In this week’s episode, Kari Naimon, the founder of AixHR, shares straightforward, actionable advice for optimizing your HR through strategic integration of AI. As she tells host Nichol Bradford, “Oftentimes, my clients think you can only use AI in talent acquisition. But you can also use it in performance management, talent management, goal setting, employee surveys, employee engagements, succession planning... In every area of the employee life cycle under the HR umbrella, you can easily apply AI to help you be more productive.”
In this week’s episode, Kari Naimon, the founder of AixHR, shares straightforward, actionable advice for optimizing your HR through strategic integration of AI. As she tells host Nichol Bradford, “Oftentimes, my clients think you can only use AI in talent acquisition. But you can also use it in performance management, talent management, goal setting, employee surveys, employee engagements, succession planning... In every area of the employee life cycle under the HR umbrella, you can easily apply AI to help you be more productive.”
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Nichol Bradford:
Welcome to the AI+HI Project, a SHRM podcast. I'm your host, Nichol Bradford, executive in residence at SHRM. Each week we sit down with experts to discuss AI, HR, and strategic insights, practical tips, and actionable steps that you can use to integrate advanced technologies into your work.
This week we're discussing empowering HR through AI. Our goal is to provide actionable knowledge that will empower you to envision and implement AI solutions that complement and elevate your existing practices. This episode is tailored for HR professionals eager to harness the transformative potential of AI. We will explore how AI can be your ally in optimizing HR through strategic integration of secure and ethical AI use.
Joining us today, we have Kari Naimon to talk about this subject in depth. Kari is the founder of AixHR, and she brings over two decades of human resource expertise to AI. And the advent of artificial intelligence has transformed her career, and she's been turning her personal fascination into a mission that you're going to hear all about. And so, thank you so much for joining us today, Kari.
Kari Naimon:
Thank you for having me.
Nichol Bradford:
So, I'd love to start with something that I heard you say that really caught my attention, that AI is really about elevating not eliminating HR professionals. So, could you explain to us what you mean by that and how you think about it?
Kari Naimon:
Absolutely. So, I look at AI as a way to remove the mundane, the repetitive, the tasks that we all already know how to do, and that us spending time doing doesn't really add value to our own life or anybody else's life. We can just have the AI do that, and that then allows us to really focus on the more critical thinking tasks and the things maybe that we went to school for or are interested in or enthusiastic about, because we have removed the repetitive, more mundane part of our work.
So, my whole philosophy around using AI is that it really should get us 70 to 80% of the way to the end product, and then we, as practitioners, as HR leaders, jump in and do the rest, which like I said earlier, is the critical thinking component and how do we want to use this, and how might this impact employees and working with employees? Which is really what we want to be doing anyway.
Nichol Bradford:
I love what you just said, because I've heard the shift in work being described as previously jobs were the thing that you hoped to do plus a bunch of things that you didn't sign up for.
Kari Naimon:
Yeah. Exactly.
Nichol Bradford:
And that potentially AI has the ability to change it into the thing that you signed up for and with a smaller amount of the things that you didn't. And so, I loved what you said about that.
So, one of the things I'm really curious about is your personal story and what really inspired you to lean into understanding how we can elevate, not eliminate through HR. Why this out of all the things you could be doing?
Kari Naimon:
So, a number of different ways I'm going to answer that question, but I will start with I was introduced to the concept of AI for everybody, which is kind of where we are right now, where we weren't a year and a half ago. It was kind of a random introduction. I was working on a project in the company that I was working for at the time, and we were launching a full-scale engagement survey for the first time they had ever done an engagement survey. And we had employees in six different countries who spoke six different languages in addition to English. Some of them did not speak English at all. I wanted to ensure that the survey was as inclusive as possible, which meant translating the questions, accepting responses to open-ended questions in languages other than English, and then, working for thematic analysis of the comments that we got back, to ensure, again, full inclusivity of the survey.
Prior to the launching of the survey, I didn't know anything about AI, so we paid a translation company to do a lot of that work. Between the time we launched the survey and the responses came back, I became more familiar with the possibility of what AI could do for me in this particular situation. We got back probably 1,400 comments in many different languages, and I was able to put that into the AI on my own, and thematicize all of those comments in what was an immense time saver for me. That was my very first use case, and I was completely blown away at the accuracy and the speed at which that process happened without having to pay an external resource to help out.
That was my initial, if it can do this, what else can it do? And I just started asking myself the question with every project, every initiative that I was working on, "Can AI help me with this?" And I can tell you with a high degree of confidence, it was rare, if ever no.
Nichol Bradford:
How has your own introduction to AI helped you help other people on their journey to be interested in it? You are a perfect case of many of our members, where you had a project, you applied AI and then you became a convert and a power user. How is that showing up in your ability to help other people do the same thing?
