The AI Shift in HR: Why BPO Will Never Be the Same

Welcome to the show. I'm your host, Nadia Atwal. Today, we have a fascinating specialist in AI who's bringing it into the offices. Welcome to the show, John Sorsese. Thank you. And having my name pronounced correctly is amazing as well. I appreciate it. John, tell us a little bit about your company and what motivated you to found it. Sure. Absolutely. And where it was, where it came from, where it's becoming today. So about 21 years ago, I went to India for the first time and I was in the HR outsourcing business and we decided to hire a vendor and do business there. And I've been going for a long time. the business I was in here in the States was an HR service provider or professional employer organization where we do everything for small business. So run their payroll, give them benefits, pay their taxes, you name it. That company got sold. I kept the people that I'd been training for five years up using with my money, got some friends and away we get. We have a company Today that company employs 600 people around the globe We specialize in helping HR service companies or bureaus whether they be payroll companies software companies everything HR helping them scale and do the transactional processing as well What's happening today is AI is starting to inject itself into that business. So how is it impacting the productivity in companies? Very much so. I went to AI4 recently in Las Vegas, and the fact that it was thrown out to me was that only 10% of companies are using AI. They're all talking about it. One of the things I wanted Cognitive to do is let's be ahead. Let's not sit around and wait. The traditional business of business process outsourcing is that somebody else does the same work for you elsewhere in the world. Business process management, where we're going, is the application of Post Software. So I'll give you that example. So we have a partner that does software implementation for HR system. At the end of the day, everybody goes, oh, I forgot all that paper that's in there. My PDFs, my pay stubs, my forms, my ionized, everything I did all these years is in there and I got to move it. In the past, human beings moved up. We took a document, moved it here to there. And we were in that business. today through the use of robotics more so than AI right now we are able to move large amounts of that data in timeframes that just wasn possible before Interesting So AI becomes more embedded now in HR systems And so how can these tools ensure that they are being used responsibly? You bring up one of my big points I try to make of security. We are dealing with bank accounts, social security numbers, information that not necessarily you want running around chat GPT. What I find with large language models is that we want to believe they won't hallucinate or do bad things. They might. So we have to draw a real cautious line of what kind of data that is protected and what's touching it, what technology is touching. Robotics does kill it, so it's a little bit clearer in that path. I think the HR industry is struggling with that in that, you know, the data we have is protected by every government in the world through a bunch of acts and laws. How do we comply with that? Yeah, because we're at the same time. So what do you see for the future and this technology and how should businesses prepare for it? I think I look at it like gaps. We used to call it gaplets. I was involved in a KTR data integration company. There gaps are getting tighter There a gap where a person has to be that going to remain but how much does the technology grab along the way we we exterminating now with our own ai and we find that we give it a task it does it great we do the same task a week later we might do it a little different because it's funny what people don't understand is that okay now it didn't do it right because it tried to be clever these are the things you have people watching i think a lot of the transaction HR fast, let's say a new buyer. You know, I hire somebody, I fill out a bunch of bulk work. I put them in payroll. I do everything I'm supposed to do. That would be automated. There's no doubt it does that. However, a human being is probably going to be on the audit side of it and make sure that they actually get paid on time. They get paid right if not. But it will take away what traditionally BPOs were in the past but become automated. So I would conclude from that then that companies that are not using or implementing this kind of technology will in the end not be as competitive. Absolutely. My father always said, be ahead, not behind. And that's what I've told my group here. We're getting into the AI business, whether you all like it or not. It might be a little terrifying with my employees as well. But I told them, imagine we have the same number of employees that we do twice the work.