The Buzz with ACT-IAC
The Buzz with ACT-IAC
ICYMI: Health Innovation Summit Closing Keynote
In this episode, Angela Wilson from Alpha Omega introduces the keynote speaker, Colonel Kris Saling, a US Army officer and talent strategist. Colonel Saling shares insights into her work modernizing workforce strategy, integrating AI into talent systems, and building human-centered solutions for the future of defense. The conversation covers the role of AI in reshaping the workforce, the importance of data literacy, and the Department of Defense's initiatives in health and wellness. The talk also delves into the challenges of fostering innovation within hierarchical organizations and the need for adaptive business processes when implementing new technologies.
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Intro/Outro Music: See a Brighter Day/Gloria Tells
Courtesy of Epidemic Sound
(Episodes 1-159: Intro/Outro Music: Focal Point/Young Community
Courtesy of Epidemic Sound)
INTRO: for any baseball fans out there. We are rounding third and heading to home.
INTRO: Uh, and so with that in mind, in position to score the winning run is. Uh, Angela Wilson from Alpha Omega. So I'm gonna welcome Angela to the stage right now. Uh, and she will be introducing our final keynote speaker. And, uh, you can either use one of the handhelds, you can use this one right up here, whatever you're most comfortable with.
INTRO: Sure.
ANGELA: All right. So I'm going to do something that was similar to what you did, Joyce, but this, I'm gonna do it with happy hour. Okay, so because I realize that we are the last session and we are standing in between you on a Friday afternoon and happy hour. So bear with us. We have some, I have an amazing, um, keynote speaker.
ANGELA: So let me introduce [00:01:00] Colonel Kris Saling. She's a US Army officer and talent strategist working at the intersection of people data and innovation. For almost a decade now, she has led successful efforts to modernize workforce strategy, integrate AI into talent systems, and build human-centered solutions for the future of defense.
ANGELA: Welcome.
KRISTIN: Thank you. It's always good to be a technologist and when your tech actually works,
ANGELA: I'm gonna come down here with you.
KRISTIN: Yeah, fireside chat, nice and cozy. Lots of people still here. Little bit burnt from the rest of the day. So we're, we're gonna have some fun with this conversation. Yes, we
ANGELA: are. Thank you. So actually, this is an easy conversation because everyone throughout the day has teed us up, but I wanna get on on that whole quote thing.
ANGELA: Okay. So, [00:02:00] AI will not replace people, but the people who use AI will replace the people who don't. That's a take on, uh, the I-B-M-C-I-O, but you know, it's my take on it. So we are gonna talk more about the human, the people side of it. So everybody's talked about the technology and we had so many quotes today.
ANGELA: I think we led this morning with Naomi saying that, um. That tech AI is not a technology problem, it's a people problem. And so we've been talking about that all day. So with that in mind, can you introduce yourself, tell us a little bit about what you're doing currently and then we're gonna segue that right into the healthcare conversation?
KRISTIN: Yeah, sure can. But on that quote note, another one that, uh, I picked up lately was that data is business, not it. So as we're thinking about that, let that kind of permeate. Um, that said, I'm Chris Sailing. I'm a colonel in the US Army. I have been working in the Army people space for about 10 years, bringing in new types of technologies, [00:03:00] trying to figure out how to automate and improve our work and to do.
KRISTIN: D take different looks at how we're going to construct our workforce. This is becoming really relevant right now with the advent of AI because the way we're looking at how we restructure our workforce, especially right now when we're having to do that based on a lot of the government reshuffling that's happening, we're looking at AI as a work partner.
KRISTIN: It is something that does work. So as we're doing our workforce planning, we're not looking at it as an augmented technology. We're looking at it as part of that workforce and that some certain percentage of each of our tasks are gonna be still human. And then others are going to be machine. So that's why latest project right now is looking at how we're going to re restructure our Army people, enterprise all of our HR functions to figure out what we can look at and eliminate as a no longer necessary project.
KRISTIN: When we bring on automation, what we can simplify, what kind of steps we can do, simply sweep outta the way 'cause our processes haven't been reviewed in forever. And then what we can automate.
ANGELA: Right. [00:04:00] So there was another quote earlier that I, that everybody seemed to like, which is electrons are, um, are more, are cheaper than neurons.
ANGELA: Right. And so with your background, your mom's background as a neuroscientist and neuros as a complexity scientist, you know, how does AI reshape the workforce? How do, how does that. Energize the workforce. How are we able to leverage people to do the more hard task than the easy, repeatable
KRISTIN: task? Doesn't it sound like we have the family with the nerdiest Thanksgiving conversations hour?
