Artificial Intelligence is a hot topic these days, with businesses being urged to take advantage of it and tech companies stumbling over each other to provide the latest version.
But for Kelly, an American office staffing company that places employees at all levels in various sectors globally, the automation journey actually began back around 2017 when the company wanted an “intentional” automation strategy. (To see the full interview with Kelly’s Ed Pederson, click here.)
As Kelly grew that practice and began saving millions of hours in efficiency, Ed Pederson, Kelly’s vice president of Innovation & Product Development, and his team started taking notice and figuring out how it could help their clients.
“My team started to sniff around a little bit and what we saw was a pretty amazing internal practice that we thought we could take externally to our customers,” Pederson said. “As we were doing our value proposition exploration and trying to figure out is it real, is it winnable, is it worth it? Kind of a design thinking approach to it.”
And with that, Kelly Fusion was born. The company added to that by launching Kelly Fusion Digital Workers in April 2023.
It’s the first product in the Kelly Fusion suite of solutions that automates routine tasks and allows employees to focus on more meaningful work.
“We have created a new labor channel for our customers,” Pederson said. “We are combining our 75 years of staffing experience with digital tools that can have limitless impact on our clients’ ability to innovate and grow. For workers, these tools free up time for creativity and upskilling.”
Folks at Kelly, like people around the country, had been hearing about AI. Pederson heard academics saying that by the time his daughter reached high-school age, some 70% of jobs in the workforce were “going to be different out in the future.”
While it presented a “fun thought exercise,” Pederson said, it presented a point of pride for Kelly.
“How do you take something that’s academic and futuristic and existential — pick your adjective — and make it a reality and take that first step and really guide people along in their journeys,” Pederson said. “What we saw a lot was tech firms coming into Fortune 500, fortune thousand companies and saying, ‘Hey, you should automate, (and) this is where we think you should automate.”
“We saw kind of a unique value proposition there where we think of it as almost a new labor channel for our customers,” he added. When Kelly started applying the job description angle to it, that’s when the need for the niche really started to become apparent. (See video clip here.)
Officials looked at work they were placing humans on and analyzed “through that sort of lens” on where there might be automation opportunities.
“We actually have started employing generative AI in the space, as well, to help us with a broader and longer-reaching view into the thousands of talent that go out on assignment to understand, ‘Is it 10% automatable, is it 30%?’” Pederson said. “If we do pursue that as a potential shift for us, where would the savings come through? Who are the key stakeholders that would be affected? And then what do we want to do in terms of reconfiguration for providing that human talent that goes alongside of it?”
Kelly now finds its clients a variety of different types of labor, and they’ve added automation. He said technologies like UiPath, Blue Prism, and the Microsoft Power platform work.
Kelly implements the digital workers alongside their human colleagues and manages their performance.
“The world of work is evolving at rapid speed,” said UiPath Chief People Officer Brigette McInnis-Day. “By pairing its workforce solutions expertise with UiPath-powered automation tools, Kelly is tackling some of the biggest pain points companies and workers have identified.
“Kelly Fusion enables work that is smarter, more efficient, and more enjoyable,” she added. “The impact of this collaboration between human and digital workers is truly limitless.”
In a press release issued after the launch of Kelly Fusion Digital Workers, the company said 162 unique automations have saved more than 650,000 hours and $13.5 million.
Digital workers at Kelly deliver value by completing many tasks such as certifying candidate profiles, verifying background checks, submitting drug screening requests, sending onboarding emails, ordering new-hire kits, and reporting results to their human colleagues. These automations have reduced the time employees spend reviewing results and have allowed Kelly to deploy talent more quickly.
“That’s the (idea) you build the business cases around,” Pederson said. “So when you put numbers out there like that, that allows for people to invest in automation and have it justified through their financial cost benefit analysis and things of that nature.
“We think there’s tangential benefits, as well,” he added. “I don’t know too many people that love taking information from one spreadsheet and transferring it into another spreadsheet and then doing some sort of scrubbing effort. You start to go cross-eyed.”
Nearly a year after launching, Kelly clients aren’t that cross-eyed anymore. They’re using it more and more — “The concept is very graspable,” Pederson said — and they’re impressed when company leaders explain the technology got its start as an internal exercise at Kelly.
They like it so much they’re becoming part of it. Pederson said he’s got an advisory board that consists of some 10 clients — large and small — with what Pederson calls “innovative” natures.
“They want to think out into the future and create that time and space,” he said. “Our advisory board allows them to do that, and they immediately latched onto the concept. And those were some of our first conversations that we had as we went out and started to sell it.”
Andrew Bontz, host of the ResistingBeta podcast and founder of Wisconsin-based ResistingBeta Consulting, is a national speaker on the benefits of AI and other marketing issues. He recently talked at the 2023 Best and Brightest Programs National Summit at The Detroit Athletic Club.
His talk centered around “Navigating the AI Revolution: Strategies to Maximize Human-AI Collaboration.” Bontz said people need to start getting aboard the AI train, and carried advice from American marketing expert, engineer and entrepreneur Peter Diamondis.
“(Diamondis) said there will only be two kinds of companies at the end of this decade,” Bontz told the audience. “Those that will be fully utilizing AI and those that are out of business.”
One concern, as is frequently the case when companies start talking about bringing more technology into the workplace, is the effect it has on staffing levels.
