With AI transforming how we work, HR needs to be prepared for a complete talent shift. But is the function ready for this new reality? 

In this episode of the Digital HR Leaders podcast, host David Green sits down with Keith Bigelow, Chief Product Officer at Visier, to explore the critical role HR plays in leading digital transformation—and how AI is changing the game.  

Tune in as they discuss:

·       How HR can lead the charge in digital and AI transformation. 

·       The impact Generative AI is having on talent management and workforce planning. 

·       The metrics HR should focus on to demonstrate real business impact. 

·       Why partnering with Finance is critical to measuring HR success. 

If you're an HR leader looking to navigate the world of AI and digital transformation, this episode offers plenty of practical advice and fresh insights. 

We would also like to take the opportunity to say thank you to Visier for sponsoring this series of the Digital HR Leaders podcast.  

 Visier is the people analytics platform for successful HR teams, bridging the gap between HR productivity and business performance, giving managers the insights they need to lead effectively. Learn more at visier.com. 

[0:00:00] David Green: Over the past few years, organisations around the globe have been investing heavily in enterprise-wide digital transformation.  But is HR ready to drive the new wave of talent management that will emerge from these technological integrations?  I'm David Green and joining me today on the Digital HR Leaders podcast to discuss this topic is the Chief Product Officer of Visier, Keith Bigelow.  I'm particularly excited to speak to Keith as we discuss how Chief People Officers and Senior HR leaders can step up as strategic partners in leading both digital and AI transformation.  But equally, I'm also keen to delve more into Keith's views on the core metrics that HR should focus on to truly demonstrate its value in this rapidly changing landscape.  Because, let's face it, while important, the ability to report accurately on headcount is not really the most compelling or effective measure of the impact HR is having on an organisation's success.   

I won't give too much away, but some of the key themes we'll cover in the episode include the evolving role of HR in digital transformation, the impact of AI on talent management, and the strategies HR leaders can employ to position themselves at the forefront of these changes.  So without further ado, let's hear from Keith himself. 

Keith, welcome to the show.  Please could you share with listeners a little bit about your career journey that brought you to Visier as the Chief Product Officer just about a year ago, I think? 

[0:01:45] Keith Bigelow: Exactly.  Yeah, it's funny.  I studied maths at university and it was something that always felt very comforting because there was always a right answer.  And that somehow drew me into analytics and the idea that we could calculate things and know the right answer.  And so, I've spent most of my career in analytics from Business Objects to SAP to Salesforce.  Later in my career, I started feeling more compelled about analytics about people.  So, I went to GE Healthcare and did artificial intelligence algorithms on medical devices to try and diagnose conditions, for example.  I found the FDA process a little difficult, so I came back to Enterprise Software with Workday, where I led all their analytics and planning.  And then I joined Visier, like you said, just about a year ago.   

Part of that was driven by such a great open platform that they have; and part was the leadership in GenAI.  And I saw the vision that the company had for really trying to democratise insights with Vee, and that was something that I found really compelling.   

[0:02:52] David Green: What are some of the differences that you've seen between maybe analytics from people data, in terms of maybe HR's readiness for people data and analytics versus other business functions during your career journey?   

[0:03:04] Keith Bigelow: When I think about the different C-suite members, like the CFO, you really can't run a company if you can't manage the GL, and that necessarily gets funding for analytics.  And of course, once you pay your bills, of course you need to generate revenue.  And so, the CRO, Chief Revenue Officer, always has budget for analytics.  It is one of the most aggressive, one of the most ambitious, risk-taking executives when it comes to adopting new technologies.  You see that in marketing as well, with the whole revolution that companies like Marketo and Adobe drove.  I kind of feel like the CHRO is the fifth child, and they get the hand-me-downs or the leftover IT resources, or maybe no resources at all, and they're left hungry.  And so, it's an interesting scenario where now, increasingly, the CHRO is one of the top five executives in any company, and yet their budget to drive analytics for their line of business and for the company writ large is, I would argue, a dramatic step below the four brothers and sisters they have alongside them. 

[0:04:20] David Green: I'd love to hear your views on the role that HR is playing in maybe driving digital transformation within organisations.  Are you, in the experience of the customers that you're working with at Visier, are you seeing HR increasingly taking the reins around digital transformation, or is HR still riding pillion? 

