View Recording: The Frontier Firm: Organization Development for AI Transformation

Kate Weiland-Moores 0:08 Good morning everyone. Welcome to our webinar today, the Frontier Firm Organizational Development for AI Transformation. I am really happy to be here today with all of you presenting on this very important hot topic, AI and especially. Around culture and the org chart, my favorite topics. I’m joined here today by Meghan Focht, our Human Capital Director. And then behind the scenes we have Joe Steiner, our Solutions Architect, helping us out on the technical side if we have questions at the end. This isn’t a technical session today, but as we all know, it’s all technical. It all threads together. So thank you, Joe. Quick shout out for all of you on the call. I think there’s going to be a survey link in the chat throughout this presentation today. We really appreciate all of you giving us some feedback and with that we will offer a 30 minute complimentary design session. So keep that in mind too as you’re craving more from this presentation today. All right. So I guess I’ll do a brief introduction of myself. My name is Kate Weiland-Moores. I am the Chief Operating Officer here at Concurrency, and I myself have been in IT for 30 years. As we’re putting this timeline together, I was really. Excited about everything. I personally have lived through a little exhausted. You know, when you when we put here 40 years of IT evolution, you know, you can also say revolution. You know each of these milestones just looking back since the 80s. It’s a lot. It’s a lot of change and we’ve all been through so much. The thing that we’re talking about today is AI. And you know, I really am excited about the fact that for the first time, at least since I’ve been doing this. I feel like with AI, it really is about the technology adapting to us as humans versus us as humans always scrambling to keep up and adapt to the technology. So I think that’s a really fascinating part of this and we’ll see what you think when we get through this. But remember, today’s not a technical session where you’re really going to learn about the concept of The Frontier firm. Some of you have probably heard about this. We’ll be talking about that today and really understanding the importance of getting your organization ready to adopt AI into your org chart. But we’re going to be talking about how you do that with a people first approach. We have a five-part series, which I think I mentioned in the first slide. Throughout the five-part series, we’re going to cover everything from, you know, the first and foremost we thought was the most important centering this around your org. Your culture and then we’ll dive into all of the other components and how do you ticky tacky technically do that and implement throughout your firm? All right, so I wanted to start with one of my favorite quotes and I’m sure hopefully this will resonate with some of you, but this is for you people leaders. This quote AI is here and soon the cost of knowledge is going to 0 but the cost of wisdom. Will never be higher, and I really think it’s a great reminder for all of us. You know, we really can’t underestimate the wisdom of all of the people, things we’ve done to get us to where we are today. And when you think about that cost of knowledge going to 0. It’s so true. I mean, I can literally jump into copilot, jump on the Internet, and I have all of the information right at my fingertips. But it’s that wisdom and all of the years of experience that we have that will help us apply the technology, especially AI, within our organizations. So you know, some of the things that I think about here at concurrency and think we all need to be thinking about is what are the things that make us great? What are the things that make our organizations great? With the adoption of technology, we don’t want to lose those things. We want to make sure that those things are at the center of our A I adoption. And let’s be honest, you know, most of us, I can say for me and and Meghan on this call today, our organizations are counting on us to leverage that wisdom. You know, to really come to the plate with solutions that won’t fail and won’t fail our culture. So anyway, we’re not really here to claim that we have all of the answers because, you know, The Frontier Firm and the adoption of A I is so very new and there’s a lot to it. I can also speak for myself and say there’s a lot of fear up front and how do we adopt A I? How do we adopt agents into our organization in a healthy way? With all of the things considered, it can be really overwhelming. So today I want you to think about your own firm. You know, how can you create value that’s going to really, really impact your business? And every single one of us on this call is in a different place. I think you’ll hear today too that Microsoft and the premise of this Frontier firm, you know, it’s really encouraged. That we take some time and we experiment. You know, what’s really going to work for the size of your company? You know, are you a product? Are you services? How big is your organization? But we’re all in that early kind of experimenting zone to figure out how it’s really going to impact our order chart. So now let’s talk about the concept of the Frontier firm and how we can use this really as a guide to get started. Some of you may already be on this journey, but I guess we’ll start by saying like, what is the Frontier firm? So the Frontier firm is Microsoft’s vision. Really Microsoft