Human-First Leadership in the Age of AI: Balancing Technology and Empathy
Whilst technology is evolving rapidly and impacting our ways of working, it is more and more crucial to maintain a human-first approach in leadership. We will explore strategies to ensure that AI supports, rather than replaces, human interactions. We will go through how this combo is key to support retention and growth strategies at scale in an environment where is key to leverage the best resource model. We will finish in sharing insights on fostering empathy and human connection in an AI-driven world.
Okay, good afternoon everyone. Please take your seats and we will get started.
Welcome to day two of Pulse Europe 2024. This is track six crucial insights for
human first leaders and we have another amazing speaker lined up for you all
today.
My name is Harry. I'm part of GainSight's customer success team here in Europe.
Now you should all know the drill by now but just a couple of reminders.
There is a Q&A in Slido. We will take the questions at the end of the session.
Please drop them into the Pulse Europe app.
Puls in Q&A area. Select track six and we will take those towards the end.
And just in case you were wondering, you will get a copy of the slide deck from
today and the audio recording from the session.
That will be available on the Pulse library within the next two to three weeks.
I'm really excited to welcome our next speaker on stage Dominic and I'm going
to attempt this DuCon Ua, head of customer success at S&C Blue Prism.
Fun fact about Dom is that he uses chat GPT in front of his open fridge
sometimes for last minute dinner decisions.
So help do a menu with these ingredients in my fridge. And the results are
interesting and apparently require human led decision to then select the dish.
I love that. Dom's session is entitled Human First Leadership in the Age of AI
Balancing Technology and Empathy.
Whilst technology is evolving rapidly and impacting our ways of working, it is
more and more crucial to maintain a human first approach in leadership.
Dom will explore strategies to ensure that AI supports rather than replaces
human interactions.
And he'll go through how this combo is key to support retention and growth
strategies at scale in an environment where key to leverage the best resources
in that type of model.
We will finish in sharing insights on fostering empathy and human connection in
what now is an AI driven world.
So please give it up for us, Bika Dom.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you, Harry.
You must know that Harry has repeated for 10 minutes to say my name right and
he managed to it.
So round of applause.
Thank you very much.
I'm conscious that I'm between you and launch, but as my boss tells to be often
when we have meeting at this time of the day, Dominic, your French launch is
important for you.
So make sure that we finish on time.
A bit of a few spoiler alerts before we go in a bit in the detail of the
content I want to go through today with you.
First one, sorry.
CHAP JPT is credited as the end of this presentation.
I used it as a digital assistant to create content.
The summary Harry presented to you was CHAP JPT generated.
It helped me and this is what we want to talk about today, how we can use AI to
do some human relation, movement content, human delivery.
Second, I'm very positive about AI.
So I don't believe that AI will destroy the world, the terminator of the world.
I'm very positive in terms of what it will bring in the workspace in terms of
helping us to be less overwhelmed in our day today.
And that's something very important. I will try to diffuse messages across all
my presentation today.
I'm happy to have a lot of questions. I'll try to keep it packed to keep a lot
of time for questions.
So please use Slido and happy to have most of the questions.
To support my last statement in terms of positive around future, I wanted to
start with these two quotes.
It's not Taylor Swift quotes as I've done last year, but more serious quotes
here around senior VPN Google or senior VPN Salesforce.
Around AI is changing the way we are working and we will see more and more
impacts on the day they are working, our day to day working, but it will not
kill jobs.
And we will have a very important way to adapt. That's the first message.
And the second message on the last, the second non-quote is we will have
digital assistance and we will be super powered collaborators.
That's very important. We will have more powers with AI on our day today and
that's the other one.
But as we said, it's more question that AI has on customer experience.
It's not intended or not in your companies, but it exists chatbots and how when
customers have questions, you don't need to be behind your phone and answer
them quickly.
You will have a chatbot available for your customers to have an answer to the
questions.
Predictive analytics also will be able for you as humans, as customer success
teams to have more proactive engagements and help also to predict issues
or identify new objectives with the customer.
