AI & The Human Skills Shaping The Future of Work LIVE

In this special bonus episode of People First, we’re bringing you a live recording from our recent panel event: AI and the Human Skills Shaping the Future of Work.

Hosted by Lotus People’s Amy Locke, this episode features an honest, forward-thinking conversation with:

• Lucy Wilson, Chief People & Culture Officer at Gumtree Group
• Claritta Peters, Chief People Officer at Fishbowl
• Nick Denison, Client Principal at Mantel Group

As AI becomes embedded across recruitment, HR, customer experience and more, this panel explores how businesses can stay ahead — without losing the human edge.

We cover:

• How AI is reshaping business functions across industries
• The evolving role of soft skills like empathy, adaptability and communication in 2025
• Practical advice for hiring, developing and retaining talent in a tech-driven world
• Where to strike the balance between automation and human connection
• Why people – not just processes – remain your greatest competitive edge

Whether you joined us in person or you’re catching the conversation for the first time, this episode will leave you inspired to lead with humanity in a digital age.

Have feedback or want to get in touch? Email us at info@lotuspeople.com.au

Learn more about Lotus People at lotuspeople.com.au or find us on LinkedIn at Lotus People.

Transcript

UNKNOWN: 0:01

you

SPEAKER_08: 0:01

This is the People First podcast, a Lotus People podcast, where we dive into the conversations shaping the future of work. I'm your host, Amy Locke, and in this special bonus episode, we're bringing you a live recording from our panel event, AI and the Human Skills Shaping the Future of Work, with Lucy Wilson, Chief People and Culture Officer at Gumtree Group, Clarita Peters, Chief People Officer at Fishbowl, and Nick Dennison, Client Principal at Mantle Group. You'll hear their insights on how artificial intelligence is transforming our workplace and why human skills like empathy, creativity and adaptability are set to become more valuable than ever. Whether you joined us in person on the day or you're tuning in now for the first time, we're so glad that you're here. Let's dive in. Is everyone settled? Everyone had a coffee? Amazing. Thank you so much for joining us today, especially with this awful weather outside. Before we kick off, I just want to say a huge thank you to everyone at Lotus People for bringing today's event together and also mention that it is our 10th year anniversary in business. So special thank you to everyone here that's helped us along the way. My name's Amy. I'm one of the directors from Lotus People. I'm going to be moderating today's event on AI and the human skills shaping the future of work. Joining me, we have Lucy Wilson, Chief People Officer from Gumtree Group.

SPEAKER_07: 1:33

Hi, everybody.

SPEAKER_08: 1:36

Thanks for having me. Clarita Peters, Chief People Officer from Fishbowl.

SPEAKER_07: 1:41

Who doesn't love a fishbowl?

SPEAKER_08: 1:46

Oh. Thank you. Can you hear me now? Thought it was already set up. And last but not least, we have Nick Dennison from Mantle Group, Client Principal. Nick, so I'll actually start off with you. As someone that works with some of Australia's largest organisations on their AI strategies, what are you seeing right now? For example, where is AI having the biggest impact?

SPEAKER_00: 2:16

Yep. So firstly, I'll talk about the market holistically. So in terms of the spectrum of maturity and uptake of AI, it's quite large in terms of people that are really in analysis paralysis, aren't really adopting AI, don't really know how to do it. through to organizations that are productionizing AI solutions and doing it pretty successfully. If I summarize what AI solutions are being productionized today, you've got the customer-facing solutions, so the solutions that create differentiated experiences to customers, so perhaps it's reinventing how an application interacts with a customer or how you process purchasing, through to more operational-style solutions, so solutions which are really there to drive operational efficiencies and automate processes such as data validation, data entry. And if I use a specific example, if we look at the finance market, for example, document automation is being used across multiple different organizations within that particular industry. So what that means is when you look at the loan application process, the activities around capturing data, validating data, looking at has the right information being put into the forms or the loan application, through to actually processing the loan application. The impact that actually has from the customer experience angle is now loan applications can be processed in minutes as opposed to taking 8 to 12 hours. So yeah, we're seeing a lot of organizations more on the operational component than the customer experience component. And that really comes down to, I guess, risk and maturity around data foundations and data governance.

SPEAKER_08: 3:54

That's so interesting. And Lucy, it'd be great to hear from you. Has AI started to influence how you structure teams and build internal capabilities within Gumtree Group?

SPEAKER_07: 4:06

Yes, short answer is yes, it has. We've been thinking about it for a while, right? I mean, Gumtree Group, it's a local hero, home to Cars Guide, Auto Trader and Gumtree. But it's also, we've had to do a lot of work around trust and safety, right? And I think recently that conversation has shifted a lot where we've moved it from, okay, we've done the trust and safety stuff. Now, Now we've got, you know, a little bit less quality in our traffic. I was actually just talking to a couple of guys about that a second ago. And how are we going to start to use, right, the things that we do know in that process that we've just undertaken to really start to influence the decisions around capability uplift? And let me be clear, there is a big uplift needed. I wanted to ask a quick question, quick show of hands. I love a bit of audience interaction. Who in the audience, put your hand up, if you or your business... have implemented an AI tool. So have implemented an AI tool in your business. Pop them up so I can see. I'm keen to get a sense of who we've got. Any AI tool. Could be for talent. It could be for HR. It could be for your customer. You could have designed it. Okay, so we've got a lot of people. No, no, no, keep their hands up. Keep your hand up if it was not chat GPT. So any other AI tool. And then keep your hand up for me if it has been clearly defined with an ROI and you now have quantified your use of that AI tool. Quantify. A little bit there, a little bit there. So we are in a place and space where that's something we're really, really thinking about very cautiously. I mean, I won't go on. I know I have a time limit, but engineers, let's use the engineering teams as an example. We've got 90 people in our business that are contributing to our engineering and our tech. Boilerplate stuff, right? testing, unit testing. Miranda, my talent acquisition lead, is going to be very proud of my unit testing capability in this dialogue. But we have people doing things that's taking up lots of time as an engineering business. How could we implement some quick wins? Now, we use Claude for that, right? So we actually, Claude works, we can test things, we can give an answer as to whether or not that's fit for purpose and it has essentially been coded the way that it should. Does the product do what it should do? But we need engineers that can read that and actually decide if that is correct even though AI tells us it is right and Claude's a great system that we use but we're really really focused on that at the moment so yes when we're recruiting we're hiring and we're talking to the market we're thinking about customer solutions we are very much looking at what does that capability look like in a new world yeah brilliant