[0:04:38] Keith Bigelow: I don't think this is limited to the CHRO, but most of the digital transformations that I've witnessed have honestly been more at the line of business level.  So, they've been each executive, that marketing executive adopting digital marketing, that sales executive adopting digital revenue generation, or the CFO, the CIO, you name it.  And the CHRO has also replaced their technology stack.  But I see that more as being an American at the state level rather than the federal level, if that makes any sense.   

[0:05:11] David Green: That does, yeah.   

[0:05:12] Keith Bigelow: But I do see it changing.  I was just meeting with an executive last week, an HR executive at a healthcare organisation, and we were talking about AI.  And she said, "No, this one's different, this one's different.  And I was like, "Tell me more.  Why do you think HR is going to jump into the driver's seat now when everybody's driven their own car in different directions historically?"  And Monica's answer was, "Well, because Gen AI is going to change work, and not just for one department, but for every department.  And if that's true, we need someone with adult supervision looking at how it impacts work and culture across the business, lest we do something that we have to kind of back up the bus and redo because we screwed it up, not thinking through the cultural impact of the decisions that we make in deploying Gen AI".   

I thought that was really fascinating, that she felt the agency, the authority, the compelling need to step forward rather than, to your point, be in the passenger seat and watch as that unfolded within her company.   

[0:06:25] David Green: Do you think HR generally is ready for the new wave of talent management that's likely to be part of the Gen AI revolution or digital transformation overall?   

[0:06:36] Keith Bigelow: It's hard to answer that.  If you say no, you're basically damning a huge swath of great people leaders.  If you say yes, you sound naïve, given that the budgets historically haven't been there for HR to be a change-manufacturer in digital.  But I would argue it's not an option, I don't think it's an option.  I don't think it's one of these things where, "Oh, no, I'll just sit in the back seat and play cleanup to the CIO", because I think that the risk of attrition and losing great talent is too high.  So, whether they want to eat their vegetables or not, I think the CHRO is going to have to lean in.  And I think that's going to be in partnership with the CFO and the CIO specifically.  I think those are the three musketeers that start this transformation moving. 

[0:07:37] David Green: What do CHROs and other senior HR leaders need to do to step up to be that strategic partner in leading this digital and AI transformation?   

[0:07:47] Keith Bigelow: I mentioned the CFO and the CIO earlier.  I saw a really interesting talk by Satya Nadella and he was describing the impact of AI and Gen AI specifically.  And he framed it in this higher-order message of what's happening at the global macro level.  Population decline is going to result on extreme pressure for productivity for every economy.  You see this in the news in the UK, you see it in the US, you see it in Canada as a national crisis, a productivity crisis.  And they say we may be in permanent deflation as part of this transformation occurs because of shrinking populations and a decrease in productivity.  And Mustafa Suleyman, this guy who founded DeepMind in the UK, you must know his work, is now the CEO of AI over at Microsoft, and the two of them are just two huge minds.   

So, you take Mustafa's book, The Coming Wave, which is all about gen AI and population decline forcing productivity increase at the risk of economies collapsing, which is why Canada's National Bank is freaking out right now.  And his argument is, the only way for economies to survive is to see this radical improvement, increase in productivity, and that one of the few technologies that's offering this to us is AI.  So, it's almost like a gun to the head.  We don't have a choice to do this.  There's an existential threat to our economies if we don't.  So, let's just say that that's right.  And then, there's this other talk by Satya where he talks about, if this is all true, then there's going to be a transfer of capital allocation from humans to AI.  And so this is why, when I think of what are the three horsemen that drive this transformation, there's got to be an incredible talent plan, and it's got to have an evolution of work as well as employees and what work they do; that's the CHRO.  There's got to be finance involved, the CFO, to talk about, "Great, if we're going to reduce our spend here, here, and here because we don't think we need these roles anymore, then I can free capital for us to spend in the digital area, in AI, to bring this about".  And then the CIO needs to sign up too, "And I'll roll that out for you in concert with a line of business leaders, so that we actually realise this return on investment that we're promising Wall Street, or any other stock exchange that we might be worried about".   

