Exploring AI, VR and Web3 Technologies in the HR Landscape with Industry Expert Matt Burns | S3 E15

Matt: 0:00

Yeah, I probably have a bit of a unique experience. I'm not really. I wouldn't consider myself, Joeri a deep technical expert. Rather, I grew up in HR as a function of being in operations. I spent much of my first professional career in operations in a retail setting, but, as luck would have it, I spent more time gravitating towards the functions and activities of my leadership role that were more people- oriented.

Joeri : 0:22

Hello everyone and welcome to the Web3 CMO Stories Podcast, season 3, episode 15. My name is Joeri Billast and I'm your podcast host, and today I'm really happy to be joined by Matt Burns. Hi, Matt, how are you? I'm good. How are you doing? I'm good too. Matt, I'm excited to have you on the podcast because I know you have your own podcast, which is very popular. But, guys, if you don't know Matt, let me introduce him to you.

Joeri : 0:52

Matt Burns is a global industry analyst covering the world of work. His areas of focus include HR strategy, technology, and analytics, alongside workplace demographics, trends, and practices. As a former HR executive, strategy consultant, and tech founder, Matt brings a wealth of practical experiences that help organizations adapt, transform, and otherwise realize continuous improvement. His track record speaks for itself leading a talented global team that won the coveted Most Innovative Use of HR technology in 2017 and the Canadian HR Team of the Year award in 2018. Matt has also a podcast, as I mentioned. It's called the Thinking Inside the Box podcast, and Matt discusses the innovative ways organizations and their leaders overcome complex issues at work, featuring guests who all walks of life. These discussions have earned a lot, I think a global following of over 50,000, which is amazing, and he's sharing a pragmatic, evidence-based approach and a compelling vision for the future through a lot of storytelling.

Joeri : 2:07

An impressive introduction, Matt, so I'm always curious about great copywriters in the company with this impressive background in HR and in technology, Of course, how did your journey lead to what we call the three technologies and their potential?

Matt: 2:26

Yeah, I probably have a bit of a unique experience. I wouldn't consider myself a deep technical expert. Rather, I grew up in HR as a function of being in operations. I spent much of my first professional career in operations in a retail setting, but, as luck would have it, I spent more time gravitating towards the functions and activities of my leadership role that were more people- oriented. I really liked watching people have success, watching them learn and grow, and I love the process. So when I got into HR, it was a very natural fit for me to spend time thinking about transformation, and at the time this was back in the early part of this century there was very much a different tone around technology.

Matt: 3:05

In fact, in the HR profession, technology is often seen as anti-human, and, if I would suggest, as a new employee, let's digitize this, let's automate that. It was met with a lot of Well, Matt. HR is a human function, whether it's hiring, training, or developing people. We should use technology, but very sparingly. That's IT's domain. HR is about creating fundamentally cool and memorable experiences, which at the time I understood partly.

Matt: 3:33

But I also saw the potential for technology to free us from doing the mundane administrative that nobody likes to do, which doesn't add value for any function, not the least of which is HR, and HR, like a lot of corporate functions, is often under- resourced. It's a cost center, you're meaning it has to constantly justify its own existence. And we can use technology to, yes, measure the ROI of our activities, but also free up those finite resources to get things done. So I'm not a technologist per se, but rather an avid consumer of the technology, and I believe that using it in tandem with a thoughtful approach to leadership and culture, you can create really cool things and organizations. And then, over the course of the last five years since leaving the corporate world, we've been doing just that.

Joeri : 4:15

Okay, yeah, I know we will talk about that, about your amazing experiences, but how do you see actually those technology trends like Web3, like AI, and so on, impact the world of work?

Matt: 4:29

One of yeah, no, I'm really excited about the potential again. I think it's more just the manifestation of what we saw being possible twenty, twenty, five years ago, and, in particular, AI has been a fundamental Game changer when it comes to everything from content creation to research and ultimately to providing tangible and thoughtful insights. Right now I think about the opportunity with those technologies. I think about starting at the basics, which is how we segment the work people are doing inside their organizations and how we Put the right tool for the right job, as it were. If you have manual, repetitive administrative activities, those in a large park can be automated with human supervision and they can grab the insights from those activities to refine processes, optimize for experience, and ultimately, whether that's internal or external, improve the quality of the user experience, for customers, for fellow employees, for partners. And that's really what HR has been charged with since the beginning of time is, how do you create good experiences? How do we signal to the market the kind of organization that we are so we can attract the right people? How do we develop a process to make sure we choose and select the right people and how do we develop processes to make sure that we can onboard them into the organization seamlessly to accelerate their path to productivity, maximize their engagement, and ultimately, retain them for the long haul? Because you're getting the back of all this.