And last but not the least, I think we are all using to an extent today is how
we use more powerful sentiment analysis to detect any risk we have in the
business, any sentiment we need to address before it becomes a risk as a
customer success team.
So that's the positive impact that AI has on the customer.
There's also a positive impact on the employee.
We hear a lot of, when we talk to each other, we hear a lot of teams quite
stretched, quite overwhelmed in their day-to-day as customer success managers,
a lot of different tasks to do.
There's three areas where AI is really helping quite quickly with team
productivity, but also team satisfaction.
First of all, post-meeting activities will use chat GPT, UNE, secure GPT to
generate minutes of a meeting, quite easy, follow up on actions.
That's quite true, and the gain site has invested a lot on these features, but
you can also use other technologies, pre-meeting activities.
I think well, the gain site, you have the AI cheat sheet, which is definitely a
very easy feature to use in terms of preparing meetings, but it can be also
using AI in other ways.
I was just discussing with Ari this before in terms of preparing meetings,
preparing business reviews, how do we use chat GPT to summarize financial
reports of your customers to understand what are the changes in their
strategies, to be sure that you are aligning your presentations to their new
objectives.
Last but not the least is how do you use AI and assisting in the day-to-day of
any customer success manager, making sure that they receive the good alerts and
the good timing, so they are able to provide the value they have in terms of
human interaction.
There's one topic I just want to spend a few seconds on is, AI is a brand of a
lot of technologies, and I think we all here, Gen AI since the last 10 to 12
months, AI will be less efficient, can be efficient to an extent, but less
efficient, around context collaboration
and how to make sure that they are in the context of the data, and how to make
sure that they are in the context.
We are able to address the data, analyze it, return an outcome, and output, but
they don't have the context, and that's important.
So having these elements is really key, and the last one is contrast, is when
you need to reschedule a meeting, something quite common in our CS day-to-day
world, having the understanding of the culture, the understanding of the type
of relationships you have with people is key, and this AI will not provide you
that, so that's important, and that's where at the end it's a human decision.
human empathy still matters in terms of dealing with complex or sensitive
issues, because you will have these human skills, these soft skills, with to
address them, it will help you to build trust, empathy, and the talk just
before now I was talking about how
And this, well, I think that's a given, but just to remind you, this is where
empathy was building trust in the relationships, it's clear, it's not AI,
obviously you will trust AI, it will be very transactional in terms of chatbot
experience, but if you want to build long-term relationships you will need to
build this trust and create the personal connections.
Your AI will be able to prepare, analyze the data, prepare your human
interaction, but the real human interaction is that's the connection you will
create with your customers, that's what will create, sorry, lasting loyalty
with your long-term relationships with your customers.
So to summarize, as a leader today, I think I wanted just to summarize what are
the challenges when we are exposing what are the challenges as a leader in an
age of AI.
First, adapting to technological description, evolution of technology, I think
there's a lot of evolution, we were not talking about chat GPT one year and a
half ago, at the volume we are talking today.
So it's a question of setting the good strategies in terms of capturing what is
the next technology which will impact us in our day-to-day cost of success jobs
So setting the good continuous learning mindset culture, and I'll come back to
this because it's a key one I want to address, but making sure also that we are
a giant enough as organizations to adapt to these new technologies.
So in the second, ethical considerations, there's a lot of projects where
perhaps you need to take in your conversation, the ethical part of AI, how do
you manage data, how do you manage diversity, how do you make sure that you
have enough data to manage diversity, that's key.
So it's a key to put in place ethical frameworks if you want to scale AI in the
organization to make sure that you bring this level of diversity.
Transparency is also key. I heard yesterday in a talk, someone talking about
explainable AI, making sure that you communicate on how you are building these
AI systems, so you build a trust window.
The third challenge is around and that's something I will come back also on
this fostering collaboration between humans and AI where I was talking as an
introduction as digital assistants.
So how do you collaborate with your new assistants? How do you calibrate to
have these superpowers AI will allow you to have?
The second is, well, there's some fear, so you need to address transformation,
workforce transformation is key.
