Why AI Should Be the No.1 Topic for CHROs in 2025
Parker Mitchell, CEO of Valence, explores the transformative power of generative AI in reshaping HR and talent management. He discusses the importance of AI-powered coaching tools, the future of team collaboration, and why CHROs must prioritize AI adoption. Learn how AI will redefine job roles and leadership development at scale.
In today's episode of the HR Leaders Podcast, we welcome Parker Mitchell, CEO of Valence. Parker shares his insights on how generative AI is transforming the workforce and HR functions, discussing how companies can leverage AI to systematize management, enhance team dynamics, and improve leadership development at scale.
He also explores the future of AI-powered tools in HR, including the rise of AI coaching and its potential to reshape management.
🎓 In this episode, Parker discusses:
Why CHROs must prioritize AI adoption and experimentation.
The game-changing potential of AI-powered coaching for managers.
How generative AI will redefine job roles and categories in every function.
The importance of AI tools in enhancing team collaboration and leadership.
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Parker Mitchell 0:00
So generative AI is probably going to lead to the biggest change in what someone's job is going to consist of, as well as what job categories are going to grow and what job categories are going to shrink. It's going to be the biggest change we've ever seen. And these are business driven decisions, but they have huge implications on people. CHROs need to be partners with the other members of the leadership team to be able to say, how is this going to affect how we think about staffing and jobs, compensation and all sorts of things. In every function, in the product function, the engineering function, in the sales function, in the research and development function, whatever the function is, it's going to change. And so a chro needs to partner with the business to understand what that's like. Parker,
Chris Rainey 0:52
welcome to the show. How are you, Chris, it's
Parker Mitchell 0:54
a delight to be here.
Chris Rainey 0:55
It's crazy. We spoke a couple of weeks ago on Zoom, and now we're here in London. Life works out that way. It sounds weird because, like, I'll ever speak to leaders like yourself, and I'll meet them, like, 10 years later or the week after. This is crazy, because, like, episode one of the podcasts, it was L'Oreal theater of Stefan chabonier, and we only met last year after, like, 10 years as well. And we're like, how have we known each other for 10 years, and we were only meeting now face to face as well, but it's so much nicer to see everyone face to face. This
Parker Mitchell 1:27
is the virtual world that we're in. We get to know each other's screen presences, and then it's so nice to connect in person. Yeah,
Chris Rainey 1:33
before we jump in, tell everyone a little bit more about you personally and your journey to where we are now with valance we'll
Parker Mitchell 1:40
give a couple of quick highlights. So I studied engineering and then became a consultant, but I was very quickly attracted to the org practice. And so the question was, how do we make big companies better places to work? How do we make them both more efficient, but also places where people can connect more and so I did that for a couple of years, but at the same time, I was trying to found a nonprofit. Now that nonprofit was called Engineers Without Borders, and that ended up just taking off. So I spent 10 years co leading that, and quickly realized that most of my job was actually around people. And how do you connect people together? How do you help them form really cohesive teams that are going to be doing difficult work in some difficult circumstances. They have to be open to feedback. They have to be able to sort of take their ego and put it aside. So we were teaching engineers. Now there's some stereotypes about engineers. We're teaching them about the Johari Window, about the ladder of inference, about the four dimensions of trust, about amygdala hijacks and how to address and avoid those. So we're trying to get them to sort of go deep within themselves to become better members of a team and better leaders. So I did that for 10 years. Then I had a bit of a zigzag in my career, and I was recruited by bridgewater associates, world's largest hedge fund, also probably one of the strangest places to work. And I work directly with the CO CEO there. So I was working with the founder, Ray, the CO CEO, wow. And part of what
Chris Rainey 3:13
I follow Ray's work a lot. Every video that comes out on Ray, I'm like, I'm watching it. It's fascinating
Parker Mitchell 3:19
work and and I think that, you know, the culture that they developed is, I would say it's sort of almost like an Olympic type culture, which is like, if you have that level of intensity, it works really well. I am personally not convinced it scales to more regular workforces.
Chris Rainey 3:36
And not everyone can work in anywhere, and not everyone for a specific, yeah, many, many
Parker Mitchell 3:40
people don't part of my role there was to look at, how do you systematize management? How do you identify the kinds of people that will succeed there? How do you help them go through the onboarding process? And one of the things I took away was Bridgewater was way ahead of its time with regards to digital tools, so I sort of looked at that and said, I think we're going to a place in the future where people will be more willing and able to use digital tools. Now, Bridgewater was all about understanding individuals, and what I thought really mattered was, how do people work together? What's the connections or the bonds between them? And so when we founded valence, it's actually a chemistry term. It means the combining power of atoms to form more complex molecules. Hence the logo, hence the logo, and hence the, you know, the focus on how people work together, on building more successful teams. So that's a little bit of the journey to founding valence.
