Unveiling the Future: Key Insights from AI Day 2024

In This Article

Unlocking the power of AI starts by asking the right questions

AI has created a technological shift, leading to revolutionary change that impacts organizations across all industries. But the quick evolution of AI, GenAI, and now AI Agents, along with emerging legislation around the use of AI, has made it difficult for many organizations to keep up.

“The fundamental nature of work, creativity, and problem-solving is changing rapidly,” said Mahe Bayireddi, our CEO and co-founder. To get ahead, it's essential to understand that productivity results from the combination of intelligence, automation, and keeping humans in the loop.

HR teams need more than just traditional HR tech. “You need AI-first products, and people-first solutions,” said Bayireddi. The key lies in leveraging intelligent, design-centric platforms that offer deep insights into the nuances of users, customers, and industries. These platforms must be capable of understanding unique preferences and requirements, going beyond surface-level data.

As technology amplifies productivity, a deep understanding of how AI and automation can be applied today is critical — but it starts with asking the right questions. “It all depends on the particular job you’re hiring for and where it’s located,” Bayireddi added. “You need to think about three things: what is for automation, and what type of automation can be deployed. You also have to think about the roles where intelligence can be most helpful.”

As we move toward a future where time-consuming, manual tasks that once occupied talent practitioners are seamlessly automated and augmented, it’s important to note that this shift isn't about replacing human roles. It's about empowering HR professionals to focus on more strategic, high-value activities that strengthen hiring and retention.

Phenom’s robust AI architecture

The goal of building an AI architecture is to be more productive across the entire talent ecosystem, and our unique AI architecture is backed by decades-long amounts of data and experience.

“Phenom brings together our legacy tech and a decade of data collection, a decade of understanding real organizations’ use cases, and a decade of culture of innovation that’s critical to building this new generation of AI technologies,” said Ilya Goldin, PhD and Head of Data Science at Phenom.

"LLM apps are only as good as the data quality that feeds them. They need really good data quality. The problem today is less than 10% of enterprise data is AI-related." This underscores the critical role of high-quality data in AI development — and how Phenom is leading the charge.

There are two key steps Phenom takes when building a safe AI architecture:

1. The first step is to map your organization's processes to understand your current position, identify gaps, and recognize bottlenecks. Kumar Ananthanarayana, VP of Product Management explains, "We've analyzed talent touchpoints from first connection to employment and beyond to highlight inefficiencies throughout the lifecycle to identify opportunities for AI and automation in our platform." This initial awareness is crucial for determining where AI can be most effectively implemented.

2. The second step is to consider how automation and intelligence can be applied to your specific processes and systems. This involves task mapping for each persona and evaluating how automation can be introduced. With GenAI and AI agents, a new dimension has been added to augment tasks, but the level of AI and automation you can introduce depends on your industry and current automation level. In healthcare, for example, a registered nurse role might require high intelligence but less automation, while retail and hospitality sectors may need a high degree of automation due to the large volume of applicants they handle.

As Kumar noted, "LLMs are evolving at a rapid pace. They know everything about the world but they don't know much about you or your enterprise." Bridging this gap requires a centralized data system that captures all talent interactions and past data, allowing you to represent workflows and hiring processes effectively. By integrating these layers of information, you can identify bottlenecks and deploy AI solutions that learn from your specific data, tailoring insights to your organization's unique needs.

Ultimately, it’s all about how the platform can make organizations become more productive across the entire talent ecosystem. “If you don’t have a clear goal, applying AI and automation is difficult,” said Bayireddi. “A lot of customers say ‘hey, we have goals, but we don’t know how to really make it work’. Our point of view is how we can connect your goals across talent acquisition and talent management so you can retain better, hire faster, and improve the quality of your overall talent.”

Related reading: Phenom Announces Talent Experience Engine, AI Agents, and Additional Product Innovations For Hiring & Retention

AI agents save time on everyday talent acquisition tasks

For almost two years, GenAI has been helping HR teams become more productive than ever. Now we’ve expanded its impact with X+ Agents that understand, reason, and rapidly complete tasks such as sourcing, identifying best-fit candidates, and fostering career pathing and employee development.

