323 - How ServiceNow's AI heat map answers "what does my job look like in 3 years": Brandon Roberts (SVP Talent Strategy & Workforce Transformation, ServiceNow)

0:00Brandon Roberts: But we didn't just like squeeze productivity, we didn't cut costs. What we decided was we were going to change their role. We were going to take these employees and say, okay, we don't need as many of you answering questions. We're going to reinvest you back in the AI and making it better. Your job is to make the data better. It's to make sure that employees' questions get answered. It's to understand the technology and how it works. And so we took some of the productivity gain, we reinvested in that. And then we also upskilled a few people who are in these roles. So we took them from, you know, the shared service role to like kind of like an entry level HR business partner.

0:35Brandon Roberts: So they understand our policies. They understand how to work with employees. These are skills that are valuable. It's just the work is different. And that's where like that example and living that in real life is a lot of what Jackie and I talked about earlier on, like why this is a human transformation. It's not just the technology. We could have just implemented the technology and let it go. you have to like figure out how work is going to change and how we're going to redesign roles. You're listening to the Modern People Leader podcast where we go behind the scenes with today's top HR leaders and work experts.

1:09We talk to them about how they've gotten to where they're at, what they do every day, and what they see coming next for the future of work. Hope you enjoy.

1:21Brandon, welcome to the Modern People Leader.

1:24Brandon Roberts: Thanks. Thanks for having me. it is today is wednesday i believe and daniel and i are like in the middle this is our hump day of an epic podcast recording week like back in the day we would go through like these hardcore like periods where we were recording like multiple pods we don't really do that anymore but daniel was sharing before we uh we had vacation over the summer and here we are recording a podcast a day this week. And so we're super stoked to have you on. I know you've been on my list of brands and individuals, people leaders that I wanted to get on the show. And so we're super, super psyched to have you today.

2:08We start every episode the same way. We call it Good News Stories. It's one of the few traditions we have on the show. We all share a personal work-related story, and we prefer for our guests to kick us off. So something positive in your life right now. What do you have?

2:25Brandon Roberts: I love that. We all need some optimism. So I've got two boys at home. They're six and eight. So you can kind of imagine what the house is like with those young ones. But somewhere along this summer, they just became like best friends and like inseparable. They haven't been fighting. I have no idea what I did. I have no parenting tricks. I have no idea how it happened. But it is like, it makes me smile. they like took their baseball card collections, which is really they're like the center of their world. And they combined them, which I found to be completely shocking. And then they the other day I came home and they had like created a skate park out of cardboard that I just like, I love it.

3:05Brandon Roberts: It's like they're having so much fun together. So that's my that's my personal one. On the work side, you know, I've always loved this concept of citizen development that people can build their own technology to help make them more effective at work. And that's been around for a long time, but AI and agents has like, you know, it's taken off, right? Everybody's doing it at this point. And ServiceNow has something called BuildAgent, which is basically like a vibe coding tool to help you build agents to help you get work done. And in the last two weeks, like three people have come up with super innovative, creative ways to use the technology to make their work better.

3:44Brandon Roberts: and that just it makes me so happy. I love it. It's not a tops down sort of organizational push. It's just people thinking really creatively about their work. I've been on a soapbox that is AI isn't happening the way LinkedIn says it's happening and I barely I used to post all the time about vibe coding and like all the cool things. I'm obsessed. I'm still obsessed and so yeah what I'm finding is like it's these stories like this. This is it's just organically happening and sometimes you can't even explain it. So that's awesome. Daniel, what do you have? You know, I'm drawing a blank right now because this is our third recording in a row, but I'm going to go with, you know, we finally have our wallpaper up.

4:29So this is a new background for me. We moved houses last week and it's been a slow process, getting everything unpacked and putting rugs out and hanging things on the walls. And as of last night, We were up to like 1130, like building furniture and doing wallpaper. But we officially have the wallpaper done and it's starting to feel more like a house. So that's my good news. I have two. I'll go personal and work. I'll go on the personal side. Daniel just gave me like an, he just lofted a softball to me. So I'm going to take it. We, Daniel and I have been living these, this like, I forget what it was called in our pod yesterday.

5:09What did you call it? You called it life emergence? life emergence. So one of our guests had this conversation. Her thing was career emergence, but... Career emergence. And I was like, oh, you know, where you just kind of like things are naturally happening to you in your career. Something to that effect, I'm probably butchering it. But Daniel and I have had life emergence where our lives in parallel, like Daniel has a year and a half year old daughter. I have an eight month old, soon to be eight month old son. And Daniel just bought and moved into a house. We just made an offer, my good news, that has been accepted.

5:44And so I don't want to jinx it too much. But if we get through this week, then we will be off on the path to being homeowners, which is super, super exciting with a new family. I also have teenage daughters. And our space right now, it feels really small with the newborn and teenagers. So that's super exciting. My other good news, this has been building for a couple of months, and I could tell Daniel has been wondering, when am I going to share good news about this on the pod? Obviously, him and I have been talking at length, but as of today, I have a new job that is not full-time NPL. I've been, obviously, Daniel and I created this beautiful thing with Modern People Leader in 2020.

6:32And we started monetizing in 2023, around the time I sold my engagement survey company to a bigger rewards and recognition company. Then I joined the podcast full time last year. And it's been great. But I also have this other story that I won't go into today of like career and life emergence. And for me, that has led me to a new kind of career path that is no longer centered around HR. For the first time since 2000, my career is not centered around HR. It's centered around growth and sales and helping. And music. You know, and music and music and community. Yeah, so it's, I'll share the details later because I don't want to go too deep on it.

7:18But it is music production software that has been built on a foundation of AI. And it's non-generative. And, you know, it's for creatives. And it's weird because we talk about the narrative of like, you know, and Brandon, you just mentioned it. That same phenomenon that you mentioned is happening in all sorts of different segments of the workforce and jobs. And music is a big one. Creatives are being significantly impacted. And so to be a part of good in this transformation is super, super cool. And it also kind of aligns. I work out of a music studio. And so all these life things have come together, which is pretty cool.