Matt: 5:53

We have to remember that we're entering into an error now, at least in Western Europe and North America, where, because of demographics, every single day there are more people leaving the workplace than there are joining it. Those are hard facts. Demographics mean that we're seeing a massive transformation of the workforce alongside massive technological transformation. So now is a great opportunity to use the case to say what work should we be doing. What work can we partner with AI on? I've seen a lot of use cases around optimizing data flows, around creating customized experiences, and I get really excited about the potential for AI to do things like Parts through research and policy and content to provide instant, real- time, tangible insights.

Matt: 6:39

So think about a world where, if you have a complex question as an HR leader, let's say, for example, you're trying to Develop a strategy for upcoming merger and acquisition, but you've never done one before. Well, yes, you can spend time going through courses. You can do research on platforms like then or You tube. You could Undertake a professional accreditation, whether it's through a university or through a learning platform, or you interact with artificial intelligence and it can surface insights from leading thought leaders, from organizations, from laws and policies that are relevant and give you at least a starting point to accelerate the path to your own knowledge so you can apply that knowledge inside the four walls of your organization. So, whether you call it a co- pilot or an assistant or an associate, the potential for a is absolutely massive For a function in this case, human resources that is growing and evolving incredibly quickly and the stakes are getting higher and higher.

Joeri : 7:38

I love how you see it, Matt. You know this positive isn't because you have people that look at a I with you know, okay, what is going on, and so on. You see a lot of possibilities. I would say you're not only thinking inside the box, as your podcast but also outside of the box. I like the way that you approach it. Next to AI, you have also been immersed in immersive technologies, if I can say that. How do you see and you can talk about your experience, of course, how do you see immersive technologies can have an impact on, maybe, building a community, or building how people who are working together, can collaborate, and so on?

Matt: 8:20

So I would love to hear your thoughts about that no, I appreciate that and I think you're back to the question about the podcast. The thought, the title, and our tagline constraints drive innovation is very intentional. The reality is that most people inside organizations don't have infinite resources to deploy technology, or deploy innovation, and they're busy.

Matt: 8:41

People that I talked to you in HR roles today are already working 5060 hours a week and the platforms and the portfolios that they had are greater today than they were in a pre- pandemic environment, so expectations are higher, whether around speed and quality, and depth and resources may be lower in an environment where many organizations saw Reductions and revenue during the pandemic or have seen layoffs out of the pandemic. You have to do more with less, and technology gives you the opportunity to do that by thinking inside the box. We're encouraging our listeners to consider the tools they have in front of them. How do we use them more effectively so they can realize a better outcome for their employees and for their customers, without just simply saying, well, I need to spend more money to get a result? That isn't true. In fact, you can actually spend less money and deliver a better result if you're thoughtful about how technology plays within that dynamic.

Matt: 9:31

Your question about VR. This is what fun project I mean for us in 2020. I'll be honest, We're running a service- based business, which means we were selling consulting services, advisory services, financial services companies, technology companies, retailers, transportation organizations, and, like a lot of service- based businesses, in 2020, our business dried up. Our existing clients said, hey, we love the work that you're doing, but we need to keep control of costs. We don't know if we're going to be here this time next year, so we're going to cut outside services, meaning thanks, but we're going to put this project on pause. Now I'm waiting for some people to still call me back from 2020 because the pause never really ended and that's just a function of the economy. Now, 2020, March, was a strange time for all of us and I remember being stuck in my apartment in Vancouver, living alone and going Well for businesses, drying up what I'm going to do with my time. How long does this kind of last? What does it mean for me in terms of the business, but also in terms of a person and Yuri?

