Larry Emond: Okay. Hi, everybody. I will introduce myself third before we get into some topics. But, knowing that so many of you are wondering how you get into these seats at some point in your career, I thought that we’d actually switch off of AI for a second. And they represent two very different archetypes of a large-company CHRO, in terms of their background. And so I wanted you guys to introduce, you know, how you got to where you are, a little bit of the journey. And Lindsay, I mean, I'm sorry, not Lindsay, Lucien, we'll start with you. 

Lucien Alziari: Good afternoon. So, I've been a chief HR officer for 20 years, which is kind of scary when you say that. Grew up at PepsiCo. Lived in, so came to the States 30-plus years ago. Lived in Vienna, Middle East. Came back, ended up as head of talent and a big sort of HR partner, business partner. I've been a chief HR officer now in three different companies. So eight years with Avon in the New York area, five years with A.P. Moller-Maersk, the big industrial company in Copenhagen, in Denmark, and now seven and a half years at Prudential in New York.

Lindsay Pattison: So I'm the opposite. I've been a CHRO, or chief people officer we call it, at WPP for 10 months, nine and a half maybe. So, when I hear some of the words described today, I still kind of go, I don't entirely know exactly what you're talking about, but I'm doing a good job of pretending that I do. Lots of chat about skills is something that everyone seems to do in HR. But I've been with WPP for 14 years in various roles, the CEO of a media agency in the UK, then the global media agency CEO, chief transformation officer of Group M, our media business, and then chief client officer at WPP for six years, and took this role on. So really what I bring is deep knowledge of WPP, shallow knowledge of HR, but the combination is WPP is a people-led business. You know, 60-70% of our outgoings, or our costs, or our assets are people. So understanding people and understanding how people can work across the businesses is hopefully the lens that I bring as I learn more about the skill set of HR. 

Lucien Alziari: And for those that want to be CHRO, the first 17 years are the hardest.

Larry Emond: So to give you the data on the archetype, if you look at the big-company CHRO all over the world, Lucien is at about 30%, and that's the kind of career HR person. What's interesting about him, too, is that if you look at his original jobs within HR, of the 30% that do become a CHRO that are largely lifetime HR, the most common pattern today, he did it a long time ago, is the talent generalist pattern that you both had.

And that's kind of today very much the route to being a CHRO, if you've been largely a lifer. Lindsay's in the 10%, it's actually a little more than 10% of people that were never in HR until the day they became CHRO. That's actually, more common the larger and more global you are. And there are some companies in the world that have systematically done it that way. WPP was not that. This was a unique situation where they decided to do that. But two very, very different archetypes. 

Real quick, myself, I was at Gallup for a long time and three years ago joined Modern to start building a different kind of talent advisory. But I accidentally fell into something about a decade ago, where since that time I've managed what I believe is the world's largest CHRO community.

And somehow I've done about 400 in-person meetings of CHROs around the world. I met Lucien here in New York, I think it was November of 2018. You came to a meeting hosted by Diane of IBM, who you guys met earlier. And met Lindsay about a year ago, or less than that. She's hosted a meeting, she's hosting another one in January in London.

And so I do these meetings, but relevant to this topic is this. The main way we've done these meetings over the years is, you get 10 or 12 CHROs that can make a day or a day and a half. Then, after you get them, you ask them what they want to talk about. What do you want to put on the agenda? So it's been this you know, 400 meetings of a big focus group on what's on their minds.

And if you look at what they want to talk about over the years, you think about all the potential topics, and you can imagine what those would be: DEI, the future of the HR function, the future of the CHRO, HR analytics, how do we develop leaders, succession, blah, blah, blah. The single most requested meeting topic by a long shot has been something in the area of HR technology and automation.

And that's because there's so much of it, right? What do we choose? A few years ago it was, do I choose Workday or SAP? Are we going to have less technology? No, actually we're going to proliferate. That's not very good, but here it's happening. What are you doing? All those kinds of conversations. 

But I'll remember the meeting, if you go back before a couple of years ago, in all those conversations, let's say 200 different meetings where that was on the agenda, AI didn't come up. It just didn't come up. It wasn't there yet. And so you didn't hear about it. And then I was in a meeting in Zurich in April of last year. Big global manufacturing CHROs. Tina, your CHRO, Charise, of Schneider was there. 

[AI] wasn't on the agenda. We had a different agenda, and somebody said, “Have you guys started messing with this OpenAI chat?” And it took over the meeting. And ever since then, about 40 meetings since then, it's always the number-one requested thing on the agenda. And I've learned to put it at the start of a half a day because it'll usually move out the second agenda because we'll just keep talking about it.

So it's been kind of a fascinating thing, and I think it will continue to dominate. All right. We've heard a lot of detailed things today. Thought we'd back out and say, you guys have seen a lot of things in your careers. This is a big one. But maybe we'll start with you, Lucien. If you think out a decade, and you think about how AI is going to impact the future of work, the future of the workforce broadly speaking, what are you, what are you thinking?

