The Walk the Dog Problem: What Happens When AI Frees Up Time Nobody Planned For

Volker Schrank (0:00)

AI will reshape how an enterprise works. It will reshape what kind of people you need, what kind of skills you need. How did you define teams when you have non-humans as active team members? How do you think about getting new fresh talent in if all of the entry jobs, or how I call it, the AI trainee is taking over that path? Technology, for the majority of what you can do with AI today, is the commodity. It is no longer the limiting factor. It is how you integrate it, how you use it, and how you make value keys out of that. You have to do the foundational enablement. You have to really showcase how does it work, what can it do, how capable is it? And from there, I think, the real difference is leading from the top.

Russ (0:54)

Welcome back to AI Impact. Today, I'm joined by Volker Schrank. Volker, thank you so much for joining us. Why don't you give the audience a little bit about yourself and your background?

Volker Schrank (1:02)

No, thank you, Russ. It's such a pleasure to be here with you today. I was looking forward to today. Yeah, where should I start?

I'm Volker, as you have said already. Based out of Munich, Germany. It's a little city in the southern Germany. I think everyone knows it for the Oktoberfest.

Russ (1:19)

Everyone knows it. The cool clothing, the cool October stuff.

Volker Schrank (1:23)

Apologies that I have just a lame shirt today.

Now, yeah, I'm an HR and HR technology practitioner for, I don't know, like 25 plus years, something like this. Currently, across a multitude of different topics. On one hand, I'm doing something similar to what you do, Russ, right, running podcasts. I'm having my Employee Xperience Lab, where I'm talking to peers and startups around what's cool, what's new, how to think about HR innovation, AI and technology in the HR space. And I'm also running the HR Technology and Employee Xperience function for Mondalis International.

Russ (2:06)

Very cool. Yes, I know. We've talked a little bit about Mondalis and what a very old iconic company it is. And so I'm sure a lot is going to come up on both of the things you do during the chat today. So as we dive right in, everybody loves talking about AI and what's going to happen and predictions. You've made a big distinction between AI for HR and HR for AI. How do you think about your role, HR leaders, large organizations in AI, just to set the framework?

Volker Schrank (2:38)

Yeah, I want to say that probably I was one of the early ones to make this distinction. By now I have seen, you can read this with McKinsey and others. But we are driving this for over a year now already. And the distinction is quite frankly, you know what I'm doing is AI for the HR function. How can we improve the HR function and what it delivers with the help of AI, right? May it be either around administrative activities and just getting to a zero-touchback office, may it be in the front office to say like, hey, how can we improve the experience for employees and for managers or candidates? But also how can we actually superpower our business partners and our COEs with the help of technology, right?

This is my daily life, if you will, where I'm with Mondelise also on a project trajectory to make this happen every day. However, this is the small price. This is the small thing. That's the must-do that I feel. The much bigger one is HR for AI, right? And you know this as much as many of the listeners. AI will reshape how an enterprise works. It will reshape what kind of people you need, what kind of skills you need, how you, how did you define teams when you have non-humans as active team members, right?

How do you think about succession? How do you think about getting new fresh talent in and, you know, scale it up to be experienced talent if all of the entry jobs or how I call it, the AI trainee is taking over that part, right? And this is the big one, because without doing that piece right HR for AI, all of the investments that any enterprise does in AI is lost, because you will not be able to realize it if your organization isn't ready to absorb it and work in an AI native way.

Russ (4:49)

As you've talked to folks either at your current organization or when you interview folks, who's going to?

I guess, own is kind of a lazy way to phrase the question, so I can start with own, but how do you see things evolving, right? For a long time, you had the CIO over here, and you had the head of HR over here, and frankly, they didn't really overlap, except around maybe Workday implementation and SSO, a little bit of employee privacy policies. But in a world where you are going to have humans doing work, humans doing work using technology, where there's a training component, so the AI is such an important part of work now, and where you have non-humans doing some amount of work, what does that organization look like? What does the collaboration look like between head of HR and CIO? It's not really about who's the boss. Do they become one organization, or is there... How does that even happen?