AI, Wage Inflation, and the Future of Work with Alex Alonso, SHRM

In the latest SHRM-focused episode, we hear from SHRM’s Chief Data & Insights Officer, Dr. Alex Alonso.

As leader of SHRM’s Research & Insights business units, Alex's career portfolio has been based upon practical thought leadership designed to make better workplaces and to grow revenues.

Listen as we celebrate SHRM 2024 and discuss wage inflation, labor shortages, and AI.

Questions for Alex include:

• What can attendees expect at #SHRM24?
• At SHRM Annual, you'll be unveiling the findings from SHRM's 2024 State of the Workplace Study. Tell us about findings relating to wage inflation, labor shortages, and AI.
• Why is HR leading on AI?
• How will AI affect jobs?
• What should employees do to remain relevant in the workplace?
• How can employees upskill?
• What does ethical and responsible implementation of AI look like in the workplace?

More About Alexander Alonso, PhD

Alex's thought leadership has been recognized through various bodies including as an inaugural member of SHRM’s Blue-Ribbon Commission on Racial Equity in the Workplace, a coalition designed to foster equitable and inclusive cultures. His research has been featured in numerous media outlets including USA Today, NBC News, BBC, CNN, and more. He has served as a member of several speaker’s bureaus with more than 400 speaking engagements over the last decade.

His works have been recognized for their contribution to real-world human capital issues. They include being recognized with the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP’s) 2007 M. Scott Myers Award for Applied Research in the Workplace for developing the federal standard for learning and development of healthcare providers; a 2009 Presidential Citation for Innovative Practice by the American Psychological Association for designing performance management systems; and the 2013 SIOP Distinguished Early Career Contributions for Practice Award for extensive applied research on the link between human resource management and organizational sustainability.


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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:03

Welcome to the HR Chat Show, one of the world's most downloaded and shared podcasts designed for HR pros, talent execs, tech enthusiasts and business leaders. For hundreds more episodes and what's new in the world of work, subscribe to the show, follow us on social media and visit HRGazettecom and visit hrgazettecom.

Speaker 2: 0:26

Welcome to another episode of the HR Chat Show. Hello listeners, this is your host today, bill Bannop, and in this episode we're going to hear from SHRM's Chief Data and Insights Officer, my returning guest, the amazing Dr Alex Alonso. As leader of SHRM's Research and Insights Business Units, alex's career portfolio has been based upon practical thought leadership designed to make better workplaces and to grow revenues. Listen as we preview SHRM 2024 and discuss wage inflation, labour shortages and artificial intelligence. Alex, I almost got through that intro. How are you doing, nice to have you back on the show?

Speaker 3: 1:05

You know, bill, it's a pleasure to be with you here always and, more importantly, I'm so grateful that I have the opportunity to be with you today.

Speaker 2: 1:12

Well, back at you, sir. We appreciate your time. So, for those who haven't listened to your previous appearances on the show, why don't you start by taking a couple of minutes to reintroduce yourself and tell our listeners a bit more about your role over at SHRM?

Speaker 3: 1:27

Well, I think one of the things that I really enjoy about my role is that I get to play the role of chief data and insights officer.

Speaker 3: 1:34

A lot of people ask me what that means, and in many cases, what it means is I get to be the nerd at SHRM, if you will, the lead nerd.

Speaker 3: 1:43

I get to find out what's going on in the world of work, how it is that enterprises and all kinds of employers are dealing with new and upcoming trends, new topics, things that are shaping the way their employees approach the day-to-day and the way that they themselves approach their employees and getting work done, making things be meaningful as well as truly successful. The other thing that I really enjoy about my role is I get to be part-time author. I get to be part-time kind of critic of all kinds of other research and I get to be the person who gets to be involved. So every time I've been with you, bill, I've had the good fortune of sharing with you some new book or some new piece of content that we're working on. Last time we were on together, we talked about Talking Taboo, my book that dealt specifically with polarization, and the good news is today we're going to talk about some of the research that will hopefully end up in a new book this time next year.