SPEAKER_08: 6:49

thank you Clarita Fishbowl has had incredible growth over the past few years as Lucy kind of mentioned earlier I'm sure I'm not the only one in this room who would say it's their favourite lunchtime service Has AI played part in this incredible growth? And if it has, how has it? Well, just

SPEAKER_05: 7:07

I don't want to make an assumption that everyone knows what fishbowl is with a salad chain. We've got a few stores in the city. But essentially, really transparently.

SPEAKER_04: 7:17

Up a bit more. Really close. There we go. Is that a bit better?

SPEAKER_05: 7:19

Yeah. Fantastic. Is it on? Yeah. The green button is on, so you'll tell me. But can you hear me at the back? Yeah, fab. So really transparently. AI has not been a big part of our story because we're largely a bricks and mortar operations business. So essentially, we are vertically integrated. And in the simplest terms, that means we do everything. So everything that comes in from our fantastic farmers locally, we process at our central facility in Rosebury. We cook everything from scratch. And then that goes out with our internal logistics teams. So what that means is there's huge scope for how we could incorporate it, but it's really been limited so far to production scheduling. weather pattern forecasting because we're a largely seasonal business so in a day like this where it's raining quite heavily we sometimes do get surprised that people do fancy a delicious fishbowl because we do have warm options but typically we use AI to more predict what the weather patterns are and how much we need to forecast and produce in order to support customer demand for that in the restaurants but we're really in a conscious exploratory phase and in our workforce we have a predominantly young workforce but we also have a growing head office and And with that team, we see the way that we're thinking about AI in two particular ways. So firstly, in terms of the guardrails, so safe usage, what's appropriate? How do we stop misinformation? How do we support good quality work outputs, particularly to people that are young and new to the workforce? And secondarily, how do we also not police it entirely and go really into blue sky thinking and have a look at, we have so much scope in our operations that we can directly control. We don't outsource it. So how can we best optimize in terms of the manual paper entry, which we've moved away from, but how can we get more efficient with that in a value aligned way?

SPEAKER_08: 9:08

Yeah, I think getting the balance is so important. Well, there's no doubt that AI is having a huge impact and business leaders really need to start thinking about what are those human skills that are going to be most essential for the future of work. Lucy, I know that you recently won an award for employee experience transformation. Huge congratulations. Thank

SPEAKER_07: 9:29

you. Thank you. That would definitely not have been possible without my team. So I just want to shout that out. They are the reason we won that. But thank you.

SPEAKER_08: 9:36

What are the types of roles and skills that you're starting to develop within Gumtree Group to ensure that your teams are future-proofed?

SPEAKER_07: 9:44

I mean, Gumtree Group is, I think, a relatively, I mean, I've come from larger professional services and advertising. So in those industries, they're much bigger. They're very global. What I love about Gumtree actually is we're small but mighty. We have just on close to 200 people that seem to make our tech incredible. And we have started thinking about what are some of the skills that we're going to need to future-proof and ready ourselves for what's to come. I was saying this a little earlier, we're probably most concerned with that sort of high school training level coming out where there is such an addiction already to AI in some really dark ways as well. How does that play out with, you know, Skills like curiosity, creativity. You know, I'm pretty much sure everybody in this room would remember having to write an essay and being given a number of words you're allowed to write it out and you were tested on that. Tapping into that part of our brain is really, really important. And so we have invested at the moment and we're continuing to do that. We're actually on a journey too. Just because we're tech does not mean we have it together. We are very much exploratory. But we are taking our time to really consider what's going to work, maybe what can create some quick wins, efficiencies, but we need people that can think that way. And finding talent that thinks that way has actually completely shifted from an acquisition perspective. I mean, people in the room would be finding that, no doubt. When you're looking for talent, how do we gauge resilience, critical thinking, the ability to adapt to change? And one of my panellists here, fellow panellists, I think is going to talk a little bit about adaptability, but how are we measuring and gauging that So we've spent a significant amount of time, particularly within people and culture, to really design and be clear on how our choices, potential choices around technology and our ever-changing world align to our values, absolutely key, values first. But then how are we going to gauge and qualify when people come through that process that they are thinking in a way that's going to help us get to that end result? And that's actually really tricky to do. But in summary, I would say curiosity, absolutely key. It did not kill the gumtree cat. We also are really, really heavily invested in the learning culture. Very, very invested. Brilliant. Thank

SPEAKER_08: 12:08

you. Clarita, Fishbowl is, of course, a fast-paced, customer-focused business. In your opinion, what would you say are going to be some of the human skills that are most essential for the future of work?