Rather than prompting GenAI to complete single tasks — and repeating this to achieve a desired result — X+ Agents are powered by multiple GenAI models that run at the same time to interact and guide each other, proactively making revisions to the initial prompt. By working together in parallel, they understand, reason, and rapidly complete tasks, drastically reducing the time HR professionals spend using tools to deliver results.

Here are new ways users are interacting with agents today:

• In-Line Agents: These agents are introduced directly within the platform, leading to natural usage and adoption.

• Enhanced Search Capabilities: Inspired by our customers and their needs, we’ve improved search functions to provide results that users can analyze.

• "Ask Anything" Specialized Agents: These agents can take commands and complete tasks, offering a hyper-specialized approach.

• AI Assistants: This is a co-pilot feature to help users complete tasks efficiently throughout the platform.

During a live demo, Maggie Allen shared how GenAI in the Phenom platform is fundamentally transforming talent discovery, and making talent acquisition teams more efficient than ever. Here’s a look at how Phenom Talent Experience Engine empowers talent marketers to create campaigns and hiring events in minutes. For sourcers, AI Discovery illuminates best-fit candidates for open roles and X+ Source automatically discovers and builds better queries for more specialized roles:

For a deep-dive into Phenom Experience Engine, AI Discovery, and X+ Source in action, watch here.

How AI Agents can bring productivity to users

At Phenom, we understand how important it is to generate efficiencies and improve productivity for recruiters and hiring managers while delivering an impressive candidate experience. To help you do just that, we’ve integrated AI into different platform layers to streamline key stages of your recruitment processes.

Now, AI is available to assist with intake meetings, screening calls, and candidate evaluations. All of these improvements empower recruiters to manage everything from intake to interviews more efficiently. Whether it's scheduling meetings, summarizing interviews, or finding the best-fit candidates, the power of AI brings speed, accuracy, and context to every stage of the hiring process:

• Intake Meetings: AI-powered intake agents streamline the traditionally time-consuming process of aligning expectations between recruiters and hiring managers. With a single click, recruiters can schedule meetings, automatically sync calendars, and create invites.
  
  Drawing on historical data and past feedback, the AI curates personalized questions, takes detailed notes during the meeting, ensures all key points are addressed, generates a summary, and suggests updates to the job description based on new insights. This reduces weeks of work to just a few quick steps, allowing recruiters to post job openings faster than ever.

• Voice AI Screening: Often, coordinating calls with hard-to-reach candidates, like night shift nurses or drivers, leads to delays. Voice AI Screening solves this problem by engaging with candidates directly, and asking fluid, conversational questions to gather essential information. This eliminates scheduling delays and ensures that critical talent isn't lost due to inefficiencies.

• Ask Anything for In-Depth Insights: Instead of manually sifting through profiles or interview notes, recruiters can ask the AI agent specific questions, such as which jobs a candidate is best suited for or details from a particular interview. The AI agent curates all relevant information, providing a comprehensive, instant response that helps recruiters make better, faster decisions.

During a live demo, Lindsay Mareau, VP of Strategy, walked viewers through the AI innovations that make this possible:

Want to take a deeper dive into how our AI is built to make all these capabilities intuitive, intelligent, and innovative? Stream our in-depth product demo session here.

How ontologies and knowledge graphs are enabling organizations to adopt skills

Phenom AI is designed to deliver seamless and personalized experiences across the entire talent journey, from the first interaction with your company through to employee development.

To support this effort, new AI agents analyze a large breadth of skills data to guide employees in career exploration, provide personalized insights, and offer actionable recommendations for career growth. By pulling data from every stage of the talent journey, AI helps employees and HR teams alike make informed, strategic decisions for personal development and dynamic workforce planning by providing:

• Persona-Level Guidance: AI agents deliver a personalized experience for employees, guiding them through their career exploration and development within the organization.

• Career Growth Insights: AI agents analyze individual profiles and match them to available roles, offering insights into how employees can apply their skills to new opportunities across the organization.

• Tailored Career Recommendations: Based on an employee’s skills and career goals, AI agents suggest personalized development paths, including learning courses, mentorships, and short-term projects, helping employees achieve their next career milestone.

• Dynamic Workforce Planning: HR teams and leaders access dynamic dashboards that provide insights into skills at the employee, role, and organizational levels, helping them identify skills gaps and make data-driven decisions on hiring and development strategies.

