Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Carol Lee, thank you so much for joining us. I can’t wait to hear what is your why?

Karelee Close:
Well, it’s an interesting question. The why. I think my why has evolved over time and when I started my career, I probably wasn’t sure what my why was. But I’ve spent my career at the intersection of strategy, technology and people, and I’ve really been interested in learning and growing at the edge of my comfort zone. So always looked for more exciting work and that sort of got me to technology and change. So over 25 years, I’ve really been enjoying being involved in really hard complex business problems, but also creating new ways to solve those with technology. And I guess my why is I believe technology is the human advantage, and I love to help companies innovate to solve problems differently using the latest technology that’s available to us.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
That’s fascinating. Tell me how technology is the human advantage.

Karelee Close:
Well, I mean, if you think about it, we’ve had fire, we’ve had wheels, we’ve had factories, we’ve had digital, we’ve had ai. Now we have gen ai and humans create that technology. And sometimes I think we feel like that technology is doing something to us, and I have a real passion for saying, well, actually that technology is available to us. How do we create it a moment where we can create advantage for that? So I think that it is our advantage and it is in our controlled and our gift to work out how to use it to solve old problems in new ways and how to solve entirely new problems. So I think of it as a really positive thing where harnessed and used in the right way, technology really creates human potential that’s very different than if we didn’t have it.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
So isn’t there a tipping point with AI where it stops being human led, where it starts being AI led? I mean, agentic AI is all about, it’s being proactive rather than reactive. Is there going to be a point where that isn’t the case anymore in the future?

Karelee Close:
I don’t know. I think many people are saying actually with responsible AI and with the way that we design AI and the flow of work, that there will be humans in the loop. And yes, the work will be done differently. Just like when we got the spreadsheets in the first time, people ask what would be the role of finance? There will be times when humans are not necessarily doing all of the tasks, but I do believe fundamentally the decisions we will make if we’re being responsible about the technology will be human led.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Yeah. Do you see responsible AI as being very popular? I mean, it’s popular amongst the people in the journalists. Is it popular, the big tech executives and AI startup founders?

Karelee Close:
Yeah, I think, yes, absolutely. I think there’s a lot of excitement around what technology can do. There’s been excitement about technology for, well, my whole career is why I got into technology is it is there’s a lot of potential. Responsible AI is something that is intricately linked to the value creation of in this next era, it’s going to be those that have harnessed responsible AI will be able to create value from it. Those that have responsible approaches will build trust with employees, and that will be one of the unlocks to scaling this technology effectively. And yet I think we all acknowledge that very few organizations are really defining and adopting a responsible AI strategy at scale. So it is an opportunity to move differently in the future, but I think the responsible use and the ability to drive trust with employees is going to be a real unlock for value creation in the next era.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
I’m surprised to hear you say that. I guess it feels like it’s a rush to be first, the first mover advantage. And so you have all this investment going in and all of this pushing of the boundaries and innovation, and it’s kind of what makes America, America is that drive to the frontier. And so to say responsibly, I will have the advantage. Sounds good, but I wonder if that’s really what investors are thinking right now. Let’s invest in the company that’s really focused on ethics as opposed to the company who is just pushing it to the limit.

Karelee Close:
I think it’s both, right? I don’t think it’s either or. You framed it as either or. But I actually think those organizations that are able to harness the power of the technology and do it with a responsible and ethical approach, they’re going to be the ones that win. So it’s both not either or, right? And most organizations are experimenting, not enough organizations are really getting to scale and getting to scale does involve not necessarily putting the brakes on the pace, but also helping people understand what the models are trained on, how the models are being used and what’s the appropriate use of the model so that it can be used in the right way.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Yeah. So these are the kinds of things you’re working on along with others, but change management is really a passion of yours. I know. And so I’m curious, how has change management changed?

Karelee Close:
Well, I’m not sure that it’s changed enough actually. I think change management needs to change more in this next era. So meta change management, where does change management come from? And in the technology space, it comes from getting people to adopt new technology. We now have a technology that learns alongside humans. And so actually we need to talk about continuous change, not change management and adoption. We need to talk about continuous learning and co-learning, co-working with this technology, which is actually a really exciting field where I think we do need to develop in a much different way where we experience the technology, we help it learn, and we learn ourselves at the same time. That’s going to be the change management of the future. It’s going to be the continuous learning and continuous change that’s done in a responsible way.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Okay. That’s interesting. So what does that co-learning look like, right in the old world, change management, let’s say with digital transformation, right? Is you’ve got a bunch of employees, we need them to understand why this technology is going to help them get them to embrace it and adopt it, and then that we’ll do basically a bunch of training and a bunch of communications. And that is the change management plan for digital transformation. Paint the picture of what the co-learning model you’re talking about looks like.