8:01Brandon Roberts: So sorry for the long-winded thank you. Sorry for the long-winded news, but it was time. And so let's talk about your story. I call this a Brene Brown question, Brandon. Tell us your story. Tell us everything. Like, you know, what was the journey that led to you in your current role? You've had a few big roles at ServiceNow, but like, how did you get there? What was that? One thing keeps coming up on the podcast, and that's leave. It's one of those processes that everybody has, but very few get right. And we just talked about this the other week with Kim Smith from Tilt. And she framed it in a way that really clicked for me.

8:41Not every employee experiences leave the same way. Some want every detail up front, others feel overwhelmed, and just want you to simply tell them what to do next. But most companies deliver the exact same experience to everyone. It's one thing to have a compliant leave program. it's another to have one that actually works for the human going through it. And that's where Tilt comes in. Tilt is a leave experience platform that helps teams move beyond one-size-fits-all processes. Using Tilt, companies can tailor the leave experience to each employee's needs, keep managers aligned on coverage and return to work, automate complex workflows like pay and compliance, and give HR the space to focus on support and not spreadsheets.

9:26In other words, the tech handles the complexity so that the people team can show up where it matters most as a human. Leave isn't just an HR process. These are life-changing moments that can make or break the employee experience. If you want to learn more about Tilt, go to hellotilt.com slash MPL. That's hellotilt.com slash MPL.

9:49Brandon Roberts: Love it. I've always said there's kind of three themes to micro or three things that I'm constantly thinking about as I think about roles or work or companies I want to go to. The first is like the most basic and everybody feels this way, but it's important to say the work has to be interesting and impactful, right? Like that's critically important. I'll talk more about how I've sort of chased interesting work throughout my career. The second thing is I got to have a leader and a manager who believe in me and almost to the point of believing in me more than I believe in myself. And I think that's really, really critical, critically important to my career.

10:24Brandon Roberts: And then the last one, which I think people say less often, but I'm a huge believer in, which is I believe chasing the chaos, chasing change in your career is really, really valuable and critical to getting where you want to go. So I'll talk through all those and explain them a little bit more. But I've always been interested in the concept of, you know, how do you make work better for people? Like that was a question that fascinated me in college. And I studied organizational psychology, got out of school, got into people analytics. using data to help understand engagement, productivity, you know, all the things that was kind of core people analytics.

11:00Brandon Roberts: And it was early, it was like early 2000s. You know, we were out there building machine learning models in HR, which, you know, before that was common. So love that stuff. I'm still passionate about how we use data to drive change and to drive the organizational effectiveness. After kind of spending a good time in analytics, I said, you know what, this technology thing really interested me. How do you build technology that really helps people to be more effective at work? How do you build technology that really solves problems? And so for the last 20 years, those two things have made up my career, technology and analytics.

11:32Brandon Roberts: And, you know, AI adds a whole nother layer to that. And then about three months ago, I decided, you know, I'm ready for something beyond that. You know, I've spent a lot of time in that space. And we did something which I think is pretty creative, but I think interesting for the moment. We created what we call the talent strategy and workforce transformation organization. And this brings together our global HR business partners with what I've historically worked on, which is technology, analytics, and AI transformation. If you think about HR business partners as being responsible for the talent strategy, we think putting them side by side with technology experts, people who understand how AI is transforming work, is really going to allow us to supercharge what we can do in support of the organization.

12:16Brandon Roberts: So that's brand new. I've been doing it for, you know, three months or so. And then like, just to touch on those other two things I mentioned, the leadership component and, you know, chasing chaos everywhere I've stayed or moved is because I worked for someone who saw or believed in me, you know, more than myself and they saw potential. I wouldn't consider myself someone who's like naturally extremely confident. So having someone who believes in you in that way is really, really critical. And Jackie Canney, who's the chief people and AI enablement officer at ServiceNow has been a really incredible mentor to me over the last few years.

12:52Brandon Roberts: And I think that's so critical to your success for so many reasons. Last thing I'll say is just that concept of chasing the chaos. I can never decide if it was intentional or not intentional, but I've like always worked for companies that were undergoing just massive amount of change. I started at Qualcomm early 2000. and Qualcomm's a semiconductor company, right? Mobile hits, iPhone gets released while I'm there. Just massive, massive change. And I've loved it ever since experiencing that. So I went to Pinterest, pre-IPO, went social networks, early 2010s. Social networks were everything. There was so much going on in that space.

13:31Brandon Roberts: I mean, now I've been with ServiceNow for about seven years and incredible growth at this company from just relative to like the software SaaS industry and now really transforming it to be an AI company and being at the center of that AI transformation. So yeah, that's my career in a nutshell. You mentioned Jackie. I'm curious, you know, I feel like a lot of times when you have a mentor, there's usually something about them that you really admire that maybe you feel like you're lacking or like it's something that you could develop yourself. Is there something that comes to mind for you when you think about Jackie where you're like, God, I really admire this one quality that she has, and I want to have more of that?

14:14Brandon Roberts: Yeah. Jackie is more than any person I've ever met a business leader who thinks about talent. And I've grown up in HR. I've had some experiences with other functions, but I'm still learning about how the business is run and how you actually take these talent decisions and say, how do we make this organization more successful? So that's one thing I'd say. the other thing that I really admire about Jackie is she is truly kind and a good person and cares about her team like that not to say that I don't do that hopefully I do that as well but I love working for someone who you feel like has your back and does it in a way that's very clear and you never have to doubt so those two things come to mind well shout out to to Jackie uh tell Tell us more about ServiceNow.

15:08I know that you cater to different categories and you have different products, but if you were to describe ServiceNow to a stranger, how would you describe what you guys do? And then once you've covered that, I'm curious, like how much of the work you're doing influences the product? Yeah.

