Why AI Fails Without a New Operating Model with Kelley Steven-Waiss

Yeah, the one thing that strikes me about your approach and that lines up with kind of my own sense of the future is that it's easy for HR people to, when asked about their AI strategies, to think in terms of what are they doing for their function? How is the HR function transforming and evolving? But the need goes much further.

broader, right? It's really about how is the work transforming? How is business transforming? And I think your background really lends itself to connecting these dots for customers.

The thing that I'm still like grasping for is Where in the leadership team are these conversations actually happening? Because when I talk to HR people, they tend to be still very fixated, thinking that the question is, how can their work change? or how can their tools change versus seeing themselves as part of that broader organizational

transformation? Am I just talking to the wrong people? No, I think you're right, Meg.

Here's the problem, and that's very much why when I say NovaWorks is an AI operating system is because we have to attack the operating model.

I always saw myself as a business person first and an HR person second.

My job is to help this organization be profitable and achieve whatever it is we committed to shareholders, to return something back to shareholders, and hopefully do good in the world by the technology, by the way, right? That was always my personal mission.

But what HR needs to be able to do, I don't always believe they are capable of having this conversation, but is what do we need to do to evolve our operating models? Because we can buy new tech, but if we take an old model and put it on new tech, we have changed nothing.

In fact, it will be garbage in, garbage out.

So the conversation needs to be, what do we need to change about our operating model? That's our governance, our roles and responsibilities, our org design, and our skills and capabilities of this organization.

What's underpinning that? People, process, and technology.

Technology is one pillar underneath that, not all of it.

So I think if HR can take a meaningful opportunity to have this conversation, not how do I optimize my own function, but how do we optimize our operating model should we break it? One analogy that I use with chief people officers when I talk to them about this When we were all little, we had a Fisher-Price toy that was this yellow box, and it had all these different shapes cut out, the triangle, the square, you know, the rectangle.

And then we had three-dimensional shapes, and it's to teach a child cause and effect.

In HR, we're looking at the company's operating model, which is the yellow box, and we have all this cool technology, these three-dimensional shapes.

And we don't change the yellow box, the operating model, but we put in all this new tech, right? And we wonder why it doesn't work.

Have you watched a toddler play with this toy? They often throw it across the room because they put a triangle in a square.

So we have to blow up the yellow box.

We have to be brave.

And that means driving that conversation with the leadership team.

And who

on the leadership team is... really ready to engage on that conversation for HR leaders that are eager to have it.

And just a fair warning, we just had Siobhan Savage on the show, and she's also having these conversations.

And her thesis was it's the CIO and the CFO and the head of HR.

I'm very curious, like if HR is ready and eager to start these conversations, are you seeing them have success with one of those types of roles or are there other places that they're finding partners for this level of conversation?