So how do you put this in place? How do you make sure that you put enough
effort in terms of training, coaching, change management with your workforce to
make sure that they are prepared to the new roles and responsibilities
that we'll have with the help of AI and key and that's where empathy comes back
in also is how do you maintain, well, maintaining a human centric leadership.
AI is good in terms of efficiency, you will be able to deliver more but make
sure that at the end of the day you are leading a team of humans and you make
sure that they are on-boarded and they are considered as human in the world.
So where to start when we talk about how to nurture empathy in AI leadership?
That's a few bullet points I wanted to address today.
Cultivate emotional intelligence, we talk about empathy as part of the global
emotional intelligence topic, it's really talking about investing on active
listening skills, sorry, acknowledging your own emotions,
expressing the understanding of these emotions and especially with your
customer, how do you build trust in a relationship is really this emotion
connections.
Promote a people first culture, so here it's really a question of
organizational culture in terms of people first, how do you work together,
collaboration is a key one, people first approach.
Communication and transparency is key in all change management programs when it
comes to AI, it's really key in terms of ethical considerations to so everyone
understands how it's built but it's also setting the tone in terms of these are
the objectives of AI in our organization.
So I work for a company who is providing automation, we provide robots at the
end of the day and we talk a lot about the future of work and how it changes
the way the people are working and this communication and transparency part is
really key in terms of setting the new culture,
making sure that the people who are impacted by the technology, AI we are
talking here, are embracing this technology otherwise there will be some fear.
Continuous learning and adaptation, as we just said just before, everything is
evolving, evolving quickly, just make sure to have this continuous learning
setup, it's not traditional in structure led training sessions but it's more
question of coaching, making sure that your teams are open to embrace change and are considering
change, new technologies and adapting to them.
And the key one I think and the key one for the adoption of AI in organization
is how do we collaborate with AI, I think it's a given we need to take AI in
organizations today but those who will go to the extra mind who will deliver
more value
are the organizations who will collaborate efficiently at scale with AI.
So it's all about building this human first culture in this new world and
because we're talking about culture, I'm talking a lot about training, ment
oring, coaching,
I wanted to talk a bit about skills and how the importance of focusing on
skills and continuous in the enablement.
I like this report of World Economic Forum where they are focusing on what are
the key skills the organizations are rescaling on and while you can see that
the third one is AI and big data, that's not a surprise.
It's new skills you are introducing to organization, more and more data, etc.
But the two first ones are human skills, human led skills, analytics, thinking,
creative thinking, how do you, what you will have more time so really address
this with more creativity, thinking.
And that's a key one.
And because we're talking about World Economic Forum, there's another stat and
we touched about it in the beginning with the quote of one of the two very
important people in the Google or Salesforce.
That it's the same numbers from the World Economic Forum which is slightly
outdated in 2020 that we're talking about in 2025 between 2020 and 2025.
There will be a lot of job loss around new technology, around the Automation AI
, all these kind of new technologies and they were measuring this around at
around 50 million of job losses, job killed with the new technology.
That can become very scary.
But when you continue to read the report, they were talking about 75 million
jobs created with this new technology.
So the delta was 25 million, so positive.
So again, no fear.
It's only a question of adaptation.
And it's a question of adaptation also in terms of even in your given skills.
We had, I was directly involved with the customer a few years ago where we were
talking about the future of work, putting in place these automation projects
with them.
And it was a banking organization and they were wanting to support their branch
advisors in meeting with customers, kind of similar to what we do in customer
success.
And they had very high targets in terms of, yeah, this needs to help our branch
advisors to offset and cross sell quite similar to what we can hear in customer
success conversations.
And the project was not working in terms of these objectives.
And so we came in and done a quite technical assessment because obviously we
think technology is not working.
Let's look at it.
And everything was working.
And what we were observing is that the branch advisors during 20, well, since
they were in the bank, they had, they were recruited with their skills,
commercial interaction, relationships, and so forth.
And they were focusing on doing data entry in different systems.
And they lost all these skills and they needed to retrain the branch advisors
to focus on upsell, quite the introduction of AI.
I see another kind of other skills happening which I would call here out skills
in terms of outsourcing skills.