SPEAKER_05: 12:22

Well, I'll speak to Fishbowl specifically and then I can talk about the wider workforce because we're hospitality and our workforce workforce in Australia is just over a thousand people, predominantly about 850 of them sit within our restaurants and it's typically young people. So for that cohort of people, we as a business are very strong talking about the value side of things. We want to be a hospitality first business. So we're in the business of customer service. When you come in, whether you've been there a million times before, it's your first time. We want you to be able to have the experience of feeling like a loyal customer, being walked through the menu with a smile, the lighted in the experience that's what we hope for whether it's one of the 54 restaurants here or the two soon to be three that we have in new york that is a human element so what we always double down with double down on in our learning experience is a digital first curriculum in fishbowl which is our digital pathway we call it this school and essentially it teaches all the fundamentals of how you make a beautiful product but of course owning in on the customer service side of things reinforced by in-person training and as a business for the time time being, and I certainly foresee it for the future, we're taking quite a different view from our competitors in terms of automating the service experience. We really believe in the power of people. So for our team, this is really a head office specific conversation at this stage in terms of talent. And I really echo the sentiment you had, Lucy, around what is essentially a process of learning and discernment. So people coming into the workforce, I don't want the standard to be, we suffered in these, I came up in consulting, I I worked in strategy consulting for a long time for people. And there's a lot of war stories in those kind of industries, in every industries. I had to go through this terrible thing and therefore everyone else has to go through that experience. That's not what we're saying. There's a lot of things that AI is fantastic for. We think about a lot of the neurodivergent or dyslexic people that we have in the workforce whose lives have been fundamentally changed because every time that they send an email, they're not essentially worried about what they might have said or not said along the way. So there have been huge gains in that way. The thing that we have to, we are working on at Fishbowl at a head office level in particular and for operations leaders is an open culture of as I mentioned before guide rails but blue sky thinking so being transparent about the usage of AI and where people feel comfortable using it and where they don't and I think particularly for young people AI usage within the workforce and I love that you said anyone else using something other than chat GPT and then kind of the hands went down because I think the way that we talk about AI use in the workforce particularly with young is where dating apps was about 10 years ago. Everyone's kind of doing it. No one really wants to talk about it. And actually, our young team members are at the front line of using these, using tools, not necessarily at an enterprise level with enterprise logins, not necessarily with acceptable usage unless you're actively talking about that. So having that open conversation about what good looks like, but making sure we're also talking about human verification. So if you're presenting something, whether or not you have used AI in any other tool, You are responsible for that work. And I will test you on your creative output as anyone else in the business will. So I think it's having discernment and accountability at a head office level and making sure we're having the training and trusting also we're not the utmost authority. If you've been in senior leadership for a period of time and you haven't grown up with AI tools as a second language, trust your team to tell you what actually works for them and then support them with the guardrails. So that's kind of the thinking that we're taking into how we want to coach our teams.

SPEAKER_07: 15:58

Yeah. Sorry, I was just going to add to that, which is an entire job in itself, coming up with that and being able to guide your organisation at a leadership level. That's really, that's a lot of work. You have to be able to define it. And then you need coaches coaching and coaching some more. And I think especially I just found that really interesting because with people in the age demographic that you would hire, and by the way, all the things you were singing around Fishbowl has definitely been my experience. They do. They take care in how they make your salad. You know, they look. Listen, yeah, lovely. Everywhere I go, I've tried a few. But I would imagine that's a really big piece for you guys, being able to kind of talk to what it looks like and what it's not. So I just wanted to add that because it's interesting.

SPEAKER_08: 16:42

Yeah, definitely. And I think it's really interesting that you mentioned the kind of different generations and different generations and how they approach AI. A lot of the kind of senior leaders that I've been meeting with for preparation for this event, they do say that there's a big difference in people who are just joining the workforce compared to millennials that maybe didn't grow up with AI. So it's really interesting on that part. Nick. From your knowledge and experience, it would be great to hear how businesses can ensure that they're getting the right balance between AI implementations and human capabilities.

SPEAKER_00: 17:25

Yeah. When we talk about sort of organizational level AI transformations. You're talking about significant change in the operating model, ways of working, skill sets, etc. So I think it's really important when you're undergoing a transformation such as that, very early on you do a gap analysis from here's where you are now and here's where you're going to be. And not just looking at that from a technology roadmap perspective, but from a people and process change perspective as well. So that way you're not not just building a technology solution, but you're also taking into account the transition to a new world. And that may involve upskilling teams. It may also involve hiring new talent to fill those gaps in those skill sets. And then also really thinking about what that technology means to the business. So making sure that when you build that technology, there's standard patterns in place, things that make it easy or easier to adopt in the future.

SPEAKER_08: 18:28

Could you talk on some of the common pitfalls that businesses might fall into when implementing AI and how can business leaders here today avoid these common pitfalls?

