Is the CHRO the New CIO With GenAI?

Defining who -and how- will benefit from the productivity gains generated by GenAI will require unprecedented Change Management for successful implementations.

(No ChatGPT used in this article!)

GenAI is already providing major productivity gains for those organizations – and individuals — that are using it. But it is also clear that those productivity gains will not automatically translate into gains for businesses, or at least not 100% of them. The question is then, how can you balance the potential benefits for business with benefits for employees? And whatever is the balance that you define for your organization, that will require unprecedented levels of change management, making the CHRO and the CIO coordination critical for successful GenAI deployments.

Most organizations are starting to deploy GenAI for simple internal use cases, as there are still some reservations regarding potential so-called “hallucinations” if used externally without proper controls – as well as expected regulatory measures that are starting to be introduced by governments. Hallucinations are basically incorrect and/or improper GenAI outputs that need to be corrected or eliminated.

As your organization starts with basic GenAI deployments internally, your employees are immediately becoming more productive, leveraging GenAI co-pilots for multiple basic, but very relevant, tasks such as writing emails, memos and blogs; getting answers to specific questions; sharing information with other employees (shared repositories, blogs, chat bots); summarizing content from documents, meetings and websites (including text, audio and video); preparing project reports, talking points and presentations; and introducing a new level of personalization of all the available information. With these capabilities employees become super-productive.

One transformational aspect of GenAI is that now everyone can leverage it and become super-productive without needing to be an expert on the technologies involved (machine learning, deep learning, large language models, and others). So, then the question is how to translate those productivity gains into benefits for the business.

At the basic level, productivity gains mean that you are either doing more with the same resources or doing the same with fewer resources. The best scenario of course, is when you can do more with less.

Doing “more” could be producing more products, having more customer interactions (to either sell more or address more customer inquiries), sending more emails (to generate more demand, increase brand awareness, manage projects), or creating more digital assets ( software, interfaces, web pages, documents, presentations). In the case of GenAI, the “resources” required are basically employee time and the information technology (IT) investments that you need to make to deploy the technology within your organization.

Regarding saving employee time, then the question is: What are you going to do with that incremental employee bandwidth? Are you going to ask employees to produce more throughput, take more training, complete more certifications, manage more projects, or come up with more ideas? And/or will you give them some of that time back, in the form of free time – a two-hour lunch break, leaving home an hour earlier, or not working on Fridays? You could also split the time savings, some for asking employees to do more and some for them for free consumption as they please. 

Speaking to some CIOs in the past few weeks, some of these questions are becoming quite real very quickly. But the transformational nature of GenAI raises these questions not only for IT organizations, but for all functions. Therefore, one aspect of great relevance with deploying GenAI in organizations is change management; for some, it is the most important factor for success. Furthermore, I was attending a recent HITEC conference in New York City. During a panel session with many GenAI experts, this topic came up, and someone suggested that “the new CIO is the CHRO” given how the people component will be the most important for successful GenAI adoption.

Pre-COVID, having a flexible (remote or hybrid) work location wasn’t a very common “benefit” when attracting talent, as we were used to working mostly from the office and then the location decision was very simple: you had to physically live there and go to the office regularly. Now when you attract talent, the flexible work location is as important as the role, title, compensation, fringe benefits, and, of course, the company. In many cases, professionals will see flexible work location as a deal breaker – if you don’t like commuting many hours of your day, or if you just enjoy the convenience and freedom of working from home, or elsewhere.

With GenAI, things get more complicated for CHROs. Now, current and potential employees will also pay attention to how companies go about GenAI. That will play a role in the ability to attract talent.  

For instance, with the time savings for employees, the questions will be: Will you ask employees to do more training? Continuously increase the number of projects or responsibilities that they have? Or will you give them some extra free time or more vacation? 

And then you will have people implications beyond time savings, related to how you build your GenAI capacity within your organization, and your internal governance – whether you entice employees to feel more empowered because they are now more productive, more creative because you give them the tools and freedom to raise more ideas and test them with less efforts, or will they feel under a lot of pressure to be more productive given the new tools and culture, and with tight governance and control to avoid the potential hallucinations versus. innovations?

We should expect that the competition for talent will continue getting tougher, but at the same time, it will open opportunities for being creative, realizing that we have a whole new way of thinking about professional jobs and work.

Could it be that in the future some job descriptions will establish the specific hours that you are expected to work as a minimum per month? Or rather be based on specific objectives and outcomes regardless of the hours that you work? Also, could there be sophisticated jobs being paid by the hour? So you could eventually work for many companies, distributing your work hours as you please – of course, with companies ensuring there is no conflict of interest. Or what about fractional jobs where you only offer 5% or 10% of your time? There is certainly more homework to do for future CHROs.

Finally, governments and public institutions will also get productivity gains and will need to determine what to do with them. Are they going to provide better citizen services without increasing budgets? Are they going to give more free time to their employees? 

Of course, not all jobs will have productivity gains because of GenAI – mainly those that are 100% dependent on physical activity and interactions; for example, if you are a cab driver, a hair stylist or a chef, GenAI will give you some insights on new routes, personalized hair styles and new recipes; but it won’t enable you to serve more clients or do things faster. 

Given the relevance of the people aspect of GenAI, the implications as to how we work and how many hours we work, will the CHRO become the new CIO? I don’t think that will happen, but it does raise the point that change management will be more relevant and critical than ever. Let’s get ready for the ride!