What as a human are the skills, the work, you can outsource to AI.
So you can become more powerful.
You can do more with you as a human because you will have your digital
collaborator here to help you.
And that's a key one here.
And it also helps, and I've said it several times, but it helps also on your
day to day and as conversations as this morning where presentations as this
motion, where you will use
AI, chapter, GPT or equivalent, Gemini or whoever to create or to help you to
create content for your presentations.
So we are talking about skills.
We're talking about soft skills, out skills.
All these are related for me to this bigger picture around what we talked about
, empathy, but about emotional intelligence.
And in terms of how do we help our teams to embrace this need of having this
exposure to their own emotional intelligence, but also managing all these
emotions you will have in your day to day with customers.
When there's escalations, where there's difficult conversations or more easy
conversations with customers, but they all come in with their emotional
intelligence emotions and you need to manage them.
So on the top of this slide here on the two first ones, it's all about you,
your teams.
Is how do you coach your team in terms of awareness about their emotions, about
their emotional intelligence?
What are they? So really investing on your teams to make sure that each
collaborator in your organization know their set of emotions.
And the second one is part of how do they manage them and how can we improve
them?
That's the start point, how can we improve them?
And after in terms of how do we engage with our customers in terms of I'm aware
of this social ecosystem with my customers and I have these skills to manage
the relationship.
I've talked about this a lot already.
And at the end, it's a question of setting this kind of, I would say, startup
mindset, but preparing the skating.
In terms of you need to do something, you need to embrace the change.
If you don't embrace the change, you will lose everything.
So it's key for your teams to jump on the train the earliest possible.
So setting for them this safe space where they are able to experiment.
They fail, they fail, they fail fast, and we will take the learnings of that.
But it's a question of not staying, not jumping on that train, really moving,
taking the move.
There was one I wanted to touch a little also on is as a leader in the AI world
, you have a lot of different roles in terms of,
inspiring people in terms of working with the new technologies, making sure
that you value people's skills, such as creativity and empathy.
Bill Bridges with the AI ecosystem, it's new areas you need to work on.
It's often very different skills here, and it can be overwhelming also for the
leaders in the AI world to embrace all these new roles as a leader.
You mustn't be afraid of that, you need to take them step by step and go in a
phased approach.
You can't phase them all at once.
I think that's also a key message I wanted to share with you today.
Before concluding, I just wanted to summarize on what are the key strategies
for humanizing the workplace, which is key,
recognizing the human impact of AI.
That's a key one working with the teams, communicating, prioritizing emotional
intelligence.
I think that's something I've repeated seven times, which is key for me.
AI as an empathy and enabler, it will provide you, and that's key to repeat
this message is,
it will provide you more time, more insights to create these connections, so
use it also at this kind of tool.
Human and AI collaboration, really key to encourage this, inclusive AI systems,
focusing on diversity, diversity is key, diversity of data.
Data sources, diversity of people in the team that's taking care of them.
This is a culture of continuous learning.
All this, obviously, are key, but I think it's also leading as a leader in this
world, leading by example.
Empathy starts at the top, so make sure that you set the tone.
You champion also human stories celebrating the successes that's key and
empowering your team to use AI and use AI wisely.
Again, I was talking about this safe space in terms of making sure that they
are able to take their own decisions and take their own tests,
their own use cases around AI.
I just wanted to conclude on two elements.
Preparing this talk, I found this little graph in terms of how do we position
AI leaders across the world.
I will not put names on who is a record of AI, or Magadan, or watch of the AI
prokalops.
You can imagine who you are behind here. It's not the point of my talk today.
I just want to talk about how they are measured here in terms of optimistic
vision.
You have understood that I'm more on the optimistic side, speculative versus
pragmatic.
Everything is moving fast, so there's a lot of speculation.
I would really highly recommend you to be in the pragmatic space, mainly take
the technology which can scale,
have a look at the speculative space because this is the next pragmatic space
which will scale.
You need to be there prepared for these next phases, but focus on what can
scale across your organization.
That was the first conclusion message I wanted to take.