So, that's how I kind of see the CHRO stepping up, is they bring this coalition of the willing for this transformation of capital allocation.  But without a plan and without a budget, finance can't do anything on their own.  The CIO can throw stuff out, but it'll really be chaos if they don't have a plan, and that's where I think the CHRO gets to step forward. 

[0:11:04] David Green: Keith, let's shift it to a couple of other things that certainly you're doing at Visier, and maybe some of the tools and methodologies that can help CHROs be part of that triumvirate that we talked about.  I think this is a topic you're pretty passionate about as well.  What is the ideal metric, or more likely, set of metrics to measure the value that HR brings to a company?  I imagine this is something you you're thinking about at Visier, maybe you're already working with at Visier with your customers.  So, what are the metrics that HR should be measuring to demonstrate its value?   

[0:12:28] Keith Bigelow: This is a loaded question.   

[0:12:30] David Green: Sorry, I've given you a few of those, haven't I?! 

[0:12:33] Keith Bigelow: So this one, I would really argue that we have so many metrics that HR is expected to produce, that none of them correlate to value, none of them correlate to enterprise.  CSRD, I'm sorry, but reporting my gender balance is not going to change the economic value of my company.  My total headcount is not going to change the economic value of my company.  And so, as I look at both the regulatory frameworks for the things that we're asked to do by HR that get into a 10K or into a 10Q, none of them equate to corporate value creation, which I think is a real shame.  And if you look at each executive across the board, "Hey, what does the CRO own, Dave?"  "Well, they own ARR, Keith.  Yeah, that's their metric".  "Cool.  What does the CMO own?"  "Oh, they own customer acquisition costs, CAC".  "Great, and what does the CX Leader own?"  "Oh, net dollar retention and account growth, Keith".  They all have a metric.   

The CHRO's metric can't be total headcount, and it can't be gender mix, and it can't be anything to do with ethnicity.  These are all important.  I'm not saying that any of these aren't important, but where our team has been focused, we've been interviewing some really interesting companies recently, and we're starting to move toward a metric definition that companies are not articulating this way, but are starting to compose the elements of it.  So, my metric of choice right now for the CHRO, if I was going to say, "Choose one and make it yours", would be net talent retention.  What does that mean?  Well, I'm sure you've read Erin Meyer's book, No Rules Rules, but she talks about talent density and increasing talent density, and that that brings you efficiency and incredible, incredible productivity.  How do I measure that?  Well, net talent retention, because it's who do I bring on and who am I losing?  And I don't care if I'm losing people if they actually aren't raising the bar for my company.   

So, if we look at the net talent retention, we're really looking at, am I going up and to the right in terms of my ability to deliver this?  And some of my favourite CHROs, in the research that we've been doing, have actually started working with the CFO and with the CEO to compensate on a sub component of this metric, which is top talent attrition.  And they pay on it.  So, "You have high top talent attrition in your team, Keith?  You're on watch.  You are no longer a top performer for the company, if you blame talent".  I mean, this is like 1980s management style, right; attract, retain, and manage and motivate your talent.  But in this market, retaining top talent is without a doubt the single most crucial element for all people leaders.  And yet, the person who has the best means to measure and drive that metric up is the person who attracts talent in talent acquisition, the CHRO and the TA team, and the person who helps talent management out.   

So, our talent team, that's really driving a higher and higher performance management bar.  And that may sound ruthless in terms of, "Keith, you want to introduce AI, you want to get rid of our low performers?"  And I'm like, "I don't think we have a choice.  I don't think it's optional". 

[0:16:40] David Green: And what of the other factors that HR leaders probably need to take account of, to analyse a report on the net talent retention metric and talent density that you spoke about? 

[0:16:54] Keith Bigelow: There are these bright stars that we get to work with, and they really are trendsetters.  One of them is a jewellery and boutique, that is one of our customers.  And their HR leadership and their finance leadership and their sales leadership are locked together.  And they behave for their jewellery boutiques the way any software marketing and sales leader would behave.  But they inject the human part into it in a really interesting way.  So, the metrics, what do they do?  They pull employee engagement data, how is this team at this boutique working together?  They pull their training data, so what have we enabled this team who's in this boutique to sell?  They then look at the actual proceeds from the till of each boutique and same-door sales by this team with this training, and they A/B test it, and they look at what training has a material impact on daily revenue.  And if the training doesn't increase revenue, yield, they stop and they switch training.   

