HRchat Podcast
Listen to the HRchat Podcast by HR Gazette to get insights and tips from HR leaders, influencers and tech experts. Topics covered include HR Tech, HR, AI, Leadership, Talent, Recruitment, Employee Engagement, Recognition, Wellness, DEI, and Company Culture.
Hosted by Bill Banham, Bob Goodwin, Pauline James, and other HR enthusiasts, the HRchat show publishes interviews with influencers, leaders, analysts, and those in the HR trenches 2-4 times each week.
The show is approaching 1000 episodes and past guests are from organizations including ADP, SAP, Ceridian, IBM, UPS, Deloitte Consulting LLP, Simon Sinek Inc, NASA, Gartner, SHRM, Government of Canada, Hacking HR, McLean & Company, UPS, Microsoft, Shopify, DisruptHR, McKinsey and Co, Virgin Pulse, Salesforce, Make-A-Wish Foundation, and Coca-Cola Beverages Company.
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Podcast Music Credit"Funky One"Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
HRchat Podcast
How AI is Transforming Human Resources with John Kannapell, CYPHER Learning
Discover the transformative power of artificial intelligence in HR as we explore how generative AI is reshaping the workplace.
The guest this time is John Kannapell, President, COO and Board Member at CYPHER Learning, a company leading the disruption of learning platforms to deliver a "just in time, just for you, just the way you want to learn" approach that puts people first.
Listen as John discusses the ethical use of AI, emphasizing the significance of transparency, fairness, and accountability in HR practices.
With a recent survey revealing many employees are using AI without their bosses' knowledge, John stresses the importance of open dialogue and clear policies to guide ethical AI usage, bringing to light the necessity for HR professionals to lead the charge in this new digital age.
Join us for an energizing discussion on how HR can spearhead green AI strategies, driving environmentally responsible and energy-efficient practices within organizations. John shares insights into Cypher Learning's collaboration with AWS to mitigate environmental impacts and boost employee engagement. We highlight the pivotal role of green learning initiatives and the selection of SaaS solutions that align with sustainability goals, underlining AI's potential to support a healthier bottom line while reducing carbon footprints. The conversation serves as a compelling call to action for HR professionals to champion sustainability.
Witness the dynamic impact of AI on organizational efficiency, where innovation thrives from the ground up. John recounts remarkable stories of AI enhancing learning and training, such as an education company creating 2,800 courses in just 30 days. We emphasize the responsibility of adopting AI equitably, with tools like AI CrossCheck ensuring alignment with corporate standards. As we wrap up, we're excited to invite you to connect with us for further insights on platforms like LinkedIn and the Cypher Learning website, providing ongoing support for those eager to harness AI's potential responsibly.
By the way, listeners - if you enjoy this episode, check out HRchat episode 593 from June 2023 featuring CYPHER CEO, Graham Glass.
In addition, check out the CYPHER Learning's “Survey report: Bridging the A
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The HRchat show has had 100,000s of downloads and is frequently listed as one of the most popular global podcasts for HR pros, Talent execs and leaders. It is ranked in the top ten in the world based on traffic, social media followers, domain authority & freshness. The podcast is also ranked as the Best Canadian HR Podcast by FeedSpot and one of the top 10% most popular shows by Listen Score.
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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:Welcome to another episode of the HR Chat Show. Hello listeners, this is your host today, bill Bannam, and joining me in this episode is John Canapel, president, coo and the board member over at Cypher Learning, a company leading the disruption of learning platforms to unleash human potential with modern learning experiences. By the way, listeners, if you enjoy this conversation that I have today with John, please do check out HR Chat episode 993 from June 2023, featuring Cypher's CEO, graham Glass a lovely chap. So, with that said, john, welcome to the show today. Beyond my wee introduction there, john, why don't you start by taking a couple of minutes and telling our listeners a bit more about yourself, what you get up to and, of course, the mission of Cypher Learning?
Speaker 3:Sure thing.
Speaker 3:Well, I've been in SaaS technology for about 25 years a variety of roles across business and education enterprises companies like Blackboard 2U worked with Google a number of years and other C-level executives across different types of enterprises to really stay in touch with critical issues around upskilling and reskilling learners, as well as managing risks associated with those businesses like it could be cybersecurity, it could be compliance risk that are solved through training and development solutions.
Speaker 3:I joined Cypher Learning about nine months ago, as you said, as president and COO, to really drive our focus and scale our business around solving those types of challenges with our AI education platform, and so one of the first things I did when I came in is we relooked at our purpose, mission and vision and, from a purpose standpoint, we continue to say every day that we give learners the power to succeed in a rapidly changing world, and that's a really important part of what we do, because the world and our markets cyber threats, compliance, other regulatory issues are changing every day very rapidly and we need to be able to give our employees the ability to learn and be upskilled and reskilled in those areas rapidly to remain competitive, not only as a business, but in our specific function or leveling up to management roles, and so we provide a platform right, an all-in-one platform that delivers faster, more personalized and better learning outcomes for our customers, and so our platform powers hundreds of millions of learners every day by delivering just-in-time, just-for-me learning moments across a variety of different industries and markets.