Matt: 10:27

I bought three things that week. I bought A video game console so my brother, who lives across the Pacific Ocean from me, to play video games and stay connected, because we did it as kids and I thought it was a good chance for us to kind of reform that familial bond. I bought a guitar because I thought you know what? I've always wanted to play the guitar and I know that playing an instrument is great for your brain. And I bought a virtual reality headset. I was passionate about the technology and thought it's something unique and cool about consuming content in an immersive way. I've always loved iMax movies. I love going to concerts, to festivals, to conferences. I love being immersed in experiences. That gives me energy.

Matt: 11:05

Now, of the three things spoiler alert I only really spent time working on the virtual reality headset because I was so enamored by the technology. The first time I put it on I went, oh my goodness, that my brain just started firing with all these potential use cases that are enterprise- focused. So I think about VR in this way and again, Joeri, I'm not a technologist, but I'm a consumer of technology and I'm an HR professional. So I'm always thinking about the experience and thinking about how technology can augment and enhance experience. And I think about virtual reality as another tool, another communications tool in a toolbox or a tool belt that includes mobile phones, laptop computers, in-person meetings, whatever the modality might be.

Matt: 11:48

Virtual reality provides the ability to have immersive simulated content that can increase the level of intimacy of interaction despite people not being in the same co-located spot. So you and I can have a meeting in VR one-to-one and it will feel like we're in the same room together, as opposed to a Zoom call or a text message back and forth, which have their use cases, but there are specific activities during an employee's lifecycle for which a greater degree of intimacy would be beneficial. I think about things like hiring interviews. Most people will say things like I want to meet the person I'm about to hire in my organization, but the reality was in 2020, that wasn't possible. We had to hire people in organizations over Zoom and take people's referrals for words of it.

Matt: 12:35

Now, virtual reality increases the intimacy of the interaction and gives greater levels of comfort for both the candidate and the manager. But it also has the potential to focus on things like training. Now you're at the programs over the course of my entire career, knowing that training materials in most organizations are very ineffective. Adults don't learn from lectures and PowerPoints. They learn through the practical application and the experiential element of learning. You pick up a block, you put a puzzle together, and you learn. You learn in teams, you learn through role-playing. These are scientifically proven, backed methods to teach people new skills and to embed learning practices going forward.

Matt: 13:12

But we've spent most of our careers as HR professionals building PowerPoint slides and doing the song and dance roadshow which, while entertaining, doesn't generally lead to outcomes including people changing their behaviors or affecting change in their roles.

Matt: 13:28

Now, virtual reality can create simulations that actually replicate real-life scenarios and allow people to embed that learning meaning. We can actually accelerate the path to training and make training a more enjoyable experience. I don't know about you, Joeri, but after about 45 minutes I'm staring at PowerPoint slides, and my mind's going in 15 different other directions. So virtual reality provides the opportunity for us to enhance the learning experience and at a time, as I mentioned, when the demographics are changing such that people are leaving the workplace faster than they're joining it, we have a knowledge drain issue we need to solve in organizations. On top of the fact that innovation is happening so quickly, we need to teach people new skills, including artificial intelligence. So to me, virtual reality is a really exciting way to increase the level of social intimacy, enhance experiences where it makes scientific sense, and pair it with the conveniences of things like Slack and text messages and teams and phone calls and emails, all of which have their own use case. Vr is just one more arrow, as it were, in the quiver.

Joeri : 14:33

Yeah, I like that. You see it as a toolbox or a collection with different possibilities, and different ways to communicate. For training, I can really understand that You are in the metaverse. It's easier to learn. It's also you know, you will be more attentive, also with your headset and so on. You feel that you're really there. With your job applicants. I can also imagine that the first meeting takes place in Zoom so that you can see the face, and the next meeting would be in the metaverse with an avatar, How does that work?

Matt: 15:03

Yeah, both. We've actually used it for things that are not HR- related to sales. We've actually sold potential clients. Send them a VR headset and let's do a demo. We can't fly to New York City to do a traditional demo in 2020. We could not be on planes, we couldn't cross borders, but we still needed to sell services and sell products. We would send headsets to potential clients and say, Okay, let's just give you the standard demo, increase the level of intimacy, give them an innovative experience, and ultimately again replicate something that traditionally would benefit from being face- to- face.

