Andreea Wade on AI, UX & Staying Human

Andrea Wade joins Alex Marcus for a wide-ranging conversation on AI, startup grit, career zigzags, ethical tech, and why some things should always stay clickable. From coding in Romania to selling her AI company to iCIMS, Andrea’s story is bold, brilliant, and beautifully human. 

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Transcript

 welcome everybody to HRIT Connect. This is a special event series hosted by System Edmund Insights. My name is Alex Marcus.
 I'm your host today. And we are so excited and honored to have Andrea Wade with us. Andrea Wade is a trailblazer in the HR tech and AI industries with a remarkable and very interesting career.
 Spanning journalism, music event management, startup creation, and now venture capital. Very, very fascinating career. As a general partner at Delta Partners VC, she invests in early stage in scaling companies, leveraging her extensive expertise in AI, product innovation and entrepreneurship.
 So previously, Andrea co founded and successfully exit an AI startup opening.io, which was acquired by our friends at Isims, and Andrea as I shared with you previously, pretty much everyone on this call is either an Isims customer and I see a couple of Isims staff as well.
 So, we're a big fan. Andrea's career achievements include launching, transformative AI solutions in HR tech, mentoring founders globally, and pioneering innovative festivals in media initiatives.
 She's a passion for empowering founders and advancing AI-driven HR technologies. And as we were getting started before the call today, she said something very interesting.
 She said, something should remain clickable. And I'm actually going to start with that. Can you talk a little bit more about what things should remain clickable and why?
 Darn. Yeah. No, I'm really intrigued me. I think it's a fact. I think we're just going to jump right in.
 I've got some icebreaker questions, too. But I want to jump into that, because I think, and I would say like the backstory to that, is that all companies are trying to find ways to make the clicking go away, right?
 The stuff that is automated can be automated, companies are trying to automate it, right? So what are your thoughts on that?
 What should remain clickable? I don't write into the deep end, and I apologize. We can get back to the script if you prefer.
 No, it's all good. It's all good. I mean, I think he was, you know, a bit of a philosophical whatever comment, right?
 Yeah. But we're trying to automate everything, right? And we're at a point in time when technologies promising that it can do that, right?
 But there's just, and I guess there's this whole story and thinking of, you know, what remains for us to do and if, you know, if automation will remove clicks, so we'll do the clicks on our behalf where do we intervene, right?
 And I think you can apply to anything. How smart do I want? Never mind, enterprise software. How smart do I want an object that I use every day to become, right?
 I think there's a little bit in there, there's a story of where humanity is at this point we want to retain some control.
 Even if we were talking about the whole subculture of clickable keywords, it's right, keep at it. It's the sound itself, it's satisfying and you receive it, but they've done the thing.
 I think I would love to and as an AI person, I will say that I have very little AI in my life for now.
 So I'm keeping a lot of things clickable for now. Yeah, yeah. There's a satisfaction and also a safety. And I've been reading a lot about AI agents lately and about safeguards in place for like, if something is going to result in the permanent deletion of something else, a human being has to be involved
 . Somebody has to sign off on that in some way, with a click or approval or something, right? But yeah, these are some of the most important questions for our time, and this audience in particular, these are all HR system administrators who are wondering, like what aspects of their current roles are 
 the most valuable, and the most secure as things change so rapidly? All right, so to get back to this group, thank you for indulging me in that.
 I just love that quote though. So I also have a background in music. I played in country bands in my 20s, and you used to organize music festivals.
 What is a lesson that you've carried from the music industry into the tech world? So this was a great question.
 Nobody has asked me this before, or I didn't necessarily think of it. But I've definitely there's a lesson there, right?
 So, and my answer is, and I'll explain why, is user experience. And now I'm, so that's right. When I organized the first of it, by the way, when I organized the first event, I was 11.
 But then I stopped, whatever. So fast forward to my 30s when I start organizing music events, right? And we're doing metal events and we're bringing bands from all over the world.
 And they're not our one ask. To all of them is you have to come to us when you're outside of a tour.
 If you're on a tour you can't come to us. Because by bringing and carrying the costs and all that kind of stuff, of bands that are not touring, we managed to get people coming from 25 to 30 countries to our festival because there was no what a place to see these bands because they were not touring.
 So anyway, so you do, so you have an event somewhere in Transylvania in an old Citadel and you have people from 25 countries coming there and you need them to buy the tickets, get on a plane, arrive somewhere in Bucharest, make their way.
 So the way I've learned to organize events is to walk through them. As a person, what do I do? How do I get from wherever I am in the world to come to you to some exotic country, Romanian, Transylvania, wherever, Right, I'm from Pennsylvania, I've been in Ireland 23 years, nearly 24 years, but originally
 I'm from there, so I would fly home and organize these things, right? So, you know, I walked through everything, okay, you arrive at the venue, you're outside the gates.
 Now what? Once you come in, now what? So, that, I carry that to product building as well, you know, you are, you're all of that.