Kari Naimon:
So, I, by default, my nature is to help other people. It's part of the reason I am in HR to begin with. I'm also a certified executive coach. I love helping other people work through their challenges. I've been that way since I was a kid. By nature then, I saw the value of it and I immediately wanted to start introducing this to my team members and to whoever else wanted to listen at that point.
And I saw the AI aha moments, which is what I call them, happened so fast. As soon as people realized how it could help them, them taking a step back and really feeling, "Wow, this could absolutely elevate the work that I do every day. Take some of that other work off my plate so I don't need to worry about it anymore." And that was just exciting for me to see that impact. So, I started doing it as kind of a regular thing and then soon realized I was much more passionate about that than I was about my job. So, I left my job and started this business, and that's what I'm doing now.
Nichol Bradford:
And so, now that you're doing this, you're seeing lots of cases about how people are applying things. What is the journey that people are on and can you give some examples where people are starting to see wins and progress that help them lay out their AI strategy?
Kari Naimon:
Sure. I think one of the biggest realizations that the people that I work with have is that you can use AI without buying any special tools and without a huge, if any, monetary investment, if you just spend some time learning how to prompt yourself. And that is my philosophy of when I teach and facilitate sessions, it's about empowering everybody to create the prompts that work for them rather than investing in a bunch of different tools that all maybe do one thing really well and nothing else. That really is how I approach this whole AI thing.
So, what that does then is it opens people's eyes to the fact that they have so much more control and power over using AI than they thought. So, that's the initial, "Wow, I can actually build these things and these examples are going to work specifically for my use case." I might have the same job as the person sitting next to me, but I do this particular task differently than that person does. They can create their prompt, I'll create my prompt and we'll still get to the end that we want, in a way that works for us. So, that's the first.
The second is, once you get your arms wrapped around the fact that you can build these prompts to do just about anything you want, without much time or money invested, it then translates to every area, you can apply AI to every aspect of the employee life cycle. So, what I talk about a lot in my intro conversations with clients is oftentimes they think you can only use AI in talent acquisition, but you can use it in talent acquisition, performance management, talent management, goal setting, employee surveys, employee engagements, succession. Every area of the employee life cycle under the HR umbrella, you can easily apply AI to, to help you be more productive in that space.
Nichol Bradford:
Just for clarity with our audience, we're really talking about generative AI and the extension of the individual employee or team into these functions.
Kari Naimon:
Exactly.
Nichol Bradford:
How do you differentiate between something that's good for generative AI versus something that's good for the traditional machine learning that people don't necessarily think of as it? It's been around for a long time. Anytime you use Siri or Google, you've been using AI, but it wasn't AI that you could have do something for you, beyond what it was structured to do. So, when someone comes to you with a use case and how do you know what's good for generative AI?
Kari Naimon:
Well, my experience is almost everything is good for generative AI. So, I was just talking to someone recently and on a flight, random flight, and she was working on trying to consolidate some notes for a meeting that she had had and turn it into an email. She probably spent two hours on the plane trying to do that work. She had never used AI before, and I started talking to her about what I do in my business and how AI could really help her. She emailed me last night and was completely transformed and realized that she could have actually enjoyed the flight and watched a movie instead of working on this particular task that she had, because the AI did it so well for her.
So, I rarely see a case where generative AI can't be used, but the use case, again, sort of what I was talking about before, is if you want to control your own destiny and you want to have a conversation with the AI, prompt it the way that you want to prompt it, so that it achieves the outcome you want it to achieve. That's a use case for generative.
Nichol Bradford:
So, for an HR leader who might be listening to us right now and they're just getting started, what are the three or four steps that you would suggest that they do?
Kari Naimon:
The first step is just get started. I think there's a fear of tech that happens oftentimes for people. And how I talk about AI is if you think about AI not as a tech tool, but as a language tool, they're all large language models, you're just having a conversation. Right? So, just start having a conversation with the AI and see what happens. That is a wonderful place to start if you've never even dipped your toe in the water.
If you are beyond dipping your toe in the water and you can see the value of potentially bringing AI into your team and/or your organization, I would then think about connecting with your IT team, your legal team, and your finance team. That's the power team right there, to really think about strategically how you might roll an AI initiative out to your organization. HR, for obvious purposes. Finance, because there's going to be investment part of it. Legal, just to make sure you're crossing all your Ts and dotting all your Is. And so, yeah, that's the power team right there.
Nichol Bradford:
What's the best way to pitch the power team as an HR leader on leaning into AI?