vision for the future and how we will all need to adopt and embrace AI into each of our organizations. So there’s actually a lot of information on this. There’s a report that I personally devoured last year. It was 2025, the year, The Frontier for. Was born and let’s note that Microsoft is really encouraging us as leaders to invest in our business and really make sure that we’re thinking about all the things to make this a healthy adoption. And as leaders, these are some of the things that I think we need to be starting with. Do you want to have a better? Your product, do you want to have a better service? Maybe it’s customer experience that you need to see improvements around and you want some better customer satisfaction. And we’re doing all of that with keeping the culture first. As leaders, we first want to understand the value that we’re looking to create. So you know, you need to create the vision for your company. So attending webinars like this, I think kudos to you. There’s so much information out there that we’re all sorting through. And Meghan and I really wanted to take a step back, show you some of the things that we’ve done. That we really feel will success set any company up for better success. And it’s OK if we don’t have it figured out. I’m going to share some statistics with you as we go. Actually, next slide, Meghan. Diving into the Frontier firm, nice and simple, it actually is a three-phased approach. I would say we are definitely well into phase one, entering phase two as an organization. As I’m talking to our customers and my friends in the industry, I’m seeing that many, many companies are realizing, Yep, AI is here, it ain’t going anywhere and they’re at in this phase one, you know, they’re realizing that they need to adopt this. And even without understanding The Frontier firm, I think that, you know, they’re hearing it in the market and are ready to to take it to that. We’ll talk through. Oh, thank you, Meghan. Some of these statistics I think are really fascinating. So phase one is really the phase that I’ve labeled like just start somewhere and get me some help. You know, you look at 80% of the people that were surveyed and this was global workforce, both Employees and leaders. They’re saying that they just lack enough time and or energy to do their work. 53% of leaders say productivity needs to increase and then 82% of leaders expect us to use agents to meet demand for more work force capacity. As I was looking at this, I was also thinking I’m like, wow, what a what a great way to ruin any. Culture by combining #1 and #2 like do more with less. I’m sure most of us have faced this and what I have to say about that is thank God for phase one and thank God for agents. So this one is to really introduce your organization to using those agents to assist. The human. Thank you, Meghan. I love the intelligence on tap, especially since we live in good old Beerville, Milwaukee. Intelligence on tap is such a great way to look at this. You know, it is truly giving each of our employees that extra oomph. That digital labor agent that can expand the capabilities of their own job. You know, some of the examples that you might be using right now in phase one and that we are using are things like Copilot, right? So Copilot and Microsoft 365 I’m drafting. Docum. Every day I’m summarizing meetings, I’m analyzing data. It is that, hey, I’m not really relying on this agent to do my job, but I look a lot smarter and I’m getting a lot more done faster using those agents. So filling that capacity gap and that deficit between the demands and that survey. I just showed and maximizing the capacity of me and my own workload. Then we move to phase two. This is really where we start to talk more about the impact on the org chart. So when you think about stage two, this is really where we as employees are gonna have like a digital friend or a digital colleague as we say here. You know, this person or this digital person, they can take on specific tasks with my direction. So they’re not working autonomously, but they are actually getting a lot more done and I can start to build them into the org chart to be like, you know what, I’m not going to be doing that day-to-day task anymore. As it pertains to like, let’s just say finance those invoices coming in, I’m not even having to look and process all of those. I’ve built an agent where like that agent can take those invoices and start to create the next task on their own. I still have to oversee it. But I’m starting to really automate some of those things that are really what we like to say mundane, right? I would say getting the human agent ratio right is very, very important and it’s the it’s the ultimate goal I think for every organization if you have too many agents. It can be really problematic. It can become chaotic. And if you don’t have enough agents, you’re going to see like, OK, this isn’t really helping the organization, save time and create capacity in the way that we’re originally helping. And then phase three, you know, fewer organizations are self-proclaimed to really be mastering this, but it’s happening and it’s coming fast. So really understanding how do you start small, how do you get engaged with those agents in phase? One phase two, taking it to that next step. But ultimately this is where the humans would set direction, but agents will literally execute the business process and the workflows on their own. So those AI agents will operate autonomously. With our human oversight, they