 Like, I come in, I click, do I know what I click on? If I take away a click, is it intuitive enough for you to know that I took away the click, and the thing will happen without looking.
 Right? So I think it was that I think learning that people, when there's, because in software you might, you don't see them.
 When you organize, you see thousands of people descending upon one point. Do they know what you're doing, right? And that kind of stuck with me.
 Yeah, you know, we call it empathy for the end user. And I think anybody who has been in music or theater or performing arts in any way or teaching, really gets the user experience and that there's a person on the other side of this, who is having an experience and that experience needs to be a positive
 one. No matter how much it makes sense that we're adopting this new software platform, if the experience of the person in the trenches was actually using it, stinks, the rollout's gonna be ineffective.
 Yeah. Okay, so what about, let's talk about the the the zigzag career path because you have done a number of unique specific things that may not make sense to to others looking at a resume and I had this anxiety myself having gone from music to teaching to non-profit to starting a business like how does
 it all make sense and what drove you, what drove you to take that approach. And I don't have to say curiosity.
 Yeah. Right, so I do not have a, you know, you said it, but I don't know, I don't have a career path that makes sense immediately to a human never mind an algorithm, right?
 Because I've, I have basically done whatever, I've gone in into whatever I got in curious about, and I also have a little problem of I don't say that I get bored of things, but I like solving things and then moving on to the next thing Yeah, and that can be anything it could be I started to you know,
 and I started computer science Then I went and I became a journalist and I was organizing these events and also because these were all aligned to my passions.
 To think that I thought I was good at, like I wrote my first little story when I was in what we called primary school.
 I was seven-eighth, and I was writing about Pharaohs. And I know that my fellow classmates, I had no idea what a Pharaoh is or whatever, right?
 I could have been, we were learning about kings and queens. I could have easily just said a king, but I decided to call the Pharaoh.
 Right, so I just leaned into things that I seemed to be okay at and things that interest me. And that's how I did the thing without really thinking, well, does this make sense?
 Do I have a future? Will this thing make me money? Well, I, you know, should I go into an engineering?
 Should I be a doctor? Should I, I never, I just did what I wanted or what's curious, and somehow worked out.
 Yeah, yeah, I can really relate to that. Was it scary at all? Because I know, I mean, certainly for our parents' generation, there was a different attitude to work.
 And then I remember in the late 80s, early 90s, everybody's parents getting laid off, right? And that dream of the way career paths were supposed to go.
 I remember, you know, my dad gave, I knew it was just heartbreaking, because he'd spent 30 years at this company, right?
 Like were you scared to take this sort of zigzag approach or did it just appeal to you because you're curiosity and drive?
 It would be strange to say that I wasn't scared. I don't remember being scared, but for sure I was because I tell you, you know, you know, we're all friends here.
 I left I Sims back in October. I knew it was time. You know, the acquisition went through four years and great company and the full team is still there, you know, that was a choir.
 So it was like, it was the huge decision. And I honestly, I wasn't quite sure what I'm gonna do next.
 And was gonna build something what I, like, nothing that I did was planned. However, I guess without sound sounding too cumbaia, I just always social knew that things will come together because I have a way of planning my next steps without planning my next steps.
 I have always built a community and a network around me. I organized, I don't know how many events in Irish tech.
 I've always done a lot of things. So there's a community and a network of people around me that every time I wanted to do something I tapped into.
 So even with this, you know, my next step after acquisition being in there leading the team to build, you know, amazing things and so on and so forth it was time for me to move on I leaned into my network and I was like no I'm going to do my next thing I've no idea what it is I said it to five or six
 people but these five or six people were I didn't need to say it to more so it's a weird I'm not I wasn't planning but I kind of was I was putting it out there yeah And as unstructured and as fluffy as it sounds, it's not, it was strategic.
 Yeah, I'll get that. So what was the biggest risk that you took looking back on the different, This isn't you made?
 Honestly, it's not a professional thing. It's literally leaving Romania when I was 22. So again, 22, I had a great career but I started writing in newspapers when I was 16.
 So I was the journalist. I was 22. I was the senior editor of an advertising magazine. I knew everyone in my town.
 I was doing really cool exciting things. And then I'm like, okay, I'm going to go to Ireland. My friends were shocked.
 Like, to do what? Who do you know? What are you, you know? And I went from, I think I told this story.
 once, but I went from being the senior editor of the Satellitizing Magazine and having this, you know, a lot of cool friends and doing cool stuff at 22, 23 to coming here because we weren't in the EU and working as a security guard for a few years.
 Well, yeah. But that's what I had to do because we weren't in the EU. Then we joined in the EU.
 I went back to, I went back to college here. I studied media marketing. I was able to jump into year or two of college because I've studied similar stuff at home, blah, blah.
 So that was, okay, when I stayed at a friend's house, why I met on the internet, like looking back, it was absolutely mental.
 Yeah, sure. You know, and at home I was established, you know, it was, it was nice and cozy, But it wasn't, you know, the revolution, we had the revolution when I was, you ten years ago or whatever.
