AI and Jobs Series: What tasks can humans stop doing? One HR lead weighs in

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Welcome to Meet the Leader, the podcast where top leaders share how they're tackling the world's toughest challenges. In today's episode, as AI grows more powerful and takes on more rote work, what should humans stop doing? A top HR exec shares one company's story and what that can teach us all in an AI era.

Subscribe to Meet The Leader on Apple, Spotify, and wherever you get your favourite podcasts and don't forget to rate and review us. I'm Linda Lacina from the World Economic Forum, and this is Meet the Leader.

Cassandra Pratt, Progyny: Parts of your job are going to change or go away. But instead of viewing that as a negative change, we could view it as a positive change. And it allows us to open up space to review different, more technical items more closely.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: When it comes to AI, most companies these days have left the experimentation phase. It's not me saying that. That's our recent Chief People Officer Outlook, a survey of more than 130 HR leads showing how they're responding to the biggest trends and the biggest shifts.

According to our latest data, companies are past that conversation stage. They've moved on to broad transformation into strategic, targeted implementation.

Cassandra Pratt knows something about this. She is the Chief Human Resource Officer at Progyny, that's a fertility benefits management company in its 10th year. We've all heard how AI will free us to do the work that only humans can truly do, and Progyny is taking that seriously. Considering what its staff could and should stop doing, ways technology will make an actual measurable difference in ways that the team can invest in the experience of working together, to make collaboration stronger and more effective.

She'll tell us all about this and what they've learned in the process. But she’ll also share the blind spot that too many leaders might be overlooking as we embrace new ways of working. Stay to the end for ‘red light green light’ - a game where she tells me which hot new work trend will actually go forward.

We'll get into all of that, but we'll get started with our Chief People Officer Outlook and some of the big priorities it highlights: sharper AI implementation, upskilling, and job design and organizational restructuring -- and how that's showing up at Progyny. Here's Cassandra.

Cassandra Pratt, Progyny: Our five-year people goals, which are based on our five-year long-range plan that we announced at Investor Day, are: employee experience, transformational leadership, and ensuring our employees have the skills needed to meet the business needs.

I think AI transformation is probably the number one piece to that because there's so many components. It involves educating and upskilling your employees to help them – and when I say educating, helping them understand it's not there to replace them, it's there to replace certain tasks or make certain tasks of their day-to-day work more efficient. And then you have to train them how to use the different tools.

We are starting out by introducing it as personal productivity, which is quickly gaining momentum and then you start to see people building agents, sharing prompts and building off that, and getting really excited about it. And so I think the AI transformation, while it's a little bit more work upfront to get people bought into it and make sure your organization is ready for the transformation, will ultimately lead to all those other areas being positively impacted.

AI allows us to make work like play – that's what someone on my team said. You were able to take all those rote tasks that you were doing before and turn them into something that an agent can do, enhance your workflows, and then you can really focus on the things that people do best, which is building relationships, being creative, stimulating your intellect.

We happen to have quite a large group of clinicians at Progyny, and so one of the phrases we use is ‘work to the top of your licence’. So if you're a nurse, you're able to really stretch your mind and be able to help people with complicated issues, as opposed to entering in the notes and some of the other day-to-day pieces that take a lot of time.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Each of those areas complement each other. How important is it to sort of drive that home to people that all of these areas are important all at once?

Cassandra Pratt, Progyny: And by the way you are supposed to do your day job too. I think that, you know, having a really clear change plan and outlining ‘this is what we're doing, this is how it ties in with any other initiative that we're working on, we understand there are a lot of demands on your time so this role is going to be scheduled for, let's say, Q1 and then we're going to be doing training on something else in Q2 but you're going have practical time to practice it.’

Really letting employees know what the roadmap looks like, whether it's a quarter, half a year, a full year. But if you don't show them all the pieces and you just tell them all of these great ideas, it can be very overwhelming. So I think making it clear and outlining how you're gonna approach this and what the steps are, and also why it matters to them. Because everybody is sitting there going, ‘All right, what's in it for me?’

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: If you hadn't identified these goals and also hadn't created a system where it's broken down for people and helping them take them through that journey, then what would happen if you guys weren't tackling this right now?