Lucien Alziari: I'm mostly thinking that I'll be playing golf somewhere, looking at what those CHROs are doing. But I've thought a lot about this. And, if I can, in order to go forward 10 years, I'm going to go back five years. Five years ago, this is sort of pre-pandemic, a number of us in the CHRO community were sort of intrigued with this idea of the future of work.

We were looking at the deconstruction of work, the reconstruction of work. It was all a bit clunky because you were basically sort of doing it by hand or by spreadsheet. COVID, the pandemic came along. Terrible experience for humankind. There were, though, a couple of silver linings on a very large cloud.

One of them was that we finally separated work from the workplace, right? Up until then, those two notions were sort of inextricably linked. People couldn't think of them as two different things. Once you can separate work from the workplace, that opens up a lot more creativity in terms of potential thinking about how that gets done in the future.

We then had a couple of years where it was, frankly, a bit disappointing because the whole debate was about when does the work get done? So the terrible, you know, how many days a week do you come into the office discussions. And then where: so it's sort of virtual or in-office, how many days a week. But nobody was talking about the work.

Alright. I think the future for HR, the next great competence for HR, is in the work. And in my career, I'm lucky. I'm a talent guy in an era where talent has been kind of the core skill set of CHROs. That won't go away. But I'm really intrigued now about the ability to optimize the integration of talent, the work, purpose, technology, right?

Can I have one minute just to talk about, I was really struck by a case study on nursing. There's a world shortage of nurses. Somebody, it's actually RAND that I think published the paper, looked at the work of nurses. Why do people go into the nursing profession? Because they want to care for people. How much of their time do you think they spend doing work that they would associate as caring for people? Very little. All right. So you study the work. So what have you just done? You've deconstructed a job into its component tasks. You've looked at the individual, you've kind of deconstructed them down to the skills that they have, and which are the ones that add most value. And then you've identified their purpose. And my guess is each hospital system that nurses work for has some kind of mission statement that talks about better outcomes for patients. So you've got organizational purpose, individual purpose, you've understood the work. Now, with the technology, you can re-sort that so that, in that role of nurse, you can maximize what's the work that is on-purpose for the individual, on-purpose for the organization, really plays to what they're best at.

And then everything else you have a choice. You can stop doing it. You can give it to somebody else who would see that as work that they really, really want to do. Or you can get it done through technology. And if you look at what we do in HR and organizations generally, we basically figure out what's the work that we need to do to take strategy and deliver outcomes for customers, right?

Nobody has a chief work officer. 

Larry Emond: It's a fascinating thought, chief work officers. Maybe a human gets this done. Maybe AI gets this done. Maybe we don't do it at all. But you're stepping back and eliminating only humans from the equation, which is really interesting. Any thoughts you have on this long-term impact?

Lindsay Pattison: Well, I've been listening all day, and I've been told by many people that trying to think about the future of work, certainly 10 years out, is completely useless. So I'm going to listen to a Noble winner who told us that. So, but just to build on Lucien's point, I think what was interesting, I heard a stat today, actually my CFO and I were texting about budget meetings next week and AI, future of the workforce planning, some work that we've done with actually Josh in the audience. So, interesting conversation. 

She sits on another board, and they just had some research back from using Copilot. It's not our company, but it's a company similar to ours. And they analyzed the time spent by people, and 14 percent of the time was spent with a client. Great, because it's a similar industry to ours, so it should be client focused.

70 percent was spent on internal meetings. So you do the math, and I'm like, when are they actually doing the work, to your point? What work do they think it is they're doing? So I think actually AI and tools that we have in AI will help us realize and really think hard about that. And I love the analogy of thinking, what's the company's purpose and your individual purpose, and then closing the gap with the work that is or is not being done in between. I think it's really interesting. 

Larry Emond: Let's take advantage of the fact that you've only been in the glory of HR for about 10 months. You were out in client-facing roles, transformation, you know, CEO of one of the agencies. Okay. So let's go outside of HR for a second. Because you guys are like 110,000 people. I think a total of a couple hundred different ad agency, PR firm brands, you’re the biggest in the world, etc. What is AI, do you think, going to do for all of that? Creative content, etc. What's going to happen there? 

Lindsay Pattison: We're six main agency brands, and we have 30 smaller ones, just to correct you, because we've been on a hard program of simplification.

But I was interested in, I don't know if Brent's still here, but I was scribbling notes because his five misperceptions of AI included number four, which he didn't go into, which was that generative AI is bad for content producers. So that would be really bad for WPP because we make stuff, like we make ads, and make content, we make PR. And he said that was a misperception. We believe it's a misperception. So we're thinking about how we use AI within our business, internally, but we're thinking mainly about how we use AI as a platform to deliver content, ideas, media to our customers. So we have a platform that thinks across strategy and planning, thinks about ideation, and thinks about content creation.