 I just felt that I wanted something different. I wanted more. And I was just going to shoot my shoot and see what happens.
 I'm going to go for a year and I can always go home. But it was, I mean, looking back and put, if you put it down on paper, It just sounds, yeah, but extra.
 Yeah, no, no, no. So when you look back on all of these different things that you've done, is there a particular project or achievement that you're most proud of?
 I don't know if it's because it's closer to what I've done or the impact that had on my life or because of what we managed to build, but I will definitely say opening.io.
 Because I've did so many things before opening.io. I had all these different companies. I had not for profits. I was working with startup source, mentoring.
 I did loads. But opening that I always the culmination of all of that stuff. Everything that I've learned being a journalist, storytelling.
 It's huge. You know, you know, small start up CEO, you have to go into these boards into these, you know, you have to tell a story that people will buy into or connect with or whatever, right?
 So that's like opening that I always the culmination of everything that I've done and tinkered with until then and then some and then the team that we put together, the fact that four years on, you know, they're all still there and we, it's just, and I've learned so much.
 taught me so much about things, about me, about so definitely, and, you know, we built something from nothing, from a kitchen to a different kitchen table, a different kitchen at a different table, but it started there, right, so that's where I came up with the name opening, and then after noon, that's
 where, and then someone found it interesting enough to buy the products, and then at some point somebody find it interesting enough to buy the company, Right, so I will definitely say that, although there's a different thing kind of close to my heart that literally came out of nowhere, my dad passed 
 away a couple of years ago. I was during the pandemic, it was, thank you, it was out of nowhere. So he was there tonight, and tomorrow morning he's gone, literally just didn't sleep.
 But my dad was a European champion at weightlifting. He was the general secretary of the body building and fitness and the weightlifting federation.
 My granddad was an Olympian weightlifting Olympian, all this kind of stuff. Anyway, I've never really talked to them about, I knew about that world and I would see the photo, see the medals, the cups, whatever, but I never really leaned into it, or honestly even asked my dad two questions about how to
 best exercise. Three years after my dad passes away I call all a strength training gym for a woman every day and I lean it it's like it's again pretty how that has happened now I feel like the gym is my church and I've it's where I find my dad and my granddad and I you know I talk to them before about
 these things, but they're like, be all the time. What a beautiful, what a beautiful tribute and way to connect with them.
 Yeah. Yeah, it worked out. I don't know. I think life and whatever, things are funny, the way they would have.
 Yeah. So now you do a lot of mentoring of founders. And what is the most valuable piece of advice that you have received that you've passed on to folks that you're mentoring.
 I always kind of say this and it was one of the things. It's really because I see, so I talked to so many founders, I even before me joining a, you know, a VC fund for years and years, I've been mentoring, helping, impress, whatever, into founders and you see the same harder of avoiding things that are
 not leading into things that scared and most. And I always do the thing that scares you most first. Yeah. Just got it.
 Whatever you have on your plate today, the customer that you want to talk to. The weather feeling at you or the invoice you don't want to look at.
 Whatever it is, do that thing first. The letter you don't want to open. There's like there's never ending stream of things to do.
 It's just an infinite number of things that you can do, and there's like three giant things that you don't want to do, and that you do them, they'll be the most impactful.
 I can totally relate to that. Do you notice any patterns or trends in the folks? And who do you work with by the way, in terms of demographics, do you work primarily with women founders, or what is your area of focus?
 I, honestly, work with anyone and everyone, I obviously, so I was on the board of Whits Island, Women in Technology and Science, so I was on Secretary of Community for a couple of years, so I do a lot of work, and there I used to organize these years of events called Askathon.
 Askathon of questions, and it was aimed at female entrepreneurs, we also had, you know, there or two guys in the room which was great to see.
 I was thought it was great that they were there. So I did a lot of work throughout the years to support, you know, women entrepreneurs.
 Today I'll talk to anyone, but I will be extra extra extra happy when I see that the CEO or chief science officer or someone one of the founders is a woman.
 Obviously that is It's rare that you'd like it to be, but it's obviously, and I do try to seek female entrepreneurs out, so there was an event 3, 4, 4, 3 weeks ago, that I spoke out, fears aimed at women entrepreneurs over about 200 of them there, and I spoke on a panel, I connected with a lot of them
 . So there's obviously that connection because I'm a woman and there's not many of us never mind in venture capital, not a lot of us.
 We're invisible startups because we're not as backed. But realistically, we function in Ireland. It's not a huge country. So we will talk to know the gender balance is there.
 And fairness, like with the VC firm that we have two general, four general partners, two female, two men, but yeah, we work well, basically, anyone who has a seed, pre-seed, or kind of series, I.
 Do you notice any trends of those things that founders tend to avoid and don't want to look at? anything in particular tends to be like, you know, this is probably an issue.
 Yeah, so it's not just, you know, so there's different things. I mean, you co-founder dynamic, it's a huge kind of thing that it works not, so you spot that immediately.