SPEAKER_00: 18:39

Yeah, I'll probably talk about two main things. I'll probably talk about hundreds of things. And look, I see a lot of businesses make pretty big mistakes, to be honest. One of them is really AI transformations being technology-led. It's not really a technology solution, it's a business solution It's a solution that's going to really impact how people work day to day. So it really needs to be all encompassing. And when we talk about design methodology, you really want to take more of a human centered design methodology when designing out these solutions, because at the end of the day, these solutions are going to be embedded into operations and processes, i.e. people's day to day. And yeah, that comes back to training again. And when I talk about training, you know, we're not really talking about training from a technology perspective. We're talking about AI literacy. The amount of people that use the buzzwords in the wrong place don't really understand what AI is. Just for this group, if you summarize it in three things, you have automation, so think simple tasks like writing an email. You have augmentation, which I think is something that people can really upskill in today. And augmentation is really about making AI your companion to be able to solve bigger problems and solve them faster. And then the last one, which is really the emerging space, the thing that's getting businesses really excited is the agent space. This is AI that can autonomously deliver an outcome without human intervention. Now, most of the time, you do want some level of human intervention in that workflow because you don't really want an agent giving a patient a medical diagnosis without at least a doctor having a look at him being like, okay, yep, that's right, go ahead. And then you have, when you look at the agent space, you also have agentic systems. So this is multiple agents trying to solve a particular problem. And the reason why we do that is because we don't want hallucinations. We really want to narrow the scope of each agent and making sure that we map that out in a workflow where human intervention comes in at the right time. The second area where I think organizations sometimes screw up on is how they define value. So value is really coming down to return of investment, business impact, business outcome. But it's not just that. So if you look at it just like that, you're just looking at the desirability perspective. You also need to look at feasibility and viability. If you go straight ahead with the thing that sounds the most desirable, every report you see from Gartner, Deloitte, there's probably an 80% to 90% chance you'll never get past proof of concept stage. So what we tell customers is to have a two-speed economy. So yes, deliver value fast. You have to. AI is way too powerful to stand around and not do anything. But also take a balanced approach so So go fast, deliver value quickly, but also keep in mind the foundations that you need to put in place to be able to deliver these solutions. So if you want to deliver an AI solution that looks at your entire product set and how do we optimize cross-selling across different products, do you have a 360 view of your customers? Or is data stored in disparate systems across each product set? Okay, well, you probably can't deliver that solution today, but it's a very good solution. Let's put it on the roadmap. And let's start focusing on solutions we can deliver today due to the power of this technology. And as I said before, you know, most of the solutions getting productionized right now are in that operational layer because those are the solutions that can be delivered today. But the smart businesses are also thinking about those really business-defining solutions and putting the foundations in place iteratively over time so that way in the next six months, 12 months, they can start delivering those solutions.

SPEAKER_08: 22:20

Brilliant. Thank you. Clarita, Lucy, how would Nick's advice land with both of you and your organizations? Well,

SPEAKER_05: 22:28

Well, I

SPEAKER_08: 22:28

think

SPEAKER_05: 22:28

fundamentally the human centeredness of it all is critical, especially coming from a consulting background myself and now being on the other side of that. If you get excited by the shiny thing without thinking about how the shiny thing is going to fit within the context of how your people work, it will be a failure. And we know most changes don't stick in a business when they're implemented. So that's really positive to hear the mandate to focus on that from a human centered perspective. I would say that A lot of people, I think, at this stage, Fishbowl included, are probably on the back foot of where we want to be in terms of, we'll talk about that in a moment, in terms of more tangible advice, but doing values-led, value chain review work to understand in the first instance where are the places of optimization that we could potentially use AI as an embedded tool, as an API, as a proprietary technology. What are we going to do with it and how? And I think it's fantastic to have consultants come in, but you want to use their time and your resources wisely so I think the first stage is being clear on what your people need and where you're at with your value chain and from the value perspective what are the things we're willing to change and what are the things that absolutely for us for example in hospitality is a people-centric thing we're always going to have a human touch to it so yeah really really resonate with with the approach to looking at the change there.

SPEAKER_07: 23:54

That's hard to follow. Well, the question was what resonated that Nick was talking about lots. But particularly for us, I think just to sort of play off that a little bit, this compliance, I mean, you know, let's talk about compliance, right? Let's start there. ChatGPT is a good example. Everybody is using ChatGPT. It's like the dating apps. It's kind of like this little society where people right things. I mean, sometimes I question if I've had responses sent through to me from friends actually that have chat GPT'd it. But let's say this is a new way of operating where we don't access the cerebellum as much as we should from a happiness perspective and we actually just ask an agent for the answer. We're really focused on ensuring that if that's the way the world's going, that two things happen within Gumtree Group. The first one is that we're going to be very, very clear on where the guard rails are. We'll give you the framework. We'll give you the freedom that sits within it. But there's going to be framework. At the moment, we haven't signed off on use for anything other than two systems, which is Claude and ChatGPT, within reason. But we need to do a lot of work around that because ultimately, if you're not building your own, right, and this is what really kind of stood out for me when you're talking about your clients, if you're not building your own, the agreement needs to be super tight with the provider because essentially what they can do is is just take everything that you've used to be able to build that code or create that product and use it to train their own AI. And that's going to happen everywhere anyway. So I guess when we talk about being a little bit on the back foot, we feel we are too in some ways because our preference is to create our own, but also there's a whole bunch of resourcing constraints, right? We're in this ever-changing, fast-paced world. So with all of that change, I think two sort of biggest shouts for us around that resonating and Nick, you know, listening to you some of the experiences with clients and then Clarita at Fishbowl, I actually think it's going to be about how do we create guardrails that still enables interaction with these amazing tools because we want people to have fun with them. Like we want to do great things leveraging those tools, but what are the guardrails and what are the safety precautions we've put in place for both our people and our business, our customers? And I think there are some things we probably won't ever change, you know, having someone 24-7 available to talk to if your ad's not working. If you're worried that you're being scammed or spammed, who is it that's touching base with you and that's handling that? We will have a 24-7. I mean, we've implemented our own AI bot, but that doesn't mean that we're going to use that for our really important conversations. It should still be happening amongst people and amongst clients. But, yeah, I mean, look, compliance, governance, all of that's yet to come. Maybe we should hire you,

SPEAKER_00: 26:49

Nick, come in and help us. Can I add to that? Yeah, please. Yeah, if you are using ChatG If you are using chat GPT and it isn't an enterprise license, please stop. That's really, really, really, really bad. Why is it

SPEAKER_04: 27:09

bad? Could you just explain that?

