“If you made a movie about AI now, it would be called Everything Everywhere All at Once,” jokes Jens-Henrik Jeppesen, a senior director for US firm Workday, which manages companies’ employees.
Jeppesen captures the zeitgeist of AI, which was a low-key tech industry buzzword for years before OpenAI’s ChatGPT thrust it into the mainstream.
AI is all the rage, unlike the fourth industrial revolution — which has become a faded fad along with Facebook’s abandoned metaverse, on which it bet $26bn. AI is gaining popularity and, perhaps unexpectedly, usefulness.
At first the biggest fear was for human jobs, but that has also dissipated as the potential for AI to improve employee skills and new ways of working have emerged.
“Every business nowadays is a talent business,” Workday co-president Sayan Chakraborty told the FM at the Workday Rising conference in Barcelona last year.
Globally there is a shift towards a “skills-based methodology, as opposed to credentials or traditional-based ways of hiring”, Chakraborty says. And AI can help develop it. This is especially “salient” for new people coming into the workforce, he says. They will have “grown up with ChatGPT”.
Last month, at the World Economic Forum, Accenture CEO Julie Sweet said the consultancy now has 12 jobs in its technology department that didn’t exist a year ago, including that of an engineer for writing the complicated prompts needed for meaningful responses from a generative AI service.
Every business nowadays is a talent business
— Sayan Chakraborty
“Many of the jobs that are being created are definitely highly skilled jobs,” she told Yahoo Finance. The big challenge today in being successful with using AI is “actually going from the cool demos to operationalising it, and talent is front and centre”.
Chakraborty says AI and specialisation will in future be linked. “We see that at Workday, in our skills cloud, which is an AI-generated ontology of skills,” he says. When new projects are conceived, the firm searches through its own skills database for a contributor.
“The companies producing human-relevant data will become increasingly relevant,” says Chakraborty, who sits on the US national AI advisory committee that advises the president on AI policy.
“You need to have a partner with you on the journey to support the business you are going to be, not just the business you are,” he says.
Workday has evolved from a service to a platform, says co-CEO Carl Eschenbach. As human capital has become central in business and software has evolved, “you are no longer doing financials and HR separately”, he tells the FM. Both have “scope creep”.
Workday says it makes sense to incorporate a company’s financial services into its HR software. With its strong HR reputation, it wants to convince CFOs that this is a better bet — especially given this increasing focus on skills.
Luckily, says Workday vice-president of financials product strategy Tim Wakeford, the HR industry is “much more conformable moving to cloud”, while it sees a larger market through the CFOs it already deals with. “We are better penetrated in HR than in finance,” he tells the FM.
Before he sold his start-up to Workday, Chakraborty studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, from which he has a master’s and a degree in aerospace engineering. He worked at Nasa’s jet propulsion laboratory as an engineer on interplanetary spacecraft and later on the early commercialisation of global positioning systems. He was also vice-president of software development at Oracle.
On his desk is an Apollo 13 medallion, commemorating the explosion during the 1970 space mission in which the crew survived.
“The Apollo 13 represents that technology is great,” he tells the FM.
“When that tank exploded in the service module in Apollo 13, and they went to the books and asked ‘What do you do next?’, there wasn’t an answer. Because no-one had seen such an event as survivable.” Then he beams and says: “What happened was that humans used the technology and accomplished something extraordinary.
“The reason I keep that medal on my desk is to remind me always of what humans are capable of with technology at their service.”
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