Speaker 4:Thanks for listening to this episode of the HR Chat Podcast. If you enjoy the audio content we produce, you'll love our articles on the HR Gazette. Learn more at hrgazettecom. And now back to the show.
Speaker 2:Okay, wonderful, thank you very much. So just this morning in fact, you and I were supposed to chat a few hours ago, but just this morning I was at an event and you were kind enough to move this conversation back by a couple of hours. The event I was at was all about HR and AI and ways that HR pros can try and better educate employees about using new tools that are augmenting their duties, or indeed how AI is helping to assist HR pros and their practices. One part of the panel discussion at that event today mentioned that, frankly, when it comes to the policies around use of AI within companies, it can be a bit dry sometimes, so I'm hoping that you can spice it up for us. What key policies, john, should organizations implement to ensure ethical AI development and usage?
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, organizations need policies that we think about in three ways. They prioritize transparency on the use of AI, fairness, to make sure that there's equitable access and responses that come from AI. And accountability. That's a key part of how your organizations use AI to accomplish their objectives is really important, and I think the real challenge is that employees are afraid to tell HR that they're actually using AI, and that shouldn't be the case. It needs to be a more open and transparent dialogue and how companies share data and how HR leaders lead by example, and the way they use AI to accomplish the mission of business, as both the standard is important for the company as well as the enforcer of how employees use it.
Speaker 3:So one of the things we did recently we surveyed about 4,500 employees across US, uk and Mexico, and one of the key stats that we found is that 69% of employees feel like AI policies are still needed, and one in four employees admit that they're using AI without their boss's knowledge. And the challenge is is we don't want to make it hidden behind the scenes. We want to make it celebrated and following the policies that the company put in place. So our approach is number one education first as a policy, right. So, whatever your policies are and we believe that making sure that your employees know what licensed systems that you are endorsing as accepted by the company to be able to be used in the flow of work are important, right. Those ones that they might be using in a secure environment that have access to company data are incredibly important.
Speaker 3:But training your stakeholders, employees and leadership on how AI systems work, how you access them, and keeping the human front and center is really important, because AI still have, you know, biases.
Speaker 3:We always say that AIs will get you 80% there, but the human element's really important because AIs still have biases.
Speaker 3:We always say that AIs will get you 80% there, but the human element's really important. You can't just take what it provides back as the be all end all. You have to continue to look at what's right in terms of the values and ethical use of the responses you're getting. Make sure it's got the right tone and use of data, if that's the right case in terms of where you're placing it internally or externally and also make sure you've got accountability frameworks to find who's responsible for oversight, especially in areas that are focused in HR, like career development and learning outcomes. We really believe that organizations succeed when they treat AI as a partner in learning, not just a tool. It's one of the things that can help employees get more efficient and deliver better quality output from what they're doing, but it's not a replacement. It's something that can be a tool that helps them do their job better, if it's done in a way that's underneath the policy that works best for each company, which is really about building trust and better outcomes through that usage.
Speaker 2:Okay, thank you very much A bit of a follow-up to that then, if you don't mind. And that's kind of where we at, John, where we at with educating and empowering those HR pros that they are informed enough to be able to advocate for greater transparency in the best ways. And the other part of that question is for those that do have that education. I'm not convinced there are a lot of HR pros out there that really get AI at the moment and understand it at a technical enough level that they are well enough position. I think it will happen. I think we're going through that stage at the moment. I think companies like yourself are helping with that. But the other part of that question is how can HR pros advocate for greater transparency in AI within their organizations once they do have that knowledge?
Speaker 3:Yeah well, hr is in a unique position you know to be, a position, I'm sorry to be a champion of transparency in the organization and to me, you know, their role as a part of the C-suite, in terms of their connections to corporate IT and the functional leaders, is critical because those decision makers in those roles are making decisions around license systems from partners and what we believe is their role is to make sure that those decision makers are very clear on how company proprietary data will be used to train third party you know, either to train or not train third party models on their IP, third-party models on their IP. And, specifically, we have a number of areas that we go in depth with those departments and decision makers to understand how the data will be used and to make sure that each of the constituents, including HR, have visibility into the proprietary data usage in terms of their ability to control how it will or won't be used to train and deploy learning models in their environment. I'd say, secondly, you know HR is at the point where they are the ones that have control and, I'd say, jurisdiction over how employees will access these services. You know, across all their different job functions, it needs to be accessed in a secure environment, and training employees on you know how they should and shouldn't access those services within or outside the corporate firewall is critically important. We want to demystify that and make sure they know what's acceptable and what's not, and I think that's a key role for HR.