SPEAKER_00: 27:12

Because that data is shared between you and the organization. Now that organization has availability to that data and it's your responsibility to protect your privacy as well as the privacy of people in your organization. but more specifically your customers. And chances are there's regulation that sits on top of that where you're also risking getting a heavy fine too. So don't do it. It's bad practice. Make sure that you're using the right enterprise-grade licensing or you have like a lockdown environment like Bedrock, for example, hosts on an AWS and you have those models running in Bedrock. And the concept of data as a product, that is making data trusted, available, secure, reliable, well governed, having people access the right data. You don't want access across all data, across all people. You want to make sure that the data is available to the right people within the organization. Yep, so really, really important to do things safely and do things right.

SPEAKER_08: 28:10

Did you hear that, everyone? Well, there's no doubt that AI is going to completely transform the way that we work. And with this rapid change can definitely lead to a sense of uncertainty for many people. and the future of their roles. We do have 15 minutes before we go to questions. I think it would be really great to get one piece of really tangible advice for people to go away and take away and implement on how they can really guide their teams through this uncertain change.

SPEAKER_07: 28:44

Okay, so I had a conversation with someone from Deloitte this morning, a mentor, and they were talking to me about the Deloitte UD that they just participated in and some of the thinking. But I'll go there in a second. Here's my top sort of three things I would definitely think about when you're tackling this very unknown world. First and foremost, think slow, execute fast. I don't think there's enough of that. So really think slowly about what it is you're about to do before you go and execute it. I don't like rules. I know I'm a CPO, but I hate them. My team will absolutely vouch for that that are here. I break things all the time. I enjoy moving really quickly from a scale-up perspective. I think kindness solves everything. I'm one of those people. But when it comes to the longer-term position for us and really thinking about what's right for the organisation, we're going to think slowly about this one and we're going to execute quickly. Second to that is have some fun with the systems that you do get. What a luxury and how grateful we should be that we're in a world where we're able to sign off on an enterprise agreement to use an AI tool to help us be more efficient and effective. So embrace that. And lastly, I would say on that, co-design it with the business. Do not go off on a tangent and feel like you're on your own or that you have to do it on your own. Investing in tools like this is an absolutely org-wide design. It is not singular and it does not sit with tech. I think it was Nick that mentioned that. In the recent transformation we did that took us 18 months, there was not one day where I had to do something on my own. I've partnered very, very closely with our CPTO and our tech teams because if it can't be built, we should know that at the start. And it's really, really important that it's co-designed. So they're my three things. I should say that wasn't one, was it?

SPEAKER_08: 30:39

More the merrier.

SPEAKER_05: 30:41

Yeah, they were great tips. For my interest actually to target what I would actually say in terms of the advice, can you put your hand up if you work in people leadership or people support, L&D, anything P&C? Yeah, fair enough. Okay, so two separate pieces of feedback. One would be for the people leaders and people working in the people space and then more generally in terms of the workforce at large. For people leadership, bouncing off in terms of the co-design and all the rest of it, I do think there are two primary important things here. So the first thing is value-based, value chain review. That's a mouthful. Second thing is around learning as a foundation for the team. So value-based, value chain review. What I mean by that is having a look at the holistic aspect of the operating model with other leaders in the business and influencers to understand what are the opportunities and the areas we are willingly going in to say, yes, we'd love some support. We want some understanding of how we can optimize and change it. And how are we going to do embedded AI? Do we want to do propriety APIs? What are the areas that we want to get involved with? And what are the areas that we say, absolutely not. At this stage of time, what we know about the technology and our values, we're not going to touch that. Have that conversation before you start engaging external resources. Otherwise, again, you might get distracted by the shiny technology instead of being clear on your why. The second thing around foundational learning is, as said, especially if you're working with a younger workforce or any workforce in general, they are using AI tools in various capacities. They just may not be talking about it. And if it's not enterprise, your data, your customer data, confidential data is probably not being used effectively. and properly and additionally they are learning work practices that you might not have the scope to change later on so we have a fantastic opportunity to really put in the guidelines but also give people the permission for blue sky thinking so enabling a general set of foundation and learning where you also have leaders in the business attend that as much as possible if your culture supports this in a relatively flat hierarchy to give the sense that there's probably going to be some members of your team depending on the business that you work in we're frontline or um newer entrants into the workforce, maybe know more about AI tools than people right at the top, that's okay. Make sure that you're providing foundational learning from people who are accredited to provide it, like Mentale Group or whoever else. For people, that's the people leader side of things, and then there's the workforce at large. And for me, there's two things that I keep front of mind for myself and my team, for people in my network, which is around AI literacy and personal branding. So AI literacy, again, that's really harping on the theme of making sure sure you're clear and not naive to what the chances are on a meta level I have a personal interest in this so a book that I just finished reading by Mo Gowdat the former chief business officer at Google X is Scary Smart so it's a generalistic look at how the world of work is going to change the future of work and I think it's really interesting to look at that at a meta level then of course depending on what your area is specialise from there but that's a fantastic book for generalist knowledge and being there's so many free and not too expensive courses available just on understanding how AI is impacting our world. The second thing is around personal branding. And I get a little bit of an ick when I say that word out loud, but the truth is, and I think there's part of the elephant in the room when we have these conversations, is AI has the capacity and is already automating a large part of service level work. That is the part of it that's really uncomfortable to say, but you have to be on the front foot of understanding where you as an individual, if you support teams, are helping them get clear on what will make them different in the workforce later on. There are huge sectors of the work that we do today that will be done differently. They may not go away completely. You'll be better placed to speak to what is safe and what necessarily is not. The thing that we have capacity and ownership of doing is really owning our personal brand in an authentic, genuine way so that without much effort, people are able to look at people's CVs, presences online, identities what it is that they stand for with a point of difference. If you're not investing in that personal brand, you're allowing something else or someone else to define it for you. So in the age of AI, be really clear on what exactly in the sharpest possible way you stand for and the value that you bring and encourage that mindset with your teams because it's going to become ever more vital as that work becomes in a scope for being replaced.