Is the technology going to impact hiring practices? Are the digital workers going to replace human staffers?
Pederson said his team had “a very real conversation about that.”
Being a company that connects talent to work in “ways that enrich lives,” Kelly leaders wanted to stay true to what Pederson calls their “noble purpose.”
The fact is, he said, the technologies are here, they’re going to stay, and, in fact, their use will only accelerate. (See video clip here.)
“We took the point of view we wanted to take an active part in informing what that future could actually be,” he said. “It isn’t just about, ‘Hey, implement an automation and you eliminate 15 jobs or something of that nature.
“It was about how do we look at this holistically, put the automation in the right place, match that with the human talent that you’re not going to automate anyway, and also provide an upskilling opportunity for those workers who are employing the automation,” he added.
As an example, he pointed to the 1990s, when Microsoft was getting big — replacing Lotus Notes, everybody was using Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, Excel etc. — Kelly took an active role in that transformation, as well.
The temporary workers that Kelly was putting out on assignment came trained and equipped with all the knowledge on how to utilize those Microsoft suites of solutions.
“Look where we’re at now … Nobody would ever question, ‘Why are you using PowerPoint.’ It’s just like part of our DNA (now) and the market has changed and adapted according to that,” he said. “It’s kind of the natural evolution of things, if you will, that it’s going to continue to change. I think we’re on this accelerated hype curve with AI right now in a lot of different respects and people are like, ‘Hey, is this here to stay? Can it really help my job?’
“I’ve always subscribed to the philosophy that when trends like this present it’s best to really grab hold of them, learn what’s going on and be in charge of your destiny, as opposed to waiting for something to happen to you.”
It’s the inherent nature of when we do something new like this (we find out) a lot of work gets done “because that’s the way that we always used to do things.”
Applying some simple frameworks and reframing the view on that work, Pederson said, can set off that “light bulb moment” when companies realize they can do things a different way.
“Then you get them there and then it’s like, well, why did we ever do it the old way kind?” he said, chuckling. “That’s the fun part and really kind of how I built my career over the past 20 some odd years of really kind of helping people see the forest for the trees.” (See video clip here.)
Companies should be embracing that idea, because there are lots of experts out there who believe that employees and companies who don’t get behind it could be left behind.
Pederson said AI is “very prevailing” and even those who don’t see the direct impact it’s having on their work are being impacted, regardless.
For instance, anyone emailing or texting on their cell phone may have noticed the feature that suggests what the next word should be.
“That’s AI, so I think if you don’t think it’s going to affect you, you need to think again to what extent it will,” he said. “Is it going to wipe out your job? Is it going to leave you in the dust in other shapes or forms? It may be a very gradual change over years and decades, but it’s there.
“Look at just recently the New York Times is suing Open AI and Microsoft for what it’s doing to disrupt the world of journalism,” he added. “So that’s a real tangible example of a profession that has been tried and true for hundreds of years. So in those sorts of instances, yeah, it can be very disruptive.”
Pederson believes just about any company can benefit from AI and the digital workers. The uses can be adapted and modified, he said, and most companies have a suite of technology solutions that they interact with in some shape or form.
For instance, Pederson controlled all the strategic sourcing spend — human relations, marketing, legal services, etc. — for the agricultural equipment manufacturer for which he worked prior to coming to Kelly.
At the time, he thought he was “pretty unique,” spending a couple of billion on it.
Flash forward, he said, he comes to Kelly and one of his first roles was the same thing.
“I got to see all industries, high tech, insurance, consumer goods, you name it,” he said. “And the same story presented itself time and time again — those were the categories of spend that they all had. And so, for as different and unique as a lot of those brands are, there still is the inherent nature of how business is done and what we’re finding are parallel with the automation opportunities that can exist and transcend across multiple customers and industries alike.”
All of which is OK with Pederson because he’s having fun with it all. He said he thrives “in the gray space” and gravitates to positions with “really big ideas.”
“We were joking around about this large IT project that I’m running,” he said. “This is mammoth, and the potential is there, but oh my gosh, it usually takes us five years and all those sorts of things. Those are key words for me to say, ‘Hey, there’s something in there that I can provide a lot of value for.’
“One, seeing the vision of what’s possible. Two, charting a course and a vision for how we can get there, and then inspiring the teams around me to also see that shared vision and to know how to take their first step.
“It gets really exciting … because everybody working on it gets it at that point and there’s this unity that comes together and the pride of, ‘Hey, I accomplished something really big.’ That just gets me really excited.”
Coming from a long line of entrepreneurs, and being the only person in his family not to start his own business, Pederson is just fine reveling in the success of the business he’s in.
“I get to work for large companies that ask me to start small businesses inside of their own company,” he said. “So it’s essentially the same thing, just how I’m wired.”
Is all of this taking the world into the future as seen in Hollywood movies, or in television shows like “The Jetsons?”
That would be OK with Pederson.
“I personally would love that,” he said with a laugh. “I’m kind of always living out five, 10 years into the future and what have you, and I’ve got my team playing around with the augmented reality and virtual reality goggles and whatnot, where most all of us have got large language model licenses to things like chat GPT.
“So, yeah, we’re definitely trying to figure out what are those use cases that could leapfrog us into the future.”
