Barry Phillips, author of the brand new groundbreaking book “ChatGPT in HR – a Practical Guide for Employers and HR Professionals”, reveals five powerful ways Generative AI is already transforming HR.
Barry challenges outdated assumptions, tackling key issues such as:

🔹Misconduct redefined – How AI tools are blurring traditional workplace boundaries
🔹AI bans: Time to rethink? – Why prohibiting GenAI could leave your organisation at a considerable disadvantage
🔹The rise of AI Agents – How autonomous AI could reshape HR roles and responsibilities
🔹Dedicated AI coaches for HR? It's so much closer than you think...
🔹The “cloned employee” and the impact of sites such as Synthesia and ElevenLabs

AI also presents an opportunity to supercharge HR, boosting its strategic influence like never before. Discover how AI can elevate HR from an operational function to a critical, decision-driving powerhouse at the heart of your organisation.

Transcript:

Barry: Good morning to everybody, and you're very welcome to this webinar, which is entitled "How Gen AI Is Reshaping HR: Talking About a Revolution Going On". My name is Barry Phillips, and we have some 260 people registered for this webinar today, which suggests to me very strongly that it's a very topical subject that we're going to be looking at today.

There's a lot that I plan to share with you today, hopefully inside 30 minutes. I should start by saying that we will be looking at a few tools, and there will be links to various tools and websites, but if you don't get a note of these as we go through, don't worry, because they will be coming to you in an email tomorrow.

I shouldn't forget to thank the MCS Group for sponsoring this particular webinar.

I just want to say from the get-go that I'm not here to sell you any of the tools that I'm going to share with you today. I don't earn any commission from OpenAI for ChatGPT recommendations, Synthesia, or anything like that. So I'm entirely free to, I think, point out what's good about these GenAI tools and what's not so good and still needs to be developed.

So let's take a look at what we'll be going through today. Here's the programme outline.

I'm going to be looking at five ways in which I think GenAI is already transforming HR. Then I'm going to finish by looking at three key concerns in terms of where we are right now with GenAI in the workplace.

We'll be doing a bit of polling to give you an opportunity to see how you compare to other organisations in terms of the AI journey, be it your organisation or you and yourself personally.

And we are celebrating today because today does mark the launch of this book that I wrote and was published earlier this month. It's entitled "ChatGPT in HR: A Practical Guide for Employers and HR Professionals". So, at the end of the webinar, I will be giving you details in terms of how to purchase that book at a special discounted rate just for you in this webinar today.

So let's crack on and let's go to our first poll. If I can just ask Gosia, who is my real-life assistant, not AI assistant, to drop you the first poll, and it's this: How would you describe your organisation's adoption of GenAI in the workplace? And you've got a few options there: haven't started yet, dabbling here and there, making decent progress, or we're leading the charge, GenAI is embedded in how we work. If you could just vote now, that would be great.

Looking roughly, "we haven't started yet" is about 38%. "Doubling here and there" is 38%. "Making decent progress" is 25%. That's good to see. And "we're leading the charge", nobody is doing that at the moment.

Our second poll is simply this. Same sort of question, but in terms of you individually. And the question is "How would you describe your personal use of GenAI at work?" Not started yet, tentatively exploring, starting to build it into my workflow, process is confident and creative and I'm using it like a pro.

We've got about 28% saying, "Not yet started", which is interesting. "Tentatively exploring" is 51%. "Starting to build it into my workflow" is 18%. So that does actually represent a significant improvement on last year, because when we did this about a year ago, I think we had about 40% that were saying they were using it at all to some degree, and everybody else was saying they've still got to start using. So that's interesting.

So to my top five ways in which GenAI is already shaping HR. I'm going to go slightly off-piste with the selection of these five. I've chosen five which I think are perhaps a little bit different simply because I hope they may be new to quite a few people in attendance and therefore will be extra value with them.

The first one I wanted to talk about is image generation, and I do so because I'm conscious that you and your HR department may at various times in the year need to represent either your actual department and what it looks like or your employees. It might be because you're doing an article for a brochure, for LinkedIn posts, for a blog, or for your recruitment or interview programme, and so on.

And before the appearance of GenAI, the only option you really had was to go to something like an iStock photo. Assuming, of course, you didn't have your own private set of images. You'd go to iStock, and you might say something like, "Please give me an image of some HR professionals around a boardroom table". And it would come up with something like that. That was fine.