SPEAKER_00: 35:21

So I agree with all the points that you guys have have said. However, yeah, I just really want to emphasize, you know, prepare for change. And I hate using this buzzword, but prepare for disruption. I think that, oh, sorry. Back in 2017, 2018, you know, AI was all the hype. I guess the difference between now, especially the past 12 months in that period, 2017, 2018, is we actually have the data that shows that AI is, you know, rapidly being consumed by users. About 12 months ago, you had about a few percent of the Australian population leveraging AI tools. You now have over 50%, and that's rising exponentially. That really signals a shift in the market and a shift in the uptake of AI. And really, I think it's early days. So every week, every other month, us, Manta Group, are changing the tools that we use because a new tool is being put to market that's better than the last. So really want to emphasize that things will change in the workforce. I personally, I'm a bit of a romantic. I think it will create more jobs and it will make redundant, but let's not lie to ourselves. If you're there to simply facilitate value as opposed to deliver value, i.e. data entry, validating forms, or your job is based off being a dictionary, then yeah, you're going to have to probably reinvent your skill set because those roles will be redundant in the future and it won't take long. Organisations right now, am I going to be a bit brutal? Yes, they are saying, hey, I've got this offshore customer service team, how can AI help me downsize that by 80, 90%? So that is happening right now and as I mentioned, companies are just at the beginning of being able to deliver these solutions at scale in production.

SPEAKER_07: 37:16

I was going to say something to that. I was actually going to say, where did the 30% number come from? Because I've been hearing this a lot lately, recently at a CultureAmp leadership seminar, there was someone in the room who said, we've cut back our people and culture business by 30%. So we've saved 30% in dollars. But the biggest question was what from everybody? How and why did you come up with that figure? They couldn't say. I think there's this pluck a number out of the sky, let's hope for the best and see if it sticks. But then the damage that's then happening underneath that and under the surface that we're also not aware of yet is super concerning and And it's going to create, to me, more change management roles within the people and culture practitioner sphere. Now, just to add to that, and sorry, I am going off track, people and culture-wise from a jobs perspective, if I said, now, look, I'm 40, I've been around a while, I've been doing this a long time. And for me, I think about the skills of the future that I'm going to hire in my teams are actually going to be super, super resilient individuals that have the ability to anticipate things that need to happen. in a change culture. And that's going to be crucial. And that to me is future workforce planning. So if there was anything I said, and just to leverage what you were saying around, you know, upskilling, my advice would be focus heavily on how you're going to influence future workforce from a skills and tools perspective as an individual. And in hiring talent within that people and culture, HR space, talent, OD, they're certainly the skills I'm going to be looking for to hire and to grow.

SPEAKER_00: 38:53

Yeah. And can I recommend a training course? So Anthropic have a really cool and it's a really fun training course around AI literacy. That one's a really good one to start with. And look, you don't need to go through the whole thing, but just to get a high level overview and understanding of how AI works and how you can embed it in how you do your day to day. You know, just starting with something like that, I think is really useful as like a takeaway. Yeah.

SPEAKER_08: 39:21

Brilliant. Thank you so much. Definitely seeing Adaptability is key. I don't know how, but we've actually managed to stay on track. And we have 15 minutes left for questions. I'm sure that there's probably a lot of questions popping up in people's heads. So... Does anyone want to put up their hand? So

SPEAKER_10: 39:45

this

SPEAKER_01: 39:49

is for Nick. You mentioned that you have to adapt to the new tools. So every month, every week, you want to try to bring in more tools. How do you deal with the change fatigue? So you keep doing this, right? But then when does it stop? Can you just say, let's stick with this and let's kind of invest all of our time and energy into

SPEAKER_00: 40:08

this? Yeah. So Mantle's a bit of a unique beast, right? Like we're 90% engineers. We love tools. So for us, it's not a burden. It's actually quite exciting. And we've got like having a learning mindset is in our guiding principles, right? And we're a principle-led organization. So it's not really an issue for us. I guess where it can be a little bit confusing for customers is, you know, we tell our customers don't get tied down to one tool. You know, don't buy like a five-year license because chances are in a few months' time, you want to switch it out. The thing is, these tools are pretty agnostic and pretty interchangeable, generally speaking, if the system is designed properly. And look, I'm talking about more organizational-wide solutions that have multiple touchpoints. If you're looking at something that's more on the augmentation side, like a chat GPT, yeah, stick with chat GPT. They're probably going to be up there with the best, all the best, and it'll be up and down. That's fine.