Kari Naimon:
I really think that HR is in probably the best position to lead this initiative of any organization within an organization. And I say that for a number of different reasons. One is that HR has so many different processes within our own house that could really benefit from using AI to help us be more productive. Right? So, start at home, let's apply AI to all the different areas in the employee life cycle, like I mentioned before, really learn the potential impact of it and how it works. Then we, as an HR team are also, we're the hub and then the rest of the organization, they're the spokes. So, we touch every other area of the organization. So, if we ourselves can learn how to use it and the power of it, then we can then help the businesses that we support within our organization also learn how to use it.
So, my recommendation would be start at home, maybe bring someone in to help train the team on how to really start thinking about using AI. And then, see where it goes from there.
Nichol Bradford:
So, let me ask you, for what you've seen with starting at home and the projects at home and experimentation, what have you seen in terms of what are the traits that an HR leader who is embracing this, what are the traits they should cultivate in themselves? What are the traits that they should seek to cultivate in their teams and their organizations as they're bringing AI in?
Kari Naimon:
Yeah. I think the biggest is curiosity, because if you are curious about how it might help you, then you're going to start asking questions that will lead you to maybe experimenting with AI yourself. So, the curiosity is really important. I think also, lack of fear that it's coming for us, it's coming for our jobs. I think there's a fair amount of HR leaders and teams who are very concerned about that, and that is why I talk about elevate, not eliminate. I really do believe there are very few HR roles that are going to go the way of the dodo, I guess, I'll say is the term, if used correctly, right? If used safely, securely, and correctly, which is, don't just copy and paste the output of what an AI gives you. We need to be involved in that process, we need to be auditing, we need to be checking, we need to be adding our flavor. Use it the way it's intended, which is 70 to 80% of the way there.
So, in terms of characteristics, like you said, curiosity, trying to minimize the fear, probably really diving in yourself initially to get a better understanding of how it might help you, and then reaching out for help if you need it.
Nichol Bradford:
What are some of the unintended challenges or unexpected challenges that you've seen people that you've worked with experience when they bring it in? What are some of the things that might surprise our audience?
Kari Naimon:
Unexpected challenges. I think, well, an unexpected impact is how much it can do and how much it can actually help you. The people who have started using it before really diving in, typically only use it to help write communications, really basic things, nothing very complicated.
I think the big surprise comes when you start integrating your own company values and leadership behaviors, and/or you are able to have it help you speak in the voice of your CEO or your HR leader. And I don't mean actual conversation, I mean tone and type of message and that kind of thing. It is so incredibly powerful and so smart, that the more information you can give it to help guide its outcome, the better the outcome that it's going to be for you. But the surprise, I think, again, is just how incredibly powerful it is. And really, like I was talking about earlier, it's way beyond just talent acquisition. It's every touch point of the employee and the employee life cycle that it can help with.
I think if there was an unintended negative consequence, it would be, and probably not a huge surprise to people, just fear of tech, "I just don't have time to even think about spending time learning this." And then, once they start seeing the value of it, it suddenly becomes a big value proposition for them to actually spend the time learning.
Nichol Bradford:
What about copilot not autopilot? As we're bringing AI in, how do we make sure that people still continue to do what you said earlier, which is they stay in the loop, they pay attention to the output?
Kari Naimon:
It's as much as we can control anybody in our company at any time. It's company guidance. It's continuing to beat the drum with your employees that that's the expectation once you bring AI in. I think as an organization you should ultimately be auditing if you're using it for say, data analysis of your succession plan and/or looking at whether or not there's bias in your hiring decisions. I mean, at a higher level, those things should be audited anyway. Right? And so, you can double down on ensuring that those audits are happening if they weren't already happening. And at the end of the day, you have to trust your employees that the guidelines and the guidance that you're giving them, they're actually following.
Nichol Bradford:
So, it's interesting that you say that. At one point, the EEOC, their guidance on AI was, "Whether or not it's internal or external, if it's biased, we're going to hold you accountable."
Kari Naimon:
Exactly.
Nichol Bradford:
"And if it's from your vendor software, we're going to hold you accountable." And then they said to the vendors, "And if the company uses it in a way that's biased, we're going to hold you accountable." So, it just was sort of like being very focused on the outcome. So, perhaps maybe that's it. That like if AI is your intern or your junior associate, as a manager you're still responsible for what your interns do. And so, maybe it's that, that you're still responsible for the output. And you're an adult, you can use that to decide what degree of oversight you give on what items.
Kari Naimon:
Yeah. And sorry to interrupt. It is as if you've brought on another employee. Right? So, you have brought on another employee or 100 employees, so you treat it as if it is your very smart intern. And I wouldn't take the output of a very smart intern and just say, "Here's my work." Right? So, it's the same philosophy with AI.
Nichol Bradford:
Yes. And at SHRM, our orientation is that how do we help our members get their organizations ready for their newest team member, which is AI?
One of the things I'd like your input on is that a lot of times when people think about AI, they think that they need to be a really large organization to be able to get benefit from it. But what you're saying, or what I think I'm hearing you say is that really it doesn't matter how small your organization is, there's AI for you. Would you speak about that?