Speaker 2: 2:38

Yeah, we are. In fact, we're going to talk in just a moment about Shurm's 2024 State of the Workplace study. Before we get to that, though, let's excite our listeners. Alex, can you give them an overview of what folks who will be attending either in person or online at SHRM Annual Conference at Expo 2024 can expect?

Speaker 3: 3:03

When thinking about the conference and what you might see at SHRM24, there's a couple of things that stand out right. One of the things that stands out to me is there's going to be a whole host of highlights that people will be experiencing at this conference, whether it's seeing the nearly 1,000 exhibitors, or getting to meet more than 500 different thought leaders in the world of work, or really getting an opportunity to really engage and learn about key topics from some of the biggest names in the world like Jason Sudeikis or Sherry Shepard or others like Johnny C Taylor Jr, who's one of my favorites. The other thing that sort of stands out is we're also engaged in a heavy duty kind of campaign to focus on thought leadership in two key areas this year. The first is what AI means and how it is that workers and employers are leveraging AI overall. The second is really focused primarily on what we're seeing in terms of the world of civility and civility at work. I'll give you two key teasers here, because I'll be talking about these quite a bit over the course of the next couple of days. First teaser is in the world of AI and HI, and what we call HI is actually human intelligence, because the truly successful enterprise is leveraging both AI and HI, and not doing it separately, but rather together.

Speaker 3: 4:23

One of the things that stands out is if you look at the data today. Since the rise of generative AI, like chat, gbt and large language models similar to it, we've seen that people are actually doing this work on a recurring basis. Most organizations are already in the process of adopting generative AI in some way, and doing so in concert with the types of roles that they have on hand and what they're trying to accomplish as organizations. Prime example, though, is about 40% of employers say that they have found a way to do it so that it is productive and actually helps grow the business, make a difference in the business, helps grow the business, make a difference in the business. What's funny, though, is 40% of them say that they've done this. The other 60% or so say that they've started to outlaw or limit how it might be used. Despite that, though, four out of every five workers in the US say that they are using generative AI every day, whether their employer approved it or not, so think about that Workers are using it, whether we like it or not. The question is how do we make it so that it's really effective both for employer needs as well as the workers' needs.

Speaker 3: 5:37

The second kind of teaser stat that I'll share with everybody is we've seen that in 2024, there's a huge kind of impact on what is happening in the world, regardless of where you are, because of various elections. For instance, there was the election in India, which led to different camps and a variety of different polarization within India, more so than they'd ever experienced. In the US, we have the presidential election, which will really shape some of the civility that we expect to see, both in society but, more importantly, in the workplace. If I ask people to guess how many acts of true incivility or uncivil behavior they experience per day, most people would tell you somewhere around less than one to one. Their days seem to be going fine. In reality, people experience at least 2.4 acts of true incivility every day. They report feeling like they're feeling incivility on a more recurring basis every day. What's even scarier, though, is 1.4 out of those, 2.4 happen in the workplace.

Speaker 2: 6:43

Wowzer. Okay, I feel like we've just got a bit of an exclusive there. Very good, thank you very much. I'm always looking for those. So I've actually just come off the back of an AI summit. I lead a bunch of AI summits in partnership with Disrupt Brands in the UK. I did one yesterday and at that talk Jim Link came up to the, to the crowd there when I was presenting. I said, uh, last week I was chatting with jim link and, uh, the two pillars of this year are ai and civility, and you know, jim and I were talking about how much ai, uh perhaps is um affecting the ways that we can communicate and relate to each other, to our colleagues and folks in our personal lives. I wonder what your thoughts are around that.

