AI and the Future of Work: Artificial Intelligence in the Workplace, Business, Ethics, HR, and IT for AI Enthusiasts, Leaders and Academics
00:05:35 · Dan Turchin, John Bruce
[00:05:35] S1: What's the humanness that you never be outsourced to bots? [00:05:39] S3: That's a really good question. I don't think, at least what I've seen so far, that their AI is at a place where it's capable capable of replacing just natural human curiosity. Right? You know, even when we're developing agents, like, we have to tell it, like, don't just accept the viewpoint I have, push back, pressure test. Right? Because if I don't, like, if we... We're building a a coworker for HR right now for HR leadership to use. And one of the pieces of feedback I got was like, this coworker thinks I'm a genius because every idea I says it's great. And so we have to, you know, force the AI to push back. And so that that skill of asking follow-up questions, of hearing something and what someone's saying that says, you know, you're telling me you're... You have an issue with a, but I really think your problem is three. Right? And I and I don't... I I I really hope at least because that's like the the skill I've used to differentiate myself in the in the marketplace. I really hope we can't replace that with AI because then I'm in trouble. But I think I think that's the skill. Right? That just... That wanting to understand, solve, suss, root out a problem. I I I I just... I don't think we're at a place where AI can do that.
00:07:18 · S2, Max Wessel
[00:07:18] S2: Next, we hear from Max Wessel, SVP of product at Workday, who leads the company's applications teams. Max explains how his team decides what to build from Aneel's mantra to run Workday like the world's largest startup, to why taste and judgment matter when it's easy to generate code. He also shares the origin story behind the events, big product announcements. [00:07:41] S4: I lead our applications teams across Workday, so all of the applications that, folks know and love. And what Aneel has really set out as a mantra is we wanna be the world's largest startup. We want clear accountability, we want clear direction, we don't want decision fatigue, we want to empower people to move fast and build new things. And a lot of what you saw in our keynote today at Rising was about just that. How do we... When we emancipate teams to focus on the most exciting use of the technology in front of us, they can create. Whether it's turning a performance conversation into an actual coaching and and development conversation through what we release with Sonic Coach, whether it's putting a team of analysts in your pocket by activating an agentic analytics system that's connected to your core. All of that is the work of teams that are empowered to move fast independently inside of Workday.
00:07:41 · Max Wessel, Dan Turchin
[00:07:41] S4: I lead our applications teams across Workday, so all of the applications that, folks know and love. And what Aneel has really set out as a mantra is we wanna be the world's largest startup. We want clear accountability, we want clear direction, we don't want decision fatigue, we want to empower people to move fast and build new things. And a lot of what you saw in our keynote today at Rising was about just that. How do we... When we emancipate teams to focus on the most exciting use of the technology in front of us, they can create. Whether it's turning a performance conversation into an actual coaching and and development conversation through what we release with Sonic Coach, whether it's putting a team of analysts in your pocket by activating an agentic analytics system that's connected to your core. All of that is the work of teams that are empowered to move fast independently inside of Workday. [00:08:41] S1: Some looking in from the outside would look at our roles as product people and say, must be easy because AI does all the work. It writes the code and expects the features and it even recommends what you should be doing more of. That's actually not the case. Talk about what's hard about your job and maybe even what's harder than it was in the past.
00:08:41 · Dan Turchin, Max Wessel
[00:08:41] S1: Some looking in from the outside would look at our roles as product people and say, must be easy because AI does all the work. It writes the code and expects the features and it even recommends what you should be doing more of. That's actually not the case. Talk about what's hard about your job and maybe even what's harder than it was in the past. [00:09:02] S4: There's a great book that was written, I don't know, twenty years ago. That was in the early days of the YouTube moment. And it was about what is creation look like for video in an era where anyone has the tools to build new content. And it was that contrarian position. The author, a woman named Anita Elberse, basically said, in an era where there is completely abundant long tail content, what we're gonna see is gravity to the things that are high quality. And I actually think we lost sight for a while there, that part of the act of product management is around understanding the problem, having the taste and judgment and the accountability to take a decision when it's very easy to generate code. It's very easy to create slap. And so more of the job is what product was always about, which is understanding what real problem are you solving in the world? How do you make something easy and delightful and intuitive for a human that interacts with it? And how do you focus on that very simple interaction making it real?
00:09:02 · Max Wessel, Dan Turchin
[00:09:02] S4: There's a great book that was written, I don't know, twenty years ago. That was in the early days of the YouTube moment. And it was about what is creation look like for video in an era where anyone has the tools to build new content. And it was that contrarian position. The author, a woman named Anita Elberse, basically said, in an era where there is completely abundant long tail content, what we're gonna see is gravity to the things that are high quality. And I actually think we lost sight for a while there, that part of the act of product management is around understanding the problem, having the taste and judgment and the accountability to take a decision when it's very easy to generate code. It's very easy to create slap. And so more of the job is what product was always about, which is understanding what real problem are you solving in the world? How do you make something easy and delightful and intuitive for a human that interacts with it? And how do you focus on that very simple interaction making it real? [00:10:16] S1: One of the things that I thought was most elegant about some of the new interfaces is that it felt like the right amount of UI, like the the the the right amount of conversational AI balance with the right amount of... I don't know if it's a traditional, but classic forms and classic UI. How do you think about the way to build agentic workflows and conversational AI in it... Right point
00:10:16 · Dan Turchin, Max Wessel
[00:10:16] S1: One of the things that I thought was most elegant about some of the new interfaces is that it felt like the right amount of UI, like the the the the right amount of conversational AI balance with the right amount of... I don't know if it's a traditional, but classic forms and classic UI. How do you think about the way to build agentic workflows and conversational AI in it... Right point [00:10:44] S4: in the workflow? So the cool thing about that UI that you saw today, it's it's all generative UI. And so we actually use the interaction with the agents in order to figure out what UI needs to be generated. One of the examples from today, we released a product called Workday Decision Intelligence. Workday Decision Intelligence is an agentic analytics tool. You could chat your way through data, but it's easier for humans to consume data in charts. And when somebody asks for a chart to be created and it comes out the way they want, in decision intelligence, you can save that as a playbook. And the next time you ask the question, when the agent goes through and does the analysis, understands the data relationships, and comes back with an answer, it'll be... Come back in that chart updated. And so we think a lot about how do we connect this incredible alien technology that is AI with all of the tools that we need to translate it into the way we consume information. You said something profound, more profound than I