I'm like, "Oh my God, that is exactly what HR leadership and people analytics should be doing".  So, the HR team, the people analytics team is actually showing the financial impact of the behaviours of how we enable employees in creating revenue for the corporation, and we don't really do so much of this.  We spend a fortune on sales enablement, but do we measure which sales enablement actually drove greater turnover in sales in terms of net proceeds?  Very few companies are trying to link together these multiple subjects.  I thought it was fascinating that they were looking at the team dynamic, "If we don't get along, do we undermine each other in this boutique?  If we do, then we need to change the composition of the team to bring up that yield".   

So, as I think of the factors, they're pulling sales data now, they're pulling other elements, like learning data, as it contributes to sales, as opposed to, "Don't measure how many people we've trained.  That is a worthless metric, unless there's some compliance thing behind it.  Great, 100% of our employees will no longer harass people because they've been trained, hopefully". 

[0:19:33] David Green: I know at Visier you've implemented your own AI agent into the platform which, as you've already said, is called Vee.  Can you share how you are seeing Vee transform the way HR and business leaders are interacting with their data?   

[0:20:38] Keith Bigelow: So, Vee, two months old, we made it generally available right at the end of April, beginning of May.  We have more than 17,000 customers.  That's about 35% of all our customers are using Vee.  That's millions of users of Vee.  And when we look at our various companies, again company culture is different, and you know this extremely well, and how companies feel about sharing information is different.  But so, what are the things that delight me with Vee is when I see that it's not just HR, it's not just executives, it's all layers of management now are having access to Vee. 

We have one customer who's actually rolled out Visier to every employee in their institution.  And there's a dashboard for the employee that quantifies them as an employee so that they understand everything from, "Hey, when was my last raise, to my last promotion, to what training have I done?  How do I appear on paper or digitally to my manager and to the corporation?"  And I think that what we're going to see here is first, a change in the role of HR business partner.  Because historically, the people analytics team enables the HRBPs.  The HRBPs go out to executives and management with their books or with live access to Visier, or some other solution, to try and bring that visibility and take better decisions on their people, "Wow, I haven't given this person a raise in three years.  I didn't realise that.  What's the dwell time of Dave and his role?  Holy smokes, he's been in that role for five years?  His propensity to attrit is really high".  All these metrics are super valuable, but unless they're cascaded and brought to someone who can take action, they're the tree in the forest that falls over that nobody hears.   

So, Vee, in its current state, is a digital assistant that allows any manager to ask any question about their employees.  But where we see this going, and I'm sure that your other clients are asking about this, is more towards agentic workflows, "Hey, don't just make it a one-shot, I ask this digital assistant a question, it gives me an answer.  I need to think about Dave's career because he's been stuck for six years in the same role.  But nudge me, tell me when I have obvious issues, outliers".  So, you can think of all the clustering techniques that we have in the old days, they all apply here for nudging, helping a manager to be a better manager.  And now, think to your point on democratisation.  How do we nudge Dave, the employee who's been stuck in the same role for six years, to understand this is how you show up on paper, this is how your manager sees you.  You might want to consider training, you might want to consider internal mobility, you might want to consider something that demonstrates your ambition and your agency and your growth mindset.  Because if you don't, you're going to be one of the victims of net talent retention, where it's just like, "Sorry, this person's complacent".  But are they?   

This is one of the most fascinating conversations I've had.  And it doesn't work so well with you as the example, but Jasmine, for example.  Let's use her.  Is she stuck in her role because her boss has biases and has left her there to dwell at that role for too long?  Or is it because she doesn't have a growth mindset?  Or is it some combination of the two?  These are where I see Gen AI and AI in general helping us a ton, is to expose to the employee as well as their leader, their people leader, "Hey, these are the things you should be aware of".  All of a sudden, I can actually come to the people leader like you, Dave, and say, "Hey, you might want to do check-in conversations with these three people".  Rather than you having to think it, the agent just suggests it to you.  And this is all about net talent retention, how do we make sure that we keep our best talent?  And we wouldn't tell you to go have a chat with Keith if Keith is not a high performer on your team, because we're worried about net talent retention.  And if he quits, bless his heart, bye bye. 