Speaker 3: 7:30

What's fascinating to me is we've seen so many different kinds of AI pop up. To be truthful, we've had AI dating back to the early 1950s. It may not have been known as AI it was actually coined at Dartmouth in 1952, or 56, I should say but one of the things that we found is that over the course of time, we've moved from the automation stage to the optimization stage, all the way through to now. What is the generation stage and the ability to predict. What I find particularly fascinating is there is a disconnect in some ways between how people should be using AI and what types of the AI they think of. Right Generative AI has made it such that a lot of organizations are looking at how they can scale that AI to become mature by connecting it with other forms of AI, mature by connecting it with other forms of AI. However, workers are just looking at it right now as a convenience tool or, in many cases, the kind of tool that allows them to do their work not only faster but better, and then also to do it in ways that are driving new thinking. So we're developing two classes of AI. One is people who use it for convenience and other people who actually know how to do it and really prompt it very well, especially in the world of generative AI. What I find particularly fascinating that we don't talk about a lot is we're seeing new forms of generative AI, new large language models pop up that are also really leaning into a specific use case or a specific way of looking at this. In some cases, we had the older iterations of this. For instance, one of the things that we've seen over the years is one called DABIS, and DABIS is one that's really designed for invention and the design of intellectual property and helping people inventors refine their products, get them to market and do it a lot faster, maybe even make the ideas better. That one is one where we've seen it actually mature over the last 10 years, and, in particular, has that matured to the point where now it's in the courts in the US, going through the process of trying to figure out whether or not we can give trademark to AI. Can we make AI our co-author and our co-developer in some way? Those are some interesting things that we're seeing.

Speaker 3: 9:49

For me, it also goes deeper than that, though, when it comes to natural language processing and the ability to communicate with people in the language that they want to use to communicate with people in a variety of different ways, as well as glean from their own kind of data and their own insights in their language.

Speaker 3: 10:10

That's particularly valuable for a variety of different reasons. Whether you're in marketing, whether you're in communications, whether you're in all kinds of information around content development, these are things that actually are new forms of AI really making a difference. And then the one that's particularly interesting for me is the increase in advancement in robotics in particular, and especially as it relates towards a variety of different industries, whether it's developing people, really understanding how you make them better, or making them safer. One example that stands out to me is the use of robotics now in the operation of large cranes. I serve on the board of the National Crane Operator Foundation, and one of the things that stands out is they're using drones and all types of robotics to make people safer, in concert with AI. The kind of standard way of thinking about crane operators isn't what we used to have, and so it's really impacting a variety of different industries, different roles, and what's fascinating is it's doing so in a way that is leading to some outcomes, but, in other cases, leading to other outcomes that we couldn't have expected or foreseen.

Speaker 2: 11:17

In terms of what can we foresee on most episodes these days, because I can't help but talk about AI in pretty much every episode that we record. Alex, you can't escape it, so you got to run with it. I often ask clever people like yourself what does AI mean for jobs and what are some of those jobs of the future? You know what are those jobs that we will expect to see going over the next couple of years, but also what are the sorts of jobs that will replace them. Um, most people say I don't know, bill, we'll find out in the next couple of years. Everything's moving so fast. Uh, what's your take?

Speaker 3: 11:52

uh, you know it's fascinating. If you were to ask me up front, I really thought that we were looking at a scenario where we'd have a turn of almost 20 years where it was unclear the kind of roles that we would lose versus those that we wouldn't. Research institutes today that are putting out information around what it is that employers know about, which roles they'll need and which ones they won't, and when it is that they anticipate they'll be displaced. Right ai is hoping to do that. What what's fascinating is you hear the big numbers, the big predictions around 74 million jobs will be displaced, uh, and then other predictions, like groups from the ford Foundation and others that say we're looking at another 100 million jobs that will be created. However, to put it in a palpable way, displacement is not the thing that actually scares me the most. What I think about, more than and it's not even scary to me what I think about is actually, will employers be able to leverage two things? Actually, will employers be able to leverage two things? First and foremost, will we be able to leverage AI in a way that allows us to manage, and the partnership with AI to manage all the new roles that are going to be out there, because nobody's talking about those new roles. Everybody wants to put a big number on them, but nobody's talking about today.

Speaker 3: 13:14

In most cases, we're looking at at least 15 new professions that have arisen just from the birth of generative AI, and I'm talking about not just prompt engineers. I'm not talking about data validators or anything like that. I'm talking about things like AI lawyers, ai ethicists, ai communicators, or experience generators, experience engineers that we didn't have, and then the offshoot careers that happen when you think about that. For instance, imagine being in talent acquisition and being able to create what is a role. That is true talent pipeline nurturing, but what you're doing is actually leveraging AI to do that as well as possible and make it feel like it's automated, and make it not automated but very personalized. So those are the kinds of things that we're seeing kind of pop up left and right, and I'm not sure that we, as employers, are ready to adopt all those roles just yet. More importantly, the other thing that sort of stands out to me, though, is I'm not quite sure that we're doing what we should be doing.