Chris Rainey 4:36
Oh, first and foremost, I realized that I've been pronouncing it wrong the entire time. So it's valence, no, balance, I'd say 5050, people. Entire time we've been talking, I've been saying your company
Parker Mitchell 4:47
name wrong. That is okay. I'd say half of our customers pronounce it. Balance, okay. No, I
Chris Rainey 4:53
want to go back for a second. What was the inspiration behind the nonprofit? So
Parker Mitchell 4:57
the idea was, this was sort of the early two. 1000s and Doctors Without Borders was doing an incredible job mobilizing the medical profession to try to help contribute to ending world poverty. And there wasn't the same type of movement, the same type of organization for engineers. And so my co founder and I thought that this was a moment, an opportunity to bring the engineering profession into this, you know, work to try to eradicate, or help eradicate make a small dent in reducing global poverty. Yeah.
Chris Rainey 5:26
No, I love that. And what was the step from Bridgewater to valence?
Parker Mitchell 5:31
So as I mentioned, Bridgewater was all about what is an individual like, and try to understand the characteristics of an individual. But they were really treated as individual Lego pieces. That was one of the terms that was used around Bridgewater. And what I believed was that how people work together, their ability to build trust, to communicate, to understand, how to hand projects off to each other, that those connections were at least as important as what an individual was like. And so when we started valence, we had this idea that, you know, myself, many other people, probably many of the folks that are listening to this podcast, if they're senior, they would have had the experience of an incredible executive coach or leadership coach or team facilitator. And when you've experienced that kind of bespoke support, you realize that that's really what leads to transformative learning and transformative change. And the problem is it's just too expensive,
Chris Rainey 6:34
it's not scalable, it's
Parker Mitchell 6:35
too exactly and so could we build digital tools that tried to recreate some of that bespoke support using, at the time it was data science, using data science to be able to personalize the experience for an individual leader, an individual team, and then be able to offer that at scale. And we very quickly began working with the fortune 500 so the scale was 5000 10,000 20,000 people, quite quickly.
Chris Rainey 7:03
Wow. And, of course, you must have been overjoyed when generative AI came along.
Parker Mitchell 7:09
I mean, it's fascinating, because, you know, if you go back to our, you know, our, some of our founding documents and sort of vision, yeah, we talked about this idea of sort of a coach in everyone's pocket, really, but it felt like science, yeah, it really did. And people talked about AI and HR, and I always just dismissed it, because AI, back then, was machine learning. Machine learning was all about you have to have labeled data, and it just doesn't capture the complexity of what management is like, of what leadership is like. Yeah, I had some friends. I'd studied cognitive psychology, cognitive science in my undergrad, so I'd been paying attention to linguistics and some of the evolution. And folks might know that Canada's was a bit of a sort of the training ground. The foundation of large language models came out of some of the universities in Canada. I did not know that, so Jeffrey Hinton was at University of Toronto. So the ad, we had some, you know, one of the one of the other fathers of AI was at the university. So there was always a bit of a buzz around that, and paying attention to it. And I had some friends who were, you know, in the sector. And one of the things they said to me is, Parker, you know how you've always said, management is about language, and AI so far is about numbers. And I said, Yes. And they said, Well, I think we're going to crack language. And so we realized early on, if large language models were going to crack language and reasoning and understanding and comprehension, that that was the place to make the investments, the power of personalization, affordably at scale, is it's just utterly transformative. Yeah,
Chris Rainey 8:49
and that was similar for me with Atlas copilot, like we tried doing this five years ago. In the beginning, it was just for the podcast. I just was like, Hey, we've got 1000s of hours at the show. Can I use AI to give people instant answers to their questions take them to the exact second in the podcast, right, or summarizing podcasts, or saying of the 1000 CHRO interviews Chris has done, what are the key, you know, characteristics of a successful CHRO? I just wanted the ability to be able to distill but it would was too early on the journey. We tried and we failed miserably, and spent a lot of money doing so long and away, but the vision was always there, just the technology, and then soon, and then soon as OpenAI launched, I was like, Oh, we were just a bit early on this journey.
Parker Mitchell 9:30
And the thing that I've experienced is the most successful companies are those that were early on the journey, because you had to have tried. You had to have thought about it. You had to have struggled with it. You had to have tried to get your data into the right form. And if you just started building in the past six months or 12 months, you actually don't get the Head Start that a company like you were jumping
Chris Rainey 9:51
on it now, because it's cool when it's the thing, oh, it's like, yeah, but let's jump into it. You know, first and foremost, why should AI be the number one problem? Re for CHROs right now.