And the speed at which you can do stuff now is incredible. So I was thinking, I played around with a tool this morning. If you just think about every level of what you might do in a marketing funnel. So we have a tool called Headline Generator, which I hadn't used until this morning. But I thought, well, I'll have a go with that one.

So it's asked me what product I wanted to look into. I said health insurance. It asked me for a target audience. I said young families. And it asked me where they were in the funnel of awareness through to buying. And I said, okay, I'll say awareness. 

What was interesting was that it then gave me categories of different headlines. The first was fear of the unknown. The second was affordability. Next was specific benefits. And then a whole section on quizzes. Because if you have quizzes in headlines, people tend to respond to them. This took less than a minute. 

I'll give you three examples of fear of the unknown. These are headlines. You can judge how good AI is at creating them in under a minute. “Tiny Humans, Big Worries: Breathe Easy with Prudential Insurance,” blah, blah, blah. What I loved is, afterwards it told me why that was good. It said it's showing empathy for that target audience. The next one was, “Unexpected ER Issues: Don't Let Them Break the Bank.” The example there said, this is a specific pain point. And then the last one, “Superhero Parents Need Super Coverage.” And it was trying to say it understood how parents wanted to be perceived. So, not that great, but pretty good to do that in under a minute. 

So we're using it in every stage of our process. And we think it will, it really will transform what we offer clients. So we're creating platforms to enable our creatives to do better work. But I think what's important is, the AI is not creating the content. There is somebody that is using AI to create the content. And those are two quite different things.

Larry Emond: You made a comment to me when we were together last night, how you might over time kind of be like a SaaS platform that has all this functionality, and it allows your clients to get a lot done on their own. And then you come in when they need to figure some things out. 

Lindsay Pattison: All our clients think they're brilliant copywriters anyway, so we'll let them use the platform a bit. But then the onus is then on us to what is that extra level of creativity? What do we do with the time saved by the automation of tasks like those? How are we adding a special sauce? So why would people really pay for our services? So actually there's a lot of work going on. And I won't repeat all the words said today on upskilling and reskilling and higher-level tasks that we can now free people up to do to really add value.

Larry Emond: Bill mentioned earlier this morning, from Vanguard, the creative destruction concept and those two books on the innovator’s dilemma and the innovator’s solution. There's that point that, you know, you ought to be in the business of creatively destructing yourself because if you don't, someone else will.

And probably a big piece of this is how can AI help us do that and kind of help us rethink our business and repurpose it. Lucien, I'll go back to you. Okay, so we've been talking a lot about the possibilities, and we just talked a little bit about where could this go. But what do you worry about? Like, how could we misuse AI in a way that would not be helpful for work and workforce and the function of HR? 

Lucien Alziari: Yeah. I’d generalize a little bit, if I can, beyond just the topic of AI, because I think that there's a theme that I would like to convey. One is, it's interesting the way Larry introduced sort of two archetypes. One, I was accused of coming from within HR, and Lindsay had real jobs along the way and then is kind of on holiday. But I don't think of myself as an HR person. And I don't think my CEO thinks of me as an HR person. And so for those of you in the audience who do aspire to be CHROs, be a business person. And be steeped and curious about what makes your company win. And you happen to bring some expertise in talent and capabilities and culture, whatever, but at the end of the day, you wake up every day worrying about what makes my business win. So, a mistake would be, don't do that, right? That's one.

The second, that I think AI is the next version of, is: HR every couple of years makes an important input an outcome in itself, and it falls off the tracks. Is employee experience important? Sure it is. Is it the outcome of HR? Over my dead body. Why does it matter? Because it produces great performance. If we produce great performance, our companies win. You can take loads of themes over the years where all of these new discoveries about important new insights, they're really important inputs, but don't lose sight of the fact our job is to help our companies win. Our job is not to deploy AI in our companies. We have technology partners. Our job is to figure out what's going to make our company win. What are the problems that we need to solve? And now here is a tremendous new asset and resource that we can use to help us unlock those problems. 

It took me a year to figure that out. Because I literally did spend a year in meetings like this with peers, and we were all talking about how are we going to deploy AI? And I woke up one day and I thought, it's the wrong question. So that's what I wouldn't do. 

Larry Emond: Lindsay, what would you worry about other than that? Where could we go wrong with all this? 

Lindsay Pattison: Well, I think it was mentioned earlier on one of the panels, because LLMs are based on all the knowledge that's gone before, there's inherent bias built into the system. So when we're using AI to then, even when we're thinking about using AI within our own organization, we have to be careful and mindful of that. When we're producing content that goes out into the world, we have to be very careful because it's generally very biased against women or underrepresented groups. So understanding that, I think, is really important. 