Speaker 3: 14:20

I am one who has been fighting the skills gap war the talent, the war for talent for the last 20 years through research, depending upon where I was and how I was involved, and one of the things that stands out to me is I'm tired of hearing about skills gaps. I'm tired of hearing about upskilling and reskilling. If you look at some of the work that employers were engaged in and a variety of groups were engaged in during the pandemic upskilling we actually missed the mark with upskilling, because most of the people who benefited from it were people who never lost their jobs. They weren't the 49 million who didn't lose their jobs, or the 45 million that did lose employment in some way. What we've done, though, is we've also refocused on skills that were needed for the time then and there, in the context of a pandemic.

Speaker 3: 15:09

When you think specifically about that, though, one of the things that stands out let's take the 260 million jobs that were lost globally.

Speaker 3: 15:15

One of the things that stands out let's take the 260 million jobs that were lost globally One of the things that stands out is we haven't looked at what the future oriented jobs are.

Speaker 3: 15:22

An easy way to think about that is to really reshape your upskilling and all your reskilling kind of initiatives to make them upscaling initiatives, and what I mean by upscaling is. I mean, throw in that AI in the middle of that upskill and you're starting to do everything with the bend or the slant to say we need to develop an entire workforce that is an AI-enabled workforce, really focuses on those AI-enabled kind of skill sets but, more importantly, can then help adapt or develop the next generations of AI as we continue to see AI growing. There's no truer version of this than the demand for what we really need. I kind of floated this idea a couple of months ago at a variety of places, including the White House. One thing I said was we need to really focus on developing not the next generation of digital natives, but rather the next generation of generative natives, and this is an area where I think we need to put greater emphasis globally.

Speaker 2: 16:28

I love it. How you just get in that cheeky mention of oh, I was just hanging out at the White House giving these guys tips on how they need to do it. Love it, love it.

Speaker 3: 16:37

It's fun sometimes, right.

Speaker 2: 16:39

We've got a couple more questions for you for today, for those listeners out there who are stressed and worried and fearful for their jobs. Um, you've said lots of positive things about the ways that ai is augmenting and and assisting folks, but you know there are a lot of folks who are out there too who are thinking well, for whatever reason, I'm not doing a great job of getting to grips with different generative technologies. What would be, what would be your advice to them in terms of ways to go about learning, asking for help and keeping ahead of the curve?

Speaker 3: 17:14

So one of the things that stands out is I immediately give everyone the advice is don't just learn the future and learn the current kind of skill set or tools that are available. Learn the past right. I find that people, really, when they understand where it is that AI came from, how it came about and, more importantly, the conditions needed to really achieve great AI, such as computing power, such as the right kind of connectivity amongst our information and our networks, and all the different kinds of tools, like energy, that are required to make those processes happen in an automated fashion and artificial fashion people start to realize that there is a heavy human influence on everything that is AI, everything that will be AI moving forward. The other thing is it gives you perspective on how far out we're really looking at displacement, but, more importantly, how far out we're really looking at a singularity moment, like artificial super intelligence, where it really becomes a being, but not only is it a being, it's something that's even smarter and thinking deeper and newer ways than what humans can do today. For, though, is I ask people to go to their local resource, anywhere where there's a learning opportunity, anywhere where you have a particular workforce investment board in the United States or, if you're in the UK, a variety of different labor ministry resources all across the land that focus primarily on, or all across the kingdom. One of the things that stands out is I ask people to really focus on taking a mindset that is I'm no longer going to be displaced, I'm going to share my job, and the job sharing mentality is different, because what you're doing is you're saying there are responsibilities that are particularly critical, that require me and a teammate to actually think about this, and I am very bullish on AI. But I will say, if you're fearing that, change the psychology of how you think about it. Say AI is going to be my teammate, my coworker, and then, from there, what I encourage you to do is start to learn about your coworker the same way you would another person. What is it they can do, what is it they can't do? What are the things that are limited? What is it that we can produce together? But also prime yourself for some of the things that are going to change for you, both in terms of your mindset, your cognitive abilities, the way that you approach problems, the way that you start to develop skills that are not the ones you would have expected AI to help you with Most employers when you ask them what they're looking for AI to do or help their workers do better.