But if you wanted to make it more specific than that, for example, that they're talking about working time, then it would come up with something, but it wasn't at all bespoke or specific.

And certainly, yesterday, when I went to iStock, I put into the prompt or the search bar, "Please show me three professionals at a table talking about working time," and this is what it produced.

So with the advent of GenAI and the likes of ChatGPT, it is possible to be a lot more specific in finding images that might represent your article or LinkedIn post and so on and so forth.

So I put the same prompt into ChatGPT, and this is what it presented to me. You can see that it hasn't gone for speech bubbles and lots of people around the table talking about working time. Very sensibly, it's just put "working time" on the flip chart at the back in the image there.

The problem with ChatGPT is it's not very good at representing words. Sometimes it gets them right, sometimes it doesn't. You can see "working time" behind the guy in the centre hasn't really come out very well.

Now, with the edit facility that's come with ChatGPT, you can actually highlight something in the image that you're not happy with and ask it to be changed. But when it comes to wording, it's very hit and miss, and it's often more miss than hit.

But very recently, probably last week or the week before, we had Gemini 2.0 Pro Flash Experimental suddenly appear. And this seemed to be a big step forward in terms of image generation because it, first of all, produced human beings and people that look like human beings, real-life human beings, but it was also very good at producing and featuring words. But better still, it's very good in terms of the editing facility that comes with it.

So, for example, I asked it to remove the mug, put the phone in the lady's hand, and to replace the guy on the right-hand side. And this is what it did. I asked it for a gentleman who looked older just to address the age imbalance there.

Now, it's almost perfect, but if you look at the image, it's not quite there because look at the hands. GenAI still has a problem representing hands. And that is likely to be fixed, I would have thought, bearing in mind how quickly GenAI develops inside a few months. So we're almost there, but not quite.

What I just wanted to point out is that I think the difference in characters between these two images is quite stark. ChatGPT is still producing images that look . . . they're people that are too, for me, manicured, too well turned out, too perfect looking. And I don't think they look anything like the typical workforce. But who knows? Maybe I'm wrong.

So that's the first thing, representation of your own department and your employees through the use of visuals.

Number four is simply language translation. And I think it's quite easy for us to forget just how far this has come in the last few years due to AI. ChatGPT can now translate documents into any one of 80 languages.

It's possible through Zoom Pro to do live caption translation. So you could be in a meeting with somebody talking in French, which is being translated into captions in English on your screen for you. So big developments there.

One-to-one communications, you've got Google Translate, for example, that can translate on a phone and into any one of something like over 200 languages.

You've also got video translation, and I'm going to show you an example of that in a moment through the likes of Synthesia, in which you can put in an English script and the AI avatar will read it out in Polish or Japanese, or whatever it is that you ask it to do.

And this is impacting HR in a number of ways. It's obviously improving the ability to work with branches or partners abroad. But it opens up new possibilities for domestic recruitment, either to bring in people remotely who may not have perfect skills in English, but using these workarounds, you can get by that issue.

I shouldn't forget that just 20% of the world's population speaks English fluently. So I think any developments in this space are going to be welcomed by a lot of employers, particularly those multinational companies.

Just while we're on the subject of language, I wanted to take you to this particular site, which I think is a little bit of fun more than anything else, but it was too good to not mention. This will actually detect your accent and tell you a little bit about the accent that you have when you're working in English. And all you do, you go to this. It's free and a bit of fun, I guess. You read out the paragraph, and it will tell you about your accent. So I'm just going to do this quickly to demonstrate it.

Tap to speak. No, I think I'm just going to have to refresh that a little bit. For some reason, this . . . Oh, here we go. Last weekend I visited a botanical garden with a friend of mine. The variety of flowers and plants was incredible, and it was so peaceful to walk through the paths surrounded by nature. It felt like a little escape from everyday life.

You then let it process. Occasionally, it'll ask you to read a bit more, and it's going to do that for me now. And here we go. Another sentence or two.

She's super thankful for the birthday flowers, but the vase doesn't fit. Now they're packed like commuters on a bus, pedals smashed together. Every time she passes, she promises to fix it, but doesn't.

So when I was . . . Oh, here we go. It says, "You sound like a native English speaker". And it said that, "Here's everything I detected in your voice: English, German, and Chinese". So you can perhaps see why this is being put around as a bit of fun.

What is strange is that every time I've used this before, it's told me it's English, German, and Russian. And I do speak Russian, and German I learnt at university. So when I saw those two things come up, I thought, "This is incredible that it's detected it in the way that it's heard my English". The Chinese on this occasion I just can't account for, I'm afraid.