can handle entire workflows, it can handle entire processes end to end. It’s really definitely going to be very powerful. Meghan’s going to talk later in our presentation and all the components that we want to make sure that we’re thinking about. So that we are empowering our own individuals to really understand the impact of this so that it doesn’t get away and run away on its own, if you will. I’ve alluded to this when I was looking at our timeline, you know, and I really, I feel like this is such a unique opportunity because as I said, this new technology is adapting to us as the humans. We’re not the ones that are going, OK, we have the technology. And we have to learn about it, implement version 123 before our competitors get there. This really is a tool that is so powerful that we can leverage with all of those other things in mind. What’s important to our organization? Where do we see this creating the biggest impact? Act. And really it’s us that is managing that and setting it on the right in the right direction. But I want to also pause here to say there’s there’s a lot that has to be done. Within an organization to make sure that you’re building this on the right foundation. I said it again earlier, we’re not talking data security in this session, but in the four sessions that follow this as part of the five series, we will get more into security, we will get more into governance. But it’s important that we’re thinking about it. 95% of all AI pilots fail, and they fail because they’re not scaling the right way because it’s built on broken process. So you’re going to have to really think about that. Make sure that you know you clean. Up your data. Here at Concurrency, we’re working on cleaning up all of our corporate SOP’s. What is that? How are we using an agent then to make sure that everyone knows how to access the right SOP and that’s some archived one that’s no longer valid? I think you know the Frontier Firm and the three-phase process, it really aims to master controlled chaos. So it’s experimental context where the teams, you know, we’re testing these concepts, we’re learning about them, we’re codifying the insights across our. Entire organization and the real barriers to this, everyone, the real barriers, it’s not just, it’s not technology, it’s ourselves. You know, there’s a lot of strategic misalignment as I talk about this with friends and with our clients. You know, the real difficulty is, you know, that misalignment at the top. And there’s a lot of people that have this magical vision that AI is just going to solve all of our problems. It is going to solve a lot of problems. Some of them are, you know, capacity planning. When you think about retire, all the people retiring, you know, it will solve a lot of. of that, but just wanted to, you know, kind of go back here and and stress the importance of some of these foundations. So in this A I era, you know, just thinking about all of these things, Are you ready? We started off the series with the the focus on culture, on people to help our friends and our clients really prepare for that human element. And you know, it’s just it’s the most important part and really what we consider the center. You know, it’s people talking to the machines. So we’re only as good as our people. How do we prepare people for what this revolution really entails and how is it going to make our business better? So I know I had a lot to say there, but I’m going to turn it over to you, Meghan, to really dive into. A little bit more on how we make this happen. Meghan Focht 17:52 Awesome. Thank you so much. I think it’s such a good foundation. We hear about Frontier Firm a lot now, at least I do. I know my feet is filled with it and I don’t know that everyone, you know, gets the chance to really sit and understand what that what that means. So. It’s really interesting to think about. This is a time where work is going to look so different. Like for my children, it’ll look so different and at the core of it, humans still being necessary. And personally for me, I have a lot of experience in HR and in driving. Changing cultures and driving human first cultures. And so for me, it just feels like a really cool moment where it’s getting more attention than it ever has and it will become such a bigger competitive advantage than it’s been before. And you know, it doesn’t have to be that complicated to do that. I think the people and workers are going to demand that more than ever, and this AI technology is going to demand that more than ever. So what we wanted to do in this section is really help you think about, OK, what are some of the things you can do? In your organization now that can start to prepare the culture so that you do have an engaged workforce and you have an empowered workforce so that the AI technology isn’t lost on you. And when I was thinking about just the clients we’ve worked with, the consultants. and and their understanding of technology and how it’s successful, my own experience and then just research, you know, listening to people from Microsoft and Harvard and you know just figuring out how people are approaching this. These were some key elements that have to be considered and looked at. The first one being intentional. You know, a lot of times businesses grow because the the demand is there and they don’t get a lot of time to stop and think. Is this how we want to grow? And here is a moment that I challenge you all to pause and say, OK, let’s be intentional about who we’re going to be. Let’s