KRISTIN: So, no, this, I've kind of grown up in this. Um, but using AI to shape, reshape the workforce, figuring out what AI should do, what it shouldn't do, we have. A lot of different analogies that we use in this summer are helpful. Some are not really kind of depending on your situation, but what we've constructed is kind of a modification on, um, a gay Hendrix pyramid.
KRISTIN: He wrote about it in, uh, the big leap. It starts [00:05:00] at the top with your zone of genius. This is the stuff that you are uniquely good at, that you like doing, that you know, really kind of requires that human creativity and capability. Next down from that is your zone of competence. No, you're good at it. Okay.
KRISTIN: It's, it's great. Yeah. Not really what you're excited about, but you still kind of need that human oversight. Then you go down to the bottom of the pyramid and it's the zone of incompetence. This is the stuff you don't like doing and you're just not good at. And let me give you everybody's favorite example of that filling out forms.
KRISTIN: Who in here has had a form kicked out? 'cause they signed in the wrong spot. Who's had one where you had to call a help desk and figure out what number you had to look up to put in this particular place where you had to have a geolocation code versus an address. I mean, so these things are just rotten and you get 'em kicked back time and time again because you have to sign them.
KRISTIN: You have to fill them, you know, there's, you mistype something. It isn't read properly by the [00:06:00] machine. We wanna get rid of that. You should not have to fill out a form in this day and age. You should be able to draw the majority of your information from a database, have a quick, easy radial interface that, you know, you click on a couple things that say, I want access to the system.
KRISTIN: I'm in processing here. I'm onboarding here. Send it on its merry way. And if you need a form for reference on the backend, automation can fill that out for you. So that's kind of the zone of incompetence. That's what we wanna eliminate or automate. Step up into that competence area. That's where you want to be augmented by ai.
KRISTIN: That's where you can have ai take that stream of consciousness, narrative that you just put on, 'cause you needed to put some stuff on paper, organize it into a usable outline. Make some sense out of it. Generate some talking points from a white paper you did. So it's helping you out. And then at the top end, the things AI is not so good at.
KRISTIN: You know, coming up with those creative strategy, future casting, forecasting, the things that we need, our creativity and our inference to be able to do [00:07:00] properly. AI's not so good at that yet. It, it may get better. Um, but those are the things that you wanna free yourself up time to do.
ANGELA: Wow. Um, so with that being said, how is the DOD re redefining how they're leveraging ai, especially as it has to do with. Overall workforce and health, wellness readiness, all of the above.
KRISTIN: There are tons of different things we're exploring in this space because health and wellness is something that touches every single soldier, every single family member, every single civilian on our workforce.
KRISTIN: There's, there's nobody who did, isn't concerned with this. So when it comes to priority for automation and ai, that's kind of where we're looking. So we've got a number of different projects that we're looking at in that space. The top one is really just kind of looking at those tasks that we can automate.
KRISTIN: Um, we, we do this a lot when in, in our recruiting space, because we have a lot of medical screening [00:08:00] that has to happen. We have a lot of databases that need to be queried. We have a lot of forms. They need to be filled out. So we've looked at those processes, mapped out those processes and tried to simplify and eliminate where we can, and then automate where we can so that people aren't putting in, in their initial entrance into the Army erroneous data that we have to go correct other places to get after the wellness piece.
KRISTIN: A lot of us are wearing these. All right. There's health monitoring there. There're trends, monitoring. We're trying to figure out what kind of ways we can introduce things like, you know, the Apple watch, the aura ring, all the number of different biometrics that are out there to help people, not necessarily for us to track their wellness, but to give them a tool to track their wellness.
KRISTIN: We're using those to try to ba break some of our most abysmal habits. I mean, my least favorite quote, you know, we have some favorite quotes here, but my least favorite quote from the military is that sleep is a crutch. It is not a crutch, it is a biological necessity. I wanna put that on record. That one is a biological [00:09:00] necessity and we need people understanding how they're performing due to inadequate sleep.
KRISTIN: Improper sleep. 'cause all of these things go into good performance. If we wanna have a world-class winning fighting force, we have to pay attention to these things. Wow, that's
ANGELA: interesting. Um. So we had talked about trust, and I've heard it in almost every panel today, is trust. Mm-hmm. Um, trusting people, trusting gut intuition, um, trusting technology.