Cassandra Pratt, Progyny: I think you would really see the burnout from employees. Workloads increase. I know for Progyny we're still growing very rapidly and you know the hiring market keeps going through lots of different changes and shifts, and so you will see people taking on responsibilities of a couple of individuals or end up stepping into a, not necessarily a new role, but a new handful of tasks that get tacked on to what they're already doing. And it becomes really overwhelming.

And I think you also have to be cognizant of the current world economic issues and what's going on, because when people go home from work, that's what they hear. That's what they hear from their friends, their family on the news. And those are added stressors.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: And how will Progyny be different in five years, once you guys sort of have these changes and they're sort of robust and mature? How will you guys be different?

Cassandra Pratt, Progyny: Well, we are celebrating our 10th year in market, and it is also my 10-year anniversary. So it's a great question. I think AI is going to be one of those things that really transform businesses like the internet did. And early on in the internet growth, no one was quite sure what it would do. I think we're a little bit more ready for AI, at least in the aspect that we've gone through a big transformation in the past, and so open to the fact that we don't know what we don’t know.

But I could foresee people really automating much of those everyday rote tasks, being able to access information much more quickly so that, for instance, a PCA [patient care advocate], when they're talking to a member, they are able to pull up through our knowledge management system all of the information they need and quickly have it on hand to have a more thoughtful conversation in a shorter period of time with our members, which will allow our members also to then go back to their day and feel more comfortable that it wasn't the half an hour or 45-minute call they thought it was going to be. They got the answers they need, they feel more prepared and overall just a much greater level of service across the board – internally and externally.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: One of the big shifts that is noted in the CPO survey is that we're moving from this sort of broad transformation to a real sharp execution, more of this implementation phase. And conveniently, Progyny, you guys are encouraging people to ask themselves, ‘What should I stop doing?’ Which is one of my favourite questions. ‘What should I stop doing?’ Can you tell me a little bit about this and how it came about?

Cassandra Pratt, Progyny: Yes. So we work with a number of different consultants and one of the consultants we had brought in, Barry O'Reilly, He wrote a book called Unlearn, which is just about this. How do you unlearn things and stop what you're doing?

And so we did a whole exercise with our senior leadership team called 'Start, Stop, Continue,' which many people are probably familiar with. And we really looked at, what are we doing today? And it could be operational items. It could be maybe you're not spending enough time with your employees in a one-on-one, talking about how they're doing and what is there for the future. You're just doing project reflex. But we came up with a lot of different examples of what we didn't think was helping us move the business forward and really taking up a lot of time, and wrote them all down and then started to commit to eliminating those over a period of time

So, we have changed some of our meeting culture, which I think is really important. We also, and this is true for me, used to have a culture of, ‘Alright, I don't know the answer, I'm gonna go talk to this person, and I'm just gonna come with my question and sit there and wait for them to work through it with me’. Now, with the rise of AI, we can actually go to our GPT and do some research.

This happened to me recently. I had a state-specific issue that was fairly complicated. I didn't know anything about it. Did a bit of research on a couple of different GPTs and then brought it to the subject matter expert within the company and said, ‘Here's my question, here's what I found through AI. Can you review it and help me create a more well-formed position on it?’ And it creates more collaboration, which I think everybody appreciates rather than someone coming and dropping a problem in your lap. You're really working together to solve something, and educating yourself and others more quickly, and at a much higher level, too.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: You said you guys were shifting a little bit with your meeting culture. Meetings are always a moving target. What kind of changes have you guys made to your meetings?

Cassandra Pratt, Progyny: So I will tell you, there is no silver bullet. And we've had ebbs and flows. Sometimes it goes great, sometimes we revert back a little bit. But really making sure we have a well-formed agenda before a meeting. And people are allowed to say, ‘I can't join the meeting if there's no agenda’, because they have other things they need to work on.

So, an agenda, most of the time, is not just a short-bulleted list. It's more context for ‘This is who's going to be in the meeting, this is what we're trying to achieve. It's going to be a brainstorming meeting’, or, ‘It's gonna be a decision-making meeting, and here are the key pieces.’