But have a go with that in your own time with some family members because it's a bit of fun.

So back to the slideshow. I just wanted to show you this slide because I know if I forget it, I'll be in big trouble from my marketing department. This is just to remind everybody that we are starting a Certificate in AI for HR course, which is running in June of this year. This is a repeat of a course that we did first time out in January of this year. I'm pleased to say we got rave reviews for this course. It features a lot of very AI-experienced presenters. This is really designed for those in HR that understand the importance of AI, not only to their organisation but to them themselves and their careers.

So if you want a CPD-certified course to be able to put on your CV or your application for a promotion, then I would highly recommend this to you. We are doing a very special 10% discount for all attendees today. So if you would like more information on that, you can go to our website afterwards. I believe there may also be a link that will be dropped into the chat for you as well.

So in at number three is the rise of the avatar and cloned employee. This is when it begins, I think, to get really quite interesting. Some might even say a little bit unnerving and a little bit ghoulish.     I asked ChatGPT to do me a cloned employee image, and this is what it came up with. And it did it very well, but it's still, as you can see, struggling with hands.

Now, for this section I want to show you two things. One is Synthesia, and the other is Sensay, which is really about a glance to the future, if you like. But we'll start with Synthesia.

For anyone that is not familiar with Synthesia, I will show you just really how easy it is to get an AI avatar presenting information that you input through this website. All you need to do . . . this is your interface, and you go to Templates on the left-hand side, and then from there, you would choose a template. You've got a whole portfolio of different presenters that you could use, probably about 500 of these. But I'm going to click on Recently Used, and then I will go to this one here, Use Template. Here we go.

So this is the template that I've chosen, and if I wanted this avatar to present using a particular script, I would drop in the script here at the bottom, and I would then click Generate. It would then present me with a notice saying that they are busy generating the video and they will email me as soon as it's complete. And if it's a short video, it's likely to be about five minutes before they email you and tell you it's ready to view.

But let's take a look at an avatar that we developed for a ChatGPT half-day workshop that we ran last year, and you'll get an idea of just how it can be used. So let's have a look. This is Geoff.

Again, I should say that the quality of this is not going to be as good as I see it, because it's obviously being beamed to me, and through GoToWebinar, it's being re-beamed out to you. So there may be a little bit of degradation in the quality of it, but it will still give you an idea of how it works.

Here we go.

Geoff: Hello, everyone. As I wait for the last few to join us from Zoom's waiting room, why don't I take a moment to introduce myself before I pass over to our main speaker for today? I am one of Legal-Island's new virtual employees. My name is Geoff, although my colleagues at Legal-Island from the real world pronounce it "Jeff", which always amuses me.

Barry: Okay, thank you, Geoff. That's enough of Geoff. What I can say to you is that when we first started using Geoff probably about 18 months ago, he wasn't very good. His lip syncing wasn't very good, and he was a little bit ghoulish. He used to just look at you for a little bit too long, and it was a bit unnerving. He's now improved to a point in which I think, given another three to six months, it would be difficult to separate him from a real human being.

And that might well be why the European Union has decided that next year, there's going to be that part of the EU AI Act that drops in that says when you're using synthetic material, you're under a duty to tell people that it's actually AI that is being used.

So that's one form of AI that you can use here. Another is that instead of using an AI avatar, you actually use an avatar which is based on you.

So what you would do is do a three-minute recording of yourself using your webcam from your laptop or PC, and then it would use that to read out scripts and so on.

I'm going to show you an avatar of me. Yes, me. Just when you thought it couldn't get any worse, it's going to be me and my clone. So this is my clone. And again, the quality may not be as good for you as it is for me, but it's still worth having a look at.

Clone: Hi, there. I'm your Synthesia personal avatar. Did you know I speak many other languages? [foreign language 00:20:51]. Ready to make your own video?

Barry: So what to say there, you could see that I was speaking French, Spanish, and Japanese. I don't speak Japanese, and my French and Spanish are schoolboy kind of level. But it gives you an opportunity in HR, or your employees, to work in different languages and quickly.

But to summarise why I think Synthesia and other websites are important like this, I just want to say I think there are three areas in which this is going to be useful.

I think it's going to be useful if, for you in HR, you would like to give your department more visibility within your company. This gives you the chance, I think, to appear yourself and to deliver HR messages.