Parker Mitchell 10:01
So I feel very fortunate these days because we have been thinking about generative AI now for two and a half years, and CHROs, I probably have talked to literally 40 or 50 in the past six months through a range of different you know, either conversations as they're exploring buying valence or gatherings, and there's probably, I think, two main reasons. So number one, generative AI is probably going to lead to the biggest change in what someone's job is going to consist of, as well as what job categories are going to grow and what job categories are going to shrink. It's going to be the biggest change we've ever seen. And these are business driven decisions, but they have huge implications on people. And so number one, CHROs need to be partners with the other members of the, you know, the leadership team, to be able to say, how is this going to affect how we think about staffing and jobs, compensation and all sorts of things in every function, in the product function, the engineering function, in the sales function, in the research and development function, whatever the function is, it's going to change. And so a chro needs to partner with the business to understand what that's like. So that's number one. And then number two, I think it's going to utterly change the HR function. And so we've been basically forced to compromise. No one thinks that, you know, an online learning session, no matter how well we try to design it, is the solution that managers are asking for
Chris Rainey 11:32
a one off online session for a few hours. Good luck.
Parker Mitchell 11:36
Exactly. People say, Well, we're going to put nuggets. We're going to put it in the flow of work. I've never heard a manager say My problem is that I don't have enough learning content to consume, and if I just had more videos to watch, I would be a better. Manager never heard that. And so we have a chance now, or CHROs heads of talent, heads of learning, they have a chance to reinvent what the learning function is to be closer to what managers have always asked for and needed. And so I think that you know that business impact on how work is done, as well as the impact on the talent function in particular, they're going to be game changing. Yeah,
Chris Rainey 12:13
what during those conversations? What's been the response, I think, from the
Parker Mitchell 12:20
CHROs that we talk to feel a natural tension, which is one a belief that this is going to be just a wave that is going to sweep through the workforce, and they need to pay attention to it. And then also, sort of both a caution and a sort of question of like, how do I demystify what is possible? How should I begin to explore it? You don't want to place a bet on something that's going to end up being, you know, the wrong path, but you also don't want to stand back and not invest in anything and miss the opportunity. And so that tension of sort of, where do I make my investments? Who are the partners that I work with, how do I understand what's possible in the technology? That's the question they're wrestling with. And I had a fascinating conversation with a chro from sort of a tech oriented CHRO from a tech company in California, and his his summary was, if I could make a clone of myself and that clone, all they did was try to stay on top of the technology. I don't think I would still have enough time to be able to truly understand Yeah, so that question of, how do I find the time to personally invest in and learn about it? I think that's one of the top questions. It's almost
Chris Rainey 13:35
impossible, wasn't it? Because the pace of change innovation, and there's like, 1000s of companies reaching out to them. Every company in the world now has an AI solution. Every HR vendor now has an AI solution. So they're just, you know, when I speak to citrus every day, they're just inundated. They're overwhelmed, overwhelmed. And everyone's claiming to, you know, solve their big, their problem. And they're like, and a big part of it is, you know, where do they start? And I love to understand what you're hearing from them, what you're hearing from them, what some of the use cases that you've seen CHRO say, this is where I'm going to start with AI. So
Parker Mitchell 14:08
in the conversations, there's probably two broad categories of use cases, and there are AI solutions that will automate back office processes. They're basically automating processes that people, employees, leaders, managers, they need to do, but they're not sort of true value add for the, you know, the individuals in the company. So you need to check your, you know, your status of how many PTO days you have, AI self serve. Ai self serve. And so if you can just take that off of and right now, HRBPs and a range of other people are answering those questions. And if you can automate that process, which has often a unique personalization nature to it, that is going to be net good, and that automation is a, you know, is a helpful function, but no manager is going to say at the end of the year, Oh, wow. Like I was able to get my answer. My questions answered slightly faster. And so I think the second thing that they're looking at is, what are tools or use cases that I can put in the hands of managers that might help them? And so we obviously have a bit of a lens that's focused on our AI coach, but we have honestly had a lot of CHROs and heads of talent say this is a really interesting use case, because it's purely net positive for managers. We're not trying to extract information from them, we're not trying to automate away their jobs. We're not trying to do anything like that. We're genuinely giving them a chance to learn in a different and better way, and we're going to run a pilot get their feedback and see what they have to say, yeah.
