AI is turning out to be pretty spectacular. Starting with ChatGPT and now moving to agents, reasoning, voice, image and video creation, the technology seems boundless. And now that Elon Musk has figured out how to connect 100,000 Nvidia chips in a high speed network, the opportunity just gets bigger.
Among all the things we’ll do with AI (art, music, warfare, medicine, science, learning), there is one feature that excites me the most. And as a business person first, analyst second, I think it has the most potential.
That feature is “interconnectedness.”
For the first time in my adult life, we have a technology that can understand the interconnectedness of information.
I have always been a systems thinker. Perhaps from my background in science, I’ve always felt that any given problem or issue could be best understood if we knew all the related factors. I’ve been reading a magnificent book “The Song of the Cell,” by Siddhartha Mukherjee, and the interconnectedness of the human body is magical. Each one of our cells, in its own complex way, works with its peers to create the magic of life.
Companies are the same. In fact as I read the book I realized that our companies are not unlike the human bodies: individual teams (cells) do things together and later have to interconnect, share, and coexist with the whole. This systemic idea (the core of Systemic HR) is what differentiates high performing companies from their peers.
I want my HR friends to think about this. Not only is every financial and business process connected (that supplier that raised his price just upset your profit on a product, forcing your sales people to discount, impacting your customer brand, for example), but HR people essentially operate in this “soup of data” every day.
A single decision like “who to hire” has enormous systemic effects throughout your organization. And if we want to make these individual “cellular” decisions well, we have to see how they interconnect with the rest of the system.
Listen To This Podcast
If this seems too abstract to you, please listen to the following podcast.
After months of work with Galileo? (which interconnects HR practices amazingly well) and many vendor discussions, I developed a pragmatic vision to explain how AI could change the entire process of talent management. It explains how an AI Agent could interconnect all our talent processes in a highly systemic way.
Can we trust it?? As the financial community has discovered (read this piece on Black Box vs White Box models), the answer is yes. AI systems, as unexplainable as they may be, outperform our own simple models. (Human cells behave astoundingly well even though we don’t fully understand them.)
Over time I think we’ll do away with “recruiting” and “performance management” and “career management” and end up with Systemic Talent Management. The same will happen to rewards (we call it Systemic Rewards), learning (Systemic L&D), employee engagement, and more.
All these things are interconnected and we always knew this. We just never had tools and data processing to show us the relationships. Now we do.
Listen here, I’d love your feedback.
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