Leena AI presents, AI Edge Podcast, ft Sue Quackenbush, Chief People Officer at Dynatrace

Oh, thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here.

So, what Dynatrace does is basically unified observability and security. We provide a platform that provides analytics and automation powered by causal AI. Dynatrace has been in existence for 20 years. We've been publicly traded in the US for the last five years. My role as Chief People Officer is really to focus on how we ensure we have the right talent, really focused on those roles that can capitalize on their skills so that we build product and provide solutions to our customers that wow.

Sure. Dynatrace is absolutely a global organization. We have Dynatracers across 50 plus countries. The majority of our employees, we have over 5,000 employees, about two thirds are outside of the US, a third in the US. And we keep expanding into different countries, so it's never stagnant. We keep moving and growing.

Sure. Absolutely. And it's a wonderful opportunity. When you think about how do we use AI within HR, we're just at the beginning stage of thinking it through. I think there's a huge opportunity from an HR operations perspective to streamline, to ensure that when an employee has a question, they can get a very robust answer quickly with the right context and the right information. My team and I have been on this journey of really transforming the employee experience across Dynatrace. When I joined, our employee experience was consistently inconsistent. A lot of that is because of how the company grew up. We had multiple HR teams really focused on different areas, so we had multiples of things. We didn't really have a harmonized approach; we were more regionally or functionally siloed. So we're in the messy middle, or the wonderful middle, of a multi-year transformation where we're essentially re-architecting the employee experience around those key moments that matter. We're putting in a new service delivery model so that employees, managers, and leaders can get information quickly. We're harmonizing our approaches and then we're putting in tools to support all of that. Where AI will come in is how can we make that process or that inquiry much more streamlined and make sure it's accurate and up to date, because the current focus is on harmonizing approaches, creating knowledge artifacts, and putting it in a service delivery model, but we're constantly changing. How do you keep it relevant, up to date, and accurate? Even with all the different legislation that's changing, how are you keeping up with that? Right now it's dependent on individuals. How can we bring AI in to really streamline that and help us so that we know we're giving the right information at the right time? That's one piece within the organization. The other piece, and I see this crossing both lines, is there's a huge opportunity from an AI perspective with regard to employee growth. Career growth and opportunity, we talk about career pathing and learning paths, but at the end of the day it's an experiential plan for an individual to continue to fine-tune and grow their skills and understand maybe what other avenues they can go down. I believe that AI can really help pull in different facets of experiences and learning moments to help an individual craft and move forward, because a lot of times people want to progress in their career but really don't know where to go. Some people might want to switch careers. I switched careers; I started off in corporate finance, now I'm in human capital. Did I do it through a great plan? No. Life happens and it changed, but boy, would it have been great to have some type of mechanism that can help me say, 'Hey, you're making this pivot. Here are some of the key fundamentals. Here's how you navigate experiences.' I really do think there's a huge opportunity there from an AI perspective. The third piece, which I think is really going to be important for individuals but also for companies, is how do we deploy resources to get work done and what type of resources are we deploying: human or digital resources? I think companies need to start to think about this because in the next 5, 10, 15 years, the landscape of deploying a resource to get work done is going to be vastly different than what we do today. All of our mechanisms have been built around a career framework, job architecture, roles and responsibilities. It's been really tied into something that's very locked in: how we compensate, how you build a career path. AI introduces a whole different way of doing this. So how companies can really assess how do I deploy resources, what resources am I deploying, is something we all have to figure out.

Well, I think it's a great question. Don't put me on the spot or anything, but I think to answer your question, you almost have to unravel the role. So you talk about AP or an analyst, unravel almost into small increments of what skills and what work is really being done. I've heard the term 'pixelate a role,' just take it into the smallest components and figure out where is an agent doing it or is a human doing it. But from a human's perspective, the skill sets that are going to be critically important: there has to be knowledge, an understanding of the work that's being done. The individual may not be doing it, an agent may be doing it, but then it's the understanding of the work, the logic and the rationale, and what the individual will be able to add to that work to progress it. There has to be the human aspect of it. When we think about what's critically important: strong communication, collaboration, simplification, being able to have strong change management. These are leadership skill sets that we're going to have to double down on. We think about how strong or not strong our communication skills are these days. A lot of times people communicate only through technology; they really don't know how to connect and build relationships and collaborate. I think those are skills that are going to be really important. It's almost like that old-fashioned is brought back to say, wait a minute, there's a magic that happens in that human interaction that can't be replicated by an agent at this point. So we need to discover what those are to add to what an agent can do.