Speaker 3: 19:58

It's not just the technical skills. It's not just technical delivery of product. It's actually also things like improving professionalism skills, improving the kind of skills that are deep critical thinking skills. Improving the kind of skills that are deep critical thinking skills. It's problem solving skills. It's focused on a help and co-worker team mentality, as opposed to someone that's actually going to materially take you out of the organization or take you out of the workplace. Those are the kinds of things that I always remind people. Take that mindset and recognize that that's where you're headed.

Speaker 2: 20:30

Very good, very good. We are almost at the end of this chat already, alex. I'll just have to get you on again soon. Two more questions for you, because one is terribly important and you are moving and shaking and you're a pretty cool dude, so I reckon you know the answer to this. I was having a look yesterday, alex, for after parties at SHRM I'll be going to the Jennifer McClure's birthday party slash disrupt party on the Monday. Any recommendations for cool things to get up to outside of Sherm annual?

Speaker 3: 20:57

You know it's fascinating. I've no one has ever said that I'm a mover, a shaker or cool. I would disagree with you wholeheartedly and mock me, but I'm happy to over drink, share a story about one of them who decided that she was going to make me cool and made me look like an old man. The other thing that was fascinating, though, is I would argue, that most people need to go visit all parts of the SHRM ecosystem. One of the things that you might look for is having a certified good time with one of the receptions that we have for our certified members and attendees. The other one that you might look to is trying to take advantage of a variety of different things, like our solutions centers or everything that has to do with our volunteer leaders and how we celebrate them. That's at CHRM, beyond CHRM.

Speaker 3: 21:51

I always tell people, if you're going to any two things in Chicago, make sure you go get yourself a sporting event and go see a Cubs game if you're there. The other thing I'd argue is make sure you get yourself a great culinary experience. Right, we've all watched the bear at this point, but I think one of the things that we want to do is really focus on what you might do to get a great culinary experience, and I always talk about two places Pie's Pizza or Pequod's Pizza. Those are the two that sort of stand out as Chicago deep dish, but the insiders know about. And then go see the Purple Pig. The Purple Pig is a great place to go eat. Neither Purple Pig is a great place to go eat. Neither one takes reservations, though. Be aware.

Speaker 2: 22:30

That's very helpful. Thank you very much. I'm planning on trying to get a Cubs game in and a White Sox game in, if you listeners are interested in that too. You've got to do Cubs first, because then they're out of town, and White Sox are there for the second half of the week, and it's also not a long drive up to Milwaukee if you fancy getting a game up there too. That just leaves me to say for today, alex, how can folks connect with you, sir?

Speaker 3: 22:54

If you're looking for me, there's always a variety of different ways to get a hold of me. Linkedin is the best bet. You can always go straight to LinkedIn at shermalexalanzo or sherm underscore Alex Alanzo. The other way to look for me and really reach out to me is just email me. I'm that accessible, believe it or not, and I'm the guy that answers my own inbox. You can reach me at knowledge, at Shermorg.

Speaker 2: 23:16

You don't have AI for that. You answer your own inbox. Very impressive, okay. Well, that just leaves me to say for today, alex, thank you very much for being my returning guest. It's always a pleasure.

Speaker 3: 23:24

Bill, thank you so much, I really appreciate it.

Speaker 2: 23:26

And listeners as always. Until next time, happy working.

Speaker 1: 23:33

Thanks for listening to the HR Chat Show. If you enjoyed this episode, why not subscribe and listen to some of the hundreds of episodes published by HR Gazette and remember for what's new in the world of work? Subscribe to the show, follow us on social media and visit HRGazettecom.