The second one was a question of balance.
I will be in this with two unknown brands.
First of all, who are expecting one day that you are humanly contacted by
Netflix,
by a customer success manager from Netflix? Nobody.
You are paying 10 euros, 15 euros a month.
It's technology-led. That's what you are expecting.
Our customers are also expecting that and you need to invest on that.
The interesting fact also around Netflix is that they have heavily invested on
data, data analytics.
Today, 80% of what you are watching on Netflix is coming from their
recommendation engine from AI.
That's key, first of all.
This is driving growth quarter after quarter in the organization.
Because they have invested on the data, they have put sets, the things
correctly.
The second one, Starbucks.
Starbucks has, when you read articles, a wonderful ordering app.
Who uses the app or who is now you are more forced to use the app, but what we
come,
what we search as an experience in Starbucks is obviously a coffee, a good
coffee,
but it's also all the Barry Star experience, all the human connection
experience.
That's why also they have a lot of pushback on their ordering app, even if they
have invested a lot.
Find a good balance between the two.
On conclusion, note before questions, invest on people.
Because Starbucks does this well and it works for Starbucks,
it's a great way to invest on people and make sure they are trained to spend
your names correctly, as Harry has done at the beginning of my source today.
>> All right, please give up for Dom.
>> Thank you.
>> Awesome.
[ Applause ]
I don't know about you, but I really enjoyed that.
We're going to take some questions now.
This is track six.
Go to the slide up poll and submit your questions for Dom.
Let's go.
If everyone is using the same AI technology, how do we remain authentic and
stand out?
I wonder if over time if we become homogenous and somewhat fake in these human
interactions, do you agree?
>> To an extent, yes, I agree.
I think it's important to -- and we have -- even if it's a new, well, gener
ative AR is a new word,
we hear more and more people investing on their private LLMs,
and I think that will address what we are stating here,
having keeping organizing your own data to create this personalized experience
with the insights, the inputs you have from your own customers is key to
address this.
>> Okay.
Aside from chat, GPT, what are the tools are you currently advocating your team
to use,
and are you training them on how to use them?
>> That's a good question.
We are trying to invest on Gainside today, so let's see.
Nothing implemented for the moment.
We are in commercial conversations.
>> Thank you for saying that.
>> How can organizations be transparent about their use of AI in customer
interactions to build trust,
but without compromising the human first experience?
>> Interesting one.
I said you need to be honest with your customers and say this is a chat bot.
I don't remember the brand in France 20 years ago.
They introduced a chat bot at the time.
It was not called a chat bot, but they didn't label this as technology.
They were trying to hide this about this is a human experience and it didn't
work.
Everyone was coming back and I believe there are some French people in the room
saying, oh, yes, I remember that.
I think it was with a travel company.
I think you need to say we are here in the AI world, we are here with proper
humans and connecting.
That's key to create this connection.
This experience.
>> Awesome.
What has been your strategy to get your teams to start playing with AI?
>> As I was saying, the easy part is we are selling this kind of vision to our
customers. It was easy to embrace these kind of changes with internally and obviously
using our technology
internally.
It's coming back to the start-up mindset.
It's setting the safe space in terms of these other objectives you need to
achieve.
You are free to use whatever the tool you need to use and also encouraging you
to bring your
experiments and talk to the team about what are your successes in terms of
productivity
getting to the extra mind with your customers using these tools and creating
this knowledge
sharing, experience sharing, and culture within the teams.
>> While some ethical considerations, leaders should keep in mind to ensure AI
's role remains
fair, unbiased, and supportive of a human-first experience.
>> The quick answer here is diversity, making sure that you have diversity in
data, considering
all your different types of customers, different types of contact within your
customers.
It's key.
It's also a question of how are you building your teams?
>> I highly believe in terms of recruitment, in terms of balancing the
different cultures
you want to have in your team and creating this more global culture.
>> All the buzz around AI boils down to using chat GPT and/or setting up a chat
bot.
Do you have any more innovative examples from your experience?
>> We are using -- yeah, and that's the trendy part.