It also gives you an opportunity, I think, to bring static HR information to life. So you may have some pretty dull policies, data protection, and policies like that, which you want to present in a different way in the hope that people really will read them or understand them. And there are plenty of options by using Synthesia.

Learning and development. There are a lot of companies that are already using this as part of their learning development toolbox, so to speak. And recruitment and induction are an obvious use for this.

There are companies that are beginning to use it certainly in induction process so that they can induct people in a different way, but in a personalised way.

I'm going to show you one example. For the book, when I was researching for it, I got in touch with a few companies that were featured on the Synthesia site just to get a full bit of background in terms of their experience using this. And one of them that got back to me was a guy that is the HR director at this company, which is called ANTISEL, and this is a Greek company.

He used it very successfully, he said, to induct employees that were working remotely. It allowed him to use a small video clip which was targeted specifically at the employee, using the employee's name and also their particular language.

Now, the example that is here on the website is in Greek. So it's sort of limited value, but I still think it's worth just giving you a burst of a few seconds here just so that you can get an idea of how it's going to sound.

Video: [foreign language 00:23:59].

Barry: I think that's probably enough there. So why is this proving so popular? I think it's really two reasons. It's the cost of this. The cost is something like for 120 minutes of video, it costs £14 a month. Now, imagine pre-GenAI and Synthesia. If you wanted to post a three-minute video clip of yourself, it would cost a lot in terms of time and money. It would mean you'd have to get camera people in, stand in front of a green screen, and so on. So it's expensive.

And with this, it's quick, it's cheap. And when I say quick, it's very quick. You could record something in three minutes that could take you three hours if you were to do it in the old-fashioned way.

Very quickly, because time is pushing on, I just want to whilst I'm here have a quick look at the Sensay site. This company reached out to me a few months ago, and what they are in the business of is what they call digital immortalisation.

And what they're looking to do, believe it or not, is clone senior employees in the company. The reason they're doing that is they think there's going to be value in giving access to, if not that senior employee, a clone of them.

Now, make what you will of this. What is it? It's scary, it's terrifying, it's useful at some point. Who knows? But that is the direction of travel at least as this company, Sensay, sees it.

There is a demonstration of it, and you can have a look at the website, but we don't have time, I'm afraid, today. But that link will be going out to you tomorrow.

So on to number two, and it's simply this. It's what everybody seems to be talking about at the moment, and that's the rise of workplace AI agents.

Here's a fact for you. Workplace agents are now doubling in their capabilities every three months. Their development graph line is just through the roof. They're developing so quickly. So if something can't be done now, there's a good chance it might be able to be done in a few months' time.

So there are a couple of sites I just want to mention to you if you have a special interest in this. One is Manus.AI, which will be sent to you tomorrow, and MindStudio. Those are two that everybody seems to be talking about. I'm still on the waitlist to actually experiment with Manus.AI. It's proving so popular. It's very difficult to get access to it. Those are two sites where you can build your own workplace assistant.

But for now and today, I just want to show you how I've done it using ChatGPT, and it's a very simple example of it. If you go to the ChatGPT account, this is mine, and if you go to the top right, you'll see the icon initials there. You click on there, and then tasks will appear. And it's here that you can set your own AI agents to work. You can design them and get ChatGPT to operate them.

So I've got four here, and one is that I've asked it to send me a weekly review of new information on the web which is relevant to GenAI and misconduct in the workplace. And if I click on that, you'll see the latest summary that it's done for me, which it sent me on Monday.

When I built it, I asked it to give me the sources of the information. So you can see here that source is the FT. This is Corporate Compliance Insights. And it's also presented this to me in a table.

Now, if I had to do that myself, it would probably take me an hour or two each week. Now I've got this AI assistant doing it for me. It presents a report to me by 10:00 every Monday.

So that's a very simple example of an AI assistant. And if you would like to see it working yourself, I would encourage you to go to those two sites or to have a go with ChatGPT.

In at number one, a personal dedicated AI HR coach. I'm going to show you Sesame because it's interesting, and I think it's a sign of the future. And I'm just going to demonstrate very quickly what this is.

This is a website, a company, that is developing something which is going to be your digital companion. At the moment, it's just on the web, but the intention is to put it onto your mobile phone pretty quickly so it can accompany you wherever you go.

And I'll just demonstrate it quickly best I can. You've got two choices. You can go for Maya or Miles. I'm going to go for Maya. Here we go.