[0:25:15] David Green: I think it's a key, isn't it?  This is augmenting human decision-making, not replacing human decision-making.  I don't know if you want to talk to that a little bit. 

[0:25:21] Keith Bigelow: Absolutely, but the agentic work, where we have multiple models that are coordinating and reasoning more intelligently than the single-shot digital assistants that we have today.  So, we've begun work on agentic workflows also, but there are companies that are outright looking to license you a digital employee.  As of no augmentation, no, we are replacing.  And this I find really interesting.  It's happening in sales.  So, if you go and look, I won't bother to market any of these companies, but business development reps, you can now purchase digital, a subscription, of course, for a business development rep, so a sales development representative for selling.  This introduces to me all sorts of curious questions, "How do my other business development reps feel", coming back to Monica's comment at the top of this conversation, "when they are working alongside a digital agent?  How does the account executive, who receives the qualified lead from the digital SDR, feel?  Do they think they're doing a good job?  Maybe the SDR that's digital is actually not good and needs to be performance managed".   

I'm not making this stuff up.  If you're going to pay $60,000 a year for a digital agent, which is what one of these companies wants, you sure as hell better manage its performance and it sure as heck better get along with the other employees that it's supposed to be working with.  So, not pro-offering crappy leads, but well-qualified leads, for example, that are ready for us to move to S1.  And this is going to happen in HR too, I really believe it.  First, to your point, it's going to be augmentation across every single role, shared services, talent acquisition, HRBPs, and using good old Isaac Newton, gravity, we're going to keep dropping the mundane, the repetitive to the AI, which it's good at.  We're not going to give it the really thoughtful high EQ work, or we shouldn't, but we will recompose jobs and we will start to have these hybrid workforces.   

I mean, I just read this article that blew my mind in Japan.  There are humanoid robots on factory floors that do calisthenics in the morning with their human counterparts.  Why?  So, that the humans don't decide that the robots are there to kill them.  And so, they are working on company culture by having them exercise together.  That's a great HR leader.  Whether they are physical and digital, meaning robot, or whether they are pure digital, agent, we're going to have these hybrid workforces because we don't have a choice.  Figuring out how to get the maximum yield from these, maybe it's calisthenics, maybe it's something else, but we've got to be able to measure their productivity, the combined unit, the whole, as opposed to the isolated few, so that we make sure that we improve the company as a whole. 

[0:28:34] David Green: So, Keith, thinking about all that, and what we've talked about, and looking at how this technology is likely to evolve, how do you see the future of work evolving, because this technology is just going to develop exponentially over the coming years? 

[0:28:55] Keith Bigelow: Yeah, it's going to change faster than any technology we've seen.  And we see that by just the rapidity of the LLM models being released by Anthropic, by OpenAI, and the velocity with which they double the performance and they drop the cost in half.  So, they're doing a factor of four there for us in less than a year, faster than Moore's Law.  So absolutely, the AI is racing ahead and it's getting the ability to reason more and more.  So, going back to your IBM example and the 8,000 jobs they're not hiring, I think first, when you think about all our roles, we're going to start delegating.  Gravity's going to pull down these mundane tasks that we don't like to do.  But some of the research I've read suggests that we're going to have to become more generalist rather than more specialist, because we will be taking on bits of multiple jobs as opposed to a singular job, because we've already delegated it so much to automation.  And if that's true, who knows?  Maybe our social sciences graduates will be the new leaders.   

But even the AI thought leaders are talking about people who communicate well are going to be people who thrive in this new, more digital economy.  So, I think roles will change, I think work will delegate down, I think employee populations will keep shrinking because of the global decline in population and the aging workforce that we have.  I think that expectation is that we'll be polymaths, that we will be able to cross subject boundaries as opposed to very narrow boundaries, "Keith, you don't just lead product, we need you doing marketing, we need you doing other functions as well".  And the assumption that I have, and this will probably sound crazy to your listeners, but when you think of span of control today, for different roles, you might think, "Oh, a healthy span of control is 7".  No, it's 11.  No, it's 15.  If I'm augmented with a really great agent as a people leader, do I double that?  Do I triple that?  Because my employee's getting augmented too.   