15:27Brandon Roberts: So my cocktail party line that I've used for a long time, so I've been there for, you know, between seven and eight years, is the average employee in a large enterprise. has to interact with over 100 different systems to get work done. Finance, HR, IT, expense, you name it, right? You can all think about the different ways that you have to get your work done. ServiceNow is the operating system that connects and gives your employees a one-stop shop to get the information they need and can create workflows that are cross-functional. So one of the things we started on early, early, this was like, again, five, seven years ago, onboarding.

16:03Brandon Roberts: onboarding involves HR, IT, legal, finance, you name it, every function in the company. And an employee had to learn that. Instead, ServiceNow presents them with a single onboarding plan, helps them get all the information they need, connects back to the systems it needs to connect. So that was sort of the core value proposition, like early days of ServiceNow. And we still, you know, that's still a core way that we add values to company. We connect your systems. We allow you to use data across all the different systems that you use. Now AI has really changed that, or what I would say is like supercharge it.

16:37Brandon Roberts: And really think about, if you think about that positioning, now you layer agents on top of it that can do work across these different systems instead of being siloed in just your HR system or whatever. And I think that's really our competitive differentiators. We're connecting across the entire enterprise. And then in addition to like building agents, we also serve as like a really fast growing cybersecurity company. So we think a lot about how do you govern, maintain control of the agents as they get built across the enterprise. And so how long have you been in the AI transformation role? Is this relatively new?

17:17Did I read that correctly?

17:18Brandon Roberts: I have been so basically in 2023. So when everything kind of exploded on the scene, Jackie and I spent a lot of time together and said, we need we need someone who's really thinking about how this changes work. And so started back then. And then we've sort of built built out from there. And now, like, what's interesting is we sort of built a COE in the early days. it's part of everybody's role. It shouldn't be a COE. Your HR business partner should be doing this day in and day out. And so that's what I'm trying to build now. I won't say any names, but I spoke with somebody else from ServiceNow this morning.

17:55And when I was learning more, and they're on the marketing team, when I was learning more about their role, the first thing that they said was, everything we do on my team is AI first. Like we're constantly thinking about, and that's not typically something I hear in a call like that because it just doesn't come up. And so, yeah, I can see it from the outside. Yeah.

18:17Brandon Roberts: And it's, you know, I think we have the benefit of it being part of our product, you know, like it's sort of like we have all these experts in the company who are thinking about this, but it's also very cultural. Like our leaders talk about it. We talk about the expectation. You know, I talked about citizen development earlier. are like, that's the expectation to be rethinking how you work and using the tools available to you. And Daniel and I have had the privilege, good fortune to interview a lot of people in similar roles as you. And I think the spectrum has been wide from those that were just like embarking and kicking things off to, you know, to these really kind of multi-wave initiatives, some failures, some wins, you know, but all like net positive stuff.

19:08And, you know, I feel like we're all looking for the brands, for more information from the brands that are like getting it right. And what really excites me about the conversation today is like, you know, the numbers speak for themselves, right? and you're going to share some of that today, but like y 'all have done, you know, it feels like y 'all are seeing the ROI and like you found a formula that works. But before we get into like the tactics and like how that all came about, like, do you think your IO psychology background kind of, you know, gives you a differentiator or kind of positions you uniquely or just IO psychologists in general, because this is my wife is actually, you know, exploring roles.

19:56She's actually being pulled into AI roles at her company. And, you know, I have a hypothesis that part of that might be because her skill set and her what she studied and what she knows, like helps her in this role. And so I'm just curious, like your take on that.

20:13Brandon Roberts: Yeah, I think it's so interesting what's happening. I know we're going to talk about it a little bit later, but like judgment is becoming increasingly critical. So when I went to school, right, I had sort of two parts. There's like the conceptual understanding of work, which I think is more important than ever. And then the second part was like all the detailed how to do research, use data effectively. And I think that's still important. but the honest truth is that AI is getting better and better at that second piece, the data analytics and AI piece. But I think what IOS psychology really does do is learn how to question things, learn how to ask good questions, and then also really thinking critically about what makes up work because I think at a very foundational level, AI is changing what work is and people who have thought about that question a lot I think are really valuable for a lot of reasons.

21:10And so great. So I totally agree. And I think the judgment piece is so critical. We talked earlier this week about how a trend of very, very senior people using AI in a way that isn't serving them well. So like this, like this lapse in judgment or lapse in like depth of questioning or working that's kind of resulting in this flop that is like, it's not good for the company. It's not good for the leader. And so, you know, I think this is all like super, super relevant. And but let's go back to the journey at service now. So 2023, you know, you're Jackie, y 'all are like, wow, this new superpower is unleashed.

22:00The board, like everyone's talking about this, right? So like, what are we going to do here? And I guess when was your personal realization that like AI as this technological shift is really about to change everything like so much and particularly in the HR space? When did you have that realization?

22:19Brandon Roberts: Yeah. Yeah. So it was 2023. And I think we all, I have a vivid memory of the first time I used like a frontier model for like, for me, it was like chat GPT. I went in and it was almost immediate, sort of like the iPhone. I felt the same way when the iPhone was released that, you know, this is going to change where and how work gets done. And I love to play around with things. I love to get in and start to build things myself. And I started doing that like almost immediately. And it just, I wasn't, it wasn't totally solving for things, but it became really clear to me that operational work is going to be reduced substantially.

22:58Brandon Roberts: There is less need for people to serve as handoffs between teams or functions. And then there's a greater need for these generalists who have this judgment skill and then these specialists who have some extreme level of expertise. And so I think Jackie and I talked a lot about that at the beginning, The technology wasn't there yet. It wasn't like we were seeing value, but you could see where it was going. And then we got this front row seat in partnership with our product teams to watch them build products using this. And one of the first things we did, which was a product called Now Assist, it's within our HR operations function.