And that way, walking into it, even if there isn't a pre-read or more that you want them to do, they've given it a little bit of thought and you can follow that agenda to have a more timely conversation and not get off track. Because let's be honest, it's very easy to have something come up in course of conversation and end up directing the meeting into a different place than what you wanted to achieve.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Changes like this have always been elusive and yet so important, but why are they even more important in an AI era?

Cassandra Pratt, Progyny: Because business is moving quickly. I think, you know, if you don't stay focused, if you don't spend the time to be very detailed, you're going to end up getting left behind or being on step two when everybody else is at step five. I also think it's very important to be very focused and specific because AI learns from us. And so if we are not clear and organized and well outlined with what we're doing, you're going to build off of that and it makes it more difficult for you to implement really useful AI solutions. They will end up being subpar if all of your prep is subpar.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Is there something that you have stopped doing that you just swear by?

Cassandra Pratt, Progyny: Well, my example of, I don't just come with my question and drop it into somebody's lap. I really try to do some research before I present something. I think that's really critical. And I'm gonna go, this is a start and stop… So it is very easy to have a day full of meetings where you're going from one office to another or sitting in your office doing Teams or Zoom calls. And I have stopped doing that all day so that I could actually start walking around and saying hello to people more, whether – we're on three floors – so not just where I sit, but also making the time, even if it's first thing in the morning, to go and say hello to other people. Because it really energizes me too. It's nice to have that human connection before you dive into work for the day. Or a break – everybody needs a chance to walk around a little bit.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: One of the big themes from the report, and the survey results, is that companies will be looking to get more out of the teams that they have, right? And I think that led us right up to this ‘super fans’ mindset that you guys have, and kind of ties into you walking around and wanting to say hi to people, because that's the lowest hanging fruit when it comes to building super fans in an office. Anyway, can you tell me a little bit about that? Because super fans isn't just about making your customers. I think what I'm interested in is making stakeholders, internal employees, making them super fans of the company, of their manager, of their teams. What is that and why is it so important?

Cassandra Pratt, Progyny: So it was born out of our AI transformation. Because as we started to realize, initially we're going to have 5% of our time back and that will continue to grow over the year. So whether it's 10, 15, 20, hopefully even more of that, what are people going to do with that extra time?

If you're working very long hours, part of it should be cutting down your work hours. But if you're working regular work hours, what else can you do? And what can you do to help yourself stay stimulated? And that's where we came up with super fans. It was to let people understand that the time they spend with their customers – and your customers can be employees, managers, internal or external stakeholders – that that really matters because that's what humans are good at. Humans are good at building relationships.

And so the more time you spend with people, the more you ask questions, the more understand, you are gonna create super fans, but you're also gonna develop a much better understanding of your audience. And so for me, that's, you know, predominantly our employees, but it also could be our investors, our providers, all of our clients and prospects, members. What can we do more of? How can we improve what we do for you and improve that service?

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: What are some strategies or tactics that people have been putting into place that have been working to make this possible?

Cassandra Pratt, Progyny: So it's newly launched for us, and this week is our Progyny Spirit Week. And Spirit Week, more showing your appreciation for the company and for other employees. So there's a kudos board, we have a number of different values, critical impact awards that we share, spotlighting different employees by them showing a craft that they're great at. So their craft could be working with Canva. It could be painting, it really is sky's the limit, yoga, cooking, whatever it might be, but spotlighting people as real humans and allowing them to show what makes them shine. And then that gets internalized by them and the energy is also felt by others, and you're able to capitalize on that and build on it.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Conversation by conversation, there's also an opportunity for people to make the experience of work, the experience of interacting really, really great. But it matters what happens in those, right? Because we saw during the pandemic, just having maybe games overall would be just wearing on the day. But people can become stronger teams by doing the work together. Is there a question people can ask to make sure that they are tapping into people's talents, making the experience of the workday really, really powerful and really great? What would you recommend they sort of ask themselves, like, ‘Am I making this happen right now?’