Chris Rainey 15:40
What are the most common questions that you see that managers are asking, asking the could you say AI citizen, or you say, I co pilot? What language do you use? So
Parker Mitchell 15:51
we've another one. We've given a name to our the name is Nadia. Nadia, great, and it's quite funny, because people feel attached to the name. We actually tried to change the name last year. Literally, there was just an uproar, and people said, I want Nadia back. What happened by Nadia? That's great. So there is an element. And I think one of our one of our customers, said it best on one of our recent webinars, and this was the chief talent Officer of Experian, and she said, I think one of the things that we forget is management, especially for new managers, and especially today, management is hard and management is lonely, and it's not true that you can just go to your manager for Help because your manager is busy, and your manager promoted you, thinking that you have the ability to do that. And most of what you're trying to do is show that you can actually do this new job. And so you need, almost like a first start, where you can just without any fear of judgment, any fear of anything, you can just bring your problem and work through it. So when we first built Nadia, we thought it was about the more traditional sort of learning and training and development. People would want to build skills, and that's not that's not the case at all. Managers want instant help on whatever problem is on their mind. They they want to save time. They have something they have to work on this week, and if an AI coach can support them on that, then they will keep returning to it. So we built the AI coach, Nadia to start with any problem that an example
Chris Rainey 17:30
of what common ones that will come
Parker Mitchell 17:32
up. So someone might say, you know, I've got a challenge with a peer of mine. We've got a project report coming up. And you know, this peer tends to take credit. And I want to make sure that, you know, we can present equally. So this is, again, this is kind of thing it's like, in the relationships of, like, the peer based relationships of, like, there's a little bit of jockeying going on, you know, people are, they're both trying to do a good job, and they're positioning themselves and how they do a good job. And so you need a, you know,
Chris Rainey 18:01
almost a good example of one, you wouldn't really go to your manager or two, right? Exactly. So you just is so unique to the situation,
Parker Mitchell 18:09
exactly. And it's about the, you know, the personal relationship that you have with that peer and how you can make it better. So that's a that's a common one. People often talk about the questions they have about their team. If they're a newly promoted manager, they might ask about, you know, how do I establish authority? You know? They might say, Well, I've read that I should be vulnerable, but I actually, how do I do like, I've got imposter syndrome, so it's hard to be vulnerable when you have imposter syndrome. So there's a lot of that, the sort of emotional energy of being a
Chris Rainey 18:40
manager, how are you presenting the feedback? Is it just text? Is it some audio video as well? We've
Parker Mitchell 18:47
been using voice, sorry, since the very beginning. So managers will speak to Nadia, and they can either choose to hear her respond, or they can read text. She'll produce both thoughts. And I'd say, about the environment
Chris Rainey 19:02
you're in, you might just want the text reply Exactly, exactly. So
Parker Mitchell 19:05
if you're people actually can read faster than they can process words. So I'd say about probably 70 or 80% of people use voice,
Chris Rainey 19:14
and so it's easier to process reading than it is hearing someone.
Parker Mitchell 19:19
So yeah, if you you can skim an answer and sort of go, Oh, here's the two key quick. I've been listening to it, yeah. And you can pause and go, there's two points that Nadia is saying, okay. Let me reflect, okay. Whereas voice, you go at the pace of the speaking
Chris Rainey 19:33
voice, yeah, before bad. And I'm assuming it's can multiple languages, 100 plus
Parker Mitchell 19:39
languages. It's available on your phone. It's available on your desktop. Microsoft Teams integration. It can text you, email you. So very much. The difference between a lot of people ask, the difference between chatgpt or gpts, and we talk about purpose built software, and so. If you have Excel, you could do your taxes with Excel or with Google Sheets, but you probably rather actually have in the US. We use TurboTax. I don't know what zero in the UK, yeah, so you want a purpose built piece of software, and really it's just macro technology. Next
Chris Rainey 20:18
time someone asked me that question, because I get that a lot with that, a lot with that, let's go partner or why don't choose that? Because we purposely built it.
Parker Mitchell 20:25
It purposely built and so there's a you understand that expert knowledge that you want to bring in, but also where someone's coming from. A lot of questions have inference behind them, and you understand what that inference is, yeah, so purpose built software that is also proactive and not just reactive. So Nadia will try to understand what are the challenges you face this week. How can I give you tips and guidance if you have a meeting coming up on Wednesday at 3pm that's that you've asked for coaching for she'll send you a couple of talking points.