• Comprehensive Skills Ontology: Phenom’s five-layer ontology, featuring inclusive out-of-the-box data collected over the span of a decade, gets combined with industry- and company-specific data, allowing for a comprehensive, unique, and continuously evolving view of skills for TA and TM purposes.

• Skills Gap Identification: AI agents support hiring managers in identifying critical skills gaps, ensuring recruitment efforts are focused on sourcing the most needed talent.

• Workforce Strategy Optimization: AI agents recommend paths to achieve workforce planning goals, offering optimization strategies based on cost, employee readiness, or other drivers.

• Seamless Employee Development: From onboarding to long-term career growth, AI agents guide employees through their journey, making career exploration, skill development, and internal mobility effortless and engaging.

Mark Feneis, Senior Director & Manager, Solutions Consulting from Phenom walked attendees through a live demo, showcasing how AI agents help businesses like yours capitalize on the data available within a skills ontology to support employees on their unique career journeys:

Related: Demystifying Skill Ontologies: Your Roadmap to Clarity

How AI identifies key gaps in talent processes and tips to improve

Beyond accelerating candidate discovery, sourcing, and talent development, AI can also help HR teams identify key bottlenecks and gaps in recruitment processes and offer actionable recommendations for improvement.

During the live product demo, Senior Director of Product Marketing John Deal walked through AI Agents that are purpose-built for process-mining to optimize recruiting workflows, drive efficiency, and reduce overall cost of operations.

“This is not just workflow automation, this is HR workflow automation, purpose-built for talent processes,” Deal said. For companies struggling with large volumes of applicants, Automation Engine also makes it possible to build your own hiring process automations using a chatbot:

To see how we build an ontology for talent acquisition to understand process clogs, and how agentic workflows are built in automation engine, get the technical deep-dive here.

How to win with AI and get ahead of AI compliance

We recognize that the power of AI in HR comes with great responsibility. That's why our approach to AI isn't just about innovation — it's about building trust. We've developed a comprehensive AI governance framework that puts ethics and compliance at the forefront of everything we do. Our rigorous model validation processes ensure that our AI technologies aren't just effective, but also fair and unbiased.

From data privacy safeguards to regular audits, we're committed to transparency, explainability, and auditability. By prioritizing ethical AI use, we're not just transforming HR processes; we're fostering a more equitable and trustworthy hiring landscape. With Phenom, organizations can confidently harness the power of AI, knowing they're backed by a partner who takes the responsible use of technology seriously.

Phenom's approach to AI compliance includes:

In addition to these principles, Goldin emphasizes the importance of interdisciplinary methods in creating a consistent framework, stating, "[AI governance] is a shared vision of how we put principles into practice." Phenom has established a tangible governance framework available to customers, which guides risk assessments and mitigation strategies for different technologies.

Our innovative approach to AI compliance and validation in hiring processes ensures that our tools only assess qualities that are necessary and relevant to the job at hand. Proactive risk mitigation is a key focus, particularly for LLMs. This includes measures such as masking personally identifiable information (PII), detecting prompt injection, and implementing secure gateways for external system interactions. For tools like Fit Score, Phenom measures adverse impact using historical data before deployment, ensuring a robust risk mitigation approach.

Phenom's AI safety offerings for HR teams encompass:

• A comprehensive governance policy

• Ethical AI development practices

• Community engagement

• Guidance on new legislation

• Model risk management

The Phenom validation engine allows for quick identification and resolution of areas needing improvement as well. Cliff Jurkiewicz, VP of Global Strategy at Phenom, reminded us that "AI isn't just another invention...it's something far more complex and wondrous, something we're still trying to fully understand and define." He encourages proactive engagement with AI tools, asserting, "It is crucial to activate and engage in these AI tools enthusiastically today, not tomorrow... you do not need permission from anyone to evolve."

How five leading brands are adopting AI

This year's AI Day took a fresh approach by integrating customer voices throughout each segment, offering practical insights and real-world applications. Leaders from Fox Rehabilitation, Regions Bank, Franciscan Health, Excellus BlueCross BlueShield, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise shared their experiences implementing AI-driven solutions to address critical talent acquisition and talent management challenges. These customer stories provided attendees with tangible examples of AI's transformative power in HR.