not just become what’s needed of us in the moment. Let’s really think about what that needs to look like and then how we create structure and process to support. what that vision is. You need that check and balance because inevitably something is going to challenge you and and might set you off course and you need to be thoughtful enough to redirect. The other one is value driven. You know, do you have strong values? Do those values make sense? In some organizations, some of the values might become a barrier in this new environment. You know, if the hierarchy is really important, that could be a barrier. So really looking at what those values are. The org chart alignment, you know Kate talked about this changing. It may include agents in addition to people and it may not be this top down chart anymore. You know, it may even visually look different in the future. And that feeds right into communication paths. We have to have companies where the intern who might be fiddling with something late at night and discovers a new way to use technology can then communicate that with the CEO fairly easily because it’s going to help the CEO. We don’t necessarily have time for long approval processes and sort of the ego that could come in play with the intern having a good idea. So we have to prepare organizations for that. And then how do you do that and how do you address the ego? And it it comes back to psychological safety, which I think is. Often a buzzword, but cannot be understated how important that is. So really making sure you’re thinking about that in your organization. So moving forward for the rest of this presentation, I think we’re the best place to start is values. And I say that because if I, if I and when I work with clients, the first question is what are your values and are they hurting your organization? Are they holding you back? Are they truly aligned with how you operate? And so we’ve come together. And kind of come up with, hey, these are four values that should be really present in your organization moving forward. If you want to be prepared. Anytime I think about values, I think about the Patrick Lencioni 5 dysfunctions of a team. And I love that parable because it talks about an organization that has all the posters and says all the right things, but they don’t really live it. And so people don’t know what the values are. And then you have another organization that maybe doesn’t have it written everywhere, but they live by those values and so they are really clear to people. People. And so that’s what we’ll talk about today is how do we make sure we create an environment like that. So being human first, collaboration, creativity and accountability are all values that may have to be rethunk about how you apply it and also are going to be really important in this. next phase of of working. So human first, it just means exactly what it sounds like. It’s prioritizing people. It’s prioritizing your employees, your customers, your communities in all the decisions and the action and how you adopt technology. And just make making sure that you hang on to that empathy, the dignity and the respect as a foundation of the your culture and your strategy. It’s interesting. I love early adopters because they learn a lot of lessons for us. And maybe by now you guys have all heard about the Klarna example where the CEO decided, hey, we’re going to ditch, I think it was like 700 customer service employees for AI and technology and and we don’t need them and we’re going to be this early adopter, but what he realized. was that um the quality suffered and he’s completely changed his tune and he’s moving to a human first approach. And thankfully for him, we can all you know really be confident that what we probably could have predicted is actually true. And gives us the confidence to move forward in this human first focus. So diving a little bit deeper, what does that mean? So it’s about ethical innovation. It’s our OK, we could do it, but should we do it? And when we do this, how do we make sure that it still supports our values? You know, if we’re going to use a bot for customer service, at what point do we make humans available and how far do we let it go? And and what kind of answers should it not answer? And you know, all those things you have to consider when you’re you’re using technology. Protect quality and human experience. You know, could I make HR all just a bot? Maybe. But do I think that’s the best way for employees to have a unique experience and for our company to understand? Kate Weiland-Moores 25:19 Oh. Meghan Focht 25:32 What each employee uniquely needs? Absolutely not. So there are going to be some things for me that I just, I’ll always say it needs to be a human and there’s going to be other things that it might be nice to have in addition to, but not completely replace. Transparent A I and automation. So we need to make sure that there’s clarity around how decisions are made by machines. This will take a lot of time and testing. I know Kate mentioned there’s a disconnect from what people believe A I can do and how much work it actually takes to have A. I do that. So I’ve been guilty of it. Where I’ve a specific example was I was trying to have copilot format a slide for me. Like I was working with copilot and then I was like, OK, format it, OK, make it look prettier. And I was so mad that it wasn’t doing it. It was. Months ago. And then I talked to our copilot expert and I was like, oh, I was so mad at copilot because it didn’t do