Rebecca Hinds: evaluation

Transcript context

…It's such an insightful question. And we unpack several of these paradoxes or contradictions because there are many of them, right? There are many of them at play in part because this is such a psychological technology. And the fact that we're treating it as a human adds a whole bunch of different complexities. And one of these paradoxes, one of these contradictions is around why do we see the people who are most fearful of the technology, most worried about being replaced or displaced, in more. And I think a lot of it is the perception. You feel a threat, you don't fully understand the technology, perhaps you don't have the support of your organization, and you want to look AI native, you want to look like you're transforming. And so the natural knee jerk reaction in too many cases is to automate as much as possible. And unfortunately, in many cases, if you're looking to automate and visibly show that you're transforming with the technology, you're probably going to point it at parts of work that you are most familiar with. And in not all cases, but in many cases, the parts of work that you're most familiar with are probably the parts of work that give you the most meaning. Not always, but certainly a case. So concretely, what we're seeing is around relationships with other people, customers service, for example, these amazing customer service representatives who have spent years, decades developing that craft of the personal relationship, the long-term relationship, all of a sudden you have a technology that can in theory automate some of that relationship building, perhaps to get completely off your plate so that you're no longer interacting with a human. That's what gives you joy and meaning at work. That is very dangerous. And that is what we're seeing. And not just in this survey, there was a fascinating at a Stanford a while back that found 41% of Y Combinator AI startups are automating things that people would prefer to keep human. And again, this again boils down to the psychology of this. We can't just assume that because the technology can do something, because it can automate something, it should be automated. We know that so much of work and so much of the process is meant to be messy. It's meant to be full of friction because that friction, sometimes it's called the IQ effect, right? When we build something ourselves, when we do the hard work of doing the thing, well, that builds ownership, it builds good judgment, it builds purpose, it builds pride. And these are not feel good, nice to haves. These are hard drivers of performance. And it's a very difficult calculus because it differs for every person, every team, every organization, but it's absolutely essential that we think about, okay, what is this division of labor between humans and AI. And the calculus should not just be, can the AI do the thing? It also needs to take into account this human piece. What does the employee find meaningful? this division of labor between humans and AI. And the calculus should not just be, can the AI do the thing? It also needs to take into account this human piece. What does the employee find meaningful? Because that meaning is going to drive their best work and it's going to drive situations where when they do get the time savings, they're reinvesting it into the betterment of themselves, their teams, and the organizations rather than more clicks of the tool or taking the time savings for themselves and not the organization. That customer service example is a really good one. And I do think it goes to show how tough this is going to be in a lot of ways, because I can totally imagine being a person who is in that kind of job because you like talking to people, you're a people person, and that is what gets you going every day. And then to think, okay, you're not going to do that anymore, but instead you're going to get to sit in front of this agent builder UI or whatever and try to string together what you used to do and watch out for its failures. And it's like, I didn't sign up for this. I don't really, I never would have wanted this job in the 1st place if I had to do this, but here I am. And at the same time, If you put yourself in the leadership standpoint or honestly in the customer position as well, I think the logic of it is like pretty unavoidable that if only for responsiveness. I mean, I've looked at, for example, my company's response times when Fin is active on our intercom versus when it's a human. And we do a great job on customer service and we do have, you know, real people, people and our customers have always really spoken very highly of our customer success team. And yet the immediate response of fitness, in many cases, it's like, it's a real value driver for the customer too, because they get out of there in a couple minutes instead of, with the longer back and forth of a human could be, 30 minutes plus the doing it the old way. So I think that is really tough. If you think about, I've seen this said recently that companies are graphs of algorithms, and that I think did not come from Glean, but it very much rhymes with some of the recent releases around the enterprise graph. How do you think people should be thinking about this from a sort of leadership executive competitive dynamic standpoint? I think it's hard to say Maybe we wanna keep some humans in customer service because whatever, we got super high value customers, they're gonna value it, there's something intangible. But I think it's hard for most companies to really make an argument that we shouldn't take a 90% cost savings and the ability to be instantly responsive to all of our customers because people like doing it the old way. But then there are, that's one algorithm in the graph of algorithms that constitute a company. But then there may be other ones where you maybe do have a better reason to keep it more human. How do you think leadership should be decomposing their organizations and thinking for all the different parts of it, what they have to accept the tides of history and where they maybe want to hold on to things for special reasons?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.