23:37Brandon Roberts: And it was using AI to answer employees' questions, benefits changes, manager changes. What's our policy on this? How do I get expense support? We had a team like many other organizations of employees and shared services that would support and answer these questions as they came in. As AI started to answer these better and better, we were seeing like a doubling in productivity of this organization. So instead of one shared service employee supporting 400 employees, they were now able to support a thousand because we deflected a lot of the simple work away from them. What I find fascinating about this example, it was cool to see the product.

24:15Brandon Roberts: It was cool to see, you know, the increase in productivity, very measurable gain. But we didn't just like squeeze productivity. We didn't cut costs. What we decided was we were going to change their role. We were going to take these employees and say, okay, we don't need as many of you answering questions. We're going to reinvest you back in the AI and making it better. Your job is to make the data better. It's to make sure that employees' questions get answered. It's to understand the technology and how it works. And so we took some of the productivity gain. We reinvested in that. And then we also upskilled a few people who are in these roles.

24:48Brandon Roberts: So we took them from the shared service role to kind of like an entry-level HR business partner. So they understand our policies. They understand how to work with employees. These are skills that are valuable. It's just the work is different. And that's where that example and living that in real life is a lot of what Jackie and I talked about earlier on, like why this is a human transformation. It's not just a technology. We could have just implemented the technology and let it go. You have to figure out how work is going to change and how we're going to redesign roles. So that was like the first time.

25:22Brandon Roberts: There was like the technology side of it, which I think clear early on. And that was like the first time we saw it come to life. You mentioned in your good news stories, this new way of working to where you have HRBPs teamed up with somebody that's technical. Is that right? Or is it with an agent? yeah so there's a couple things going on so so i was talking specifically about my function so my function that the group that i lead basically brings together hrbps analytics technology and ai transformation teams into a single organization to try to support all these transformations that are happening across the business and then i think there's a whole body of work that i think we're going to talk about with like how agents are actually supporting hr business partners to do their work more effectively.

26:13Well, let's start with how this shows up throughout the business. Are there any stories that you're able to share where an HRVP and somebody that has more of the AI talent and whoever else is on your team, how they've teamed up to help somebody in the business?

26:32Brandon Roberts: Yeah, I love that. So I'll talk about a recent example. Engineering, software engineering is changing substantially as a result of agents. And more and more, the actual work you're doing to develop software products is less about how well you know how to write in a specific language or code, more about can you control agents, assess, understand the requirements, and make sure that what comes out of it is good. Validate, again, going back to the judgment piece versus is the technology piece. Work's changing. So we realized that means different skills. It means a different profile that we're hiring from.

27:14Brandon Roberts: And so the HRBPs who supported this function work together with the business leader. And then we have an expert around AI transformation and work design, brought those four people together and says, okay, work's going to change. How we deliver software is going to change, you know, do we need a new role? Like, is this actually a new role? Or is this just like kind of an upskilling of our current talent? We decided it's actually like a different profile. It's a completely different role than the way that software engineers have delivered work. Okay, what happens next? Do our peers have this role?

27:47Brandon Roberts: You know, what's the compensation implications? How do you make sure to support this, these people with the right tools and technology working with our IT organization? So it's highly cross-functional, But our view is that HRVPs should have a really critical role to play in thinking through all these people components of it. That's an example. There's stuff happening in HR. There's stuff happening across the enterprise in the same way. I have to say that before I joined full-time at Playhead, I was an operations and strategy advisor, really just focusing on go-to-market sales stuff. And it was the first time I've been exposed to an engineering team in the AI era.

28:33And I have to say that what I saw and experienced and continue to see every day, because head of engineering is a bot called Ludwig, and it's dropping things into our Slack. And it's just amazing. And it's constantly coding. And we're still small. So we have full transparency. And it wasn't until that moment that I was like, oh, wow. I thought these things were happening. And so now when, you know, I feel like there's going to be a future moment for like all employees. Like there's going to be a similar effect in all other departments where like the tech is kind of integrated the right way or like in a scalable way.

29:18And things really just start to like be reimagined. Yeah. Yeah. And, and so your comment about like focusing on engineering, I've just been thinking about like the last like two months of my life, just like observing this. And, and I spent a lot of time in the stack and I spent a lot of time talking about AI for HR. And so how do you think companies can help employees and help just the workforce understand the actual change that's happening? Because I think there's like the lagging tail is the ROI. Like are we seeing ROI on our internal AI investments? But then there's like this macro view of like, oh shit, regardless of what our ROI numbers – I don't know why I can't say ROI today.

30:05But regardless of our ROI numbers, like there are like massive leaps and bounds happening in other places. And so does that make any sense to you? How much compensation risk do you think is hiding in your spreadsheets right now? For a lot of people teams, comp has gotten way more complex than the system supporting it. You got merit cycles, bonuses, incentive plans, approvals, benchmarking, pay equity, transparency requirements. And somehow, a lot of it is still being managed through Excel, manual uploads, or HRIS modules that weren't really built for this level of complexity. And you know, that's all fine and dandy until there are three versions of the same comp file, or one person becomes the single source of truth, or leadership asks why a pay decision was made, and the answer is harder and harder to explain.

30:58That's where BCom comes in. BCom is a purpose-built compensation platform for organizations managing complex pay programs, especially those teams that I was just referring to that have outgrown what spreadsheets can comfortably handle. It helps people and total rewards leaders run complex comp cycles at the speed of business, connect compensation, performance, and pay equity in one place, create clear governance with clear audit trails, and use AI responsibly with humans still in control of the decisions. If your comp strategy is getting harder and harder to manage, Be Calm is worth checking out.

31:35You can learn more at be calm.com slash MPL. That's B-E-Q-O-M dot com slash MPL.