UNKNOWN: 41:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08: 41:09

Amazing. Any other questions from the audience?

SPEAKER_02: 41:15

Thanks, Charlie. Hi, guys. I think excellent, fantastic. Each one of you, first of all, did a brilliant job. So thank you so much for that, guys. It was just very authentic. Question to any one of you here with AI and growing so rapidly. We don't know what the next 12 months or let alone the next six months could look like. Where do you see talent or for recruiters, the space that exists today and the opportunities that exist today. Where do you see that go? With AI bot, with MS Teams having an actions plan when I actually have myself bring along with me the AI bots that helps me to take notes for interviews, influence hiring managers, of course, with a human-centric approach where I have the opportunity to make the change, but it takes away my admin job. Where do you see the recruitment market go? Thank you. Very solid question.

SPEAKER_00: 42:15

I might start then I'll pass it off so I actually used to do equipment I actually just think it will make you be able to do what is most valuable for your job spend more time with candidates spend more time with people as opposed to doing admin if anything it's going to increase productivity and increase the quality of what you do yeah

SPEAKER_05: 42:38

So really keen observations there. I think in our world in fishbowl specifically, we do a lot of... frontline hiring across kitchens, operations, restaurants in the hundreds of applications per week. My team are tasked with the, my small but mighty team are tasked with the job of often filtering through that, assessing that. It's very high touch points. We have found some automation workflows that have worked for us, but being really transparent, I think the technology as it continues to learn employer branded centric language will get better. At this stage in time, a lot of those candidate workflows those AI recruitment tools aren't fit for purpose for a business like ours. It's way too clunky at this stage. We've made a really conscious choice not to adopt it in the candidate experience because it's not centric to our employer brand, a bit clunky at the moment, a bit disjointed. And I don't really, transparently speaking, I don't trust the bias in which is currently filtering through the systems and the people that make those systems at this stage in time. In a year's time, I actually think it will be a very different conversation. And echoing to your point, there's this kind of mean that goes around the ether around AI and that you want it to be able to do the equivalent of your laundry so that you can sit inside and paint. And I think that's what we want in the human capital space, in the people space. I'd love my team to still be the touch points for the human facing chat with any candidate to be there when people really need us. Those are the skills that we want to keep optimizing. That's always going to be needed. Filtering through the hundreds and hundreds of CVs just to understand if someone's fit for a job. I can't wait until the system is fit for purpose and understands our employer brand. in a naturalised way, because we will definitely bring it in, but we'll just keep the human touch points and save the kind of laundry equivalent work for the bots.

SPEAKER_02: 44:25

Especially for volume recruitment, I can

SPEAKER_05: 44:28

understand. 100%.

SPEAKER_07: 44:31

I feel like that's been answered. Anu, are you happy with that? Yeah, I

SPEAKER_10: 44:37

echo, so. Hi, I'm Sunaina from Maple. So thank you all for your contributions. Your point around personal branding really resonates with me. and something that my team and I think about quite a lot in terms of our workforce, but also ourselves. So, you know, work hats off or rolls off in this kind of answer. Personally, how are you thinking about each of your kind of core strengths now and how that needs to evolve in, say, 12 months' time? That's a

SPEAKER_05: 45:03

good one

SPEAKER_07: 45:04

for you.

SPEAKER_05: 45:05

You talked about this. The question is, what are personal core strengths that we're working on and that need to evolve in the next 12 months in the face of AI in particular So just really doubling down on the point, and this isn't necessarily a fresh answer, I wanted to do the laundry stuff of my role. And for me, as values, as people leaders, and for all of us, it's going to come back to the core in the best possible way if it doesn't go into a dark metaverse. We get to go back to the core of what we do best, which is the relationship side of things. It's the coaching. And you said a really interesting thing. Coach the coaching of the coaching coaching. That's right. Keep coaching. Keep coaching in the sense that there's a huge amount of change, a huge amount of change fatigue. I can sense the palpable energy in the room shift when I mention that thing about the redundancies of jobs. People will want humans that they trust in a workforce to help guide them through this. So my investment isn't, of course, it's about learning new tools for myself and really stepping to the areas in which I'm still naive. And I really want to learn from the team that know better and externally, whether it's in external courses or panels even like this and spaces like this. But for me, it's doubling down on the relationship and my availability for the business, particularly when people have a moment of vulnerability, whether it's at a leadership level or an entry level role and say, you know, this new tool that we were talking about, I actually don't have the faintest idea and I'm not too sure what it means for me. It's the availability that I have for the business and the relationships in that way.

SPEAKER_07: 46:38

Yeah. Absolutely love that. We have been focusing a lot within Mighty team on, you know, we often get referred to in those people roles as the weaver, you know, because you kind of seem together all the things that are happening that nobody realises are happening. That to me is the new currency. So from a personal brand perspective, I always think back to my Deloitte days, what do I want to be famous for? I want to be known as the weaver, the seamstress. I want to be the person that's able to tie all those things together that can whisper things that are really important that help us do really great work and be really good people, one of our values as an organisation. So that's my main focus. With that in mind, everything I do then falls within that, right? And let's be real, people aren't talking to us about AI tools necessarily at work. They're talking to us about real-life problems, challenges internally, and I think I really do believe that that's going to be just the best currency to hire in anybody coming through the workforce. So if you can find a way to be known for that, go do that.