Speaker 3:Hr is a unique position to champion transparency, so I think that's good. I want to focus on making sure the policies are known. I want to make sure that employees are trained on how to access the right solutions in a secure environment and making sure that they're facilitating cross-departmental collaboration. I think those are the three things I'd like to say.
Speaker 3:The main thing is just to summarize that HR is a unique position to be a champion of transparency, and for me, what I see in successful organizations are they're training employees on the policies continuously to make sure that they have visibility on what the right and ethical and secure use of AI technologies are within their corporate systems. Secondly, they're continuing to demystify the decision-making around what AIs are or are not acceptable within those environments, how you access those services, what kind of data can be input and how those models are or are not being trained on corporate data. And third, they need to ensure that across all departments that AIs are aligned with the organizational values in terms of how they're being used across sales product engineering operations, to make sure that each of those teams understand how it's being used, what the human checkpoints are along the way and make sure the outputs are consistent with organizational values.
Speaker 2:Okay, rock and roll. Thank you very much. I am going to switch things up now, as I often do in my show, because I like to change up the tempo sometimes, and I'm going to challenge you to answer in 60 seconds or less. Just this next one. With the rise of AI-related cybersecurity threats, John, such as deepfakes and automated attacks and whatnot, how can HR enhance cybersecurity awareness among employees? What does that education look like?
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's fantastic.
Speaker 3:Well, cybersecurity is more relevant than ever and we believe HR can enhance awareness through personalized training. That's the best defense that companies have against cybersecurity threats. We work with a lot of companies in this sector, like Binary Defense and Threat Modeler, who use our software for training companies on cybersecurity authentication standards how you access through multi-factor authentication, isolating role-based administration around what employees do or don't have access to, monitoring telemetry on things that look odd in your corporate systems. That might be a leading indicator of a threat. And then, most importantly, evaluating ongoing threats and building programs through training because it's changing so systems that might be a leading indicator of a threat. And then, most importantly, evaluating ongoing threats and building programs through training because it's changing so rapidly. I mean, just last month, three 16-year-olds in the UK took down Uber. I mean it's incredible the access and maturity levels of what's happening to companies today, and we believe that, through platforms like Cypher Learning, companies that make training a part of the employee experience not just a compliance checkbox but continuous are the ones who are going to succeed.
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Speaker 2:Okay, thank you very much. Next question I'd like to ask of you is how can HR Pro support the development and the adoption of energy efficient AI systems to mitigate environmental impacts? These beasts that are pumping out all this amazing ai technology, you know they take a lot of energy and that's only going in one direction, of course. Um, therefore, if an employee wants to work with a company that aligns with its values and some of those values include, include, uh, green goals and green motivations then they ain't going to like it. If the AI is sucking up all the energy, how do HR pros help with that?
Speaker 3:Yeah. So HR can help by promoting green learning initiatives. Number one, educating employees on sustainable AI practices through easily accessible training programs, the the ones that are the best fit for them. And then, secondly, you know, advocating for efficiency by encouraging teams to adopt solutions that optimize energy use, like what we do at Cypher Learning. Right, those platforms that they're using have to demonstrate that they are utilizing energy efficient data centers.
Speaker 3:So at Cypher Learning, we use AWS as our primary hosting platform. We align with AWS on how they design their data centers to focus on energy efficiency. They have continued to use 100% of their electricity consumed. Anytime they're using electricity, they're matching that with renewable sources of energy for the last several years and right now their infrastructure is up to 4.1 times more energy efficient than on-premise software solutions. That helps us combine with them reduce a company's workloads on carbon footprint by up to 99%. So those are the types of things by looking for SaaS solutions that have an energy efficient policy and then, obviously, measuring it over time, collaborating with their IT departments to assess and report environmental benefits, we can help with that by allowing them to pass through the energy efficiency and carbon output reduction that we're able to achieve through these platforms. Those three things really help HR professionals build knowledge and trust within the community about energy efficient AI solutions.
Speaker 2:John, I wonder how excited should HR pros be about the possibilities of AI when it comes to a couple of things One, having happy, engaged employees, but of course, another responsibility of the HR department is to help ensure that the bottom line is looking healthy. How excited should they be? We're well into the age of AI. It depends on who you talk to. You could argue it's been 20 plus years in some respects, but certainly the last few years it's become something that's on everyone's mind, and machine learning and AI is permeating into everyone's jobs these days. Is it a great thing, and how excited should the HR pro be?
