I'm Matt Davies. I'm the Chief Executive Officer of people consultancy, Hapus People. We are a people consultancy that parachute into organisations and either do some fractional HR support, retain support, or we help for a one-off project and then jump back out too. Sometimes we also do leadership development programmes, executive coaching. And at the moment, I am an interim Chief People Officer at Monmouthshire Building Society. So some of the examples I'm going to be sharing today are from some of the clients we're working with and some from Monmouthshire Building Society, who have done a brilliant job of working on their AI strategy.
I'm also a fellow of the CIPD and closely work with my local branch here in Wales, where I'm from, but also do quite a lot with the Senior Leaders Network as well.
So lots of our clients are having this question of how is AI going to impact us? A lot of colleagues are worried about it. There's a lot of fear in the press about how it's going to take jobs, how it's going to completely revolutionise the workforce, how jobs won't exist in 1, 3, 5, 10, 15, 20 years that people are doing at the moment. And because of that, a lot of people have an aversion to even talking about AI, let alone playing around with it, learning about how to best use it in the job.
So a lot of our clients at the moment have reached out to us and gone, we want some support. We're looking at our AI approach, our AI strategy, our digital strategy, our transformation strategy that has an element of AI in it. And it comes usually from a place of we want to be able to use it to improve our culture or use it to improve employee engagement, not necessarily just to save cost, which I think when I go back 15, 20 years ago, a lot of people when we were going through a digital movement and there was going to be the digitalisation of lots of activities. The thought process was, we'll introduce a new digital tool and now save jobs. And in reality, we haven't really seen that as an output. So those are the challenges that our colleagues are facing at the moment and what clients of Hapus are facing.
Specifically working with Monmouthshire Building Society at the moment, they've taken their tech lead and they've built a project with representatives from across the business, not necessarily people that work in AI or digital or tech, but people who are early adopters of AI, people who have already read about it outside of work, listen to podcasts, people who are naturally interested, who are the early adopters. And then what they've done with that group of people is developed them into professionals. They've upskilled them. They've used some training from in-house that they've designed, and they've also done some market research on what's great out there in the market. And they've been able to upskill this team to get curious within the organisation, think about how can AI impact my area. There's a representative from customer facing teams, from HR, finance, etc. That means that there's a good cross-section. And then this group is getting together every two weeks to talk about how am I using it? How do I think I can optimise my work? And then once that's all tested and learnt, we can think about how we can roll that out across the organisation.
Often there's fear, not just in Monmouthshire Building Society, but across loads of organisations where people think this might make my job more efficient, this might take my job away, this might mean that they need fewer people to do my role. But in reality, what it really means is it makes you more efficient, which means that you're doing less admin and more strategic work, which in our experience in working at British Gas, when we brought in digital approaches, I was there for 10 years, we found that it meant that lower skilled admin work started to disappear, became fewer and fewer, which then meant that the work our colleagues were doing was higher value. And therefore, when we rebanded roles, roles were worth more to the organisation and actually freed colleagues up to give a better level of service to our customers. I think building societies are uniquely positioned in that they've got already a brilliant reputation for giving great service. So when you underlie that with digital transformation and AI transformation journeys that building societies are going on at the moment, puts them in a really good position to excel in the market.
The other thing that happened, so that's the testbed early adopters learning about AI. Then you can run focus groups for each areas of what you know so far, what are you doing, how can we use it? And almost give, if you tell everyone, these are all the ways that you can use it, sometimes that can be a little bit overwhelming and exhausting. So picking one thing that they can do to make their role slightly easier or nudge them into it rather than throwing people off the deep end into using it, especially people who are a bit more reserved or a bit more fearful or feel like it's being done to them. Give them one opportunity or one example. For example, I'm running a team meeting this Friday. I want to do a fun activity the last 15 minutes. Copilot, can you help me plan something? It'll give you 5 ideas. It takes the thinking out of it. You can look at those five different ideas and make it easier for yourself.