No one has come and said, 'Hey, AI is going to take my job.' Maybe it's just not in our workforce that hasn't happened. I have heard from other colleagues and clients where people talk about AI being a huge cost savings and replacing all of these roles. My response is, 'Okay, what's the best outcome? How do you use AI to take the routine and make it automatic?' At its simplest form, and as AI progresses, there's going to be logic on top of that and thinking on top of that, but how do we use it so we're capitalizing on the efficiency that can be gained, the combination that can be gained, and then really free up time for the strategic thinking, for the consultative work? From my team's perspective in HR, being able to have any kind of reporting or dashboarding or answers very quickly delivered so that the business partner can work with their stakeholder and really talk about trends, implications, making those decisions. Too often we're spent creating the numbers or the trends or the data. If that's done very quickly, securely, and accurately, it's more about 'Okay, what are we going to do with this and how do we move forward?' So you're going to see a shift in the work from the tactical to the more strategic.

Absolutely. And just something that can be done when that individual wants to engage. A lot of times the learning opportunities are very controlled and set in a period of time, and it might be in the middle of a day when you have a million things going on. You might do it because you're supposed to, but can you retain it? You only have so much capacity to focus. With everything, the pace of work is very quick. Having something that can really help you when you want to focus, I think you'll get much better gains.

I think it can be really real now. Start small. Really think, is there a body of work, is there a role associated with that body of work that could be done through an agent? I'm a big believer in piloting. Start small, pilot it. You really look at it as testing to see how this works because you're going to learn. We're all learning. So I think you can start now. There's no reason not to, assuming you're working within your AI governance and things like that. Really think about how can we test this. It's that curiosity that will lead to adoption. If there is a fear of this, you're not going to start. I would rather say let's look at this as an opportunity, let's be curious and see how we can test this out, where can we start, but really start small.

From an HR perspective, definitely HR ops, 100%. I also do believe there's an opportunity with regards to using AI from a recruiting perspective as well. Is there a way to streamline the actual process of recruiting and scheduling conversations? Can this streamline and help make that faster and more efficient? We talked about career development, which I think would be a really fun one. And then the other one is the resource deployment aspect. I think that's more further out because it would require a strategic workforce plan, really understanding how work gets done and whether an agent can do that work or not. I think that's a little further out. But I do believe recruiting and onboarding can be another opportunity for AI to help streamline and provide information quickly so that someone can react to it. I'm not saying that an agent would take away 100% of the work, but if it can augment an individual so that they can quickly procure the information and then say, 'Yep, that is right. Let's go.' It just helps provide a more consistent and streamlined experience.

Oh boy, that's a hard one. That's a great question. Coming from inconsistently inconsistent to providing experiences that are robust and wow you. What can AI do in five years? For me personally, it's how do you grab contextual information across different functions of the business, also pulling in external information, so that from a CPO or CHRO point of view, you're getting the latest, most robust contextual trends or information that you can react to. I belong to a lot of different associations, I have different CHRO organizations, I pull from our data inside Dynatrace, but I'm the one trying to pull and piece this all together. Because of the complexity of so much data out there, AI could really help. I hope that in five years, AI can pull the right pieces of data to build the right informative report or information that someone can really take and use, knowing that it's something that is this is it, this is where we are at this point in time with the greatest latest thinking, where we are from a company perspective, and how does that formulate the future course of that organization. That would be pretty cool.

Yeah, I mean the pay one, we grab a lot of information, but if you take that and take it down to this skill set, this body of work would be paid this way because we pay by role, we don't pay by skill or by actual body of work. So take it to that next level where it's almost not piecemeal but could get to that piecemeal answer. But I'm also thinking about as you think about your company and the future strategy and the opportunity that each organization has in front of it, how do you capitalize on that opportunity? From a talent perspective, is there a way to really grab those key insights, information gathered both internally and externally, to help maybe give a better probability and guidance on what that next step is? With the world changing, change is happening so much quicker than in the past. Disruption, we can go on and on about what's going on in the world. I really believe it's like how do we still chart and move forward in a way? To be able to pull information and really use AI to get that information to those decision makers, I think will be great.

Absolutely, I would love to. Thank you for having me. It is a journey, and I do look forward to applying AI to help the journey go a little faster.