this. And he’s like, yeah, it doesn’t do that yet. Like that’s not how you do it. And also your prompts are probably wrong. So we do see a disconnect in just how magical we believe it to be and then what it. Actually is capable of and you can probably get it to that point. But it does take training. You know, employees have to still train these these models. So we have to understand what that is. We have to be checking it. We have to understand, OK, what are the humans wanting out of this? What are the companies wanting out of this? And then how do we make that happen? Because it doesn’t just. Know things, you know, it can’t. It still can’t read our minds. Can’t wait till that happens, but it it can’t today. And then digital well-being. I think this is really important because we see this across the board. I I got into a conversation with another. Entrepreneur in Milwaukee and she asked me the question like, whose responsibility is it for employee happiness? How much is the employer responsible and how much is the employee responsible? It’s a really interesting question, especially since we have so many things. Happening in our world today that drive just human dissatisfaction. And I do think that employers have a really unique ability to consider this and help employees. But I can’t help if you’re scrolling Instagram at night and getting sucked into a comparison game, right? I can’t help if like our children are on YouTube and suddenly different videos pop up or I know I shouldn’t be scrolling my phone when I go to sleep and go to bed. But I yes, I still do that, so I need to check in with my own self. If that’s serving me or not. So we have to be thinking about that and we can’t solve it completely, but we do have to make sure we’re not erasing human interaction, face to face interaction, because that is what ultimately fuels us as humans. So it needs to be considered. And then continuous learning and adaptability. What we know is that technology is changing at such a fast rate. I think Kate’s quote about knowledge, the cost of knowledge is 0, the value of knowledge is 0, and it’s going to be focused on the wisdom we can. We have to be able to keep up, and so much so that even in our interviewing process, we’re saying, OK, yes, we do need certain knowledge, especially as a consultancy, but let’s really push and test for employees who’ve learned quickly, who’ve learned on the fly, who can adapt to change because. What we know for sure is going to be happening. The next one is collaboration and collaboration’s always been hard. I mean, if you’ve ever worked on a group project working with some launch students now and you you can see the challenges that exist in group projects, it’s always challenging with humans and now we’re adding in this other element. Of hey, you also have to collaborate with technology in a different way. A great example for me, I had to collaborate with Copilot to create these images and it was kind of cool. So I, you know, asked for a concept. I didn’t like what it it gave me, so I had to think about how I adjusted the. Questions. And then when I kind of found the theme of image that I liked, I had to make sure I kept working off that prompt for all these other things. And it was, you know, a labor of love between my copilot and me to come up with these images. But I worked together with it. And so that’s a an example of the collaboration that we have to look at. So it’s that human and machine center synergy agents will be our teammates. So we have to be working with them. We have to think about the work that they’re doing. We have to think about how we. Help adjust that when it’s serving us, when it’s not serving us, the cross-functional fluidity, we’re not going to be able to be like this is just the HR bot, you know, there’s going to be other pieces that have to go along with it or the agent that’s serving this area is going to have to consider other parts of the business. So we will have to break down silos and figure out how we approach that together. Shared intelligence. So we’re going to have systems that are built from collective input. There’s going to be the agent and the, you know, the system behind the agent that’s producing information. For us and then it’s also what we are inputting and then co-elevation, not competition. You know, I think that’s the conversation about is this going to take our jobs away? I don’t think so. You know, we have a lot of things working in our favor that protect that. We do have a lot of boomers that will retire. We have. Workforce these days that have a lot of choice and they have choice to go freelance. They have choice to work at other companies and people are demanding more of organizations and how we use technology. So we’re going to see that play and we’re going to see it hopefully be able to support each other and then radical candor and feedback forward. We are lovers of radical candor here at Concurrency and if if you don’t know what I’m talking about, just put it in YouTube. There is. So many good videos explaining it, but also read the book because it’s fantastic. I figured out what it was later in life, but I realized sometimes I wondered why people still talk to me after I gave really direct feedback, and that concept helped me understand why it’s about caring person. And challenging directly. That’s going to be really important. You know, if we have these tools as humans, we have to lean into our humanness, which isn’t maybe a word, but a concept that I think you you understand. We