Chris Rainey 20:56
Says predictive, so like, send you some stuff. No, because it's connected to a calendar, it knows his meat is coming out. Hey, you know, here's some advice, absolutely, cool, that's cool. Absolutely, that's, that's, I think that's the that's where it's super interesting. And you get the, it just becomes part of their flow of work in the day. I love like and also, as managers, we're so busy sometimes to get like, nudges and reminders and stuff like that, it's just so helpful.
Parker Mitchell 21:21
It's just two or three little bullet points, or just a little, you know, message on Microsoft Teams, and you go, oh yeah, that's the thing that we talked about that I wanted to do, yeah,
Chris Rainey 21:28
does it? Can it access the transcripts from calls?
Parker Mitchell 21:33
So one of the interesting things is just watching the range of use cases, yeah, that emerge as it's out in the wild, and so people are seeking to upload pieces of information. Yes, I was thinking. So we started with a very straightforward version, and one of the things that companies asked for, that we very quickly built, is Canadia access my values, my company values, my leadership frameworks, my cultural expectations, etc. So we have a easy way of integrating that. So if you're working, is that just in
Chris Rainey 22:06
the prompt, so you just prompt that, or how do you integrate that? I mean,
Parker Mitchell 22:09
we have a huge we think that the the challenge that managers face, that coaching faces, is, how do you draw on an increasingly large context to be able to give the right coaching. And so if I have, if I'm a coach and I have 100 conversations with you, there's a lot to draw on. And if I know my company's values, can draw on that. If I know more about your job, what is it like to be a, you know, a salesperson, I don't know in the you know, we work with steel plants. You know, if you're, if you're if you're a manufacturer in steel plants, what's unique about your job, or if you're a salesperson and, you know, consumer packaged goods, what's unique about your job? So there's, there's almost an infinite amount of context, and you can't just dump that.
Chris Rainey 22:51
That's another thing that's different, right? When you talk about the difference between what you're doing and and chatgpt doesn't have any context. It doesn't have any sort of such an important thing. So the fact that you know it knows the person's job title, what it means to do that job. It knows the company's values, the culture. Uses all of that,
Parker Mitchell 23:08
all that, and to be able to pull the right, in general, a context window, you probably can't have more than four or five potential things for the prompt to draw on, yeah, otherwise, it just gets confused. And you could run the same thing 10 times. We've done it 10 different answers, yeah. And so what we've done, we have in our head of AI as a Turing fellow here in the UK. Actually, he's co authored, or authored 100 plus papers on it. And his expertise is, how do you draw on this context to be able to make smarter conversational assistance. So that's the I think that's the key, because a manager wants the personal guidance that feels right to them. And the more you can do that, the more people are going to get value, the more they're going to use it, the more context you get. So you get this positive flywheel.
Chris Rainey 23:54
What some of the other ways you see AI being experimenting with, experimenting with in a workplace.
Parker Mitchell 24:00
So I think there's sector specific use cases. Okay, so obviously there's a lot of folks out there experimenting with copilot for for GitHub, and so I think that's a that's a particularly useful opportunity.
Chris Rainey 24:16
So in HR, maybe for people,
Parker Mitchell 24:21
who are, you know, who are programming? Who are you know, who are coding? The copilot for GitHub allows you to be able to complete basically, tasks that might be, you know, might take five or 10 or 20 minutes, almost instantly, because copilot saying, I think I know what you're doing. I think I can anticipate this. So it won't write an entire program for you, but it understands what the task is that you have, and take an action, yeah, and it will, like, complete it for you. And that, you know, the power of coding, in AI for coding is, is actually it's extraordinary, and it's going to get better and
Chris Rainey 24:57
better. You can think you get to the point where people don't. Need to know how to code, and they could just write a prompt.
Parker Mitchell 25:02
I mean, I think we're, I think it is probably similar to, you know, the advent of the calculator so you can, okay, you know, you don't have to know how to multiply two numbers in your head. And, I mean, if you look back at the 1960s and 70s, there were roomfuls of people whose job it was to do manual calculations, and that was replaced with the calculator and with the computer, but you still needed people to think about, what are we trying to do? What's the effective way to do it? So I think we'll be able to get to a place. I mean, I am not a coder, and I tried Saturday one, Saturday morning, me too, but I've used it. I've tried it. Can I just, like, write something and be able to, like, have a website up and running? And I chose a relatively simple, you know, simple solution. And the Gen AI, I think I used Claude, which is part of the anthropic family, and it's got some really neat innovations. If you haven't tried Claude, you should check it out. And I had a, I had a website up and running, interactive website in probably about 45 minutes.