Speaker 3:Well, to me, I can tell you personally, it's the reason why I joined Cypher Learning when I first saw the product that is built on, you know, ai, built on our education platform. It's what I call an epiphany moment, where everything you thought about how training and development was delivered for the past hundred years has now changed. We're in the middle of a transformation, and what you're seeing from most of the research that we've done is employees are driving that from the bottom up. We see it in learners, in schools as well, where the students and the employees are adopting it faster. Right. Then the companies can get their heads around how and what the best use of these technologies might be, and so what we believe is that if companies and leadership can embrace the change and acknowledge that employees are using this, and give them the right guidelines around what the ethical and responsible and accepted use of these technologies are, it's driving transformational change within organizations.
Speaker 3:Just to give you some perspectives, in one of our recent education companies, they developed 2,800 new courses in less than 30 days.
Speaker 3:They were able to increase their credentialed learners that are completing their courses.
Speaker 3:They boosted that by 10% to 15% versus their prior solution, and they also reduced their dropout rates by 10% during that time, and so what it's unlocking is this incredible ability to drive efficiency, not by replacing you know employees or driving you know, transformation, you know through reduction, but complementing right their work every day by giving them the ability to reduce manual tasks with high quality agent assistance right that give them the ability to deploy faster, more relevant, more personalized and better outcome based learning right in the work environment, and so we're thrilled with that. I think that the second thing that's so exciting is that it's never been cost effective to drive personalization of the type of training down to the line level employee. Until now, right, most learning has been one size fits all, and now, with the efficiency of what AI is able to do, and we've been able to develop courses in as little as three minutes that are 80% ready for deployment right, that's game changing for the ability for companies to drive incredible efficiency through their workforce, and so that's why I'm thrilled about what's coming from AI.
Speaker 2:Love the answer. Thank you very much. That came from the heart. Great answer. Okay, we are almost out of time already, I'm sad to say. We'll just have to get you on again in the future. Just a couple more questions for you, john, before we wrap up, so maybe you can reach underneath your desk and pull out your crystal ball. Looking ahead, how can HR pros over the next few years continue to guide employees through the evolving landscape of AI in ways that ensure that tech advancements enhance employees' lives and do that in responsible and equitable ways?
Speaker 3:Yeah Well, hr leaders can prepare their employees by focusing on number one, lifelong learning. So we're in the market with a lot of our companies that put training and development as a top three priority for their business, because their market, their competitors or regulatory environment are changing so fast that they need to upskill employees rapidly. And if they build a culture around lifelong learning, not just once a year learning you know that end of year compliance course but a continuous process of making learning accessible to them through the flow of work right. The flow of work right not just in a destination, but embedding it in the applications that they're using every day to allow them to access knowledge quickly and easily. But also courses that can help them upskill over time will make them more fluent in AI and the use of AI within their day-to-day. You know tasks that they're tasked with in a job function I'd say secondarily tasks that they're tasked with in a job function I'd say secondarily, promoting inclusion.
Speaker 3:Form. Committees have policies that are inclusive around continuous evaluation and monitoring and updating from employees. From a bottoms-up perspective. Make sure that you've got a diverse set of employees that are representing how and where AIs are being used, as well as what the outputs are to make sure that they're in line with company values. That's why we've launched something called AI CrossCheck, which continuously evaluates the evaluation of the responses that come from AI and make sure that it's in line with either company or corporate standards, as well as accuracy by checking with third-party web-based sources that we know are accurate to validate those responses. And then, lastly, just making sure they're creating feedback loops, empower employees on how AI will evolve, allow them to bring ideas to the table for consideration, and maintain open and transparent feedback on how AIs are being adopted and how they do fall or don't fall under corporate policies to guide them to the future around how AI will be used responsibly and equitably.
Speaker 2:Thanks, john, and just finally for today. How can our listeners connect with you? So maybe that's LinkedIn. By the way, I'll be sending you a request straight after this. Maybe it's email. Maybe you're super cool all over TikTok and places. How can folks learn about Cypher learning and you mentioned AI cross-check there in your last answer Specifically I'm guessing they can go to the website and find out more about that too 100%.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I'd say the best place is to start either find me on LinkedIn I'm available, john Canepel, on LinkedIn but also I'd say the best way is to visit us on our website at cypherlearningcom. There's a link right prominently in the upper right-hand corner that says you can contact us and schedule a demo and get to know a bit more about you and your specific areas of interest and some of the challenges and how we might be able to help you solve those challenges with the world's leading AI education platform.
Speaker 2:John, just like Graham Glass, you are a credit to Cipher Learning. Sir, I've enjoyed my conversation with you today. Thank you very much for being my guest. Thank you Enjoyed being here. Appreciate it, bill and listeners as always. Until next time, happy working.
Speaker 1: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.