SPEAKER_06: 47:47

Hi, good morning, everyone. My name is Danny. Firstly, well done to the panelists. You've all spoken very well and I've really enjoyed your insights. Just a question for the panel in terms of how you see people recruitment going forward. And for context, I've hired a few roles recently and there was some screening and candidates are even using prompts and things like that. I had an example of a candidate that actually read out the prompt whilst answering questions. People are using chat chatty teams to put together I'll

SPEAKER_07: 48:22

touch on that while I've got the mic around tech. Actually, my talent acquisition leader is sitting just behind you and she would be much better suited to this answer. But with a lot of blood, sweat and tears because, you know, all of those things that make it. So I love experiences for people. I love giving people experiences where they're like, wow. And I'm so sick of hearing from candidates how incredible our talent acquisition process is. I'm sick of it. Well, not really. I love it. But I do say, yeah, yeah, we know Miranda's an amazing leader, right? Because people tell us about their experience. By the time they're getting in front of an exec, they're telling us that this experience was fantastic. Our dream is actually when we reject people, that they still refer their friends. That's what we want. That's the experience we aim for. Now, with that being our goal, that's all nice and fluffy. And I promised I would talk a little bit about fluffy because it's important. But, you know, you need processes that are going to help you get there. We are still actually, I mean, Miranda will vouch for this, we are still really labour intensive in terms of recruitment. I know that the low hanging fruit, allegedly, is to put a system in place that helps you quickly sift through resumes. Now, we would use that if we had 750 applications to a graduate program, we would absolutely use that because you know what, we love grads, but there are six or some half dozen of the other, it's kind of same, same after you've got 800 of them sitting in your inbox. But The resilience piece and those skills I talked to, so those softer skills, they still need gauging face-to-face. And you can tell if someone's using a system. We have a rule at Gumtree Group, you don't get a job unless you've come in to meet us. So we actually, whilst we're a hybrid business and we do have remote workers, everybody, even our remote staff, have come in to meet us. We either fly them, we make a point of going to Brisbane, WA, wherever we're going when we hire, and it has been a really strong strategy because guess what? You can't fake real life. And I think that's probably where I'll finish, but I think there's definitely an important part in getting in front of others and being clear that actually the person I'm sitting in front of is exactly who they say. And we've also, just to add to that, I know I said that was the last thing, but in terms of the testing that we're doing around engineers or around product design workshops, we've actually moved them to in-person. So our belief is that if you're passionate about your craft and you're good at what you do, then you should come in and show us and let's have that conversation, just like this one today in person, um, where you know that what you're buying in terms of the skills in that individual and the cultural ad is truly there. So, I mean, we've got all of the framework that sits behind that, but, um, in terms of recruitment, it's probably the most laborious, um, labor intensive, bitsy administrative heavy role. Um, yet at the same time, the expectations are so crazy on our recruiters. Um, and you know, when you overlay that with culture and being able to cultivate experiences. It's a lot. So I would actually say just make sure you do plan and really think about what are the areas that are going to create efficiencies for me and are they legal? Do I have an agreement in place for it? And am I allowed to do it? Because chucking, you know, 20 resumes into chat GPT is not necessarily going to give you a yes to that question.

SPEAKER_04: 51:41

No, I agree. I agree. That's a good answer. Does that answer that for you, please?

SPEAKER_03: 51:47

Hi. As someone who's in workforce planning and optimisation, hospitality, retail, a couple of others, I've been exposed to instances where operational front-line teams will have AI-driven forecasting, scheduling, and they'll make the outcome actually worse than what the AI is telling

SPEAKER_09: 52:08

them.

SPEAKER_03: 52:08

So I guess what is the way to circumvent that and actually try to train to say that the AI is doing a better job than the human interaction?

SPEAKER_00: 52:17

How I tackle that problem is the first thing I do is I look at the solution that's being built because my first sort of where my brain gravitates is, is this a poorly designed system? Is it embedded in processes it shouldn't be embedded in? Where does the human intervention come into play during that sort of workflow? And I'd say probably most of the time it would fall on just like a poorly designed, poorly integrated solution. if we're talking about workforce optimization, for example, because that's a very common use case in AI. And a lot of companies are doing that very, very, very successfully. The other angle, let's say, okay, it's well-designed, it's integrated properly into operations, people are using it properly, which is probably unlikely. I then look into, okay, how is this solution being optimized and run? So yes, ChatGPT is sort of like a SaaS. You don't really need to think about maintaining and enhancing it, but custom-built AI solutions, you need a team continuously optimizing and taking care of it. If you don't, then yeah, it will start to deprecate. It will start to become legacy. So I'd probably say it fits into one of those two buckets, maybe even both buckets.

SPEAKER_05: 53:44

Can I just add onto that? I'm not too sure what your exact business but this is an ongoing question that we have internally at Fishbowl in terms of rostering of teams because we've grown very rapidly in the last nine years from one store to 54 in Australia. And how we use rostering is the most efficient, AI-centric way as possible. We could go that way. We've intentionally stepped away from that until we can reach a solution that's customer and people-centric. Simply because of what you're talking about, the quickest way to get attrition for frontline workers to not really fully understand the context of their lives and put them onto shifts and situations in which don't work. And so in addition to everything that Nick said in terms of the technical parts of that solution, I can't overemphasize again how much you need a human, and I'm sure you guys already do, a human overseeing that, not so that you default to little Timmy's got a dentist appointment, so we have to make sure that all the rest of it, but that is the core reason in terms of disengagement for staff and also customer experience where the patterns and forecasts are really useful. And then you also need to have the human touch to say, does this actually make sense for our business? And again, employer branding, value add, that's where you have a human to say that actually makes sense for the team that we have.