GPT Party 3.0. Talent and Technology: Transforming HR and Onboarding with AI GPT Party 3.0, the largest Russian-language networking event dedicated to artificial intelligence, took place in Silicon Valley on March 9-10. More than 450 people gathered at Plug and Play to meet leading experts, entrepreneurs and investors, discuss the latest trends in artificial intelligence and gain practical knowledge. The panel discussion “Talents and Technologies: Transforming HR and Onboarding with AI” discussed how artificial intelligence can currently be used to attract and develop talent, what the companies of the future will look like, and the importance of such professional competence as programming. The speakers of the panel discussions were: Nikolay Oreshkin, Alexander Volchek, Andrew Gri, Petr Mebert; the moderator of the discussion and the author of questions was Vitaly Timoshenko. How do you use AI in your company or how is it used in portfolio companies? What ways do you see AI being used to improve the efficiency, retention and development of talented employees? Alexander Volchek: “When it comes to improving efficiency within the staff, I often think about internal employee scoring, regular surveys and subsequent additional assessment. However, I cannot say that this leads to significant changes in working with employees. With the possible exception of sales managers, where automation systems are used to evaluate and improve efficiency, for example, in handling calls. In terms of talent development, I have not yet seen significant results. There are projects that attract my attention in the field of recruiting and talent search. For example, using artificial intelligence to improve resume scoring at the selection stage, conducting video interviews and analyzing candidates.” Peter Mebert: “There is a saying: “It is not artificial intelligence that will take your job, but the person who learns to use it better.” That is why we are actively developing and implementing artificial intelligence to improve the efficiency of software development, especially for routine tasks such as testing and documentation. Working more efficiently and being happier are two different things. We use artificial intelligence to help employees not waste time on routine tasks, for this we integrate various services so that employees can focus on more important things and create value for the company. We are constantly working to optimize the process of recruiting, training and retaining highly qualified specialists. We also strive to use artificial intelligence to optimize teamwork, especially considering that our employees are distributed across 50 countries and have different cultural and linguistic backgrounds. It is important to note that with a large number of employees and access to a large amount of data, the efficiency of using artificial intelligence is becoming increasingly noticeable from an economic point of view.” Andrew Gray: “To retain employees in a startup, you need to approach the search and selection of personnel in a new way. Anyone can master ChatGPT and do the work of an advanced specialist, but it is important how they feel in the company and how much they understand the importance of their work. We recently attracted a specialist from retail, who is now engaged in AI. We gave him the task of optimizing our data in the pipeline, and he, using ChatGPT and other AI tools, figured out the task, although this was a new direction for him, since he was motivated and ready to learn. We use various tools, including a paid version of ChatGPT, paid accounts and copy-lots, so that each person feels their mission in the company and brings their knowledge, and does not do routine tasks. My idea is that in the modern world, it is not some specific skills that are valuable, but the motivation of employees, which can even be partially intangible.” Nikolay Oreshkin: “I personally believe that over the next decades, artificial intelligence will replace any routine human work that does not require a strong emotional connection between people. However, we have not yet achieved this. It is logical to assume that the simplest and most primitive junior positions will be the first to be replaced. Among our portfolio companies, we see that ChatGPT and other tools are used not so much by juniors as by seniors to optimize complex tasks. Seniors who are good at programming often turn to ChatGPT to write complex code. Maxim Sapozhnikov quoted Johnson Huang, director of NVIDIA, who said that there is currently no need to teach children programming because the code will be written by artificial intelligence. Instead, it is important to learn how to formulate requests correctly. Unexpectedly, this is already becoming a reality and seniors are already actively using it.” Vitaliy Timoshenko: “I was inspired by Nikolay’s words, I will add a little on this topic. Recently, a friend of mine was invited to head a startup. He told me a phrase that at first confused me, but then inspired me a lot. He said that he would fire programmers who would program. The context is important here. If a business wants to solve business problems, its task is not to program, but to solve problems. If problems can be solved with ready-made solutions, they should be used, because the business wants to get a quick result. Now about my answer regarding talent. It so happened that my startup works in this area. We help use artificial intelligence and human experience to extract the best knowledge from experts. For example, the best sales manager can do something in his own way, despite training, so he does it better than others. We need to extract his knowledge. Initially, a person conducts an interview, after audio and video recording, as well as the rules and regulations of the company turn into a training system or a system of advanced training, which allows you to create the same high-quality specialists. We have many successful cases where this works. In this case, the use of artificial intelligence is the ability to create an effective training system with unstructured content. The second point is personalized support for the employee during training, including pre-boarding, onboarding, advanced training and retention. We use gamification to encourage employees to constantly develop.” There are several opinions on Johnson Huang’s statement. What do you think about programming? Should we teach programming to our children? Andrew Gray: “Learn to program, guys. It is a universal language of communication, similar to learning the multiplication tables or playing chess. It allows humans and machines to exchange thoughts. When you interact with ChatGPT, you may have noticed that programmers interact more successfully with ChatGPT. Why? Because programming teaches you to express yourself clearly. It is frustrating to be misunderstood, programmers experience this less often because programming teaches you to express yourself more clearly and precisely.” Peter Mebert: “I want to change our perspective a little bit, because I am not a programmer myself, that’s obvious. In my understanding, the impact of using artificial intelligence goes through several stages, and often people focus only on optimizing individual tasks. But behind this is the optimization of business processes, then the optimization of systems, then comes the review and rethinking of the entire business model of the company. The organizational structure of the future will consist of a mixture of people and agents who will work at different levels. These agents can help with email, filling out forms and so on. People within the organization will interact at different levels – with each other, with machines and in a mixed way. Future organizations will be very dynamic automated structures, where people will complement the basic functions. Take, for example, a leadership team or a team of junior programmers – they will always include specialized agents performing different tasks. This is my vision of what the organization of the future will look like. This is why I cannot answer the question of the need for programming definitively.” Alexander Volchek: “Here is the most dangerous thing, when a person who runs a company worth 2 trillion dollars expresses the opinion that children should not be taught programming. This is an indicator of how people who make decisions may not be aware of the consequences or hidden motives behind such statements. For example, what internal interests may be hidden behind this statement. As a programmer, I believe that programming develops both hard skills and soft skills, it is the basis for developing all other skills. I completely agree with Andrew Gray’s statement that learning programming is like teaching a child to count or read, it is an important foundation. Such statements can have serious consequences and affect the lives of many people. In general, it is not worth discussing whether a machine will replace people or not. Agents have existed for 15 years, and a large amount of software communicated with each other. With the advent of the Internet and the automation of computers, their number simply grew, but this did not lead to a decrease in the number of programmers or jobs. It’s unknown what the future holds, but the movie does a good job of showing what the consequences might be when artificial intelligence becomes powerful.”
