When we talk about AI finding its feet within a business, the obvious challenge is change management. How do you ensure your team is on board with the change? What if they have technical questions? How does a business address their fears and concerns? This is where having a people-focused leader and a technology-focused leader forming a united front is incredibly valuable.
Kelly Davis is the Chief People Officer at international law firm Gowling WLG . Al Hounsell is the Senior Director, AI Innovation & Knowledge. Davis has been in HR leadership roles for most of her career. During that time, she has been very intentional about the way she has moved between industries.
Hounsell started his career as an entrepreneur. He then went to business school and law school, before ending up in a large global firm. There, he fell in love with the nascent legal technology ecosystem. He joined Gowling WLG over a year ago. His goal is to reimagine the practice of law by infusing it with technology.
HR and AI as a Team
Gowling WLG is an international law firm that takes a firmly people-centred approach. And when the conversation around AI became louder at Gowling WLG, the business worked hard to make sure people remained the focus. Davis and her team have played a key role. Davis’s experience is that HR people can be expected to become the go-to sources of information for the latest hot topics. A few years ago, that was the pandemic; now, it’s AI.
“It’s an interesting thing,” she says. “I think back to where I started my career, and there was always the conversation of whether HR was part of the business. How does HR get to the table? How does it get an equal voice? I feel like that’s really evolved in the time I’ve been an HR leader. We lead the people strategy; we lead hiring and recruitment; we lead training. There’s this great fear of not being an expert on whatever is critical to the business. It’s a feeling of ‘we got here, we’re at the table, we need to seem like we’re in control and we know these things’.
Collaboration is Key
Using AI wisely also includes getting the right partners involved. For Hounsell, this required a scientific, data-led approach to figure out where AI would actually add value. To do this, his team ran over 1,200 tasks and collected more than 47,000 data points. Then, they made purchasing decisions based on real-world performance – not sales pitches.
“It was also a key feature for us that the AI had to keep humans in the driver’s seat,” Hounsell adds. “The review process is absolutely critical, because we know AI is a predictive tool. We need that transparency on where it’s pulling information from, and we need to make the workflow of reviewing and tweaking those outputs as seamless as possible. That’s what ensures our people can easily stay in control, and apply their best judgement.”
AI Supporting Human Strengths
With this in mind, Gowling WLG is in the perfect position to be aligning its use of AI with its people-centred strategy. That strategy is formed around the company’s core values and what makes it unique; a focus on wellbeing, equity, respect, and belonging. The AI piece is built in and addressed as a tangential work tool, not only to make work better, but to position Gowling WLG’s strategy correctly. “It’s a collaborator, not a replacement,” Davis says.