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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Welcome to Corozant Technologies, home of the Digital Executive Podcast. Do you work in emerging tech, working on something innovative, maybe an entrepreneur? Apply to be a guest at www.corozant.com forward slash brand. Welcome to the Digital Executive. Today's guest is Amy Farner. Amy Farner is the Executive Vice President and Head of Research and Product at the Josh Burson Company.
In this role, she leads the vision and integration of the firm's research and product portfolio to shape how HR organizations operate in the age of AI.
Chapter 2: What is the journey of Amy Farner in the HR tech industry?
These capabilities are delivered through the company's agentic HR assistant, Galileo, a platform that from a standing start less than three years ago, now counts for more than one third of the firm's revenue. Well, good afternoon, Amy. Welcome to the show.
Thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be here, Brian.
Absolutely, my friend. I appreciate it. I know you're hailing out of the Phoenix area. I'm in Kansas City, so appreciate it. Today, we've got a hot one like you typically do in Phoenix. I've got a lot of friends down there, so I just appreciate you making the time and traversing the time zone.
So, Amy, if you don't mind jumping into your first question, you've spent over 25 years moving across HR advisory, consulting at Deloitte, product innovation at CEB, and now leading research and product at the Josh Bershin Company. What through line connects all those chapters and what brought you to this particular role at this particular moment in HR's evolution?
It's a great question, Brian, and I really feel like my career is kind of like the island of misfit toys.
I've moved around a lot and worked in a series of different roles, but I really feel like the thing that connects those roles is that across the last 25 years, I have a real passion for helping HR professionals and practitioners use the latest tools and technology to really elevate their craft.
And so back in the early 2000s, when I was with CEB, I was helping to think about what are some of the innovative tools and technologies we can use to drive better employee engagement.
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Chapter 3: How has the Galileo platform evolved in the HR landscape?
At the time, we were really focused on retention, by the way, the dot com boom. But, you know, that was really a really an exciting opportunity to shape how HR could affect the employee experience very early in the evolution of that particular concept.
Similarly, I remember back in the day when we were trying to figure out how do we unlock all of the data that we have in transactional systems and use that to help us drive better decision-making for the organization and really create a more strategic approach to how we're solving people problems.
We were able to do that in revolutionary ways using Cognos cubes delivered over the internet in early days when... That was a little painful and slow. Now, of course, we're at the forefront of the AI revolution.
And we're really thinking about how do we continue to use these new tools to push forward how we're able to strategically manage our people and solve our people problems in service to the business strategy and goals. So that's really kind of what I've been passionate about. And it's really been exciting to see how the different technologies have enabled different facets of that journey.
That's awesome. Appreciate that, the background. Obviously, you have a diverse background and roles across a couple of decades there. But what I really heard is you had a passion for HR and how you can help HR professionals, which is just amazing. And some things you did highlight or all this re-highlight is things like employee engagement, which are always number one in companies and culture.
Data-driven decisions, connecting all those disparate systems. I think that's Me working in tech for a long time, I get that. And that's just amazing what you did there. And of course, you're at the forefront of AI now, which, again, things are evolving. And especially at this time in this day and age here with AI technology. So thank you.
Amy, you've helped shape the evolution of Galileo from a research assistant into an intelligent workflow platform now used by over 1,100 companies. How do you think about the difference between AI that surfaces insights and AI that actually changes how work gets done? And how does Galileo navigate that gap?
I think it's really interesting the journey that we've been on at the Josh Burson Company with Galileo and the journey that I think all of us have been on in the last couple of years as we've navigated the AI revolution. So when we first started experimenting with AI in our organization, taking a step back, we've always been an insights company.
So we found we were sitting on a pile of really powerful insights that we knew were helping organizations, but we weren't able to scale that. So when we first started experimenting with Galileo, we thought, hey, we're solving this problem. We can now surface these insights at scale for so many more organizations, for so many more professionals within those organizations.
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Chapter 4: What is the role of AI in shaping the future of HR management?
That sounds so exciting, right? It sounds really, really highbrow. But what does that look like? So the first thing is that the manager is actually now able to access tools that take a lot of those transactional management tasks out of their flow of work. So we're helping managers with what's often been the heaviest and sometimes least value added part of their job.
I'm scheduling, I'm finding information. We're able to automate those tasks and we're able to use agents to provide better support to managers in those tasks. Second thing is we're using agents to help managers do their job better because we are, again, using AI to democratize access to advice and support.
Now, every manager can have an AI-powered coach who's saying, hey, you need to help coach your employee on their performance. Let me help you with that. Let me give you tips on that. So we couldn't stop. scale that with HR providing that one-on-one coaching to every single manager in most organizations. But with AI coaching, we can actually support and empower and enable managers more.
The third thing though, is that the manager's role is really now no longer about routine supervision, but it's about helping employees navigate this huge transition. So they still need to be able to prioritize, they need to build culture, they need to align teams, they need to develop track talent, but they also need to help their teams adjust to how their roles are changing in the age of AI.
So we are calling on super managers to champion the use of AI, to help their teams think through how they're reinventing work, to experiment, to really help them navigate that uncertainty of the transformation as well. So it's really a huge opportunity, but what we're finding is that almost 80% of organizations aren't there yet. they're still working towards that transition.
They haven't clearly defined, clearly communicated to managers what that's gonna look like. So I don't think managers are going anywhere, but I do think we have a lot of kind of a lot of runway ahead of us where we need to help define what are those revised and revamped expectations for managers and how do they support their teams using new tools that are available to them and then in turn,
helping their team use new tools that are available to reinvent their workflows and adjust to what does work look like in an agent-fueled environment.
Awesome. Thank you. I like what you said about the middle management. The person isn't going to be obsolete, but the role is going to completely change. And I would agree with you there. These managers are able to obviously move these repetitive mundane tasks off their plate, leveraging AI, of course. So their whole workday, their workflow is going to completely change.
And they now can be provided coaching, right, as a manager or leader with the power of AI and with In this world of AI that we're moving into very rapidly, they also need to be able to help their team reinvent their work and adopt AI, those sorts of things. So I appreciate your insights. And Amy, the last question of the day is,
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