Fox Rehabilitation

Kristie McCaffery, Director of Recruitment at Fox Rehabilitation, shared how her organization is addressing healthcare staffing shortages through technology adoption and innovative recruitment strategies focused on targeted messaging, personalized candidate experiences, more efficient hiring processes, and candidate rediscovery.

Key implementations include an AI-powered chatbot, video job descriptions, and "high-value hiring" to streamline their screening and scheduling process.

The implementation of these strategies has yielded impressive results:

• Reduced application time from 7 minutes to < 1 minute

• 295% increase in job applications

• Approximately 800 recruiter hours saved screening and scheduling since April

Regions Bank

Tony Howard, Senior Vice President of HR Technology at Regions Bank, outlined how AI is transforming their recruiting processes. Key challenges included: analyzing large volumes of recruiting data; efficiently screening applicants; and sourcing candidates for hard-to-fill roles.

Now, AI and Generative AI is helping with:

• Data analysis and identifying inconsistencies

• Efficient candidate screening

• Mining historical data for specialized roles

• Skills matching

• Faster candidate communication

"AI has been a large help in not only going through that data, but also finding inconsistencies in the data and highlighting those areas where we might look for improvement," Howard explained.

Related: How Regions Bank is Solving Critical Business Challenges with Recruitment Automation

Franciscan Health

Ellen Page, Director of Talent Acquisition for Franciscan Health, shared their transformative journey in revamping recruitment strategies through AI technology adoption. “We had to find a way to give our recruiters back more time to do what they do best — develop and nurture relationships with candidates and our hiring managers,” she said.

Combined with a successful traveling nurse program, they implemented an AI-driven career site, a 24/7 chatbot, and one-way interviewing.

In addition to markedly improving the candidate experience, the results for Franciscan’s bottom line have been impressive:

• Net Promoter Score increased from 64 to 78

• Open positions reduced by 44% (from 2,700 to 1,500)

• RN openings decreased by 58% over 90 days

• Time to fill reduced from 72 days to 59 days

• 400 new coworkers hired every month in 2024

• 2,000+ new coworkers hired through the chatbot alone

Read Franciscan Health’s case study here.

Excellus BlueCross BlueShield

Tim Lippincott, Vice President of People Strategy at Excellus BlueCross BlueShield, shared insights on how his organization is leveraging AI and skills-based approaches to revolutionize their talent practices. Key initiatives originally included a revamped career site, which led to expanding their AI use to a Talent Marketplace to foster internal mobility.

"We are banking on [skills] as a long-term strategy. And we are seeing some initial great responses from our work," Lippincott stated. "What we're seeing is a tremendous leader response, and we are on the cusp of launching this to our employees. And what we're anticipating seeing is they're going to see us as a long-term option," Lippincott concluded.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Sadie Bell, Vice President of Innovation and Deployment of People, Systems, Digital Experience and Intelligence at Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), shared insights on their responsible approach to integrating AI into HR processes.

HPE's approach focuses on using AI for good, maintaining high ethical standards, and taking a human-centric approach. "We check to make sure that the AI is actually reducing the bias and not proliferating bias. We understand that artificial intelligence is and can be a friend, and we like to remove all the ways that it can be a foe,” Bell emphasized.

Bell outlined the following checks and balances:

• AI ethics and responsibility council

• Human-in-the-Loop approach

• Employee training

• Regular audits

• Stakeholder engagement

• Continuous learning

These customer stories highlight the diverse applications of AI across talent acquisition and management — from improving recruitment efficiency to fostering ethical AI practices — demonstrating the real-world impact of AI-driven solutions in HR.

The future of augmented work is here

The transformative impact of AI on HR technology is evident through innovative solutions like talent discovery, multilingual chatbots, advancements in interview intelligence, and skills ontologies. They allow organizations to face challenges head-on, identify gaps in their recruitment processes, and build intelligent workflows that can streamline operations effectively.

Advancements in AI and automation are reshaping HR processes, enhancing productivity, and creating more personalized experiences for both candidates and employees, positioning organizations to thrive in a competitive landscape. But to be at the forefront, you must understand and apply compliance regulations to your practices to ensure fair and ethical AI usage.

To see how Phenom can help advance and improve your company’s recruiting and retention efforts, book a demo of our Intelligent Talent Experience platform right here.

Watch AI Day on demand here.