have to be communicative with each other. We have to call out if something’s not working. And we have to do it with this shared understanding of, hey, we want everything to be as good as possible and just a lot of direct feedback. You know, I talked about that intern needs to be able to access that CEO we need. To be able to trust each other enough to get feedback up, down, sideways quickly because the technology changes so fast. So creativity, this is another one that is changing. We’re seeing it change already. I think about like how many of you all have had to sort of stunt the level of creativity because you don’t have time or the cost of it is. And the ROI isn’t there. I certainly have done that where I would love to spend more time on something creatively, but it just gets to a point of diminishing returns. But now with AI and with the agents that we have and with copilot, we can do things we couldn’t before if I wanted to create these. Images before I would have had to have the right tools. Even just formatting something or moving a little line could take a lot longer than you would expect. To find the right color might take longer than you would expect it to take. Even coming up with the ideas and the amount of creative blocks you might have. And so the fact that. I could or even what what would I have done before? I would have searched the internet to find exactly what I wanted, which usually I wouldn’t find what I wanted, and then I would just have to settle. So this allows for a level of creativity that we haven’t had before, and it’s that interplay with human and AI where we’re going to be able to accomplish a lot of a lot of cool things. So we want to think about human ingenuity with machine amplification. So it’s still my idea. I’m still prompting the the agent as to what I want. But it’s helping me create that faster than if I had to do it on my own. We need curiosity driven innovation, so we still need to think about what if. And that question maybe becomes more powerful because we have less limitations and so. I know at concurrency we look for those people who are sort of incessantly curious and now we might be able to get more answers for all the questions that we have in a more efficient way and we might be able to test things faster without it being a drain on our timeline or our finance. Co-creation with intelligent agents. A perfect example in my images I created adaptive thinking. So creativity thrives in change and what we know is change is inevitable. So we need to make sure we’re supporting our people being creative. Questioning things and preparing for what’s new, designing for humanity. So it’s still human first. We still have to think about the experiences that all of this creates and then empowered expression. So. Does every employee have access to the tools that help them do this? Are we encouraging them to share ideas? Do we have space for employees to use the tools to bounce ideas off and then bounce them off their human co-workers? So these are all things we have to support in the future organization, accountability. So this is all well and good, but we still have to hold humans accountable and now we’re going to have to hold these agents accountable, which is a new. Sort of way of thinking. This image is my favorite because when I first started with copilot and asked him for an accountability image, the robot had a sad face and I just think that is a perfect example of. Hey, accountability is not sad. Accountability is happy. And I of course told this to copilot, probably with an attitude which it didn’t care about. But it is happy because when everyone is held accountable or at least is offered that conversation of accountability, then. Then it’s clear as kind, right? It’s working or it’s not working. Cool. Then we can move on. If we’re not holding machines or humans accountable, things get really mucky, feelings get pretty sticky, and it’s not a good place to live. So the robot is happy. Accountability is good. But some of these things we have to think about is the human oversight of technology. So you could set up an agent and I would say our recommendation is if you’re setting up an agent, you should have a clear SOP and you should have a clear RACI chart. Who is ultimately accountable for this agent who has to contribute information to this? Who is going to use this agent? That allows you to have multiple check insurance with this agent to say is it still doing what it needs to do? Did the people put the right input in the agent that needs to continually be added to it? Ultimately, if this agent isn’t working or if it’s causing problems? Who am I holding accountable human wise to own that and to get it back on track? So that accountability becomes incredibly important. We can’t just set and forget these agents. They will need constant management, just hopefully, you know, with less feelings and with less. Dynamic needs, you know, we can, we can tackle it a little bit more straightforward and it ultimately helps the humans sort of lean into what we offer as humans. So the transparent systems become really important. How is it working? What input did we put into it? Is it what we originally wanted or? We’ve discovered that it can do something different. We might need to redo SOP’s and we might need to redo a RACI chart. Still the ethical data stewardship. We still need security and thoughtfulness in how we do this. You will have the shared responsibility across teams. Hence the RACI continuous monitoring