Karelee Close:
Yeah. Well, I would just give you a practical example. We’re doing some of the most extensive gen AI work in the world across industries and across functions. But importantly at Accenture, we like to use the technology on our own function. So I’ve been working with our marketing department on implementing agen architecture in end-to-end campaign management. And the co-learning there will means, so day one, we have a intelligent agent that can look at content and can look outside at all of the other publications that have happened in the rest of the world and compare an idea that we have for a publication. You could imagine we have a lot of ideas with the size that we are. Compare that idea with what’s been published and say how unique is it? How is it compared to what we are trying to position in terms of our brand?
Really interesting day one, the model is pretty good, but it’s not perfect. It is actually better when we provide feedback. So we found that our marketeers providing feedback to the models, coaching the model effectively actually got a better result. Interestingly, people working with the agent then needed to provide feedback, but they also then needed to learn how to ask the agent the appropriate questions. So they needed to learn how to prompt. And actually even over a short period of time in as l as two to three weeks, we saw an exponential learning between the intelligent agent and the marketeer if there was a context of that continuous feedback loop. So I think that’s an interesting area for change management. It’s not like, here, Jessica, I’m going to give you a piece of technology and here’s how you’re going to use it, but I’m actually creating the context where the human and the intelligent agent are working together to solve a problem.
And one of the interesting things in terms of adoption was we gave them the ability to say, thumbs up, thumbs down on the recommendation from the agent. And that was an important sort of bit of tissue connection between the person doing the work and the intelligent agent to say they could still review the work. So they were still in fact a little bit in charge of the work as it got done, as they got more and more comfortable with the quality, then we could actually sort of have them reviewing a little bit less. But we had to effectively have an onboarding approach for an intelligent agent. And it was a moment where we were looking at it and saying, actually this is quite cool because we think about onboarding a new intern or a new employee and we give them a few months of learning and experience and stuff, but we don’t always think about that with technology.
And so we were trying to think about, okay, well what’s the onboarding experience that we need to have with the intelligent agent and how does that work with the context that we set for the marketeers? And interestingly, the context for marketeers is a little bit interesting when you start talking about intelligent agents, what people think about is a science fiction movie. They think about something that’s going to come and take over battle for Galactica. And so I had to play with that in the communication. So I was like, how do we frame this? So it’s not like a whole bunch of robots, but it’s basically a set of technologies that help marketeers do their best work. And so we started to play with, I mean the imagery coming out of the tech function was basically, here’s these robot agents. And I was like, can you please take that away?
We ended up with, we talked about the agents being super agents or utility agents, and we talked about not necessarily that they were human coworkers. I think that’s a little disingenuous, but we were starting to talk about how would these agents work in the flow of work with the marketeers? And importantly, we had to really talk about it’s not really about productivity. Yes, it is about doing things more efficiently, but it’s about being the best marketing function in the world. And that ambition that was linked to the purpose of our team was really important. And so I think there’s a two-way communication that needs to happen and onboarding experience, and also really thinking about how you link the narrative of using intelligent agents to the purpose of why people are at work, why they care about their job, why they care about what they’re doing.
And so if I take that out of the Accenture world and I put that into call centers is a lot where people are using intelligent agents. Well, how does that help us provide better service to customers? I think that sometimes in the technology world, we say, well, technology will automate and the robots will take over the world and stuff. And actually that’s not really fair. I think what we can do is say, how do we achieve the purpose of our company, of our teams in a much better way using the technology back to this technology as our human advantage? What is it that it’s going to do to help us do things better? And I think yes, we will be more productive, and yes, people’s jobs will change, but the narrative that links to purpose and the results and the results not only being about efficiency but about being really effective and doing things differently is going to be important in the future. So that’s a different part of change. It’s a deeper part of change, right?

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Yeah. I mean, this feels like maybe it feels more emotional because we’ve seen all the sci-fi movies that depict the robots, but you bring up an interesting point that there’s a fine line in agents are not human. And so we need to be careful about that. There was a headline this last year where Sarah Franklin, the CEO of Lattice, they announced this great news, we’re going to create profiles for agents in our talent management system. And they were thinking this was going to be headline making, very good, exciting news. And what ended up happening was people revolted on LinkedIn and just destroyed them in the press saying, how dare you, agents are people. AI isn’t people. You can’t create that. Now what’s interesting is what they were trying to do was responsible ai. They were trying to be able to keep AI and agents accountable for the work that’s being done and track that. And yet there was a fear response that was just so obvious. Did you see that?