31:43Brandon Roberts: Yeah, yeah. And I think we were going to talk about this, so I'll jump to it now. But like, to me, the first step in that process is really to understand within your organization, because every organization is different. Where is AI going to impact roles, tasks that you do today? So we did this exercise like early on, probably 2023, 2024, that we still use and still keep updated. We take every role in our company and say, what do you spend time on? What are the tasks? And then how likely is AI to augment that task? And there's third party data that you can get that says, all right, if you're spending time on reporting or analytics, that's highly likely to be solved by AI.

32:24Brandon Roberts: And so we get this view, we call it the AI heat map, but it's a view of where do we think that the technology is really going to transform roles. And the truth is, like, when we did this analysis, 100 % of roles were impacted. There's not a single role in our company that doesn't have some level of impact for me. I think that's probably not surprising. But what it does do is sort of focus your efforts. Like, the engineer is like a key place where you need to, you know, invest. There's going to be a change in how they deliver work, a change in the skill sets needed, all of that. So it gave us like a little bit of a roadmap that we could use to start that process.

33:02Brandon Roberts: And it also helps to your point, like, if we were getting a lot of questions from employees about like, what does my role look like in the future, right? People are nervous, they've identified as, you know, as doing a specific role or specific task for a long time in their career. and we could at least say, look, like there's a proportion of your job that AI may do, but these are the things that we think are uniquely human that you're going to continue to do in the future. So that AI heat map told us where to invest, where to put our resources. And it also gave us an answer to employees' questions to say, you know, this is what your work looks like in the future.

33:38And I think that helps bring people along.

33:41Brandon Roberts: It's not as scary as like, you know, know, AI is going to just transform your job. No, these are the tasks we want you to be spending your time on. I think that's been really helpful. And was this like a, you know, web page that you created with all of the roles in the business where there were explanations that anybody could see? Or as a person in one of those roles, are you just receiving like, you know, what the report came back with for you? Yeah. So we left it up to the business. We did not open it up to everybody, but HR business partners had it to support the entire organization. And as these topics came up, if a business leader was really concerned about it, we'd give them access to the information so that they can share it with their teams.

34:22Brandon Roberts: And I think it just gave directionally, this is where we're going. It's not perfect, right? It's not going to tell you all the detail of exactly what the roles look like in the future. But I think in instances where we shared it with employees, it was positively received. And sorry if I missed this, was this a homegrown tool or was this something that you bought externally that your team's still using? Yeah, so we took external like third-party data. We used a tool called Pearson Fathom that was around for a while. And then we've used other third-party data providers over the years just to make it better or kind of cross-reference.

34:58Brandon Roberts: And then we've also done a little bit of customization internally where we feel like there's something unique about our roles. So it's a little bit of a combination, But basically, the output is more or less, it's actually part of, we'll talk about data agent in a little bit, which is our agent that helps summarize this data. But if you go in and you talk to data agent, you say, what's how much of a software engineering job is likely to be impacted by AI in the next three years, it'll give you a breakdown. Here's the tasks that are likely to change from it. And so that's a tool that, again, our HR business partners can use to go have conversations with their leaders.

35:32And so there is kind of multiple scenarios that could play out. There are scenarios and where like the scope of work that Steven's responsible, that like chunks or pieces of that are going to be automated. and then there's like scenarios that are probably more like bigger impact to the role itself where like oof yeah we used to need SDRs but like now you know we have an agent that's doing all the scraping and doing this and doing that and it's connected to all of our you know our sales tech stack so how have did were you able to organize that like because the heat map gives like a great kind of overarching lens and it can show you like, all right, maybe this is how we start to, let's get feedback from the business.

36:22And maybe this is how we start to prioritize things. But then like the devil's in the detail, like, okay, we're in, we're in the red zone of one of the heat that, you know, really hot areas, you know, can you take us through kind of the process that y 'all went through from there that, you know, that you've seen work well from there in terms of redesigning. And it is definitely a, that heat map is not a solution. It's a, it's an input to

36:48Brandon Roberts: a strategy, right? It's a way for us to understand where we maybe should spend more time or where we think work is going to significantly change, but I totally agree with you. So like, generally, the way we approach this is we look at a few different things. So one is our AI control tower. AI control tower is sort of how we run AI internally as a company. Every single AI tool or use case we have that is impacting employees, I can go in there, I can see, okay, this is how many people are using it. Here's where AI is really being leveraged across the company. So if we have an AI-assisted coding tool, I can tell you how many people are using it, what functionality they're using, all of that.

37:28Brandon Roberts: That is one signal. So the AI heat map is a signal. If I see, for example, a specific role is using a technology, you know, the AI-assisted coding as an example, like that can be a signal to say, hey, we need to go in and really think about is this work changing, right? Like so you use the technology as a signal, you take the work as a signal. And then we bring together, again, HR business partners, someone with experience in role redesign and workforce planning, and then AI transformation experts. and we put them in like a tiger team and we go out to the business where we think it's important and we work with them to say, do we need a new operating model?

38:05Brandon Roberts: Do we need a new org structure? Do we need to create a new role? Like the example I talked about with AI platform software engineer. I think one of the things that is complicated about this AI transformation is it's different. You know, like every single one of this, like these examples that we're talking about, they're different, right? You have to go in and understand exactly what this means for your overall go-to-market motion. You know, how does that change? So it's not as simple as just like, this is the equation to do the transformation, but we look for different ways to get signal and to know where to invest our time and resources from a transformation perspective.

38:41And so you mentioned earlier data agent, or am I getting that right? Tell us more about that.

38:48Brandon Roberts: Yeah, so this is more like internally to how we're supporting our HR business partners, which is near and dear to my heart, as you can imagine. So we have a product that ServiceNow builds called EmployeeWorks. I talked about earlier kind of what ServiceNow does. EmployeeWorks is our single front door. And if so, an employee needs any information, they go there, they can get any information they need. If it's finance, HR, IT, legal, you name it, right? So that's sort of where all of our employees start. And then underneath that, this EmployeeWorks orchestrates agents to help us get work done. And we've been building these agents and connecting it to EmployeeWorks.