So, those nudges that we talked about a few minutes ago, they're happening to me, they're happening to my employees.  I'm getting syntheses of meetings that happened, like the use case that you just gave.  That level of efficiency and talent density is going to be really crazy.  So, we may see a lot of organisations flatten, for example, as a result; I'm doing more things, my span of control is much broader.  So, those are the things that I would watch, and I certainly wonder, like in workforce planning, will we set new targets that we measure for span of control?  "Hey, I want it to be 50% larger than it is today, two years from now.  Cool, what does my workforce look like?" 

[0:32:06] David Green: What excites you most about this new technology?  And then, what's your biggest concern? 

[0:32:12] Keith Bigelow: Excites me most?  I'm a father, I have two boys and you read The Coming Wave by Mustafa Suleyman, and it's really required reading.  I make everybody I talk to read it.  It's staggering, staggeringly concerning to read this book and what it means if we don't adopt AI to our global economy and to our national economies.  I don't want to leave my kids in a worse place than the way that I found it.  They certainly have from a climate and other areas.  But from a work perspective and an opportunity perspective, the idea that it's just this ever-shrinking, declining opportunity is something that really concerns me.  And this is my hope, and I think this is the hope of Mustafa's book -- I think he's a humanist -- is that we can make things better.  But every technology can be abused.  Guns can be abused, AI can be abused, and we see that already in politics and in elsewhere with disinformation.   

So, it's staggering to me how much of this is done in open source, and if we use the climate change, the sea level is rising in terms of what's commodity LLMs, and open source is already at GPT4 now, open source is GPT-4, which was amazing a year ago.  And that worries me a lot, because when you go back to Suleyman's book and you think about the bad things that could happen with this gen AI, well, you're in the UK.  Remember when the UK health system basically was held for ransom?  That was like preschool-era technology that did that.  Think about a virus that's actually mutating with every new hospital that it goes to and changing, unlocking more and more data.  A lot of bad can come from this too, so that's what worries me, is that great tools can be positive, and very, very negative too. 

[0:34:38] David Green: How can workforce analytics enhance HR decision-making and drive business success? 

[0:34:44] Keith Bigelow: Yeah, I think throughout this conversation, we've said it's not about HR decision-making.  Of course, there will be those, but when we think about what is the potential, what's the return, it really is your second one, driving business success.  I talked about the hospital that wants to drive yield, I talked about the jewellery boutique that is driving yield.  Those are the models that I hope that everyone emulates and patterns after.  Because if your employees aren't well trained and they aren't well engaged, and they aren't fairly compensated, they're going to be somebody else's employees.  And that just puts your company at risk, your net talent density drops.  And I think it will become one of the key indicators, and I can't wait to see companies use it as a mechanism for them to actually have the HR leader not only be earning that top-five salary that they have in companies, but much more present at the board meetings, much more present, not about diversity, which is important, not about gender, which is important, but about the business impact of their employees, and that they can say, "Through turning these knobs, I've helped yield".  And that is what I think workforce analytics allows us to do. 

The best companies are already doing it, and it's just a matter of how do we enable the right people to think that this is their mission at the rest of the companies. 

[0:36:26] David Green: Nice thing to leave our listeners with, Keith.  It's been a fascinating time for me talking with you, Keith, I've learned a lot.  I don't have the book by Suleyman, but I am going to go out and buy it now.  You've definitely sold that one to me.  For listeners who wish to learn more about you, Keith, and maybe find you on social media and find out more about the work you're doing at Visier and more about Vee, what's the best way for people to get in touch? 

[0:36:52] Keith Bigelow: I am so promiscuous on LinkedIn.  So, connect with me on LinkedIn, connect with Visier on LinkedIn.  This is where we share a lot of the innovation that we're doing, a lot of the innovation that our customers are doing.  And those case studies I think, like I said, are the model.  And so, I would say LinkedIn is the best place to go.  There are other places, but this is the one I feel is the most professional to build those relationships on. 

[0:37:20] David Green: Brilliant.  Well, Keith, thank you very much for sharing your time and expertise and thoughts with listeners of the Digital HR Leaders podcast.  And I'm sure we'll bump into each other at an HR technology conference sometime soon.   

[0:37:36] Keith Bigelow: Coming soon.  Hey, thank you so much for the opportunity.