Leveraging AI for Skills Improvement with Gretchen Alarcon at ServiceNow Knowledge 2024

This is Textron tv. All right, welcome back to ServiceNow Knowledge 2024. And now we're talking about workspaces and soon talent management and the whole employee experience.

And this is Gretchen Alarcon and there's just a lot to unpack here as of late. So let's just start at the beginning and see where this goes. But we've seen this kind of shift where everybody went, worked from home for a while and now we're trying to bring everybody back in.

And a lot of people are halfway moving back and forth. And it seems to me there's a lot of tension in that conversation. But the one thing underneath it is people seem to be voting with their feet based on the experience they have at the job.

Yeah. And so is it more important suddenly, like the actual digital employee experience seems to be crucial for organizations? Yeah.

You know, if you think about when we think about where employees work, there's a question of what technologies do they have access to and then what's the environment where they're working in? Right? And those two things need to be aligned because if you are doing a hybrid workforce, you have to assume at least part of the time they're working from home or elsewhere.

And they must have a great experience to get access to information. But then if they're coming into the office, we wanna make sure that they have a good workplace experience around, you know, do you know who's in the, in the office that you can collaborate with? Do you know where best it is for you to sit?

So we're having a lot of conversations with customers right now about how do we make the in-office experience a good experience for your employees. So if they are hybrid, they don't feel like they're sacrificing something if they're coming back to the office, we want both of those to be good experiences. Who's leading that conversation in these organizations?

Because historically it was kinda like the IT people would come around and they'd be like, here's your app, here's your box and the way you go. Yeah. Is that involving into, are HR people involved who's, who's kinda leaning in here and saying this matters?

You know, it's a combination of HR people and facilities people. But what I'm finding is that when you talk about the overall employee experience that is more and more hr or it's a dedicated role that might sit in between HR and it, who's looking really at that overall experience, but the workplace, there's the facilities, you know, do things work, you know, are will the lights come on, that sort of a thing. But then what's that experience like?

Do we have collaborative space or do we, are we all in offices? That sort of a thing. HR has got a bigger voice in that now because they are so focused on that employee experience.

I feel like there's been a change in the nomenclature. We used to call the employees this, the employees that uhhuh now you hear it referred to as the talent. Mm-Hmm.

And it's almost like they're barring uh, nomenclature from the sports world or are the studios. And so are you starting to see organizations think about the human capital as talent that needs to be managed much like I would a ball club? Yeah.

I think what's evolved a bit and HR people have been talking about this, it goes in waves, but it's been very important for the last year or so, is this question around not what job are you here to perform, but what skills are you bringing to the organization? Because with all the changes that are happening in the world, you know, with AI coming on the space with generative AI just exploding and creating all these new ideas, people need to really think less about the job you were hired for and more about where else can you contribute or what else could you bring. And so thinking about talent starts to kind of say, you know, you're not my employee and I hold onto you forever.

You are a talent who is available in this organization and maybe it's better for you to work on another team for a while and come back to me based on where your skillset fits best. Are they actively trying to cross pollinate skills? 'cause it used to be kinda like I was in this job here and this is my thing now are, are we seeing folks a little more horizontal across different processes and you know, becoming more valuable as a result?

Yeah, I think there's value in both cases for both the leaders of the organization as well as for the employee when you think about it that way, right? Because what a leader can do is say, you know, I have all these people who have this skillset, but I need a bunch of people with this skill set. How am I gonna get them there?

Am I going to recruit them? Am I going to develop them? What's my best way to effectively get those skills into my organization?

And for an employee, when that's presented to you as an opportunity to say, I want you to take this assignment, or here's a new assignment that might help you grow your skills. You're not only being more, more valuable to the current company, but you're building transferable skills that will help you in your next role. Whether that's in this company or further on in your career.

Of course we're at this show and you can't walk five feet without somebody talking about ai. No kidding. And It, and it seems like we're all collectively having this, where's my cheese moving moment?

Um, our organization's gonna have to figure out like okay these processes are being automated, we need to upskill. But where and how. It seems like we're all kind of trying to figure out the where and the how of the upskill.

So yeah. Um, how do you guys see that kind of evolving? Yeah.

You know, I heard a great comment from another colleague that I'm gonna shamelessly steal about how the work that needs to be performed is going to change. Maybe not super fast, but how the work is performed is going to radically change. And so that how piece is where I think people are really starting to explore what can gen I to do for me?