Karelee Close:
Yes, I did. And you can see it and the facts are there and the press doesn’t help us, right? Because a lot of the narrative is robots take you over the world and job loss. And they’re like, the fact is the jobs will change. They will. And in the era of the mismatch between the skills we have and the skills we need, there will be people who will not have the work that they want. And so I think what’s upon us is an era where we need to help companies really find ways to understand that skill gap and create opportunities for employees to move as much as possible and to develop a continuous learning as well as continuous change cycle for their talent. And the other thing is really to not go too far on this humanization thing. We just published something on our future life trends on the dignity of work, and I’m quite passionate about that, and it cautions us to really, the data actually cautions us to really avoid over humanizing the technology and to actually use this moment in time to create more human interaction.
So it’s sort of an interesting paradox, if you will. So we have more technology available to us, but yet we have to find ways to use this moment to be more human in our interactions and use the technology to enable us to do that. What do I mean by that? I mean the tasks that I could do more easily using gen ai create space for me when I have that space in my job. Do I then have more time for more human or does the gen AI prompt me in new ways to be more human in my interactions with my teams? And a good example of that is I can actually within Accenture and my team predict people that are at risk of leaving and actually using the gen ai. I can actually then create moments where I can have more human interaction, more human tissue connection because I can learn more about what’s happening with teams. I think we need to find ways of creating more dignity, more better human experience using the technology, and that’s just going to take a bit more creativity and a bit more human ingenuity than just ramming new things in and expecting people are excited about it. But that link between intelligent agents and job loss, I think we need to wrestle with a bit and we need to create new opportunities for people and we need to create more human experiences for people at work.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Are those new jobs just going to be more technical? What do you imagine the future of work looks like for the job list that need to upskill? What are they upskilling towards?

Karelee Close:
Yeah, I think that’s an interesting question. It’s like on the minds of C-suite, whichever industry you talk about, I think there will be new technology related roles. There will also be new roles where there’s a need for fusion skills. So more empathy, more human understanding, more human-centered design in the way that business processes work. There’ll be a lot more work on redesigning the way that work actually happens and also providing feedback to the agents. And I think I always go back to the image of when we introduced spreadsheets and finance departments, were saying, oh, what are we actually going to do? Or we introduced technology and call centers, and people say, well, there’s not going to be any more call centers. I think we will find just a shift in the skills that are going to be needed. And I actually think there will be more human skills needed, more problem solving, more ability to work with data and work with technology to ask deeper and harder questions and come up with more innovative answers. So it’s a moment where we could be perhaps more creative and more human rather than just more robotic.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
But it’s funny though because I just met with a vendor who has an AI tool that can create more empathy in the workplace through carefully crafting communications, inserting AI in between you and me as colleagues so that when I talk to you, AI sends it through a filter. Let’s say everyone takes a personality assessment. Now, this AI bot, I’m not the technical person you are, but it understands how I like to be communicated with and what my personality is and how I like to work. And it understands that about you. I send you an email and the AI tool says, well wait a minute, actually Carol Lee would rather you start with your point and end with a story. Whereas when then you respond to me, it says, well, actually Jessica would like you to start by asking her how her weekend was, right? And so it’s maybe increasing empathy, but it also feels like this strange dystopian, are we even communicating if AI is making it better for both of us? And it’s not really how I talk or how you talk.

Karelee Close:
Yeah.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Have you seen these tools?

Karelee Close:
Yeah, I have. And in fact, we had one around synthesizing some performance feedback and input into performance reviews, and I had a play with it. And I still feel like at some level it’s good to have a recommendation, but actually the way that I would write the communication to somebody who works for me, who spent all year working for me tirelessly, I think I still need to put my own personal touch on it. I’ve seen the tools. I’ve had some great debates with chief people officers on how far can you take this? And again, I think it helps us understand and segment and become more intuitive, but it doesn’t replace the judgment that humans have, and I think that’s where we’re going to have to find the, where’s the delicate balance of, well, if I just spit out something to you at the end of the year in a performance review and you knew it was written by Gen ai, you would be very frustrated.
I think at some level, if it helps personalize, I think that’s helpful. If it helps provide a recommendation, it’s helpful, but it doesn’t really necessarily replace the judgment of a leader in some of these instances. So I think there was a bit of a really healthy debate amongst chief people officers at one event that I was just at, and there was someone from a more tech firm that said, actually, all of this stuff could just absolutely be automated. And then others are saying, well, if you do that and then it becomes disingenuous, then you miss that human connection that people have and that people need. So I think you need to find the balance of providing recommendations and being more personal, but equally being personal yourself with the messaging or with the recommendations that will come. I mean, if you take it just as an example of your own personal experience in working with, let’s say you’re booking an airline ticket and the airline knows a certain amount about you, that’s great, but it’s only as good as the thing is the recommendation.
It’s actually even sometimes when you have a real issue or you really need help, you do want to talk to a person. And so I think what’s exciting is when you get the person is actually their human performance is amplified with the technology as opposed to it’s just replaced. What do I mean by that is, well, if I have a thousand people working for me and I get recommendations around what’s really on the minds of my team, I can actually be better at my communication and better at reaching people. That’s amplified intelligence. If I just say, well, that will spit out my comms and I don’t have to care about it. I think that’s artificial intelligence and the difference between amplified intelligence and artificial is an interesting one to play with, and I feel very quite strongly that this is a moment where we can use AI to amplify intelligence rather than just make it artificial, if you know what I mean.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Yeah. Well, it’s interesting you’re talking about comms specifically because I feel like the trend in leadership communications, I’m talking CEOs talking to their town hall entire teams or even releasing press releases, it’s become more and more artificial, whether it’s because of AI or not. It’s like everything has become so scrubbed and so clean and everyone’s so nervous that they say what ends up feeling like nothing and there’s no authenticity in it and almost feel like we need to get back to realness in the way that we communicate because that lack of trust is being perpetuated from these bullet points that we see CEOs reading the notes while they’re on the zoom call and it’s like, hello, we’re right here. Can you just talk to us about what’s going on? And chief people officers are trying to solve for that. You’re giving a lot of credit though to the leader to understand the nuance between choosing and not. I think a lot of middle managers are under prepared for real leadership and they’re being given these tools and they’re just applying it and then it’s creating chaos. That’s another interesting question about middle managers. I mean, we’re seeing the decimation of middle management organization structures. Are you seeing that with your clients as well? Has AI reduced that middle layer?