The other thing in terms of other clients who are doing quite cool stuff and similar things, a lot of people are setting up early adopter working groups, coming up with recommendations for the organisation and then implementing them. One friend of mine at another client asked Copilot, how can I be more efficient in my job? Please scan my emails and my meetings and give me some recommendations. Copilot said, how long would you like me to go back in terms of scanning your emails and meetings? This colleague said two weeks. Copilot then scanned the information, came back within two hours and said, if you meet with this person for 30 minutes with this agenda, you instead will reduce your traffic, e-mail traffic by 10 a day, which means that you're going to, both of you are going to be more efficient. Great. That's one example of what Copilot can say in that moment.
The other thing then that this colleague did was say, look at all of my emails from the past month and meeting agendas and shape for me a personal development plan. Copilot said, I'll get that ready for you within the next hour. It came up with, these are my recommendations. How does this feel for you? What would you like to add? What would you like to take in? And what blew this colleague away was, it was very in line with feedback that they've had their whole career. So they're around about 40 years old. So they've had a similar length career to me. And it was very, very accurate, which given that it's a relatively new tool and if it's only going to get more accurate from here, it's quite surprising. It's like nudge theory. You're nudging people into being able to use it themselves to drive efficiency themselves rather than it being done to them. And that's the unique thing about this. It's widely accessed. It's not expensive compared to other systems and tools that we would have had to do in terms of how we trial stuff.
So in going on this journey, we've been able to see that colleagues have been in both Monmouthshire Building Society, but in other clients as well, we've been able to see that because people have advocated for it within functions rather than a training team pushing it or an IT team or digital team pushing it, people have been able to have a point of reference of someone who's an expert in the area. And it doesn't take a lot to be an expert either. You just have to be like 5 minutes ahead of the person who's trying it just after you. And then you can just nudge, be supportive, give people ideas, talk to them about their fears, and you're dismantling it then and there rather than it being a thing that's ethereal and over there.
Then for us as people professionals, we currently have a huge volume of change that's happening because of AI. One, because we've got different tools and systems, which means that we've got different ways to do workforce planning and different, we should be workforce planning in different ways. Thinking about what our skills, what skills are required in 5, 10 years from now and how we bring that to life for people and start to make that relevant now. But also we've got an engagement journey. We've got a job to take people on the journey of utilising AI, bringing it into roles, seeing how we can drive more efficiency. And as a result of that, potentially having more flexibility for our workforce as well. I've seen some organisations who are giving initiatives where they can, if they drive more efficiency by using digital and AI tools, then they're offering more flexible working approaches. They're offering a four-day work week but paid five and colleagues are really responding to that in a big way. So if we can emulate that and make it a win-win situation of, yep, we're driving higher performance, higher efficiency, but also our colleagues are benefiting from that in quite a big way too. I think it's a win-win situation.
So in summary, my advice here is to not be afraid of AI, but to embrace it and bring it into the organisation, advocate for it, lead by example, and use your early adopters who will be passionate about this to bring it to life for your teams who may be the late majority or laggers. Take away the fear from it and use nudge theory to get people to use it in small ways and build up from it, not drown people or throw people off the deep end.
The thing that I would ask you to reflect on is how can you learn from others? So sometimes when you're only focusing on your organisation and what you're doing in this space, it can feel quite lonely or quite quiet and there might be opportunities that you miss. Loads of us in the people profession at the moment are testing AI, are thinking about how AI is going to impact our organisation, our culture, our engagement, our colleagues, our skills map, our strategic workforce planning. So get in touch with a peer group, see what other people are doing. Some people might be doing that strategic workforce planning really well. Some people might be doing that change initiative really well. See what you can learn, see what nuggets are out there and bring it back into your organisation.
My big call to action here is don't do this alone. Use CIPD networking groups, use your own network, reach out to people in the local area. If you see a post on LinkedIn of someone doing something quite cool, reach out to them, ask them for a call, see what you can learn and bring back into your organisation. Use them as a speaker on a call with your AI champs or however you decide to name that group. But my big reflection question or my call to action for you is just to share that knowledge with others and learn from others.