Matt: 15:37

I'm not here to advocate for a world where we all sit in our houses with our VR headsets and never leave. What I'm saying is there's an opportunity to be inclusive and be innovative about technology. The fact of the matter is, Jorri, and you'll appreciate this, I worked in a number of global roles where my team was dispersed, so this was before the pandemic. This is 2018, 2015, and 2010, where I was a member of a team that was scattered across the country or scattered across the world, and the reality was most of our interactions occurred over email and video conferences. We'd come together during conferences or team meetings, but that has happened sporadically throughout the course of the year. Well, if you've ever been the only person on a Zoom call where there are a hundred people in a meeting room, that's a special kind of uncomfortable and just unenjoyable experience. Virtual reality democratizes access and makes everyone feel like they're together even if they're not, and that has a huge potential for hiring, training, sales, coaching, for performance management.

Matt: 16:35

Again, think about any interaction where it would benefit from a greater amount of social intimacy and, at the same time, you can't be together in the same room. That's the diagram I'm looking at when can I not be with you in the same room and when do I wanna have more social intimacy? We use it for team meetings, for example. That's a great spot for us to collaborate, brainstorm, talk about problems, and we could do that over Zoom. It's just way more fun in VR.

Joeri : 16:59

Exactly. Actually, you should look at it. What is? If you have a way, if you have a meeting, you need to look at what is the goal of the meeting and where is it the best place to do that meeting. Is it in real life, if possible? It's in a metaverse, it's on Zoom. Is it a phone call? You know, it really depends. And what you said about, because I've been doing that for the Rise community and a few other communities where we have people from all over the world that are in those communities, and I set up an event in the metaverse and I was like just in the same place with people from the US, different states from the US, from Canada, from Australia, from everywhere around the world, and you really feel that you belong to this kind of community.

Joeri : 17:43

But of course, Matt there are also some challenges with new technologies, as they always are. So okay, there is the headset. Not everyone has a headset. Sometimes you can also have some technical difficulties with that. What is your experience? Do you see certain challenges that need to be solved? Do you have any tips?

Matt: 18:03

Yeah, I think any technology, whether it's Web3, whether it is artificial intelligence, virtual reality, social media, the cell phone, the internet, the phone every technology is a double-edged sword. It's a disruptor and it's an accelerant, and if you put bad things into those tools, you're gonna get massively accelerated negative outcomes. We look at social media. It's connected us and also divided us at exactly the same time. So I would look at AI and VR through a similar lens, which is how do we wanna be intentional about its use case so that we can maximize the potential positive benefits while potentially avoiding some of the negative consequences of the technology? You mentioned VR. Now, I'm a big advocate for VR. I will speak about it to anybody who will listen about how powerful I think it is. But the barrier you mentioned is real. Until you've put on a virtual reality headset, I can talk until I'm blue in the face and it doesn't resonate. But the moment we put on a headset, people gain appreciation of the wonder that it can create. The example I would use here is when we did our conference in 2020, we worked with Microsoft to basically do three full days of virtual reality content. We replicated a traditional HR conference. We brought speakers in. We did panels, we did podcasts, we did keynote addresses. We did it all in VR, meaning people could show up with a virtual reality headset, live in the crowd, and interact with speakers one-on-one, but we all did so from the comforts of our own homes. We also live- streamed it to platforms like LinkedIn and YouTube, so people could consume the content without a headset. But those who had the headset on clearly had a more immersive and compelling experience compared to those who didn't. But to get people to put on the headset required an incredible amount of change management. Change adoption with new technology is difficult when you have to ask someone to A. make an investment, which, in the case of VR, despite the fact that it's one- quarter of the price of an iPhone, it's still an extra cost. And then two, there's this natural reticence to putting a big, clunky object on your face, and for some people, they just don't wanna do that, and I appreciate that. I understand that you might look silly. You don't know how to use it. There's some anxiety around what it means. You may have a natural bias towards in-person and feel that VR is inhuman. All those things might be true. And when we trained 55 of our 60 speakers to use virtual reality for the first time universally. They were like this is incredible. In fact, as a social point, 20 of our speakers coming out of the conference ended up implementing virtual reality in some way, shape, or form in their organizations. Having had the experiences firsthand themselves, they went okay, I get it. This needs to be used for training for team meetings performance management and other use cases in enterprise settings. But it required them to put on the headset. So virtual reality, unlike augmented reality, is always gonna have that barrier it's still gonna require you to put on that headset.