Karelee Close:
I know if it’s reduced, I think it will definitely challenge some of those layers. It’s certainly in areas where the middle managers are the sort of filter and forward function, if you know what I mean. I do think the ability to scale some of this stuff does get stuck with middle managers because of the fear of job loss. I think the organizations that actually unlock the attention and the drive of those middle managers are going to be the ones that are a bit more interesting to watch. But I do feel like there’s, what is that middle layer doing, and are they in the way or not is one thing. The other thing is the functional silos that have existed I think will come into question. So what happens between sales and marketing and call centers, service and support and the like? We’re starting to see, well, hang on a minute.
If you have a mix of intelligent agents that can do coordination across functions, do you need the same functional boundaries? Right? And do you have a new level of intelligence that even humans can’t sort right now, which is integrated business planning is a great example of that’s a very complicated set of handoffs. People are doing it right now with a bit of automation and then human ingenuity on top of it. I think there’s some better ways I would call that new levels of connectional intelligence. There’ll be more there. And so I do think the middle managers are going to have to think about what’s their role in innovating. So the ones that will have jobs will be the ones that embrace AI that I find new ways to solve problems. And unfortunately, some of the behavior is a control, right? Because it’s like, well, the thing that made me successful is I’m owning this information and I’m going to share it with this other function when I decide, right, they can’t
Live without me. That kind of behavior stands in the way. And I’ve lived 10 years of AI at scale and digital transformation and stuff. The biggest gap is not the technology. The biggest gap is that middle layer in the organization and people’s willingness to change, frankly. And I have a real interest in understanding within organizations, what is the learning culture that you have? How open are your teams to learn? And I think those that will be successful are going to be the ones middle manager or not. The ones that really embrace innovation, throw out the old get to the new actually are more human in how they engage people on the answers and how they use technology. Those will be the winners and the ones that hold onto it and try and control it are going to be the ones that move more slowly. And you mentioned the learning curve advantage.
There’s definitely something in this next era to be thinking about there. If you think about this, bring your own device thing. Do you remember it was before Covid where people were wrestling with, do you control the corporate assets that people use? Can you bring your own iPhone and plug it into corporate systems? And those organizations that sort of said, Hey, do that and we’ll figure out the security policies as we go moved a lot quicker, and those that controlled the thing actually got stalled and then eventually got to bring your own device. Think the same sort of thing is going to happen in this next era is the ones that figure out how to harness the technology, how to embrace it, how to work with it, rather than just continue to fight it, are going to be the ones that are moving and they will make mistakes, but they will also then learn. So the ability to continuously learn and develop and grow, and the employee and manager’s appetite to do that is going to differentiate versus the ability, the need to control and create policies and be too predict about,

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Right, micromanage? Yeah, I mean, it’s so interesting that you say that because it answers something that I have tried to understand, which is, I mean, it’s kind of unfair for the middle manager if you think about it, because the system around them has created incentive for them to hoard information and control. You get promoted if you are the one that the company can’t live without. If you are the one who knows the most, if you are the one who everyone needs to call, and those are the people that are, we can’t live without. Well, that is beneficial to your career. Those are historically the people who move up. Right now, the rules are changing, and so the incentives need to change. Do the incentives need to change first or the incentives going to, how does the structure and the way that we manage talent going to what your role is now? How does the way we manage talent have to change in order to shift that dynamic?