and improvement, as I said, and then those clear boundaries for agents, what is it going to do? What is it not going to do? If it starts to do this, is it an issue or is it sort of an added benefit? And we need to be constantly maintaining and looking at that. So this sort of new world and as we’re thinking about how agents and A I can really enhance our employees work experience, it starts. It makes me start to think about engaged employees, right? We’re at a we’re at a place where a lot of people could automate a majority. Of their job and sort of sit back, kick their feet up. And from a company perspective, we might still be getting the same amount of productivity and maybe even a little bit more. And so the question is sort of like, do we care? And the answer is yes, we do care. We should care. And you know why, right? So some facts we know about engaged employees. Well, first of all, I think everyone knows having engaged employees is good. Why is it good? There’s an increased productivity, there’s decreased in absenteeism, there’s lower turnover rates. Also, there’s stats that talk about having engaged workforces can earn up to 21% more profit. Companies might see a significant increase in revenue. The your growth can even happen faster when you have engaged employees. They’re out there. Looking around for the organization, how can we be better? How can we eliminate these things? So we know there’s a benefit to engaged employees. I would bet that in the next few years what we’re going to see in these stats is that the increase in productivity of engaged employee is going to be. Significantly higher than 18%, because now that engaged employee can multiply their impact with AI and with agents, and they can go on to the next thing, monitor that or set up a system to monitor that, and now go tackle that list of creative ideas that we all have in the back of our brains. And often we just don’t have time to tackle. And if we think back to Kate’s stat about employees are feeling like, hey, I’m not using my skills as well, I’m feeling overloaded. There’s another stat that says 60% of people feel sort of underutilized in what they can bring to an organization. So not necessarily. Clearly that they’re not working enough, but hey, I’ve got other value wisdom that you’re not tapping into and we’ll be able to to tap into that. So it becomes incredibly important in the future. So what are some things you can do today? One is be a role model. I think this is when. At concurrency, I felt the most success is when our employees were holding each other accountable. Not only were they living the values, but when someone wasn’t living the values, they said, hey, are you OK? Like, hey, this isn’t how we operate here. How’s it going? Can I help you sort of get back on track and think about why you’re maybe not? Feeling this way, and anyone can do that. You don’t have to be in leadership. Classic engagement surveys. I don’t think they’re going away. I think that there’s a lot of value. We just got ours and it often validates things that we’re already feeling and knowing. And sometimes will pop up patterns that you didn’t realize were maybe as big of an issue. Create space for people to connect and share ideas. When you talk about those communication loops, figure out ways that people are meeting people that they wouldn’t normally know, or groups are coming together to just ideate. A lot of times we eliminate the ideating time for productivity, but we cannot underestimate how important that time is. Connection to leaders. The intern has to be able to share an idea with top leaders. And so how are you making that happen? How are your leaders making sure they’re approaching? How are they making sure they’re in touch with what’s happening and they know personally people within the organization? And another thing that we do is a personal engagement form and we frequently ask our employees, you know, rank these different elements of your job one to six. What’s most important to you today? And then how satisfied are you? And that really helps us individualize the employee experience as well as just figure out what we need to do to keep them, you know, happy. And in some cases it helps uncover that maybe this isn’t the right place for them. Or maybe there’s an easy tweak we can do that the employee didn’t realize was available. So it it sparks really good conversation and making sure each employee is is thought about, not just as a number, but as the human that they are. So some key enablers for success. You want to establish an organizational culture enabling innovation. You want to create an AI vision and values based on your organizational culture, that intentional culture, have a center of excellence of people passionate to lead. So really getting those groups together. Together to say, how should we be tackling this and are we doing it the way that we want to? You need to have responsible AI practices to ensure AI vision and values alignment. So that ethical piece, not losing sight of that enable all users to create and innovate. It’s that psychological safety. It’s the feedback. Kate Weiland-Moores 44:46 2. Meghan Focht 44:52 Loops. It’s creating that space for creativity. And then of course, sign up for the rest of our sessions. Joe is going to be a speaker in many of them, and we have some other people who will pop in there. But there’s a lot to explore, a lot to understand, and a lot of really foundational work that you can do now. Um, before the pressure of really getting