I think AI, again, when I'm thinking about the content and what we put out, there was, I think it was a gentleman from Delta was talking about the challenges around data. I mean, there's a whole ton of information that's out there now that can be, that turns into deepfakes. So our CEO was deepfaked earlier in the year. It was in loads of newspapers around the world because it was a really, really impressive scam that voice cloned him. It was emailing employees using his face, using his voice, asking for details, asking for money. Very, very sophisticated. 

So I think when you're in the business of advertising and putting content back out there in terms of, again, to Lucien's point, the business that we're doing is we're trying to create brilliant marketing for our clients. Anything we do is in service of that. And we think about the use of AI. You know, advertising at its basic, has to be legal, decent, honest, truthful. And those are not four words that you naturally ascribe to AI, sadly, at the moment. So actually the ethics of AI and how you use AI, how you use it internally, because there are concerns about how you bundle that data with other people's data, and how you're going to use it externally, I think are really important conversations.

Larry Emond: Maybe just as a final thought, you commented a little bit on it before, Lucien, but, expand just a little more on how does all this change the future of the HR function itself? A little bit more on that. How might it look very different a decade from today than today? 

Lucien Alziari: Yeah, I personally believe that the fundamental role, if you believe my thesis, which obviously that's up for you to debate with yourself, but my thesis is: My job is talent and capabilities to win. I don't think that changes over the next few years. The context in which it gets delivered changes dramatically. The resources with which we can confront those issues going forward, I mean, they were a twinkle in our eye 15 years ago. Now you can do it. And you can do it in seconds. 

So that will not replace the fundamental curiosity about how does your business win, who do you compete against, all of those kinds of things. But when you've got those twinkles in your eye now about, well, what about this? Now you've got the ability to really make very, very fast progress against that. But I don't think it changes the fundamental role of a CHRO, if you believe that sort of fundamental premise, and I do. 

Lindsay Pattison: I mean, I agree. I think a CHRO is a strategic advisor. I always talk about the CPO, CFO, CEO being a triumvirate of how you make decisions. You can't leave the decisions to the CFO. You need to have the people lens applied to everything that you do. Because, certainly for us, and for most people, it's a people-based business. 

I think the other thing that will be different, or the thing that we need to think about as the conscience within our business, to some extent is, is the balance of humans and AI, and not letting one rush to overtake the other. Because there is still fear. There was a panel earlier about how we get ready. There are still people who are fearful of AI and fearful for their jobs. So our role is to ensure that people feel enabled to embrace the future, that they are AI optimists.

Someone talked earlier, I think Jennifer, about pilots, not passengers. So feeling you're in control of your own destiny. But managing that balance and having a culture that's optimistic about that balance but doesn't leave people behind, I think, is really important as you move forward. And I think the human skills as a leader in general become much more important. So compassion, courage, curiosity have been talked about a lot today. I think those are really, really important. 

And again, I loved the analogy when someone talked about, they were rereading Thinking Fast and Slow. Because sometimes our job is to slow things down, and think about things, and be that, I've said it again, the voice of conscience, which I wouldn't naturally say I am. But because technology moves so fast, we can rush towards it like the next gold rush. And actually being thoughtful about how we apply it in a balanced way is really important. I think it's incumbent probably on the people in this room. 

Lucien Alziari: If I could, one last sort of analog. So I grew up as a talent person, and it's been a talent era. I've been very lucky with that. But the key question in talent is: talent for what? Talent's not a generic. It's competitively defined. It's defined by your strategy.

Have the same question about technology: technology for what? The thing that brings together, for me, the talent and the technology is: What's the work that creates competitive advantage for your company? That actually is kind of the unifying measure now, which at the moment, nobody has that lens. 

Larry Emond: I'm going to keep us on time. Something occurred to me today when I was listening to everything. I've done a lot of advisory and coaching in my life. These days, it's mainly a combo advisory and coaching for new and first-time CHROs. But I've been around that field my whole career. And I was thinking about, for all of us and myself. Well, how should we use this just in general?

And one thought would be something you referenced. How can we all leverage AI to help us get a bunch of stuff done faster, better, more creatively, whatever, that allows us more time than maybe we've had in forever or ever, to just think, to be reflective, to be unhooked. None of us do that anywhere near enough.

And it could be that one of the great gifts of AI is to allow us to get more of that time in our life. I think we all know that'll make us a lot better at what we do, both professionally and personally. So maybe that's something to jump on. 

Lindsay Pattison: I agree. I mean, we were talking about capacity unlock and time, and I was saying, “Oh, what could we do with it?” And someone on the team said, “Well, maybe we could let people have lunch breaks.” I was like, “Oh yeah, good point.” 

Larry Emond: Like really, right? Well, thank you two. It's been a pleasure, my time with you guys. And thanks for showing up today and doing this.