Karelee Close:
Yeah, it’s an interesting one because that gets into the deeper aspects of change here. Not just like, go use this. You have to get into the talent framework, the KPIs and performance and reward system of a company to get into that deeper thing. I actually think that the school of thought around context drives behavior is a little interesting one. So if your context is hoarding, information gets you promoted, then that’s what your behavior will be. If your context is those that embrace change and innovate and grow and thrive by doing things better and different over time, if that is the context, then your behavior will be also different. So I think what the C-suites going to need to grapple with is getting to shifting the context for people from functional silos and functional disciplines and the like to rewarding innovation, growth and a learning culture.
And frankly, we have good models for that. So the digital innovators, so some of them are actually very large companies now pioneered with a real innovative culture. The trick is how do you get an innovative culture in a large corporate? And I think there are some schools of thought there, but what’s going to be important is the skillset and drive around innovation and learning and continuous learning. And so at Accenture, when Julie Sweet came into her role as CEO, she’s put a huge emphasis on innovation and learning. And interestingly, when you profile Accenture employees, you will see that one of the highest characteristics of people are their learners. They like to learn and they like to grow. And I think you’re going to have to, each company is going to have to look at, well, what is the culture that I have had in the past and what elements do I want to keep that make me special, and what do I want to change that would help me to embrace?
And I think it’s curiosity and learning and growth, that mindset that’s going to be interesting to watch. Interestingly, that mindset’s a healthy one for things like diversity, equity, and inclusion and the like. So I actually think it’s quite a positive time to reflect on what is your organizational culture and how you can think differently about the pace of change and the pace of innovation that you can drive. And a lot of people say, oh, it’s because of technology. I don’t think it is, but it’s a good moment to be thinking about it because without some of those cultural shifts, you’re not going to get the impact from the technology.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Yeah. Well, we did research with Stanford last year to look at which culture type drove the most results, and it was an adaptive culture, one that is able to shift and learn. I mean, it’s exactly what you’re saying. So it’s not just better for our personal growth, it’s better for the business, which ultimately it needs to be because there is, it’s interesting you say it requires us to look at our performance evaluations and our KPIs and our metrics and what competencies and upscale, but that feels very hr, right? And there are a lot of CEOs that look at those HR things and say, whatever, just figure it out. I’m trying to drive results. They see it as unrelated, like disconnected. And I think HR leaders are having a harder and harder time justifying their impact on results because it feels so peopley, it’s separate. How do you bring those two back together when you’re working with a client where the CEO O is like, that’s hr. I’m going to go talk to the chief revenue officer.

Karelee Close:
Yeah. So it’s interesting. I think they unlock is the functional discipline or the business discipline, HR and tech working together

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Because

Karelee Close:
It’s not HR alone and it’s not tech alone and it’s not the business guy alone. So it’s a much more cross-functional approach that unlocks the stuff with speed and scale. And then the HR stuff is basically HR needs to shift to better understanding of skills. So the understanding of skills versus jobs. So what skills do I have and how do I craft the next era of jobs and how do I help people move through a job framework that promotes continuous learning and development and creates a context for people to develop and grow. So that’s the HR thing. The technology thing is how do I get the right stuff to people and actually how do I innovate even in the way that I deliver learning and development, performance and reward. And then in the business side, it’s going to be, well, how do I actually create the context for people to move differently?
How do I change my process? How do I change the way that I deliver, whether it’s marketing or finance or supply chain, it’s the three things to together that unlock real value. It’s not just one or the other. And that’s another area of leadership that I think we’re going to see in the next era is those people that can think cross-functionally and work across disciplines are going to be really valuable. So I mean, you can’t change a business without changing your people and changing your technology, and it’s that combo that you’re going to need. And I think some of the chief HR officers, the chief people officers, they have to become fluent in technology to be relevant in the business. They have to think differently about org design. They have to think differently about skills. I think we’re also going to see a massive shift in the way we deal with corporate learning. And it doesn’t always live in hr, but wherever it lives in the org organization, corporate learning is going to change. We’re not getting the right people out of universities. We’re not having people sit in jobs that work through a framework of do this one role and then do this next role and do this next role. And frankly, the next generation actually wants something that’s very different in terms of the relationship with their employer. So I think we’re really going to have to innovate using technology in that field of hr, but applied to business problems.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Yeah, that’s interesting. I was at Oracle for 10 years doing organizational development, and the way that they solved for figuring that out was doing Oracle. At Oracle. I mean, our HR team was implementing technology at Oracle as a client. Oracle was creating the software, and then we were learning how it helped, how it didn’t, what impact it has, and then we were able to go sell it more effectively because we were the first and biggest client that had ever used it, and we practiced what we do. You do Accenture at Accenture?