39:24Brandon Roberts: So I kind of describe them as Lego bricks that are helping you do certain things or tasks that you used to have to do manually. So let me tell you like a story that I think makes this really real. So I had an HR business partner who was in a leadership team offsite. They're sitting around the table. They're talking about what's preventing them from being successful in their organization. And the leader says, hey, I think we have way too much complexity. We're too slow. We're not moving fast enough as an organization. and I want to understand what's driving that and what the different causes of that are.

40:00Brandon Roberts: Historically, what happens is that HREP would take that as an action item. They'd go meet with six or seven different teams, your people analytics team. You'd get data on your employee survey and what your employees are saying. You'd go talk to a third-party research company about what are best practices for removing complexity. Our view is that a lot of what AI agents are allowing now is that you can do this in the room and get this data in real time. So we built a few different agents. It's not one agent. One of them is data agent. This is pretty simple. Like, hey, I think they're worried about complexity.

40:40Brandon Roberts: What's the spans and layers of this organization? Give me a view of the org chart. Are there any concerning areas around number of employees? Are we growing in certain areas? You can ask all those questions and get data that informs that conversation. Similarly, we have an engagement agent that will go to our employee voice survey and summarize that data. Tell me what employees are saying about complexity in this person's organization. What sort of feedback do they have? And so you start to imagine, right, like these different ways of orchestrating agents that are doing work that you've historically relied on people for and the people spend more time building the agents, making sure the underlying infrastructure is set up And so that's where we're trying to go with Data Agent and with a number of other agents that are supporting our HR business partners and the overall HR organization.

41:31Brandon Roberts: A single orchestrated layer, so they all start in the same place. And then, you know, each of these does sort of a different task that helps execute the work. One of my favorite go-to phrases when I ran an engagement survey company was that HR is data rich, but insights poor. Like, of course, they're outliers. Like there were some that were like, you know, abysmal, like worse than poor. And there are some that like did okay or too great. But the vast majority of organizations, you know, lots of data, little insights. And, you know, and that, how do you find a bias to action or the ability to act when like you, you can't even get past like that insights hurdle.

42:20And what I love about what I'm hearing is like, you do that with an orchestration layer, like, you know, that that's an agents that are specifically built to analyze to go deep on that data, which in many cases, like you have years and years and years of pulse. and engagement survey data or just like people data. Like there's so much that you can tap into. And this seems to streamline, if I'm understanding that correctly. Yeah, yeah.

42:48Brandon Roberts: That's exactly it. And I think there's a huge reskilling component to this. This is like, you know, all of these are just examples that are happening all over the company. But like if now the person who, as an HR business partner, maybe didn't spend a lot of time converting data to insights to recommended actions now has to like build that skill. So, you know, obviously HRVPs, there are HRPs that already have that skill, but some do not, right? And so these technologies are allowing us to have this information at our fingertips. And then we need to reskill and upskill so that we can really use it effectively and to get to the right outcome as a business.

43:28And that's been a big learning.

43:30Brandon Roberts: And we're still trying to like figure out how do we make sure that even if you, you know, you can get data and get the wrong insight. How do we make sure everybody's understanding exactly what they're looking at, that we all have this like common understanding of what the insight means. So that's, that's something we're still working on. And again, it's just like a perfect example of how we need to upskill in almost every, every role today. Yesterday, we did an episode with somebody named Jessica Zvon. Do you know her? So she wrote a, she wrote a book called built for people maybe like four or five years ago.

44:05And her whole thing is running your people team like a product team. Freaking genius. She's awesome. She's one of our collaborators. And so we do a monthly newsletter with her and we have her on the podcast probably like once every few weeks. And so yesterday she was walking us through her vision for HR and going forward and how she believes there's going to be three archetypes. There's going to be like the coaches, there's going to be the architects, and then there's going to be the, Stephen, help me out. What was the third one? I was hoping you weren't going to put me on the spot. I can't remember.

44:47But it sounds very similar to the vision you're casting for HR at ServiceNow. And so, yeah, what are like the, We've talked about HRBPs, but what do you see the archetypes of HR roles looking like going forward? Yeah.

45:04Brandon Roberts: And I am a passionate believer in product mindset as a skill of the future. I'm sure that's what she was referencing as well. We have a product organization in my team who's thinking that way. We have true product managers, people who have thought about this technology. So I love that generally. We've actually been talking about, and I think there's articles externally that talk about the same thing, but this has always resonated with me. This concept of people strategists, which is really like the evolution of an HR business partner into someone who is doing what we just talked about, which is like really informing the strategy and being a leader.

45:42Brandon Roberts: There's people technologists, which I think is going to be an increasing, increasing large proportion of our HR organization. people who figure out how all these things fit together to drive outcomes and then people scientists which I think you know these are sort of like the deep level of expertise I still think you're going to need some of those maybe fewer than we have today but I think those three profiles end up being what an HR organization does and I think in general this is probably a generalization But there are going to be less archetypes than we've had in the past. I feel really clear on that.

46:20Brandon Roberts: It's exactly the way they're organized. We'll see it play out. But strategists who's helping really transform a business using all the technology that's available to us, technologists who are building everything that needs to be able to do that, and scientists for those areas, you need really deep expertise. Almost exactly what she said. I found my notes. So the first bucket are like strategists slash coaches, the second bucket architects. So the people building the technology and putting all the Lego pieces together. The third, which was different than yours, was those thinking about the physical experience.