And we're seeing that it's gonna impact most organizations in some degree. It's not going to just hit one type of organization or one level of an employee as it has in the past when we've had these kind of technology changes. I think what's really interesting to me though is thinking about how that assistant changes the employee experience and thinking about, you know, I don't have to log a case, go for a search, read through eight pages of documentation.

I can say I am looking to leave on my parental leave early. What do I need to do? And now assist could actually take me back to say here's what you're eligible for.

Would you like to make that change? That's a hugely valuable thing for me, which is going to help me have a more productive experience. Do you think we're all gonna evolve into the point where we all have our own little digital assistance that we're supervising?

We're all effectively managers now and we need to think about work in those terms. 'cause I'm gonna have, I don't know, four or five different assistants that are all digital ai. Yeah.

But the way I use them will distinguish me from everybody else. I Think it's an interesting question around will it be multiple assistants or will there be one who becomes, you know, I was jokingly before you saying this is my extra brain, right? Who's going to just kind of help me with knowing my patterns, what I need to know, serving it up to me?

You know, I can remember a long time ago kind of asking the question around why do you have to be a certain level before you have an assistant? Because it's such a valuable thing when you have a human assistant, right? So if you are an individual contributor or a manager and you had that assistant who knew you and could guide you into what you need to know and help prioritize your day for you or summarize things, that's a very big value.

Means now you're focusing on the things that you really contribute as a human. Your creativity, your intellect, your judgment, your collaboration with other people and you're not spending your time doing the administrative, the things that take a lot of time that aren't really as much contributing to the value that you could bring to an organization. Do you think that will improve work life balance?

And I'm asking the question 'cause I'm married, my wife and I we're constantly having conversations about who's gonna do what when around their work. We all do. Yeah.

Um, but that might get easier if I have an AI assistant that I can offload certain tasks like you know, scheduling the dentist meeting or whatever. Sure. I think that's actually where there's a great opportunity for us to say which of these things are going to go away.

And personally, you know, I used to say my time when things really got kind of taken away from my me time is Sunday nights because I would be doing all of my approvals, all of my things that I didn't get to last week. Kind of all the administrative work. So you know, if on Thur, if I don't have to spend my Sunday nights doing the admin work because my assistant has done most of that for me, well that's a whole weekend night that I just got back.

Right? That's great for me. I have four children.

What's this me time thing you're talking about Your four children are probably farther ahead on using a lot of this generative ai. This Is true. They're trying to use that to manage me bro.

That's right. The other way around. Um, so you guys are launching a talent thing here at the show.

What, how does that fit in the portfolio and what is it gonna let me do that I couldn't do before? Absolutely. So if you think about where ServiceNow started, we were in service thinking about cases and case management, helping people answer questions.

As we started looking at skills, we started thinking about what are the other areas where people are maybe not having their workflow terribly Well, we moved up the space originally into kind of the bigger moments for our person onboarding, offboarding going on leave. We've had that available for years. And when our customers started asking us was if you can streamline that, could you streamline some of the other talent processes where I might have multiple systems that an employee could go to but they don't know when to go into what system, right?

So if I am an employee and I want to grow in my career, what am I gonna do? Am I gonna get a mentor? Am I gonna take a class?

Do I need to set goals? Do I need to talk to my manager about anything? How do I do that?

For most organizations, that's kind of tribal knowledge. Like you kind of learn how things work. But if we can make that more visible to an employee so they can say I have a growth aspiration and here are the steps I'm taking to get there, their manager can see that and their manager can say, actually you're making progress or That's great but I don't think you're gonna get there right away.

Let's reset and let's have a growth conversation around how do we get you on the right path. So it's really again about orchestrating that talent process, right? Yeah.

'cause sometimes you don't know what somebody has for certificates that they've taken and studied and suddenly there's a job opening and you're thinking I gotta go higher outside when there's somebody sitting right there that actually can do that job and it's easy to replace them than the other one. Sure. That's a great idea.

Um, as we kind of go along, do you think we can also get to the point where I can have a better handle of what talent we need? Right? Today the job is at where we, the company is moving in this direction.

I would like a little analysis that says Hey, we need more talent in this area with these skills to actually achieve that goal. 'cause frequently, I mean I don't think this is telling tales outta school, but occasionally we get assigned some new task and new thing and we look around and we go, me and what Army? I need my helpers around here, right?

Yeah. I think there are some really great opportunities for us to think about what is the supply chain of talent? What's the demand for that talent, right?

So, you know, we've talked to some consulting companies who are saying, how do I make sure that I've got the right staff to staff in incoming projects? I want people off the bench. What skills do they need to grow so that they can be staffed onto these projects, right?