What I was saying at the beginning, I think it's a question of you use chat GPT
for what
it's good at.
I think it's more -- there's more -- and when it comes to the CS world, when it
comes to
health scores in terms of analyzing data, identifying low signals of risks,
these are
the areas where we have invested also a lot.
>> Okay.
Apart from your presentation just now, what are some of the best use cases for
AI in
day-to-day work life that you use?
>> I will not talk about my fridge again.
>> No, okay.
They know about that.
>> That's a difficult question.
I think that -- for me, it's really using the power of gen AI to capture all
the -- you
have quite easily access with gain site and all the different technologies you
have internally
on all your internal data on customers.
It's how we use data in terms of capturing this knowledge, these insights in
the open
world and asking -- yeah, asking again chat GPT as in the world, but asking
your digital
assistant in what are the latest news, what are the latest reports, and give me
a summary
of these insights to prepare a call with the customer?
That's a key one, I think.
>> Okay.
How would you suggest to performance manage AI adoption as a core of the
customer success
role?
Some of this must come from us providing tooling, of course, but any tips on
how we measure
and socialize AI skills within our teams?
>> It's really creating this area of this culture of experimentation,
continuous adaptation,
not stuck in your day to day and embracing all the new changes.
When it comes to performance and manage performance, it's also a question of
how do you set this
in the objectives of your team being more efficient?
It's not a question -- we don't do this in my team today, but it's not a
question of
number of meetings you have with customers, but it's more this qualitative
indicators
you want to follow globally as a team, and that's our thinking important also,
is having
these collective indicators as a team that we are progressing in this direction
>> Okay.
How do we get people to use tools like chat GPT well as it's easy to use it
badly?
Good point.
>> Yes, and we have a lot of experiences on that.
I think it's a question of investing and coaching people in terms of -- yeah,
while I was talking
in a few minutes ago that I'm not a strong believer in the hard skills of
prompt engineering,
but it's making sure that you have this coaching in terms of collaborating,
talking a bit
with your digital assistant, and talking the good language and the precise
language. I think that's the most important.
>> Okay.
Interesting one.
How do you prevent people from thinking that you are cheating if you use AI?
>> Why?
>> Who asked the question?
>> No?
Okay.
>> I think it's not a question of cheating.
It's in tracing technology.
It's in change which is coming with the technology and making sure that it's
accelerating not
only your growth, but the outcomes you are delivering with your customers.
I don't see where we are cheating here.
I think we can refer -- perhaps it's a problem of branding on the game side
side in terms
of AI cheat sheets where we are cheating because we are preparing the meeting
quicker.
Perhaps not the good branding for that.
>> We might need to change the name there.
What exactly do you find as being empathetic and what is your definition of
diversity?
How do you ensure that it's authentic diversity that actually brings a
representation of the
demographic of where you work and who you serve?
>> I was just discussing this a few minutes before the talk because I'm
currently in
recruitment process and balancing the team and balancing the diversity of
genders.
Clearly, he's a key one.
We are also serving in the different regions under my responsibility, serving
them with
the specific culture, making sure that because culture is important in making
them adopt
these new skills.
It's making them safe in using this new outsourcing force they have under their
hands in terms
that can use quite easily.
There's less problems in terms of availability constraints.
AI is always available normally.
It's more this setting of culture, more than a question of training.
>> One more?
>> Yes.
How do you determine the balance between automation and personal touch points
to avoid making
customer interactions feel overly mechanical or impersonal?
>> That can be a subject for a full presentation.
I'll try to be short as I told you, launch is important for everyone.
>> It's a question of bringing the humans at the good moment in the life cycle
of a customer.
Obviously, you will segment your customer base and you will have -- and I heard
this morning,
I think, if I recall correctly, it's not a question of having digital
interactions only
with the low segments in your customer base.
But it's more a question of defining where the human will make a difference in
order
to make a difference in your customer base.
>> That's where you will make sure you have these human touch points.
>> We are keeping you from lunch now.
Just very quickly, a few reminders.
You can access a copy of the slides and the order of recording at the post
library.
Check that out.