46:57And sorry, Stephen, I cut you off. I know you were coming off mute. No, no, no. It's interesting. And, you know, I think that, you know, it's going to be so, I'm so excited to just see what, how these traditional constructs are just going to be, you know, reimagined, like the, including the fundamental construct of like work. You know, what is work? How do we define it? How is it measured? How is performance related to this unit of work, you know, assessed, reviewed, you know, how do we promote based on that performance? say it's like so fascinating but i realize we are like these hours just blow by but before i forget we absolutely need to introduce you to jesse in addition to just being an acclaimed author and like like-minded as you like for some reason as soon as you said that daniel i was like yeah brandon and jesse like i y 'all i think y 'all would y 'all would have fun chatting so we'll broker an intro there earlier I mentioned like this personal belief that like I don't know that LinkedIn is this like house of mirrors right now of like content AI generated content that is being like tweaked and then like deflected like people seeing oh this post is going viral so I'm gonna just like re put that post through AI and regenerate and so I just I don't know I still don't have the right words to describe it, but it just doesn't feel, it's incongruent with what I'm experiencing in the real world.

48:30And in the show notes, I see that you put together an AI playbook. And so, you know, I would love to be able to do something. I just don't have the experience of having transformed. And Daniel knows I tried to go get that job for like nine months. I was like convinced I'm going to be a transformation agent. We're like human. We're getting in a company, like doing these great things. You've actually done that. And so like, tell us about the playbook. What, like, what kind of brought you or inspired you to, to even want to create a playbook? What does it look like? Tell us more.

49:06Brandon Roberts: Yeah. So one of the parts I love about my job is I also get to talk about, like, talk to our service now's customers about the transformations they're going on. And so I get brought in to sort of like just share best practices with our customers. And, you know, we were starting to have these really early conversations in 2023 and in 2024. And we were going through all this stuff. We were doing the AI heat map. We were trying to understand work. We were trying to like solidify our own positioning on like, you know, what's going to happen to work as a result of this. And Jackie and I just had a conversation and said, let's try to spell out what HR's role in this transformation should be.

49:46Brandon Roberts: We believe this is a human shift, not a technology shift. We believe that passionately. OK, that's great. Sounds great as a soundbite. What does that mean? What does HR actually need to do to support the organization? So we built this playbook to really help navigate that and to also just spell out some of the things that have worked for us internally. So we've broken into like three sections. The first one's like build an AI powered HR function. So this is a lot of what we just talked about. What do you need to do to make HR itself more effective using AI? So sort of like your role within HR to make it better.

50:23Brandon Roberts: And then the second and third piece are more about how you help the organization transform. And to me, there's like two pieces to that. So first is everybody agrees there's a huge reskilling challenge. I call me naive, but I believe there's going to be plenty of work. I think the question is, do the skills that we have map to the work that needs to get done? So if you believe that to be true, the big challenge is just can we reskill the workforce effectively in time as AI changes work? And so we've done a lot. ServiceNow University, we've invested a lot in ways to build skills. And so we wanted to share that.

50:58Brandon Roberts: We shared kind of how we're reskilling and upskilling. And then the last piece is like the transform the workforce piece, which is you can implement the technology, you can have all the right skills, but then you need to change the operating model, you need to change how organizations are organized, you need to create new roles, how do you actually help the organization do that. And so all of this was meant to kind of really spell out, hopefully, in like a very, like I'm like a very tactical person. I don't want to hear like the sound bites. I want to see like what work did you actually do? So we created the playbook to really help people get started on that journey.

51:35It almost reminds me of when Darren Murph was at, was he at GitLab or GitHub? I always get those two confused. and he was the head of remote and they open sourced their full playbook for running a remote company. And so where can people find this? Is it publicly available on the website? Yeah, yeah.

51:56Brandon Roberts: ServiceNow AI transformation playbook and it's the first thing that'll show up. Yeah, Jackie and I are the authors. We partnered with like Ali K. Miller and a few other folks on it as well. So yeah, readily available. So you can't find me, but last question before we go to rapid fire, I know you do a lot of podcasts and writing and you're on LinkedIn and I'm sure you get a lot of people reaching out asking to pick your brain. Like what's the question that you're not getting that you wish people would ask you? When I think about our recent humans, times, machines, conversations that we're having with CHROs, there's one theme that keeps coming up.

52:36The vision is clear. The pressure is real. but the roadmap is a little bit less clear. It's one thing to talk about the future of work. It's another to sit down with your CEO and say, here's how work, the workforce, and our organization really need to change. But I get it. There are a lot of difficult questions that you need to answer. Like, what work should we redesign? How will AI reshape roles and careers? What kind of organization do we need to move faster? And these are exactly the questions explored in Deloitte's latest Human Capital Trends Report. There's some interesting findings in there.

53:13The report shows that we're no longer balancing tensions. We're at a tipping point. The report brings together insights from thousands of leaders and explores how organizations can build a human edge. It's about moving beyond simply having humans and machines to creating a system where their capabilities multiply. It looks at how companies are redesigning work for this new future, how to shift from a mindset of cost efficiency to want to value creation and how to move from static plans to dynamic orchestration of talent and technology. In other words, it helps turn big future of work conversations into practical leadership questions for a world that won't sit still.

53:51If you're thinking about how your organization evolves in the age of AI, go check it out. It's a great read. I read it a couple of times. So if you want to learn more, you can find the link in the show notes.

54:02Brandon Roberts: That's a great question. I think there's a couple. Can I say two things? Sure, yeah. I think just as a general observation, people are way too focused on technology and not enough on the skills of the people to leverage and integrate it into their work. So that's like fundamental to my belief is that we need to be talking more about exactly what we just talked about. If you're an HRBP, you used to have these skills. You used to do this work. We've now completely changed that. We've armed you with these incredible tools. Now you can influence the business directly. Do you have the ability to transform that data into a meaningful strategy and influence the business?