ANGELA: So give us your feelings on how trust plays in on implementing new technologies. Health. You know,
KRISTIN: people, well, trust is. Just woven finally into the business of health. I mean, there's people giving you both good and bad information that you have to be able to take and trust. And obviously there's the options of second opinions, but building that trust and that open communication, and that's what this means, is incredibly important.
KRISTIN: I [00:10:00] did hear it highlighted, I think it was in the previous panel or the one before where we're talking about. The trust inherent to people understanding what bringing these new technologies on does to their work and does to their job. So again, that's a piece of open communication. If people don't trust the technology, they're not gonna use it.
KRISTIN: I mean, they're gonna take a look at that and go, okay, that's suspicious. I'm not gonna use it. I'm gonna go back to doing my old way. 'cause I don't trust this thing to do my job the way I know I can. So then you don't get the bang for the buck for the tool you've purchased. At the same time, you might have, uh, tools and technology out there that haven't been vetted appropriately.
KRISTIN: You haven't gone through all the full exercises, and maybe you shouldn't trust. So as you're implementing these technologies, I. It's very important to do that end-to-end business process, understand what the input is, and the output is in a way that you can critically evaluate it, and in a way that you can communicate to your workforce exactly what it's doing and exactly what's happening.
KRISTIN: For us, that has been a very big education standpoint. [00:11:00] We have data literacy courses and AI literacy courses that we're teaching throughout the army. To help people understand how to intelligently interrogate what the machine is doing so that they have trust in whether or not it is doing a business process appropriately, and it can really free them up to do other things.
ANGELA: Well, that's good. Um, there was a couple of conversations earlier about digital literacy, and I had, I hadn't really heard that before. Um, what is your take on data literacy, literacy versus digital literacy? Do you have a thought process on that? I.
KRISTIN: We are kind of starting to bring in all different elements of it.
KRISTIN: I focus on the data literacy just because as we've heard in the previous panels, data is foundational to getting any of these tools to work. If we don't have a good understanding of data and how it's collected and whether or not it should be trusted, I. If you layer AI on top of that, all you're doing is getting to bad decisions faster.
KRISTIN: Yep. So we start with the fundamentals, the building blocks of any kind of tool we're gonna build, whether it's just simple RPA, whether it is a complex [00:12:00] algorithm, whether it's Angen, AI layer. So we want people to understand what data it's drawing from and then move from there for the AI piece of it. A lot of the education we do on AI isn't necessarily on ai.
KRISTIN: It's about figuring out whether or not the process itself is appropriate to bring AI into. Because I mean, I think everybody's had a little bit of experience like this. AI is kind of some magic fairy dust that people wanna sprinkle on problem sets. They wanna buy this tool, it's gonna solve all their problems, not necessarily.
KRISTIN: 'cause if you don't change your business processes to adapt to the technology, you're really not getting any bang for your buck and you might just be making a bad process go faster.
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GOLF AD: To foster relationships, share insights, and celebrate the achievements in our community. No need to be a golfer to join in on the fun. You're welcome to register to attend, and celebrate with the golfers at the Winner's Circle reception. For more info visit act i act.org/upcoming events. We look forward to seeing you there.
ANGELA: So I am going to, I, you know, I have tons of questions. I mean, we had a really great conversation. We could go deep dive in a lot of different areas, but I do wanna offer some time for questions for the audience. And so, uh, if that's okay, I would like to do that. Mm-hmm. Okay. Perfect. [00:14:00]
KRISTIN: Yes, we're conscious of the creeping happy hour.
SPEAKER: Any questions from the audience so I know where to run to.
SPEAKER: Is everyone quiet?
ANGELA: Everybody's thinking about that first
SPEAKER: thing. Is this thing on?
ANGELA: I have another question if, you know, if we keep going. Go ahead, angel. Keep going, please. I, I wanted you to offer some advice because, you know, here we are, the DOD is doing. Um. Phenomenal work in the area of, of, of technology, especially ai and looking at people, looking at from a people-centric perspective.
ANGELA: I know that Avery Muse had talked about the six generations that we're dealing with. So we're talking about the audience, the patients, et cetera. You know, how can we, um, be very cognizantly aware of that? What things can we do to make sure that we are not ignoring that fact? Mm-hmm. [00:15:00] Just because we're trying to advance technology,
KRISTIN: we use a lot of just customer experience metrics.
KRISTIN: We do a customer focused, um, perspective when we're developing things and we're trying to look at what exactly what kind of interface. Our customers are looking for, and in our case, in Army hr, our customers are all our soldiers, our civilians and their families, and our veterans. We do a lot of work for our veterans.