 And there's other green and red flags on how they answer, I think, and it's not, I don't know if I would call it a trend, but you do see it with founders often that they don't want to go to where saying I don't know to something that you ask realistically, as an investor, you like it when they say I 
 don't know, right? I'm taking notes. Thank you. Because if you're telling me you're going to know something, you know, you're honest, I'm like, okay, you're on.
 That's that's a busy way to establish honesty. And then you're open. And you're kind of telling me why you don't know about how you're going to find out, right?
 So that's all kind of, you know, that's good stuff. Not being close enough to your customers. Because a lot of founders are afraid of that.
 If you're not close enough, then you can't just build what the solution looks like in your head. You need to build a solution that will be used on a daily basis by users.
 Right, so that closeness to, then there's the struggle of the founder who doesn't want to sell and want to understand that they are the salespeople.
 They are the main salesperson for a long while. Right, and you see, you kind of see that, that's, that's, that's, that's, it is a little bit of a, I wouldn't call it a trend, but it's a, it's a nearly part of the journey where the founder does the thing, it might be technical, they might not be technical
 , they just, they would like to do all the other things rather than the things that, you know, will bring in the money which is sales.
 And they tried to hire too early, like hiring for sales too early, it's always a thing that I see always and it's just too early, I'm like, I'm sorry, but it still has to be you, it has to be you.
 That's fascinating. You know, Colin Day said something very similar and he said that the investors insist to try to get away from sales and investors insisted that he keep doing it for much longer than he'd ever anticipated.
 Yeah, it's interesting. They will never be any more better than you, like within a certain timeline, I was right. At some point when you get big enough, and you know, and the solution is mature enough, and it's understood out there, but again, you're selling that story.
 You know, the why you have, you're there, like, calling was the product guy. It was so close to, you know, what would be built.
 There's just, there's the passion. I would always, like, I don't, I would say, I don't like selling, but I'm good at it.
 storytelling. Yeah. I don't want to be good at it. Apparently I'm good at it or I hate it. You're good at it.
 Okay, fine. Yeah, it's too bad. So, so we're going to start to transition towards the subject of AI, which of course is top of mind for everybody these days.
 I want to start with was there an aha moment in your career that solidified your passion for AI. I'll tell you, mine, it was when I used an AI tool, this was like two and a half, three years ago, I used an AI tool to write some copy for the website, and it came up with stuff that was better than anything
 I could have written, and I Googled it. I Googled it verbatim, like this must exist somewhere at the internet. It did not exist somewhere at the internet.
 That was my, oh my gosh, this is like, Gutenberg, printing press level, major tectonic shift in technology, and obviously AI has been around some form for a very long time.
 I've since come to understand, right? But what was that moment for you when you realize it while this is the thing that I really want to seek my teeth into?
 Well, look, so again, I come from Romania, where the educational system is different in Ireland and perhaps in the States, we major in something in secondary school and high school, right?
 So we major in something in high school and I major in computer science. So when I was 16, I was doing C++ and Pascal and all these kind of things, right?
 And I think for me, the Ahomo, it was way, way, way before it was say I, you know, and it was really about, you can be anything with technology.
 You could just literally build your thing, right? Because I don't, I might, my grandfather from my mother side was a carpenter.
 And he could the most amazing furniture and doors and windows and all these kind of things, right? There's so many trades and people who can paint and sculpt, then they can just create things with their hands and I can't many of that.
 But with code, I realize you can build anything. You want an app for something because the thing doesn't work, building.
 You can build a thing for a thing. It's just, you know, knowing coding languages. It's like knowing some other foreign language.
 It just allows you to do things, right? It allows you to control this thing that results into a thing that can be useful.
 So the fact that, you know, technology empowers you to just create stuff, that was pretty much it for me. And then for AI, like we found it opening in 2015, we started playing in 2014, right?
 decade ago, but we're really putting and I was so scared, I will say this, but putting the output of what our models could do nearly 10 years ago in front of people and seeing their reaction was everything.
 I mean everything. I remember being this, it wasn't a demo. Well, it kind of was, So, I mean, the largest recruitment agency in Ireland, they saw our technology and they're like, okay, this is interesting.
 We're going to try it and Andrea goes, because I don't know anything about the industry, because I never worked in recruitment, I never worked in T.I.
 in HR, anyone's just white, so, and I think it's Lucien in it. Like, I'm going to sit, can I sit next to your users and see what they do?
 And I still remember it as girl, We introduced the solution into this company and it was called Merlin and Merlin was magical and whatever.
 And I'm like, okay, do you search with, you know, how do you, she was hiring for some role? And I'm like, do you search with this Merlin tool and see what you find?
 And she puts in something. And she was hiring for this for a couple of days. This list comes back. She does one click.
 She looks at the second person. She opens. I'm looking at her face. She opens the resume and forgetting that I'm even there.
 Her next thing was she picked up the phone and she called the candidates while I was doing a demo. She literally, you know, this person was in their database.
