step process where as you saw earlier we assess and understand where are people starting. We use the Genetic AI assessment to understand both fluency but also the management environment and how leadership is showing up to support transformation to give you both sets of data around fluency levels and management capability. Then we have over one hundred different workshops on topics like leadership and management in the age of AI but also helping people go up the levels through enablement and fluency and then building and those are live workshops plus AI support.
Finally once we’ve done the intense kind of up the curve workshops then we sustain that learning through continuous nudges, measurement through Slack or Teams and AI coaching going forward as well as a weekly schedule of ongoing workshops so that everyone gets the latest and greatest that’s coming out feels like weekly and so having an always on up to date workshop schedule helps to drive that sustainment as well.
That’s it to kick us off, we wanted to set the scene with personas and the way that HONE supports organizations. If you want to learn more about HONE and how we can support you on this journey and even try out our needs analysis that we just described for your team or a small group of folks at your organisation then feel free to follow this link, follow the QR code or any of the follow ups that we’ll do and we’ll have a quick chat and can give you access to this assessment as well as a free report and then see where the conversation goes from there.
With that I’m excited to turn it back to Rea and just to say I’m really grateful again for you all being here, hope you have a wonderful day and take away some great tools and tips for your AI transformation mission.