Matt: 20:53

So I think we'll see the explosion of that technology once the use cases become more universal. Right now they're still focused largely on gaming and military applications. They need to obviously expand outside of that into entertainment, concerts, networking, and other events. That will create much more democratization of the technology itself and, as I mentioned earlier, it's not meant to be the replacement for all communications. We still wanna create opportunities for employees to come together and meet in the same place.

Matt: 21:23

We still wanna have technologies like Slack and email and texts that allow for asynchronous communication for global teams that create flexibility in the flow of work. We just wanna be thoughtful about the use case and be mindful about some of the opportunities, and overindulging in the use case. In the same way, AI, AI will be an incredibly powerful tool and if we're using it to analyze and take the right kinds of actions, it's gonna be an incredible democratizer of knowledge and education and access and insights. Or it can be a tool that can be used to divide. So I think it comes down to what's the intention behind it and being thoughtful about its adoption, and in our case, it means getting a lot of different opinions, cross-functionally in terms of how we're using it so that we don't have any blind spots when we implement it.

Joeri : 22:11

Right, when talking about the metaverse, I have the same experience as you. When you organize these people, I have this wow moment, wow, this is amazing, and so on, but of course, you want to keep that feeling like you know when you have some new tag in your hands, people are always excited and then they start to use it less. Now, of course, you have also the narrative that it's a bit against the metaverse and more in favor of AI. Do you feel you know in your experience when you have companies talking to clients or whatever, that the metaverse narrative is a bit, let's say, people are less likely to listen when you talk metaverse than before?

Matt: 22:53

Yeah, I think it's actually getting more likely. I just don't think that it's come. I expected the adoption rate to increase. So I think we talked to people who've been involved in virtual reality and we were lucky. Our opening speaker for the conference was Dr. Tom Furness from the University of Washington, who actually invented the technology 50 years ago for the US Air Force to create cockpit simulators for fighter pilots. His goal in creating the technology was eventually to democratize education and to democratize knowledge, so he has most of his work now advising school-aged children on how to use the technology and the flow of education.

Matt: 23:27

In saying that, I think that virtual reality itself still comes up against the barriers that we mentioned, which is that people are reticent to spend extra money. They may not be sure how to use the technology. They may see it as an inhuman communication element. I think that is again a lack of knowledge and awareness. And because it's not in the flow of work like artificial intelligence or augmented reality, which don't require a headset, which doesn't require you to pull yourself out of an existing environment and step into a new environment which is much more integrated into the flow of work, we will see more rapid adoption of those two technology platforms, more so than we'll see virtual reality, which I think will just take more time, and that's okay.

Matt: 24:08

I mean, I think there's time and space for us to have innovation and we don't want to move people any further and faster than they're ready to go. But I think the word of today, for me at least, is intentionality. Let's be thoughtful about how we're using technology to create space in people's schedules, create space in the flow of work so that we can take on more innovation and spend more time doing the things for which we get energy. We're passionate about interacting with other people, brainstorming, being creative, building relationships, and spend less time filling out spreadsheets and sending emails, and writing copy for our marketing campaigns which are valuable, but I think most of us would agree that are probably things we'd spend less time doing than interacting with other people.

Joeri : 24:53

Yeah, I think most of my audience entrepreneurs, and marketers like to be creative and to do stuff instead of the operational stuff which we can automate. Therefore, if AI, if you can have experiences that people remember and like to be there and they like to connect and the metaverse can, of course, or the virtual world, so you want to call it, be a thing, I always also see that external events like, for instance, apple's new headset that will come, or other events, can maybe make a breakthrough. Also, there is even because I mentioned Web3 for me, the Metaverse is a part of Web3, people see all these new technologies, they hear about the bear market and then they are influenced by the media, of course, but I see a lot of potentials, not only for HR but also in different industries. Absolutely, what advice would you give to marketers of all entrepreneurs that are looking at AI, that are looking at the metaverse but not sure where to begin? What would you advise them?

Matt: 25:55

So I think, two different questions. Let's start with the metaverse and let's wrap it up with AI. With the metaverse, the simple advice would be is try it. If you haven't had the opportunity to put on a virtual reality headset, it doesn't matter who the manufacturer is. You can work with Oculus, which is owned by Meta. You can work with companies like Pico Samsung or other platforms, and you can try a use case. It doesn't have to be enterprise- related. It could just be a gaming console. It could be watching a concert or watching YouTube or Netflix.