 She didn't know that they have it. She was in their database for days. We showed it to her in literally one second and her next thing was pick up the phone call this person and talk to them what I'm sitting there going, wow, this thing really went, and you know in my head I did not say that to her, so
 I didn't think I was, could you be able to think about that, so through the eyes, because you can, I think about it, I started coding when I was 16, I'm in a little bit of a technical bubble, right?
 So I'm in an AI bubble. I need to remind myself where the world is and where I have, and where the people around me are, and then where, you know, so need to check myself all the time, and yeah.
 Yeah, you know, I gave a presentation to my friend's high school class a couple weeks ago on AI, and this one young man came up to me or it's an ask me if it's still worth it to learn coding.
 What would your response be to that? It's worth understanding how technology works, but you will probably not code the way, your father might have or your mother might have or whatever.
 So I think this is, you know, within AI, there's this whole conversation around, will AI take our jobs and what's going to be automases and the idea of the idea and how can we upscale people and and within there is what what is academia doing like what are schools doing or how can they align to all of
 this because it's moving so fast and it's so out of you know, how do we how do we do this right and I don't think like on the standing how technology.
 works needs to be there. There's a lot of good stuff under on the standing software engineering. There's maths, there's different things.
 But you're not going to learn to do that, you know, to click. This is not going to make clickable the way it has been right.
 So it's, yeah. You know, I was speaking to a friend who is a math tutor about this and she said her son goes to a university in New York City.
 And approach that they've taken at least with, because all the, every all the kids are just using chatGPT and discriminately all the time, right?
 And so they want to surface it and be able to make it a part of the education. And so, sometimes with writing papers, they say we want you to write this paper once on your own and once with chatGPT and compare the two together and allow that comparison to help you build your understanding of what good
 writing is. And when she shared that, it occurred to me that I actually have kind of done that on my own.
 Like I will have AI rewrite something for me. And I'll recognize like while I used shawl instead of will or whatever the case may be.
 And I'll think about it a little bit. But I think having that awareness and surfacing that as an educator, I think can be very useful.
 It's not just a way to get away with something. It is, you have your own personal teacher at your disposal 24 hours a day if you choose to use it that way, right?
 And so I'm kind of imagining that programming may be there may be a similar way to to use it to help you understand programming so that you can then build with those skills.
 And I think about Excel, for example, like I've done some stuff with Excel that I don't No, if I ever would have been able to ask with Jackie PD, Jackie PD, that I don't think I ever would have done had I not already been very good at Excel, myself, before it.
 And I think that's my biggest concern. And I think there's also like this mentorship gap now, like the current cohort of mature coders, how are they going to pass that on to the next generation so that they can understand the technology sufficiently.
 So if it's sort of long term, I don't know. There's just a lot of them packed there, you Like, well, are you in conversation?
 So it sounds like you were your own technical, did you have a co-founder for opening.io or Europe? Yes, it's just a CTO, super smart guy, super talented guy from my hometown.
 So I'm here 23 years, here's about 13. I knew him since I was a teenager, and he decided to move here.
 He actually won the programming, Olympiad and Romania 20 years ago or whatever. I was cold in the country, whatever, at that level.
 So here's far beyond anything in anyone I just, but anyway, yeah, and he's still in isims being the guy that everyone leaves alone to build really cool stuff.
 Yeah, I love that guy. It's a important guy to have in your team. So earlier in the conversation, we were talking about human centered approach, right?
 And so, when you're thinking about how HR leaders can balance the integration of AI tools while maintaining that human centered approach, what do you think they should prioritize with that, right?
 I mean, look, I think for now, So I don't know where we're going to be in 2014, 2015 or 2013 or whatever, right?
 Right now. And I'm not certainly there's the influence of being from Europe and having the U.A. I act and how our industry is seen as a high risk identified as a high risk industry.
 So in Europe, under the U.A. I act and I'll say this a lot of states in the state, you know, there, you know, like the New York City bias law and so on, informed our approach from the European approach and the Europeans are learning from, you know, there's this hope going on right now, but we're classified
 as virus, just like immigration, biometrics, law enforcement, right? So you can understand the responsibility of implementing such technologies, you know, on the data that we deal with for the use cases that we build with while maintaining the human in the loop.
 I don't think there's any other way for now. When we get, I won't even say if, when we get to a place where we can fully trust these systems that they're making, you know, they're auditable in real time and, you know, we build these bias and fairness and ethical considerations properly into the models
 , but we're not there yet, right? So, we can only build with the human in the loop, and you'll hear that when you talk about your energy of AI and building responsibly you build with the human in the loop.
 So, I think before anything technical or producty or whatever, I think we need to invest in AI literacy for HR teams, for everyone, certainly for HR teams, right?
 Like, teams need to understand how to use these tools responsibly, they need to find questions, right? I sat in a lot of customer calls and I haul it all the questions.