So aligning that better. Or you know, organizations that are going through major shifts where they might say, you know, I'm overweight on certain talents right now as I go to recruit my next people, I don't necessarily need to hire for these skills 'cause I already have those I need to target very specifically other skills, right? So I think there's a good opportunity to talk about what are the impactful skills in your organization?

What do you have now? What do you think you're gonna need and how are we gonna get that those skills for you? Are you gonna develop them?

Are you gonna acquire them? Are you gonna borrow 'em from another team? Like what's the best way for you to do that Besides adopting the ServiceNow platform, what do you see people who manage teams really well doing and that you wish other people would kind of crib?

I think one of the things that is really interesting to me when you think about the role of a manager is so much of being a manager is having awareness and context, not necessarily doing the transaction, right? So if you think about, you know, as your employees are going about their daily work, you're not necessarily over their shoulder every day, right? But you generally wanna know is the project on track or you generally wanna know are they aligned with their goals?

And so I think having that focus on visibility for key capabilities or key things that you need to know as we developed our manager hub, that was actually one of the things we focused on, was of your team, who is on what journey and then what do you need to do? It's not, you may not need to do anything, you may just need to have a a visibility. But we can also direct you and say this person needs you to go in and focus or it's time for your quarterly growth conversations.

Here's what you talked about last time, here's what we would recommend. You talk about this type, right? So how again, can we assist you in having really solid conversations?

Because when a manager, a people manager does well is coaching and guiding their employees to their best performance, right? That's what we want them spending their time on. And so the more we can align that with what they're used to doing, the better we're going to be is serving the employees.

Alright? 'cause you're looking for a light touch, but we don't want to have a situation where they couldn't accomplish the mission so they changed the mission and you're like, wait a minute. Absolutely.

And that's again coming back to what are your goals, what the outcomes you're trying to get to and how are you aligned to have those outcomes, right? So that's a large part of this conversation is what is the business doing? What is it you, what are you as a manager accountable for?

And then how do you make sure your people are best aligned to that? Alright, We talked about all the fun part of the thing, but there is this thing called toil and involves managing people and this paperwork and processes and all this kind of stuff. Mm-Hmm.

I mean we've talked about ai but can we just automate all that out of existence? I mean, how far can we get? Because there's just a lot of stuff that people don't want to do.

You know, I think there's a great opportunity with AI for us to take the areas where a casual user, an employee or a manager understand something and let them solve that problem while having a subject matter expert do the part that they need to know. So, you know, if you think about if you are gonna go on leave, I don't need to read eight pages of documentation. I want to know what are the steps, show me the five steps in order and then show me what I have to do next.

Right? So that removes a lot of the administration. I'm probably still gonna have to fill out some content or what have you, but if I don't have to read through eight pages and get frustrated, I'm gonna be more productive, right?

Same thing as a manager. You know, if AI can say, oh by the way you are coming up on some training that you have to do, it's scheduled to take 30 minutes. We put that in your calendar for you.

Alright, I may not love training, but it's on my calendar, I'm going to do it. I'm not gonna be behind in getting the phone calls from HR going, why haven't you done this yet? Right?

So again, we may not get rid of all of the burden. There are always gonna be some things, but if we can make it easier to work with and make you feel like this is a productive use of your time, we're gonna be adding more value. Last question.

Is this all moving up to like a board level conversation? It seems like folks are having a conversation about the company is the talent, so is this the tenor of this thing is changing? It is.

I think some of this changed with HR during the pandemic, right? Because we were so focused on safety and where are our employees and you know, it was a, it was a brand new world. Um, and HR was very much at the top of that conversation with the CEOs kind of saying, I am the voice of the people.

Here's what we're doing. And that didn't go away. As the next challenges have come up.

Now we're very focused on, look, the economics are a little bit uncertain. How do we make sure that we are timing our hiring appropriately? We're spending our cost appropriately.

We're giving good returns to our shareholders. That is all about, for most organizations, talent is the biggest cost in their organization. So how do we make sure we are making the best use of our talent dollars, but also being very aware of what we're going to be asking of our talent.

What skills do they do we need to have in house? That's absolutely a c-suite and board level conversation. All right folks, you heard it here.

No matter how smart AI gets, an organization is always as good as its talent. Hey, thanks for coming by. Thank you so much.

Appreciate it. All right folks, that's a wrap for ServiceNow Knowledge 2024. It's been an awesome experience.

We learned about everything from AI of course, but to talent management to talked about application development. We've even talked about the future of business and the age of digital processes. I found it fascinating.

I hope you did too. And hopefully we'll see you again next year.