Karelee Close:
Yes, a lot actually. And it’s one of the things that our CEO Julie Sweet really emphasizes is being our own best reference. So actually the skills-based organization work that we do with clients is actually based on doing that for 750,000 people at Accenture. And the learning that we had around doing that, and some of the pioneering that we’ve done actually has been put into some of the main tech platforms because some of the actual packaged applications don’t necessarily do everything that we would need it to do. But so we do. And within HR, all of our corporate functions, we first apply the most leading things that we can think of and that we can come up with within Accenture. And that creates a credibility with clients, and we also learn what’s real and what’s not real. So in the genai space within marketing, finance, hr, we are very much pioneering, okay, well, let’s have a look at what’s the landscape of opportunity and then actually try and apply it in our own function at scale and the areas that actually work well, we can talk to clients about and the areas that we don’t, we can also share that learning because both of them are quite important.
And it’s an interesting one where once you’ve done the work, you take some of the consulting mumbo jumbo hype away from it, and then it becomes much more real and concrete. What are the things that really do drive value? So a lot of the gen AI tooling and stuff, it’s still, it’s interesting, but it doesn’t necessarily change a whole person’s job. So one of the things that we’ve learned is you actually have to take a more fundamental redesign of processes to get the real impact out of Gen ai. A lot of people are saying, well, are we really seeing the value? We see absolutely massive value when you redesign the work and then you change the workforce at the same time. So it’s work and workforce together. The redesign of the work is something that actually is a little scary to some people. You actually have to really fundamentally redesign the way that a function happens.
But it’s exciting when you get it right. So my example in marketing was this end-to-end campaign optimization. We had to really think differently about there was hundreds of steps that were taken before and how do you apply intelligent agents through it? We’ve done the same thing in some of the areas of hr, really questioning how do you do self-service for employees? How do you manage, what’s the role of an HR business partner going forward? And by doing it in the real world with our own functions, it does help us sort of get a little sharper on which things are still not quite mature enough and which things actually work really well today. And my learning on this, having supported the change efforts within Accenture as well, is fewer things done more deeply and more well that really have an impact. So you have to fundamentally redesign the process and then you have to get people working in a different way to have a real impact.
The other thing is you have to really redesign jobs. So a lot of people talk about, well, will this gen AI replace a job? It might not replace a job in its entirety. It will take tasks off of people. And so once some of our learning has been, you have to understand the current work and then the future work, when you redesign the process, you then have to say, well, how would I reconstitute the tasks that are now included in a job? So I think we’re going to see the deconstruction of jobs, and actually in that creates a really exciting opportunity. But most people go to job loss. What I go to is, Hey, is there a moment where you can create really exciting jobs? Jobs where there’s more sustainability, more opportunity for mental health, more opportunity for people to work in different ways, which creates the employee experience of the future.
So back to the why question that you asked at the beginning. I feel like there’s a moment in time where because there’s such a fundamental shift, a generational shift in technology, we will be defining the future employee experience in this next era. What I’m excited about is to do that in a way that creates a more equitable and healthy set of employee experiences for people working and to find ways to help talent develop and grow and evolve faster and to innovate in the corporate learning space. Because I think the way that we’ve done that, you get two learning events a year or something like that if you work at a company, it’s just not enough. So how we unlock human potential through continuous learning and continuous change era. It’s a fascinating space, I think where we’re going to see a lot of

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Innovation. Well, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics just released their productivity report and we increased productivity 2.2% or something like that. So that productivity push is always there. And you look at the last 50 years of work when let’s say this was my work, and then technology allowed my work to only be this. Well, the company found something for you to do for the tasks that you no longer had to do because of technology. And that kind of productivity and sanity I will call it has not let off yet. So how do you get that? What you’re talking about sounds amazing, more room for learning, more room for mental health, more balance. But how do you get CEOs to say, let’s not fill that empty space with more activity.