 And I without going into detail or whatever because it doesn't even matter, I've heard how the questions have changed over time and they have changed with you know gaining AI literacy or they sort of morphed because a lot has happened and there's a lot of noise and we don't know what to thing anymore
 , right? So, of course, I should see, you know, we've seen the partner, but you have to understand what goes into it, right?
 So, the industry itself, I always felt very, very, very strongly about this, even from the moment when we built what was opening that I owe, because we built from a candidate perspective.
 We were frustrated candidates that wanted to build technology, put it in the hands of professionals and let them use it for our benefit, right?
 So I always believe that the industry itself needs to prioritize ethical AI development and then hate our leaders need to learn, need to lean towards adopting ethical AI tools and with that you need, you need to know the questions, you need to align with the vendors, figure out what their roadmap are
 , you know, all that kind of good stuff and then But in all of this, I think what we need to figure out as our jobs change is the preserving of that human connection, the personal connection, right?
 So talent management is ultimately about people, not just process. Yes, people go to all sorts of processes in TA and HR and all those kind of stuff.
 But that want to one face to face, we need to maintain that, right? area where we can do that, right?
 Because we are dealing with humans. So I think it's a mix of this. On the side what I as align with ethical usage in this industry, we have that's our mandate.
 And then maintain that human in the loop, but that personal touch really, it's more than having a human in the loop, it's having that face to face, that personal touch kind of thing and that's what we need to figure out as our jobs are changing because we keep hearing about this.
 Well, jobs will change, you know, AI will load, man, then that, that, that, that, that. Fine. What will it look like?
 And will you lean your human skills? And how do you build AI literacy? Because I personally just play with it all the time and I want you to videos before going to bed each night and I'm like making a point of being super current, right?
 Because it's really, I mean, scary but it's really fun as well, right? For somebody who isn't like a techy enthusiast and let's face a lot of people going to HR not because they're super like into technology, right?
 A lot of people going to HR because they love working with people, right? And now they're being brazed with all of this learning that needs to happen around AI literacy, like where should your average HR leader go to be more informed about what's happening with AI?
 I think we're at a time where we're, I don't want to say it's a bit of a wild west, but we're all out there googling, right?
 And we might find a, I don't know, we might find a series of videos or we might find a blog and we're like, okay, I'm going to listen to this person.
 I'm going to listen to what I think we need to, so there's a bit of that. Every person is kind of, and based on your curiosity, based on whatever people are doing different things, finding your taught leaders is a big one, right?
 There's just so many voices out there. Find the four people or the three people that you want to listen to.
 Whoever they might be, you might need to ask around, you will be a research, but find those voices. Figure out that you trust them.
 Understand what they talk about, how they talk about it, and then keep an eye on that. Maybe look at course, but I think that, so again, wild wise, a lot of people, you know, we're all Googling.
 I think companies need to do more, and I think companies are figuring out, okay, what do we do? How do we upscale our employee?
 And it's a weird one, it's an interesting place where art, because it's not a specific, let me upscale and rent project management or something.
 years three horses. There is something about pulling them in the bubble if they're not in the bubble. And on the standing, you know, even the basics of how to interact with this technology, of how to write, so I think companies need to do more.
 They're trying, but everyone is trying based not on frameworks that we have, you know, that have been existing for a while, everyone is trying to be so googling and it's not what someone else is doing, right?
 But I think all things that you said, you know, the YouTube videos, the people that might be out there at the front line of these frontier models that are translating things to people, maybe some good product companies that are, you know, there's emerging startups So scale up so good companies within
 the industry who understand that their customers are users are lost and they're putting out content all of that. And then internally, as I said, the companies just need to, yeah, pull together courses or whatever, but also this is an important one.
 The last thing that I'll say with this one, inform their employees of their own stands on AI and what their companies do and, right?
 Yeah. And go, well, look, us as company X, we adopted GitHub co-pilot and 50% of our users are using it and we're seeing this and we're seeing that.
 We haven't adopted this other thing, but we've done this one and this is why we've the transparency, right? But, you know, it's a process and again, we don't have templates for these kind of fast changes.
 Yeah. Oh my eyes doing 12 days of Chris every day is something you. Yeah. It's a lot that did you have have you played with the video voices system thing on chat GPT?
 I did not do that. Oh, you got to do it. I played with O1 and it's it's very good.
 Yeah. I'm walking around I'm walking around with a camera. So if you don't have chatchipity on your phone, you can now use the camera on it and it just shows it what's around you and it recognizes virtually everything.
 I was watching Star Trek last night. I was like, who's this actor? Pointed at the screen and like, oh, this is so.
 And so, right, and any, like, incredible. Absolutely. I remember seeing this demo like a year ago and I was like, and that's just a demo.
 It's here. It's here. It's amazing. It is here. It's not in Europe yet. I can't do it. There's a few things that I haven't made it to Europe yet.
 Oh, okay. This is the issue of compliance regulation. There's a whole Europe in Europe. You're so stodgy with your tea and crumpets.
 Anything goes over here. Anything goes like that. I know, we're like, oh, yeah, safety last. It's bigger, better anyway.