Chris Rainey 26:06
It's nuts. I use one. I think it's called Web 10, and it's a specifically for websites. You go on the website, you write your problem on a website about this, this and this, and it just builds it straight away and even generates the images for the website, the copy for the website, everything, even it is, even a section I clicked on, is, like, here's all of your like, social media promotion campaigns just automatically generate those that would have took me months in the past. What I could do in like, what I did in like, an hour. I mean, it's
Parker Mitchell 26:37
fascinating. I think you and I are doing the thing that a lot of experts recommend, which is just experiment with it. And it doesn't have to be for you don't have to you're not going to find the winning use case in your first experiment. But the more you understand what's possible, the more you have a couple of these magical moments. I mean, our eyes are lighting up at what's possible. The more you as a chro or a head of talent, the more you personally experience it, the more conviction you bring to your teams. Yeah,
Chris Rainey 27:06
I think, and I encourage that with the team constantly as well. Like we just, we typically take maybe, like, three, four hours edit a podcast, and one of my editors came to me with a plugin that edited the podcast in two minutes. So it knows who's speaking. It switches the camera back and forth, zoom in, zooms out, literally. And you can see the timeline just editing in real time, two minutes for an hour episode. And I was just like, do I continue paying you the same amount of money? Because that's one of the interesting things that right now, right is the way in which what gets done is also going to change. So if someone typically took them the entire day, someone's figured out how to do that exactly in half an hour, should we, should we still be paying them the same amount for doing that?
Parker Mitchell 27:54
And I think one of the things that I've heard is happening at companies is because there's a lot of you know, there could be some restrictions or some hesitations about use cases, you still have enterprising employees who are trying to figure it out on their own. Yeah? And if you're, you know this editor, or if you're an employee that's found a way to do a day's work of work in an hour. Yeah? Do you have an incentive to share that?
Chris Rainey 28:20
That's such a good point, because I don't think I would in my previous company, unfortunately, because of the way the culture was, I, I have an example, but it's not ai, ai. So when LinkedIn first came out, I worked in a company for 10 years, outbound sales calls, you know, three, four hours of calls a day, $150 a day. Super strict KPIs, right? Like, like a Wolf of Wall Street type sales floor, like, you know, super high intense sales. And what I did is I found a, like, a Google Chrome plugin that was connected to LinkedIn that allowed me to message people on LinkedIn and set up calls, so all of a sudden I was only having conversations. And my manager at the time was like, all actually, the whole team was like, how are you only having calls? Like, what are you doing? And I was like, I didn't want to tell anyone. And they're like, it doesn't make sense. It's like, you have like, now you're doing three hours on the phone. Now you're doing an hour right, and getting four or five times the results, because I had a very tailored search specific right? And I even and then I used the money, or extra money I was making, and I bought my own marketing platform, and I bought leads, I bought 50,000 HR contacts, and I had another campaign running here, and my LinkedIn automation, and I was still calling as well. And I think I did that for like, two, three years, and I was, like, the average deals were like, maybe, like 20 a month. I was in like 80, and he would just have no idea why, and it was because the company didn't, there wasn't in the past when I had approached my leadership with those type of ideas, I was just shut down. I. I immediately just, and I think this is shut down, such
Parker Mitchell 30:03
a great example of what CHROs need to be doing. They need to role model it. They need their organizations to be role modeling. They need to make sure the whole company is doing that and so to be able to celebrate people who are finding efficiencies, to be able to reward them, promote them. And you were on the front lines, your manager probably wouldn't have figured out how to, you know, get that plug in, or what those options were, because he or she isn't doing that day to day. And so your innovation might happen from your frontline employees, and you need to make sure it is, yeah, that's where it's going to happen. And you need to make sure there's clear flows of information and just repeat over and over again that it's good to do these experiments as you know, as much as possible, within the constraints of, I know it's called, yeah, that legal and IT and security, but figure out a way to thread that needle, because if you tamp down the innovation. It's going to happen anyway. It's just not going to produce the benefits that you want as a company.
Chris Rainey 31:06
Yeah, it's fascinating. Well, I'll talk specifically about a talent function. How will AI impact the talent function?