Karelee Close:
I mean, in some ways you will fill the space with more activity. I think you just need to fill it with activity that adds up to something that people want to do. So if I put self in the shoes of the CEO, I have to improve productivity. I equally have to attract the best talent, and I have to keep that talent and I have a different contract with the next generation than I would’ve with generations of the past so that we know factually that people want a different relationship with their employer than they have in prior generations. So that to be attractive to the next generation from an employee value proposition, I think you have to innovate on continuous learning. So I think it’s not either productivity or exciting jobs, it’s both. And it’s breaking that compromise between productivity means just more. And I think productivity could mean better.
So I actually think there’s a wonderful way to say, take off the tasks that are routine. Actually in a lot of our gen AI work, we found that many of the pain points that people have in their current jobs are the things that are actually addressed by better fit of technology and better use of the intelligent agents. So I think there’s an opportunity to say, use this moment to redesign things for productivity, but also for the attractiveness of the job and the dignity of the work effectively. And that dignity of the work means involving people in the design of the jobs and involving people in the choice of how this thing’s going to look. And actually when you do that, you get to really break through results. The fundamentals of human-centric design, we just use human-centered design when we think about customer experience and retail environments.
We don’t always use human-centered design on designing jobs. And so I think there’s a moment to say, let’s use data. Let’s use tech. Let’s use human-centered design and get with something that’s much more productive and healthier. And there’s another area of passion, which is it’s a moment where, look, we have not made as much progress on diversity, equity, inclusion as we should. We have not made enough, as much progress on attracting people from different walks of life into new jobs. This is a moment in time where we could design a future which says we can look at the criteria of what the new world looks like from the perspective of productivity as well as the objectives that we have around sustainability, mental health and employability. And we could get to a better answer. And I don’t think it needs to be either or.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Yeah, I mean ideally that would be great. What we’ve seen historically is that with the economic cycles, CEOs come and go from caring about employee experiences. I mean, when the market is tough and it’s hard to find top talent, they invest heavily in the employee experience and benefits for employees, and they give people the ability to work from home or whatever, and then let’s off. Then suddenly we forget that we cared so much about. And then you hear headlines, I just saw one this week. There are vast swaths of managers, hiring managers now who don’t want to hire Gen Z because Gen Z’s expectations are too high. So forget ’em. And the hope is that we won’t need them because with the advancement of technology and the increased productivity that we’ll be able to get away with it without hiring them. So do you predict that we will need people as much as maybe it seems like unemployment is pretty low right now. Will we still need people as much in the future with the advancement of technology and this joblessness that will come and the upskilling that we’ll have to react with?

Karelee Close:
I mean, I think we’ll have different jobs. I think the question is because you continue to drive productivity as a nation or across industries. So I think that the interesting thing will be the ability of people to work in different ways and the ability of us to adapt the skills that we need. I think there’s a big gap between the skills we have and the skills we will need. And so it’s less about jobs and it’s more about the match between skills and work that I would be thinking about.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
And that exists now in the hourly workforce, right? Manufacturing,

Karelee Close:
Yeah. Sorry to interrupt, but it existed in the industrial age. It just happened over
Multi. You had that sort of with the industrial age, you had this mismatch between people that worked in farms and people that worked in factories, but it happened over quite a large amount of time. What the issue is that we have now is it’s not a lot of time. This thing’s moving a lot faster. And so I think it’ll be the people that are going to be willing to change and willing to grow and learn that are going to be the ones that will have the jobs that will have continued employment. And then the question for government and for society is going to be how do you actually shift the context of people who maybe don’t fall in that place of really wanting to learn and grow? And I don’t know if it’s a generational thing where you want to learn and grow. You can’t just say it’s middle managers or this is a Gen Z or whatever.
Actually, our data would show that it’s actually not a generational thing. It’s a mindset thing. So a mindset of, am I a learner? Am I someone who wants to change? And it’s funny because I’ve spent my life learning, I spent 25 years in consulting probably because I couldn’t figure out what I really wanted to do when I grew up. But that learning aptitude is, it’s not always easy to learn. And a lot of people say, oh, I want to learn, but they don’t, right? Learning involves hurting your brain a little bit and changing the way that you do things and trying something and failing. And when I have teenage kids and I sort of like my daughter said, she’s getting to the edge of her intelligence. And I’m like, no, no, no, no. You’re not getting to the edge of your intelligence with math. You’re just getting to the point where it’s actual work to learn.
And that’s the point where you dig in and I think we are going to need to find ways of helping people coming through the academic circles, people coming through the next generations to develop that learning muscle more. And I think the learning muscle is going to be more important than the actual thing that you graduate with. It’s interesting working in this discipline, this field, and then watching my teenagers start to think about, well, what are they going to do in terms of education and jobs and stuff? And a lot of the advice they get from counselors is stuff that I think, well, I don’t know if those jobs really even exist when you come out of school even three or four years from now, an accounting assistant or whatever. I’m like, well, not so sure with all respect to accounting assistance. But I said, I think actually the mindset of exploration, the mindset of growth is really important.
And then I think there’s a lot of people in big corporations that actually they haven’t had to do the real learning and the real growth. And that’s the unlock for many CEOs is to think about what’s the thing that they need to do? What’s the set of experiences that they need to do to get more of their people moving, to get more of their people feeling like if they take a risk and if they try something different, that will be okay. And a lot of people say that, but all the performance reward things don’t let you do that. And then how do I create the context where people can move? Maybe you’re a finance person, but I need somebody that’s doing prompt engineering in the HR space. How do I move those people from one place in the organization to another when it’s not just a standard selection process?
So I think our clients are starting to release, ask those questions of like, okay, so these are the skills I have and I need, how do I move people? And I’m not sure we’ve really worked that totally through just yet around, well, what are the base skills that you have? And then what are the next adjacent skills? So we have that within Accenture in our technology function. We can actually look at the kind of skills we have and start to say, well, I can develop the next era of skills in a few areas. That’s great in technology. We’re going to need to do that all over the place to say, if you looked at me as an employee, the skills and experiences that I had, what else could I be doing besides the job that I’m doing today? And how would I demonstrate that I could learn that stuff? And how quickly,

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Right?