Cassandra Pratt, Progyny: I would say start with, ‘How well do I know the person I'm talking to?’ And if the answer is not that well, take some time to ask basic questions. It could be, ‘Hey, what did you do last weekend?’ And then build off it. Really actively listen to them and build off and ask about family, pets. If they said they went for a hike, where did they go? Or hiking in the middle of winter. That's really interesting. What intrigued you about doing something like that? So getting to know the people, I think, is really important. Start there, and then you're able to learn more about them, they'll continue to open up, and it's a great place to start.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: When we were talking about the importance of sharpening implementation, that also works with job design. Why is that so important? Why is this focus so important, not just for productivity, but also how you are maybe thinking about how your role needs to maybe fit in with the overall climate, but also where the company's goals are and things like that? How does it work with job design?

Cassandra Pratt, Progyny: I think the ways of old job design where you have a job description and a set of responsibilities and that's what you do every day is really going by the wayside. Jobs are much more fluid. I think that will only increase in the future, as AI starts to do different things and enable different workflows for us in ways that we haven't yet imagined or created.

Then you're able to match the skills of a person to what is actually needed from a business. So it's not that your job description said ‘X, Y, Z’. It’s, ‘Alright, maybe you're doing X, but we realize you have skills in A, and this project really needs somebody that knows A, let's pull them over.’

And so having not only the ability internally at the company to really work within that fluid structure, but helping employees become comfortable with that fluid structure because oftentimes people are concerned when their job description starts to change. ‘What does that mean for me? Is my role going to go away? Is it going to morph into something I'm not prepared or wanting to do?’ And so keeping an open dialogue and helping people really understand that the fluidity is a positive thing and will help them utilize their skills best.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Can you, for those who aren't familiar with Progyny, very briefly sort of say what you guys do?

Cassandra Pratt, Progyny: Progyny is a fertility and family building company. We've been in market for 10 years. We started out offering a self-insured fertility benefit to large employers and have expanded that now into a full suite of women's health products. Menopause, preconception, pregnancy, postpartum and now we're launching something called Progyny Select, which will open access for fully insured markets to the fertility benefits.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Progyny, you guys have also been a leader on some benefits to your employees and so you guys offered pregnancy loss leave in ‘21. That's long before California made it mandatory. You also have leave for people who have a baby in the NICU [newborn intensive care unit]. Why are benefits like these so important for future-proofed teams?

Cassandra Pratt, Progyny: I think they really are important because they are not an additive. They're something that's really core to be able to support your employees. When people understand that they have the support when they go through different traumatic events, then they're able to take the time to regroup and come back, and be the best version of themselves.

We also have something called catastrophic leave. We all know that leaves oftentimes are too short for what we're trying to achieve. And so we added this new type of leave to be able to extend and support our employees when you just don't have a hard stop after three months or one month, depending on what the leave is. And so, we really believe in caring for our employees and being able to help them when they need us most, because they do the same for us when they come to work every day.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: There's a shift that was noted in the survey that maybe there would be a little bit less focus on high competition for talent. And some companies might just be so distracted by the AI needs and the shifts there that they are not maybe putting in new benefits and thinking about that, how can they develop the well-being side? What would you say to companies who lean off benefits for wellbeing?

Cassandra Pratt, Progyny: I would say it may seem like an easier decision or less expensive decision for right now, but in the long run, it's going to end up costing you time. It'll probably cost you money because outside of wellbeing, it ends up going to something more extreme and hits your medical insurance and your medical claims.

So even though it's really the immediate need that seems like something we could back off of a little bit when we have all of these different priorities on our time, I think that neglecting those elements is really detrimental to employees because it will hurt them in the long run, and it will end up hurting your company both from a productivity standpoint, but also from that bottom line financial when you start seeing different types of medical and mental health claims rising on the back end. And those are far more expensive than the wellbeing benefits are.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Do these benefits ladder up to this larger trend of making the most of the team that you have? What do you think of that?

Cassandra Pratt, Progyny: I think it's a great question. I think it is true that work has changed. Employees believe that they need more from their employers than they did 20 years ago. It's not just go to work and then go home. And so these type of benefits help show people, employees, that they are supported, that you're caring for them, that they can have the flexibility to take care of their life needs and then come back to work.

