ADP’s Chief Talent Officer Jay Caldwell shares how working with AI should be treated like a gym session for your brain, where you flex your mental muscles. Learn how leaders should go from focusing on metrics like productivity to prioritizing skills like critical thinking and collaboration when using AI. Jay also shares why double-checking your AI’s work using your own knowledge is so important. For more on ADP’s AI and HR tools, visit ADP.com

Video Transcript:

Jay Caldwell
It's early with AI and it's already quite powerful. And to me it's some of the most powerful things is the information that's at your fingertips. And so it's to me, these other skills are more important in terms of how you use the information, not necessarily producing the information.

Patricia Stark
So how do we find that balance of employees utilizing new technology, but not rely on it so much that they're just like, oh yeah, that's good enough.

Jay Caldwell
Yeah. The brain drain that comes along with the technology. I was thinking about how how you do this with your kids sometimes maybe take the technology away. And I've seen some companies starting to practice that is actually, you know, workshopping something without the technology and tools and, and just kind of flexing the mental muscle a little bit more.

I think also applying the technology in different experiences or different contexts helps as well. So I think that's a great way to think about developing. Moving forward is not just the information you could produce or the information I could teach you, but also how can you apply it in different places or different parts of your organization, because then you're flexing a different part of your brain in terms of context shifting or working with different people.

Patricia Stark
So I'd like to go a little bit deeper here on some of the human skills and why you feel they're going to become more important as we use AI, more and more things like critical thinking, relationship skills, communication skills, all of these things that are so human are going to be more important the more that we use AI.

Jay Caldwell
Yeah, yeah. Well I think it's early with AI and it's already quite powerful. And to me it's some of the most powerful things is the information that's at your fingertips. And so it's to me these other skills are more important in terms of how you use the information, not necessarily producing the information. So at the individual level, things like creativity, critical thinking, judgment, these are important as you as an individual use AI.

For example, in the early days of AI started using it and sampling with it in terms of analytics and even our own workforce analytics. And what I noticed pretty quickly is if I wasn't prescriptive with the AI, it was wrong. As an example, I was looking at workforce data and it double counted locations within our organization. I knew that answer was wrong because I know our organization. If I didn't know the organization as well ,

critical thinking is important to ask the AI questions. Check it’s thinking. Validate some of its thinking. Maybe cross-reference a little bit with another AI tool to to double check that it's correct, but also to ask really good questions. And I think that's one of the best skills in in interacting with AI is being able to ask great specific questions and then you get better results.

So that's at the individual level. And then at more of the group level. That's where the collaborative skills are really important. Influence skills a leadership skills because it's going to produce great information. It's not really valuable unless you can actually achieve something with it. And that still happens through people. So I can have a great idea that I came up with with my AI teammate.

But if I'm not able to influence others on, for example, an initiative that I came up with or a business case that I created, if I can't personally communicate that effectively through the organization, it's not going to get off the ground.