Kari Naimon:
Yep. A couple different ways to respond to that. The first is the smaller the team, the more you're probably going to benefit from it because you need more support potentially. Right? So, small and mighty teams are trying to do a lot and AI can really help with that. I think where people get confused around you need to be a really big organization in order to be able to use AI, is when you think about, "Well, we need to buy all these tools." Right? And so, then there's an investment and only the big companies have the money to make the investment in tools.
If you step away from tools for a moment, which again is my philosophy, don't start your AI journey with buying a bunch of tools, because you're never really going to learn AI then. You're going to learn the tools that do AI for you. If you, yourself, take the time to learn to prompt and that kind of thing, you have so much more control. It is available to anyone and everyone at a $0 price tag. You can really get yourself up to speed on how to use AI in a safe, secure way, without any sort of upfront investment.
So, it is out there. I can talk about the products that I use, but I'm tool agnostic. I don't use actually any special tools except for one use case, which is on the data analysis piece. Generally speaking, I am entering into a secure avenue of access to 10 different AI models, and all I do is prompt.
Nichol Bradford:
Yeah. And what I've noticed when I use tools is that different tools are better for different types of tasks.
Kari Naimon:
Exactly.
Nichol Bradford:
And so, I will jump from tool to tool depending on what I'm doing. One of the things that your response brings up for me is sort of doing an analysis of what breeds success and what historically, even though the AI is different, has led to failure.
On the success side, it really is about starting with the business strategy because to your point, if you start with the tools, then you'll end up with the solutions that your vendors can supply. And so, it's really important to go through the process of, "What is it about our value chain that we want to improve? How do we want our employees, how do we want our customers to experience our company?" And then, "What are the things that we would bring on to make that change happen?" And then, "How can AI be leveraged for that?" And it really, it's like starting with that main thing versus, "What is our AI strategy?" Starting with just like, "What is the AI?" Will get you a solution that the tools can deliver.
Kari Naimon:
I would take one step back from that and say that where companies are challenged now, if you don't really understand the power of AI or what it can do for you, it's very hard to create a strategy around it. So, I would take a step back and say, dive into it first, use it, get a better understanding of how it can help you. And again, I would lean on the HR team for this, for the reasons we talked about earlier, and then think about strategy. I think, right now, we're not in a position with so many companies just diving in, to be thinking strategically when you really probably don't understand, this is a very different animal than anything we've had before.
For companies who are just starting out is think about use case panels. Right? And so, who in your organization is just super enthused about the prospect of AI? How are they using it now? How might they use it? Really double down on encouraging the use of it, because then exactly to your example, that would've come out, right? Because one of their biggest use cases is, "How do we want the customer to feel? And this is the way we want our customer to feel, so let's apply AI to that, help us do that better." And so, for organizations just diving in, if you think about creating groups of people that, like I said earlier, are very enthusiastic about it and are kind of diving in, you can learn so much that way, that you probably wouldn't be able to learn if you just said, "Hey, here's AI for everybody. Go use it." And not really being involved in collecting those use cases and understanding how it's benefiting the people that are using it.
Nichol Bradford:
Last question. Five years from now, what does it look like? What does elevate not eliminate look like? What does HR look like in five years?
Kari Naimon:
I would say two to three years, as fast as AI is accelerating, I think we also have to maybe crunch our timelines down a little bit. So, I hear you on the five. I would say probably two to three. For the companies that really embrace AI, I think every person in the organization will have access to AI at their desk, on their computer, and ideally building the prompts on a regular basis that work for them, to do their jobs more efficiently. That's the easy answer. Right?
I think the more complicated answer, and this is really TBD, is what the employers decide to do from a cultural perspective on the time that's going to be gained from using AI. So, do we want to make the decision that we're going to hire fewer people and double the workload of the people that are still here using AI, because they can be more efficient? Or, better answer, do we want to think about really leveraging the work-life balance that can be gained by encouraging our employees to use AI? And I think that's going to be a very important philosophical discussion that these companies have to start having now as AI starts to spread.
Nichol Bradford:
So, I'll do my three to five-year too. I think that in addition to what you said about everybody having AI and using it, I think we're also going to see agent systems where people have basically four or five AIs, multiple AIs working together, doing the things that they ask them to do. But I think the exciting thing about this time period is that it's where the board gets reset. And from a business perspective, that's really exciting, because there's more room than there ever was to create something new.
So, thank you so much. I so enjoyed talking to you and really appreciate you for coming.
Kari Naimon:
Thank you for having me. This has been very fun. The time went incredibly fast. So, thank you for all the great questions.
Nichol Bradford:
Thanks for joining the conversation. We'll catch you next time on the AI+HI Project.