54:45Brandon Roberts: You know, definitely some HRBPs for sure have that skill, some may not. And so how do we build that within the organization? Some of it comes from practice, but I think it's just one of those topics that people say reskilling and upskilling a lot, but then you say like, how are you in your day-to-day work actually helping people to do this? and it frequently loses muster. So I'd focus more on the reskilling part in general. And then I think the other part, the other idea that I'm really interested in right now is how do you get people to step away from their identity of what they do in work? So this is maybe like a little bit more meta, more societal, but like, to me, part of the challenge we're facing is that we're asking people who chose a role, chose a career, who have spent their time doing certain work to work completely differently.

55:37Brandon Roberts: And people identify with that role and with what they've done historically. And so I think there's this big, how do you create this ability to embrace the change? How do you create a culture that doesn't reject, it almost embraces the challenge to really change? Because it is very fundamental, right? Like I chose organizational psychology because I love data and analytics and I love understanding how people work. If you then told me I have to be at something else, like, I don't want to, like, I chose this because this is my, this is what I want to do. Like, this is my role. And I think, unfortunately, like, fortunately or unfortunately, we're, we're sort of, people are being put into that box as, as work changes.

56:20Brandon Roberts: So I think how do we bring people along in that change is critical. Yeah, totally agree. and like as quickly as we as early as we can so it's not like the the consequences of the change happening and people not being prepared and not having been open-minded to understand like the realm of possibilities that are now available to us right and rather than like head in the sand um like that that to me is what i fear the most because it just feels like there's a segment of people out there that are just not still not engaging. And I get it because it's, these are real fears. Well, Brandon, we could just, I feel you're one of those people that I feel like we could just keep talking to and talking to and talking to.

57:06We're right about an hour or close to an hour, which means we need to wrap up. We have a couple traditions before we end the pod. Next up is what we call rapid fire questions. The same set of questions we ask every guest, We'll make changes every now and then. You ready to do this?

57:23Brandon Roberts: Ready. Let's do it. Awesome. First question, what's one piece of advice you'd give to someone starting in HR today? So my general career advice is what I said earlier. Find interesting work, find leaders who believe in you, and chase change, growth, chaos, however you describe that. But the other thing I would say, specifically for HR, learn about the other parts of the business. I think I didn't do that enough early in my career, and now you're catching up to understand what everybody does. Chase chaos. I feel like we heard some similar version of that from, was it maybe Molly Graham this week, Stephen?

58:01Yeah. If your team gave you a superpower nickname, what would it be and why?

58:08Brandon Roberts: I'll tell you the feedback I most normally get is that I'm just calm. Like I stay calm no matter what's happening around in the organization, which I think is a superpower. But also I'll go with the connector. You know, I'm able to like connect with people and understand across the organization. My ultimate pet peeve is silos. I just think we're all better off if we work together. Yeah. One of the flaws of the traditional like work org design silos. Next question. What's a strategy or practice from another company you'd love to steal? Yeah. Yeah, my first my initial thought is, you know, I'm a huge fan of Ali K.

58:49Brandon Roberts: Miller, so not another company, but I think she's got some amazing ways for people who like hear about agents, but haven't gone in and actually like tried it themselves. I feel like we need everybody, not just my service now, but everybody to just go and start playing around like we talked about the whole citizen development concept. So I think the practice I would take was just, even if people can't do it internally to companies, because sometimes there's complexity around data and governance and all sorts of things, make sure they understand enough to build an agent in their personal life, so that they understand how the technology works.

59:27Was that Allie Miller or Kay Miller?

59:30Brandon Roberts: Allie Kay Miller. Allie Kay Miller. Okay, cool. And last rapid fire, who do we need to have onto the show next? I'll go. Oh, actually, you know, we were talking about how important reskilling is. Janie Housen ServiceNow, she is leading our learning. She is thinking so creatively about how you create simulations to build these AI skills, which I find, like, totally fascinating, getting away from, like, classroom training and really figuring out how you help to build the skills of the future. So I'm a big fan, and she's got some interesting stuff going on. Well, we did it, y 'all. We're at the end.

1:00:08And I'm kind of bummed at beginning this one. It's been a lot of fun. But we have the final tradition is what we call one word of race close. Just as we reflect on the last hour and change, you know, a way to wrap things up. It doesn't have to be one word. It can be a few words. And we prefer for our guests to go first.

1:00:25Brandon Roberts: Okay. I was thinking about this one. Like optimism is what I'm going to go with. I feel like it's such an interesting, crazy moment. we as HR are the function that can help the organization navigate what we're going through we manage through change we build skills like this is this is our moment so I feel like it's it is scary it's scary for everyone scary for for me too how much change is happening but I think we have to be you know optimistic for that we can do this and I think we we've got a playbook we can figure this out I'm gonna say HR 2030 I feel like a lot of the ideas that you're sharing, it's going to take a while for companies to adopt them.

1:01:09ServiceNow seems to be on the cutting edge and doing some next level shit. And so that's why I'm going to say HR 2030. Awesome. I love that. I'm going to go with chase chaos, chasing the chaos. I forget what you said, Brandon. I feel like that's super applicable in my life right now. I told Daniel, I was like, absolutely not. I'm not going to go work for an early stage company. Like I just do not have that desire. And here I am in the pre-revenue world leading sales. So I'm going to chase the chaos.

1:01:43Brandon Roberts: I love it. I think it gives you so many opportunities, you know, like you just learn more. You do. It's fun. It's fun. But it's you got to be built a little different for it. So, well, it's been an absolute blast, totally lived up to its billing. having the Brandon Roberts from ServiceNow on the pod. Thank you so much. You're part of the NPL fam now. A lot of our guests come back. So we would be honored to have you back if someday you're interested in doing that. But thank you so much. It's been a blast. Love that. Bye, guys. Bye, guys. Thanks for tuning in to another episode of the Modern People Leader.

1:02:21We really, really appreciate it. And if you enjoyed the show, please leave us a five-star rating. It would mean the world to us. and connect with us on LinkedIn. We want to know what you think about the show, and you can find links to both of our profiles in the show notes. Thanks again for listening, and see you on the next episode.