Parker Mitchell 31:14
Well, I think to me, the one of the purposes of the talent function has been to say, how do we develop our people? I mean, that's probably there's sort of two broad things, which is like, how do we bring in the right talent, and how do we develop it? And honestly, bringing in the right talent, everyone knows it's hard to be have a competitive advantage in that. It's just difficult. And so if you can be disproportionately good at developing your own internal talent, I think of, you know, Barcelona's, you know, Academy for their their their football team. You know, they were famous for picking and identifying and building the right talent. If you can do that, you can, you know, create a sustainable winner. And so we've always been limited by if you ask talent teams and L and D teams how you know they're doing learning, and if you ask an employee or leader, how they learn? You're unfortunately, going to get two different answers. There's a lot of, you know, people just, you know, if they're lucky, they had a good mentor, maybe they have a peer, maybe they have a friend. Maybe they're reading books or podcasts, listening to podcasts on the weekend. They're struggling to be better, and they do turn a little bit to their talent team, but they honestly try to figure it out a lot themselves. Yeah. And so that ability to say, Okay, how do we support each person individually in the place where they are and genuinely help them to build the skills using AI in a way that personalizes it for them? To me, that is a it's just a fundamental rethink. And so the encouragement we give to the talent teams is don't look at your existing processes and try to understand how to make each of those connected sort of building blocks better, because you actually have a chance to start over, start from first principles. And we haven't had that opportunity sort of ever in our, you know, in our career. So it should be really exciting. Yeah,
Chris Rainey 33:01
I think that's one of the things. I think you're meeting my co founder, Guillermo Miranda, next week, and with guillermo's background as chief learning officer IBM Boeing, when we started Atlas copilot, that was one of the main things. He was speaking about less uses as an opportunity to completely reimagine this. Because it's a once in a lifetime opportunity. Exactly it took. It takes a little bit more time, see, when you try and create, to create something that not that's never been done, you know, as well, but that's exciting as well. At the same time to be on that journey.
Parker Mitchell 33:32
The thing we encourage, you know, when I'm talking to the CHROs or chief talent officers, is have a portfolio of of experiments. Yeah. So experiment with, like, a simple change. Experiment with something, okay, maybe, you know, one of our existing vendors has an AI version of X. Experiment what that's like. But also experiment with the bigger bets, the bet that could be truly transformative. And the only way you find out what works these days is by truly putting a solution in managers hands, and by seeing what kind of partner you have, is this a partner who understands AI is going to be sort of making sure that they're on top of, you know, the latest trends on all the different architectures that exist out there, etc, if you have a solution your managers like and a Good partner that's sort of growing with the technology that actually has the a transformative potential that potentially just doing, you know, smaller, safer experiments might not expose
Chris Rainey 34:30
you to you kind of go to combination of both, exactly right?
Parker Mitchell 34:33
It's portfolio of experiments, yeah, I
Chris Rainey 34:35
think. But you also have the right culture and to be able to do that, right? Because if you you need to have a culture, I love Nova is they always talk about the culture of curiosity, right, even to the point where they, every year, they celebrate the biggest failures of the year, which, I think it's always hilarious. It's not framed that way, but, you know so but because if you don't have that, people aren't going to take those risks. Yes,
Parker Mitchell 35:00
I agree, and I don't think you can use we don't have this culture as an excuse. So I think at the top you need to say this is the mentality of experimentation, the lens of experimentation that we need to have, and you need to as quickly as possible, bring as many people as possible along. Yeah, and some companies, if they've had that for a decade, they might have a bit of an advantage, but that's your your challenge as a, you know, as a leader, is to bring that as quickly as possible. Yeah,
Chris Rainey 35:33
we'll talk about a lot of UK use cases. What advice would you give to, then, enterprises, companies that are looking at a solution like this? Because we, as we said in the beginning the episode, the beginning of the episode, one of the biggest problems is they're overwhelmed with a million companies approach a name about various AI solutions. What advice would you give them? Like, one like, where do they start? But also, if they're speaking to, like, example, an AI vendor or a solution that has AI like, what kind of questions should they be asking,
Parker Mitchell 36:02
I think probably by now, one of the big sources of information for them should be their peers. And so network with your fellow chief talent officers, network with your fellow CHROs, your heads of leadership, and ask them talk about that portfolio of solutions, you know, what are the, you know, the changes we're making to our back office, like, what are the vendors that you're using there? What are the, you know, the bigger bets, what are the truly transformative bets? And what are the partner? Who are the partners that you've enjoyed working with? So I think that that is probably the safest way to cut through the noise. If you're talking to an existing vendor, what we've experienced is everyone hand waves the same about AI. And so it's really hard to demystify that, yeah, but really try to dig into what their AI strategy is. You know, is it truly transformative, or is it just adding on to their existing way of doing things? Because I think AI will put some of the existing sort of tracks, learning