 Well, you're going to, you're going to love it when you get it. It's incredible. But let's return back to organizations using AI.
 So how should HR departments think about measuring the ROI of some of these tools? Because every major vendor out there now has some sort of AI functionality.
 I listen to Josh Burst and a lot and he talks about the difference between some tactile and functionality and baked-in functionality.
 Every major vendor has some form of tactile and functionality. Like when you're thinking of budget and allocating resources, what should be front of mind in terms of like quantifying the ROI of an additional spend?
 I mean look, often we're at an interesting time when we are really presented. nearly every day with solutions looking for problems.
 Right? Yes. Yeah. And our industry because data-heavy, document-heavy, scale, you know, it's ripe for automation. It's ripe for adopting these technologies.
 Of course there's elevated risks because we're in the end, you know, But before any of that is, you know, it's taking this pack and figuring out, you know, what are we trying to solve?
 How do I quantify today? Like, what are we solving? I can't remember the average number of solutions that an enterprise has within our space these days, but I don't know what it was nineteen, it was more, it was half, and if you're global, right you might have an ATS in some areas and another one in 
 the different and then the CRM and this old just a gazillion of things going on right so and different ways of looking at things and so we might have these amazing high end 2020 you five nearly solutions but we're still solving the same problems right and we're still kind of looking at them the same 
 way because we haven't yet learned in new ways of looking at it, right? So it's like, okay, well, what's the baseline measurement?
 Like, what are we measuring here, right? Can we monitor these things? I think the products of today or the products of the future will bring that monitoring thing in the workflow, while work is happening, not after work has happened, right?
 And the moment I'm going back and I'm looking at all the things, how many jobs I climb and he says, you know, the best products are thinking are implementing those in the workflow as you're filling a job, you see in real time, you know, horses, you know, where candidates are coming from and you know,
 all that kind of stuff. So I think I think there's an opportunity there, but realistically as you have to figure out, you know, what is it?
 Is it time savings? reduced our spend doing, I don't know, in our case, was always resume screening, right? As I said, we built that recommender engine, we started in 2014, 2015.
 2025, we're still talking about the same thing. We're still talking about matching technology. We're still talking about screening, taking a million years, you know, about scheduling things taking long, about taking notes, taking long, and being scattered and all this, right?
 So what is it? Is it time saving? Is it cost saving? Is it? I don't know, quality of metrics, who's giving you the best candidates.
 Candidates falling off career sites. We haven't solved, you know, on one end, we're talking about AGI, you know, the awakening on the AI, and on other, we have the same exact problems in this industry that we had.
 you know. So it comes back to what are you trying to solve? Are you, you know, what are you looking to, again, is it the cost as a time, is it whatever?
 So back at I since again, I'm not there anymore, but Raya Moss's work did some very interesting work on top of our work and showing reduction in time and all.
 kind of stuff, right? But it's it's also fuzzy with the introduction of these new genuine eye things, you know, like think about, I don't know, job description, augmentation.
 You play with that, if you play inside of a vendor or if you're doing it on CHATGPC, How do you measure, what do you measure there, how good this, so I think it's some of again, as said, we're trying to solve the exact problems that have been solving 10 years ago, and then there's also a little bit of
 a learning curve, but I think vendors, the successful vendors that are adopting these technologies, they will build the products to show you the proof that they're working as well.
 So, you know, we've saved this much time or we've saved this or whatever it might be through a dashboard through real-time reporting through whatever the heck there is.
 These will become product features that will prove that value of this automation. So we are, we have nine minutes left for a presentation.
 I'd like to invite our audience to drop any questions in chat. I have a couple more questions for you, Andrea.
 But if you have something that you would like to ask Andrea, please drop in chat. I wanted to ask you about the issue of AI in bias.
 Do think it's overblown, exaggerated, or do you think it's a concern that folks should be very worried about? I'm sorry, I just realized that I'm coughing.
 So again, there is a reason why the application of AI in this industry for some of the use cases, not all, right?
 But for some of the use cases that we would build for are considered high risk. A bias is absolutely a concern within this industry and, you know, use cases that involve matching and, you know, things like breathing leaderboards or or whatnot.
 And the topic of bias and fairness and overall responsible AI has to be an evergreen world map item for any other company that is building in, you know, in this space.
 So, it is honestly, I don't know if I would compare it to software, it's an integral part of building AI, right?
 So, for that purpose, you know, you have to make sure that you have tests, and look, there's defined ways to do that now.
 all these models and different frameworks of analyzing if a model is or not biased against the different data points exist out there, but you have to introduce it into your development cycles.
 You have to test for it. You have to create experiments all the time. It's not something that you could so in our case I'll give you an example back in opening that I owe, and then in I since we would build all these recommender engines, but never ever introduce data like name or gender or whatever else
 it might be, but we still tested to see if the reasoning bias against names and gender and so on and so forth, even though this data was never introduced into the algorithm ever.