KRISTIN: Anytime they have to update their records or provide anything that is a proof of service. So we've really tried to take everything from our, our top driven hierarchical, we're pushing everything up to the leader to make a decision. We have turned that around and we're trying to push everything to a tier zero level of service, a self-service layer.
KRISTIN: So as we're developing tools. A lot of what we're doing is really democratizing data and democratizing functions. We're pushing those out to our soldiers and commanders at the edge with an understanding that they're going to need certain information and they're gonna need certain processes. So how can we provide those to them in a way that meets their experience?
KRISTIN: And from that [00:16:00] it's, it's interesting you bring up the different generations because that's exactly what we see in our Army service center that does HR records. 'cause we have. Everybody from the 102 year old veteran to the brand new service member or the ser, the new incoming recruits family who has a question about something that we're doing in that space.
ANGELA: Wow.
KRISTIN: Some of them wanna be able to make a phone call. Yep. Some of them don't wanna talk to a human, they just wanna go on chat. Others are good with just a quick automated interface, even though some of us are just gonna yell representative, because, you know, it's middling levels of, but we have to provide all those venues.
KRISTIN: Right. Just because some people, you know, it's, and it's really kind of interestingly divided, not by generation, but by, um, levels of experience within. You know, gaming, other types of digital adoption. The people who are the first ones to download the new app or buy the new gaming system. I mean, my mother is a great case in this.
KRISTIN: She's 73 years old and she created a GPT to answer questions [00:17:00] for her students about her syllabus. So I'm like, my mother is creating more AI lately than I am. Um, so we just kind of have to look and see who wants what type of service. And with these tools, it's very easy to provide a little of each. Very good.
ANGELA: And so one more thing if, oh, we have a question. Go ahead. Yes.
AUDIENCE 1: Hello to Nadine from, uh, I wonder what are some of the challenges you face to encourage innovation in your agency? If no challenges, what best practice can you share with other agencies so they can encourage, uh, innovation in their agencies?
KRISTIN: The biggest challenge is that we're the DOD. We are this very hierarchically structured organization with command rules, and we know who our decision makers are, and they're supposed to be the subject matter experts and et cetera, et cetera. I'm exaggerating a little bit, but actually not that much.
KRISTIN: Innovation typically bubbles up from our lowest levels. Some of the most creative and innovative people you will ever meet in your life are young [00:18:00] American soldiers. They will go take a problem set. They will go search for tools, they'll use AI to search for new tools. I mean, two years ago we're start, you know, we're, we're seeing all the drone activity happening in u in Ukraine two years ago.
KRISTIN: A whole bunch of my soldiers from 82nd are out 3D printing drones and crashing them into the headquarters so they can get outta their war fighter exercise. 'cause hey, we won, we're done. So they're, they're figuring things out. What we're trying to do and what our processes we're trying to build for them is to find these young innovators, the problems that we're trying to solve, and see if they're finding a new problem that we don't have resources for yet, and then guide them toward the appropriate channels.
KRISTIN: Okay, you made a thing. Now if we're gonna scale it, we have to teach you how to build it appropriately, what the safety standards are, how to contract it appropriately, how to get it into the acquisition pipeline, et cetera, et cetera. So. We're trying to teach them who to reach out to for resources to scale their ideas if these things are successful, and to make sure that they're, uh, compliant with law and policy from the top [00:19:00] side.
KRISTIN: I have to teach my leaders to act like venture capitalists. They're not pushing a top level solution down anymore. They're looking around for these up and coming solutions and figuring out which ones to resource and which ones to kind of throw their, their. Their weight behind. So instead of having this centralized, we're going to procure these things at the top level of the army.
KRISTIN: We're also trying to figure out ways to evaluate different tools and different solutions soldiers are creating to solve their problems and squish that decision space down.
ANGELA: So I wanted if you, since we have a few more minutes, okay. I would like for you to sort of. Tell the story of how you got to the role that you're in, because I think that sort of is a way to, um, introduce innovation into an organization. Well, not as brass, but anyway, go ahead.
KRISTIN: No, it's always fun because, um, people ask how I, because I'm a complexity scientist and an army engineer by background.
KRISTIN: How did I get into hr? [00:20:00] Well, like all good stories, it was an accident. So I started out my analytic career working at Endo Paycom in the Pacific, doing counter threat finance analysis and counter-terrorism analysis, and going out with special operations, ODA teams and building partner capacities in different organizations.