tracks, almost out of business. And so I think they need to develop an independent point of view of, you know, where do we think AI is going to be truly transformative? Yeah. And then I think the the third thing is, you know, how easy is this, to actually do a trial? So if it's easy to put in managers hands, if it's easy to sort of differentiate in the experience and understand that, I think that's the you know, the quickest way, and then obviously, you know who are the use cases. We've got an incredible AI Summit coming up, and the whole purpose is to demystify some of the challenges. So we have, I had to write a list down, because we've got so many, but we've got the CHROs of WPP, Hearst Prudential, the former CHRO of IBM, and then either global head of talent or global head of leadership of Experian Delta, Novartis, Schneider, electric Analog Devices, city and Thomson Reuters, amazing. So this is quite a collection of like, top leaders, and they're going to be sharing literally, what are the solutions that they're exploring? Who are the partners that they're finding most helpful? What are the internal use cases that are, you know, being pulled, where the demand is being pulled from? All these kinds of questions. So it's happening in New York, in in a little over about five weeks, there's a virtual option as well. But attending those kinds of events, talking to their peers in those kinds of forums, so crucial,
Chris Rainey 38:30
Wednesday, November 14, amazing. Well, if you're wherever you're listening or watching right now, there'll be a link in the chat to sign up. There's a virtual option as well. Virtual option as well. Amazing. I'll link that in a chat. And we're doing something similar. In December. We have our AI HR Summit. Exact same thing, and you use the exact word to help demystify. Yeah, right. And I want to go back to your couple, your three points, first and foremost, you, you'd be amazed how little CHROs I speak to actually reach out to their peers. So do that? Reach out to your network? Ask what they're currently doing, what's working, what's not working. It's such a simple thing to do that can save you a lot of time and headaches by doing that. And I love the fact that you said there's a difference between companies adding HR, I mean, sorry, adding AI, but compared to companies that are grounded in AI right from the very beginning, very different, right? We
Parker Mitchell 39:19
call it AI native, like rather than adding it to our old suite of tools, we said we're going to build it from scratch. We're going to integrate our tools, but we're going to integrate 360s we're going to integrate calendars, we're going to integrate everything, starting with AI at its core, amazing.
Chris Rainey 39:33
And what's the last part? What was the third one? I was completely blanked,
Parker Mitchell 39:38
just the that portfolio of experimentation. Yeah,
Chris Rainey 39:41
we didn't have to plan this question. But what are questions around AI that we're not asking that we really should be
Parker Mitchell 39:54
so I personally think the impact of AI on the workforce is being under. Discussed really, I think that the speed with which, so I think we're probably, there's a few different chapters. So there's, you know, the single purpose, AI, the sort of chatgpts, they really to get them to be effective and efficient in productivity tools, you need to really invest time. And as an individual, you need to solve it yourself. I almost think of this as sort of the, you know, back in the late 1970s early 1980s the sort of hacker culture around computers. If you were invested, you could build a solution and you could solve something, but it didn't scale. And so you have individuals who are using it very effectively in your company, and you have individuals who aren't using it. But as more products are built, purpose built products that integrate the AI into a workflow that solve a problem for you, whether it's, you know, a leadership type problem, or whether it's sector specific, whether it's sales, or whether it's engineering, or whether it's R and D or something else, you will start to find that you can hit the productivity across your entire workforce. And I think that those purpose built products because they are designed for specific, you know, specific groups and specific purposes, they actually will scale and almost instantly. I mean, we could, we could turn on our AI coach, Nadia, to 100,000 people, you know in 24 hours, and you never really had products that were that efficient. And if that was the prizes, man, they could hit that scale. Yeah. And so once that happens, I think that people's jobs will change more quickly. The relationship between individuals who might feel threatened and the company is going to change, and I think CHROs need to be investing so much up front to build that trust, put tools that are helpful show positive use cases, because I think there's going to be a lot in the next 24 months that's going to shake
Chris Rainey 41:54
things up. Yeah, I think we'll leave it there. You said 12 months, right? But it feels like the pace of innovation, what I thought was going to take us a couple of years, has been happening in three to six months. And there's, you know, we've got, you know, we've got Elon Musk launching his new large language model, his other companies, players come into the four fold. Obviously, co pilot launched their what, two weeks ago, as well, their new update. It's absolutely fascinating times before I let you go, where can people connect with you personally, if they want to reach out to you directly, and also, where can they learn more about valence
Parker Mitchell 42:30
they can connect with me on LinkedIn. I'm very active there, and so we'll be able to drop the link in Valence is valence.co and we'll put a link in for our AI summit and really encourages people to sign up for it.
Chris Rainey 42:42
Well, I appreciate you coming. It's nice to see you in person, and I'm looking forward to the summit. Yeah, as well. It's wonderful
Parker Mitchell 42:46
to connect. You guys are doing great work here. Appreciate you. Bye, thanks, Chris.
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Richard Letzelter, CHRO at Acino.