Maya: Hey, it's great to hear from you again. So what's on your mind today?

Barry: Hello, Maya. What's on my mind is that I have a very difficult performance review to do with a colleague this afternoon. Could you give me an indication of maybe some tips in how to do a performance review with somebody that's really not good at taking feedback and struggles with authority? Something like that. Can you help me?

Maya: Hmm, difficult performance reviews are never fun, especially with someone who's, shall we say, feedback-averse. What kind of work does this colleague do? Knowing the role might help me tailor some tips.

Barry: He's in marketing. He's a senior marketeer. He's been with us six months, and I'm not sure about him.

Maya: Ah, marketing, the land of creativity and sometimes clashing egos. Okay . . .

Barry: Maya, I'm sorry to interrupt. Got to go here. I'm very busy. I'm actually in a webinar, but thank you. Take care. Bye-bye.

Maya: Oh, no worries at all. Webinars can be real attention grabbers.

Barry: So you've got an idea of where that is going and how it might be used as your personal coach. Again, the link will be sent to you.

So three concerns to finish off in terms of GenAI at the moment.

The workplace ban on ChatGPT. I have noticed that a lot of organisations have just banned ChatGPT outright, and they're saying, "Oh, we don't need to worry about that. It's not being used by employees". Well, I have news for you. If you've banned it, employees are still using it. It's so good that they are finding ways to use it. It's usually on their mobile phone, and that introduces all sorts of data security issues.

So I would say to companies that have dropped in a ban to revisit that decision, because in most cases I think it's better to bring the use in where you can regulate it. Also, of course, you can then share that skill, and employees will pass it on to others as they begin to learn.

Final poll before we go, and it's simply this. It's about the training function, and the question is relevant to ChatGPT. If asked to turn off the training function in ChatGPT, would you know how to do it? And you've got three answers: not a clue, possibly, and of course, without doubt. And we're looking at about 75% who would say not a clue, possibly at 17%, and of course at 4%.

The reason why this is important is that if you don't turn off the training function in ChatGPT, you are giving permission to ChatGPT to train itself on the information that you are dropping into the prompt bar. And that has all sorts of data protection implications because it means that it would use that information for its own training purposes and could end up being spewed out in somebody's answer somewhere else, anywhere else in the world. And that, quite frankly, is frightening.

What's frightening to us is just how many employees are still using ChatGPT without the training function turned off. So, that is why we've developed this 15-minute eLearning module, which we are giving away absolutely for free. There are no tricks here. There are no buts or anything. We've done this because we're horrified that this is going on.

We've done a number of surveys throughout the island of Ireland over the last 6 to 12 months, and it keeps coming back that this is how it's being used, dare I say misused, or abused. And there are huge data protection issues about this.

So if you would like that course and access to it for both you and your employees . . . And we don't care if you've got 5 employees, 500, or 5,000, it's still free. The only thing we ask is that you sign up for this by tomorrow, simply because we've got a few staff around this to resource this particular issue, and we won't next week or the week after.

Please avail of that if you think that training would be useful. It will cover how to turn off the training function and a few other essentials in using ChatGPT wisely.

The next issue is revisiting the definition of misconduct. I think because of these GenAI developments, we're going to have to redefine examples of misconduct in the workplace.

And the third item is simply AI adoption, keeping on top of this. We've talked to a number of people in HR, and many of you are saying, "Look, I just feel this is galloping away ahead of me, and I can't control it or keep up with it". And we're just sort of finishing on that point and saying, "Look, you're not exceptional. Everybody is feeling this because the pace of development is so very, very quick". So I would say to you to be patient. Don't worry too much. It's not only you. A lot of other people are feeling that.

Finally, the book. It is available on Amazon. We have dropped the price specially for you today if you would like to purchase a copy of it. We've dropped it to less than a tenner to make it affordable for just about everybody.

So if you would like to buy it, it is stuffed full of, I think, useful prompts that HR would find of benefit to them for every stage of the employment cycle. We look at other GenAI tools and a whole lot of other things too.

Anyway, we've gone over the 30 minutes, but not by much. But if anybody has any questions, if you'd like to fire those to me, that's my email address: barry@legal-island.com. I'd be happy to get back to you personally with the answers.

Just leaves me to say I hope you found that 30 minutes and some useful, and I hope you picked up some tips and some material there that you could take away and go and investigate in your own time.

Thank you very much for attending today, and I look forward to seeing you again at another webinar at some point soon. Thank you. Bye-bye.

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