KRISTIN: Loved what I was doing. It was really fun to go out and feel like I was actively making a difference and stopping bad things from happening. So I had interviewed for another job to do it following that job to go to the joint staff J eight, where they were doing similar large scale analyses, was ready to go, had my position all set, and my branch goes, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
KRISTIN: You're doing back to back joint jobs. We can't do this. I was like, why not? They want me, I want that. Why? Why is this an issue? And they said, uh, you're, you know, you are, you're gonna go to HQDA staff. You need to do some Army staff time. You're going to the G one. And I sat there and I'm just like, oh, my analytic career is over.
KRISTIN: I don't know anything about [00:21:00] hr. I don't know anything about this new organization. Okay, fine. Let's go figure this out. So I get dropped into this organization of about 800 people trying to figure out what they're doing on the Army staff to support Army human resources. I get involved with an analytic team and most of the stuff they're doing was on spreadsheets.
KRISTIN: And they were doing a little bit of their analysis in SaaS, but a lot of it was just on these suites of interconnected spreadsheets. I mean, we're talking. Chewing gum and piano wire put together, and this is what they're doing to forecast the size and shape of the army. So it's like, oh, okay, we're gonna fix this.
KRISTIN: So went around looking for different resources. Ended up making friends with the then director of the Army Analytics Group, which is based out in Fairfield, California. He was in talking about. Some of the capabilities of this, um, this data repository he was building that had a layer of virtual machines on top of it, it was like, oh, we can do something fun with this.
KRISTIN: So we started building what we called at the time, the Human Capital Big Data Program, and we took [00:22:00] in all of our personnel data, our medical data, our legal data, every database that we could get our hands on and we could get a feed from. We took and we put into that data lake, and then on top of it. With all those virtual machines, we loaded up, uh, licenses for all the analytics software that we could get our hands on at the time.
KRISTIN: And we built a program where our analysts could come in, use those virtual machines, pull in the data that they needed, pull in the software that they needed, and work on programs. Um, in about, probably about a year and a half, we had installed IBM Watson and I was supervising seven AI projects. We were doing, uh, behavioral forecasting, uh, looking at people at risk to arm to self-harm to others.
KRISTIN: We were doing insider threat detection. We were doing a lot of really cool stuff. So that program had gotten off the ground. My leadership wanted more and more and more of this and come to happen. I sat in on a briefing from then, um, brand new brigadier general JP McGee, who is the director of our Army Talent Management task force.
KRISTIN: I saw [00:23:00] him producing a lot of documents, giving a great pitch. I was like, this is a great pitch. I'll buy the, I'll buy this 99 Corolla you're selling. And then he shows a couple of charts that had come outta my office and explained 'em incorrectly, and I was like, oh, okay. Had you until then, all of your audience is my army people, people, and they've all heard me give this pitch.
KRISTIN: I gotta go fix you. So I made an appointment with him to go sit down with him and walk him through these charts. I said, I, I love the problems that you're solving. I absolutely love this. However, if you are going to talk to my people, you gotta, you gotta go through this. The way we go through this, I'm gonna tell you what all this means.
KRISTIN: So I booked this for 30 minutes and this goes on for like two hours. We're talking about all the data problems, all my frustrations with the data in the Army people space. And he takes a few notes. He says, okay, this is great. I'm gonna, I'm gonna run with this. Let me, and I was like, okay, I'm in the office down the hall from you.
KRISTIN: Let me know if I can do anything else. And I leave. I go on about a week leave, and by the time I come [00:24:00] back, my boss looks at me and he goes, what did you do? I was like, oh, crap, what did I do? He's like, I, I promise I didn't hurt anybody's feelings too badly. And he goes, no, no, no. You have orders to go to Talent Management Task Force.
KRISTIN: I go, oh, well I'm supposed to leave this summer anyway, this is January, by the way. No, that, those orders for were for that week. So I showed up, walked into Gerald McGee's office. I'm like, Hey, new boss. Uh, what am I doing? He goes, Hey, all those problems you brought to me, you had some ideas to fix them. Go fix 'em.
KRISTIN: I was like, okay, best job ever. And that was six years ago and I'm still at it.
ANGELA: Yes.
ANGELA: I thought it was an impressive way to do it. Any other questions? No. Well, please help me in, well in thanking. Uh, Colonel, you were amazing. I appreciate your conversation and, uh, you know, have a
KRISTIN: Thanks all. Thank you, Chris.
Yohanna: Thank you for joining us at the Health Innovation Summit. [00:25:00] If you're passionate about technology and eager to explore more incredible events, make sure to visit act iac.org/upcoming-events. Keep your curiosity sparked and your calendars marked. Until next time, stay inspired and connected.