to that phase three is upon us. So I think the survey is in the chat and we’d love for you to fill that out. Feedback is a gift. We love it. Even even if it might feel harsh in the moment, we love to get better. So please give us every every thought you have on how this is going. And then also we will offer that complimentary 30 minute session to explore how to structure your team’s roles, organization to prepare for AI adoption. So please take a moment to do that and thank you all so much. I know Kate mentioned this before, but we’d all love to connect with you. And really happy to have Joe on too. So if you guys do have questions, we also have our technical technical guy in our pocket here. So would love to hear what what questions you might have as well. Kate Weiland-Moores 46:08 Thank you, Meghan. Joe Steiner 46:12 Thank you, Meghan. Thank you, Kate. If anyone cares to post a question in the chat or in the Q&A, we’d be happy to to discuss anything that comes to mind for you here. Amy Cousland 46:26 Yeah, Joe, we have a question here in the Q&A. I can go ahead and read it. It seems every day there’s a new news story about white collar layoffs as a result of A I. Generally speaking, what jobs are being lost and what new jobs are being created? How could I make sure that my career is on the right side of this? Joe Steiner 46:35 Yeah, please. Meghan Focht 46:49 I think if I can jump in and and Joe and Kate please support or tell me I’m off track, but I think that there are some big decisions being made at especially at a lot of the bigger organizations about where the focus needs to be. Joe Steiner 46:55 Please. Meghan Focht 47:07 And sometimes the big moves have to have to happen sort of in a big way, especially at those bigger companies. But I think what ends up happening is you have to just be ready to learn, you know, and you have to be learning on your own. You know, no longer are the days where an organization. And can just set up the training path and the career path is right there. And if you do XY and Z, then you will get the job. You have to be driven to stay ahead of things. I also, I mean with Microsoft especially, you see where those big layoffs happen and they reorg and they hire a lot of those people back. Too. And I think that even in this day of AI and technology and AI and recruiting processes, it’s still relationships are king and queen. You got to keep your human relationships warm. You got to get out of your house. You got to go meet people. You got to go be a human in front of human. Because we’re still going to have an innate want to hire people that we know and love. So I would say too, if you’re looking for that career advice, do your own research, try to stay up to date on. What’s happening and and skill up where you can, which now it’s easier to do than ever and really stay close to people. Kate Weiland-Moores 48:29 And I think, you know, that also ties into why that quote was my favorite quote as it applies to this because you know, knowledge is there and there can be this fear about like, well, if anybody can access that knowledge, what how does that impact my my values as an employee? But being able to apply the knowledge and to navigate. Navigate any ecosystem, any organization that need is still there. I also put a couple of statistics in the chat and these are things that are changing all of the time, but two in particular are kind of supporting even what some of these other stats we shared. Earlier and 70% of US employers still cannot find, cannot fill vacancies. So it’s slightly below the global average of 75%. And then even in tech, you know there’s Meghan referenced some of the layoffs that have happened. There’s a lot of layoffs in tech and then a lot of rehire in tech and I think it’s a shift. As to what the role really is, and you know, in cybersecurity and AI related roles, there’s still a big demand. Meghan Focht 49:37 Mhm. Joe Steiner 49:38 Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. That, you know, I think just where I’ll tackle Meghan a little bit. I think, again, relationships matter. People still like to deal with people. We haven’t crossed those thresholds where they’re preferring to deal with. You know the technology quite yet, but I think it’s important to remain relevant. I think you need to understand how to use a I because that’s what’s going to make you the most productive employee for your next employer, so. Meghan Focht 50:09 Mhm. Joe Steiner 50:10 Very important that you understand, OK, here’s what I can bring to the table. Both me and the, you know, my use of A I here is what adds value going forward. It’s it’s the new tech skill that you need and so I think that’s. That’s really important. I think, you know, Meghan cited an example earlier where there’s the knee-jerk reaction that some had had to be like, oh, I can replace people with this. But some of those companies found quickly that that didn’t work quite the way they wanted. And I I think you’ll. Meghan Focht 51:03 Yeah, good question. Amy Cousland 51:08 Hey, I don’t think we have any other questions. Thank you to all of you for people who came and listened to this great event. And for Meghan and Kate, thank you for a great presentation. We’ll go ahead and end this. And if anybody can fill out the survey, please do. Umm Take care. Meghan Focht 51:22 Yeah, please connect with us. I’d love to meet you. Amy Cousland 51:25 Alright, take it. Kate Weiland-Moores 51:26 Everybody, good luck. Thanks. Joe Steiner 51:30 Thank you all.