Matt: 26:25

Try a headset and then be open to the idea of adapting those use cases in your workplace where you think it could add value. Again, I could talk about this till I'm blue in the face, but until you put that headset on, it's going to be hard to connect these two dots. So try a headset, and if you try a headset, I promise you that you'll be able to go. Okay, I see this. And then your creativity, like our speakers, like my team, we'll start to spin to a place where it becomes obvious what the next step is. That's point number one. Point number two AI. I'm really excited about AI and it's only going to get more exciting as we think about looking back at this period of time. This will be a window in which the human species, the business world, and society in general see a massive step forward, and we're still in the early days of AI. Again, my recommendation would be is try it. If you don't have a free, open AI account right now and you're not using chatGPT, you're missing an opportunity to at least explore and learn, and be creative.

Matt: 27:25

Joeri, since this came out, I've been using chatGPT at least two hours a day. Yesterday I used it for well over six hours in the course of the day, doing research, building copy, asking questions, and refining. It incredible opportunity for us to be more thoughtful about activities that traditionally we would do. So I'll give you an example. I haven't done a Google search in over three months. I only asked chatGPT because I could do a Google search which gives me a finite set of answers predicated on Google's algorithm and what they want me to find. Or I can be more thoughtful in the flow of work and ask chatGPT to fill in some of those gaps. If I'm more thoughtful about the prompts that I create for chatGPT, the answers are almost always better. So it's a habit that I've broken, going from Google using traditional search into now using AI, which provides much more robust content. So I would try those tools, try those solutions. There's lots of great content on YouTube.

Matt: 28:17

On LinkedIn, you can follow people like yourself and people like me and see how we interact with the technologies and then apply it little bit by little bit each week. Try a use case, try to write an article, try and do some research, try and leverage it to create some graphic designs. Just start to experiment a little bit. Our team, we try and create at least an hour per week in everybody's schedule Just to experiment and try and explore, to learn new things so we can bring that knowledge back to the broader team. In two words, just start.

Joeri : 28:48

Exactly For me also, Matt, it's a part of my day ChatGPT and other AI tools. I was already using AI before chatGPT was available, but yeah, actually it's like a cell phone, a mobile phone you just or the internet. You just wanted to work. There was a time that there was a bit stressed when it didn't work, but now it seems a bit stabilizer. Also, a few other options than chatGPT, like Clote, which is also an option, Matt, you also mentioned following you. We are at the end of this podcast episode. I would ask you where can people who are inspired by everything that you've said, but you can talk so much longer about AI and stuff? Where would you like to send them?

Matt: 29:30

Find me on LinkedIn at Matt Burns HR. I'm on the platform almost every single day for a couple of hours. I'm really excited about the opportunity to network. We met originally, Joeri, over LinkedIn just by seeing we had common interests and common passions. And here we are having a podcast conversation. So find me on LinkedIn. You can see what we're up to, see what we're doing, send me a message, and would love to stay in touch.

Joeri : 29:51

Right, and also, Matt has an amazing podcast. I will, for sure, put the link to your LinkedIn profile, Matt, and the link to your podcast in the show notes. As always, there will be show notes and an article link to that. So, Matt, thanks, it was really great and amazing to have you on my show, thank you. Thank you.

Joeri : 30:12

So guys, I loved how Matt talked about AI and immersive technologies and all these possibilities and just thinking you know how can you use it for your daily life and make your life better and combine it, not saying I will just do the metaverse or just the AI, but see how you can combine it with everything, as you have been doing a lot in your communication. There are so many possibilities these days. If you found this podcast episode useful and interesting for people around you and I'm sure you found that be sure to share it with them. If you're not yet subscribed to the show, I think this is a good moment to do that and, of course, I would like to see you back for the next podcast episode. Take care Bye. Web3 can take your best to new heights and you're ready to harness its power, but feeling lost and overwhelmed. Therefore, join my W3X WEB3 Mastermind.

Joeri : 31:11

Send me a personal message for more info you can find me everywhere on social media, there's only one person with my name, Joeri Billast. Talk soon.