Because it isn't as segmented, you know, work-life balance is not really something you hear about as much anymore. It's sort of work-life integration. And with the hybrid work environment, there's also the element of letting people have a certain amount of time in the day when projects and meetings have to happen, but then they go take care of the other things they need to with their own health or their family, and then can always get back online. So it's balancing all of those different aspects. It goes to the fluidity of jobs as well and understanding what your employees need and supporting them because they are, you know, your biggest asset and you want to remember that.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Cassandra and I also played a fun little rapid response game that I like to call 'Red Light, Green Light'. Basically, I mentioned some fact that we have all heard about what's ahead for the future of work, and she held up a green card or a red card to let me know if she thought it would move forward. The first prompt I gave her, four-year degrees will become obsolete. She raised a red and a green card. Here’s why.

Cassandra Pratt, Progyny: I think it really depends. So in something like finance, law, medicine, a four-year degree is your start to have that more technical training, and that's really important. I think for many other roles, actual work experience and life experience is far more valuable than a four-year degree.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Is the white collar job over? Should we all just become plumbers?

Cassandra Pratt, Progyny: No, I don't think we should all become plumbers. Although many of us should become electricians because with the rise of AI and data centres, electricians are gonna be in high demand.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Allay people's fears about all of these trends that we've been hearing about. ‘Hey, everything that you do behind a computer is gonna be replaced in 18 months.’ Why is it that we shouldn't all just go to a super analog profession?

Cassandra Pratt, Progyny: I think that it's really true that AI is gonna automate and do some of your tasks, right? Parts of your job are going to change or go away. But instead of viewing that as a negative change, we could view it as a positive change. And it allows us to open up space to review different, more technical items more closely.

We are still the decision-makers when it comes to AI. AI shouldn't be making the decision. It should be helping you compile the trends and the data, so that then the human can read through it and make the appropriate decision. But then again, you also have the opportunity to build real human relationships, and AI, as much as it may try, is not the same as a human. You need the human face-to-face time to really build those relationships with whomever your customers are.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Is the specialist, rather than the generalist, going to be the king of the AI era?

Cassandra Pratt, Progyny: I will say no. Specialists are clearly hugely valuable. But again, I think even in the AI world, you need generalists who can connect the dots across many different areas of the business and help people understand all the different decision-making points before they move forward.

So think about a generalist in HR. We have specialists currently that focus in compensation, or benefits, learning and development, or more specific areas of learning and development even. And while those people are hugely important in the future, you need the person who can connect those dots and say, ‘Here are all the different things that are available. Let me package it using AI for whatever audience I am talking to and make sure that we don't miss something.’ Because if you have everybody in silos, even with AI, you're going to end up missing something.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: And your last question, will we fix the skills mismatch? Let the record show she put up a red card so she wants to be cautious about how quickly we're gonna tackle this. Tell us why.

Cassandra Pratt, Progyny: Because skills are always going to change. So, we will start working on the skills deficit now and then in the next five years there's going to be more skills. So if we go back to the electricians that are needed, now we know they're needed. I think we have to hire something like a 180,000 in the next five years. There's all different types of trade programmes going on, many large companies are sponsoring them. But this was a, ‘Oh no, we should have done this before. Now we have to do this now.’ There's always gonna be something like that.

So while we can train our employees and they can up-skill to the best of their abilities and the best of our foresight, there will always be something new. And that's part of what makes work so interesting and exciting, is that you know there's gonna be something new in the future. And I think with AI, that something new is gonna come much more quickly. And so we have to be ready to figure out, ‘How do we spin up training and experiential training for people in a faster, more effective way?’

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: That was Cassandra Pratt. Thanks so much to her and thanks so much to you for listening. If you know someone looking to stop doing something, send them this episode. Send them a card while you're at it. It's worthy of a celebration.

If you want more insights just like this one, make sure that you click follow or subscribe on your podcast platform. This way you never miss an episode. But this is part of a three-part series. You can dig in next week on Navigating Upskilling's Messy Middle.

I mentioned our Chief People Officer Outlook, I will have a link in the show notes, and you can find a transcript of this episode as well as transcripts from my colleague's podcast, Radio Davos, on wef.ch/podcasts.

This episode of Meet the Leader was produced and presented by me, Jere Johansson as editor, Eve Schaffner as a studio engineer in New York, and Gareth Nolan driving studio production. That's it for now. I'm Linda Lacina from the World Economic Forum. Have a great day.