 So it's like testing for, I don't for poison somewhere where there was no poison right. But proxy there's this data that can create bias for different reasons.
 There's you can't you know there is no guarantee and there is no such thing as an absolute lack of bias and when we talk about bias certainly in this industry we talk about unintended bias right so that's how we refer to it.
 Nobody wants to build matching algorithms that are biased from day one, but unintended bias happens, so we have to force.
 And that is why the human in the loop and the risk factor in all of that kind of stuff is associated with this industry, because for now, again, I don't know where we're going to be in 2014, 2015, or whatnot, but for now, we cannot allow systems to to end decision-making around the candidate or another
 . So, unintended bias, very real, and we, you know, Google Responsible AI, there's, you know, the same definition all over the world of what it is, and it's a matter of building.
 But you build explainability into this. You audit the thing by third party vendors. you have all sorts of different safe checks and walk-not and so on and so forth.
 So that is I believe the only way to build in this particular industry. Got it. Caitlin, you had a question, you want to come off mute?
 No, no. Hi, Andrea. So my question for you is, I would like to know a little bit about your process and what your brain does when something inevitably breaks.
 So when you're creating something and it just goes bananas and completely off the rails, how do you get things back on track?
 Like how do you think through that process? Ooh, that is a great question and I'm actually very good in those moments.
 But what do I actually do? I never really, I shine in disaster mode. Like my friend, my friends joke that I should be sent into like disaster areas for things right.
 I'm like, Okay. I focus on problem solving, right? So let me give you an example, right? Two weeks ago, it's not a software thing.
 But two weeks ago, my partner owns a gym, I co-own this as gym, and it got flooded. And the gym gets flooded.
 And he can't be there. He has to go and pick up or whatever. So I have to go there. And I get there.
 The gym is full of water. Ray has stopped, but Ray is coming back in about 20 minutes. Five people arrive and all the five people are trying to see why has the water not gone through the kind of the drainage system.
 And there's spending all this time on unclogging the drainage system while the gym is still flooded and there's more water coming.
 And about three hours pass and more rain is coming and more water is flowing and these five people were still standing around in engineering mode.
 At that point I just I and I let them solve the thing because it was the landlord it was whatever at that point I go okay.
 The problem that you're trying to solve is the long-term problem that of course needs be solved, because this can't happen again.
 But right now, the thing, our gym is flooded, things are deteriorating, I need a simple solution like buckets. So I go and I buy three buckets and I come back and I'm there shoveling the water out on my own because the five people have left because they didn't have a magnificent engineering problem that
 would fix the thing. So I'm shoveling the water out on my own and then a six person arrive who wasn't there earlier who's asking me, what am I doing?
 And I yelled at them when I said, I can't explain to you, you're the sixth person that's trying to help if you want to help pick up the bucket.
 Because I knew and by the way, I bought three buckets and I bought sandbags. I got water out, I put, I dried the thing, I put the sand bags down and then And once all that was done, we had time to think of the bigger engineering problem of how are we going to, you know, so it's really, I suppose when
 something like that happens is what has happened, how can we improve things in this particular moment? What can we anticipate more rain coming, more flooding coming?
 What can help us, it doesn't have to be something complicated, it could be buckets. And then let's figure out the exactly stop the bleeding first, right?
 So I don't know if that gives you anything, but honestly, it's just for me is, I don't know, I just go into problem solving mode and I go little chunks.
 You can't do the big thing then. Six people are right. At that point, my buckets have, sort of, you know, And the sandbags have saved what we could that day.
 And then the rest, we had all the luxury in the world for a company to come and do the whole professional drainage, whatever, and everything is fine now, blah, blah, blah.
 So, no panic, just think of a solution, figure out what's needed, short-term long-term. Who with one bucket at a time?
 It'd be able to switch gears, right? It's like, you can do that high-level problem-solving, right? But right now, the gym's flooding.
 Like, that's the problem we need to take care of right now. Yeah, I love that. I was, and honestly, at that time, nobody was paying attention to me, so I got just so frustrated that I just went and I did my whole buckets on my own.
 Anyway, so yeah, but I don't panic. I don't know what happens in me. I don't panic. Well, Andrea, we are out of time today.
 Thank you so much for joining us. This has been a fascinating conversation. Really, really appreciate it. And if folks want to know more about what you're working on right now, where should they go?
 Should they go to your LinkedIn? Website they can check out. Uh, LinkedIn. Yeah, I think LinkedIn. I'm also on Twitter.
 I won't call it X. I'm also on Twitter or on Blue Sky. I'm trying to go more towards Blue Sky.
 Anyway, I'm, um, but yeah, LinkedIn. Okay, great. All right. Well, thanks again. And thank you everybody for joining us today.
 We will see you for those of you who are in our isons community. We'll see you this Friday 1 30 p.m.
 Eastern and I hope everybody has a wonderful holiday break and a prosperous 2025. I'll talk to you soon. Bye. Thank you so much.
 Thank you. Thank Andrea.