Karelee Close:
Yeah.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
And part of the problem in doing that is that the org design will inevitably have to change, right? Theoretically, you were talking earlier, we’re not going to be in these functional silos anymore, which by the way is the number one complaint that clients come to us for is we’re operating in silos. We need cross organizational collaboration more. I mean, it’s been the challenge for as long as I’ve been in my consulting career. So imagine the future of work in which the typical organization is not designed by function, but is designed by work process, for example. Given your example, is that what the future of org design looks like? Work process?

Karelee Close:
Well, it’s a big question. What the future of work design is. I think, I mean, within the agile at scale disciplines, there’s some decent stuff around, it’s around value stream. I think many organizations are going to go more to the closer to customer, closer to value cross-functional teams working together and platform work comes into that. I think we really need to start experimenting more with what is the org design of the future When you have collections of intelligent agents that can do a lot of the coordination and collaboration, I think that sort of, you are a finance, you are hr, you are, it is going to have to move to people that are working more closely together to solve customer needs or employee needs. And that sort of the disciplines around agile or platform or agile at scale tend to be the ones that are a bit more progressive.
But equally, I think there’s a good amount of discussion around, well, could you get to even more self tuning organizations where even the way that people are staffed and assigned into functions becomes a little bit more fluid? And a lot of people feel like, well, that’s a little crazy because it’s hard to manage it. But I think with data and systems, we’ll be able to say you could post activities that are available to people and people could self-select into work. And there’s some good examples of pilots in those areas. I think the fundamentals are going to be, you’re going to have to manage the sort of structure in some way, shape, or form, as well as performance and reward in some way, shape, or form. But the ability to organize people more along the lines of value and have them working together more quickly will be really important. And I think the culture of doing that, I always look to the tech natives for, they come together in a really fluid way quite often times. And even larger organizations that have gone into the sort of agile at scale have done really nice things around organizing on customer value streams. And banking’s done that for quite a few years. But I think there’ll be new ways of talking about organization design in the future.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Yeah. Brilliant. Well, I have a thousand more questions. I just looked at the time, and we have to wrap it up, which I’m so disappointed about because this has been so interesting. Thank you for sharing your expertise with us. So I have one more question though before you go, which is, what is one thing that you don’t get asked about very often in these types of interviews that you wish you were asked more often?

Karelee Close:
I think what I don’t get asked about as much is what’s the positive inflection point that we could create in this moment where actually there’s a lot of change in organizations and the impact that we could have on diversity, equity, and inclusion. And by that I mean, look, if 44% of working hours are going to change, if a lot of the jobs are going to be reconstituted, why is this not a moment where we actually take a big step forward in creating more opportunities for people from different walks of life and to fix some of the age old issues of diversity that we have had for a long time? So I would encourage a of this is a moment in time, a generational moment where we have the opportunity to change companies. I would encourage us to not think about it as well, what’s going to be automated and what’s going to be lost, but what are the opportunities to actually create new things that solve our old issues? So I think this is a moment in time where we have the opportunity to change companies for the better and to pioneer and innovate in the way companies are designed, the way leaders lead, the way people show up to work. And I think it’s a moment where we can amplify human intelligence rather than just think about what’s artificial and what’s automated and what the technology might do to us.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Carol, close. That was amazing. I would love to have you back on to talk about that more and hear ways in which you see that happening in the future, because I mean, it’s such a refreshing way of looking at the future. Right now we’re being bombarded with bad news and there’s silver lining. There’s light at the end of the tunnel according to you. I want to get on your tunnel, on your train, I guess.

Karelee Close:
Well, it’s been a pleasure to talk to you. I think it’s an area of passion where technology can be our advantage, and I think there’s too much that gets put into what is it going to be done to us? And now is a moment for leaders to actually truly lead, to learn more about the technology and to find ways to use it for good and for creating better places to work

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
And to take accountability. I mean, it’s so easy to just point the finger at big tech or AI startups or investors and say, look, they’re ruining our world. That’s a lot harder, but a lot more rewarding to say, what about this can I control? And how can I influence this? How can I implement this in my organization for good and for a different reality in the future where everyone’s thriving more?

Karelee Close:
Yeah, and it’s fun. I mean, thank you. There’s so much more we can do now that we couldn’t do.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
I know,

Karelee Close:
Right? And look, we’ve had AI since the fifties and now we have gen ai and we have exponential set of abilities. It’s just a moment to lean in and if you’re afraid of what’s out there, to learn more about it and to demystify it for yourself, because I think your own learning is part of the unlock. Right.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Awesome. Thank you so much, Carlee. It was so great to have you on.

Karelee Close:
All right, thanks. It was a pleasure talking to you.