Hello, everybody. Wonderful. I'm excited to see everyone here. Just setting myself up, and I will get going. So welcome everyone to my session today.It's called balancing humanity and automation, the dual dilemma for leaders. My name is Descelyn Wood. I'm the chief people officer here at Syntax, and I'm the only Descelin Wood on LinkedIn. So if you like the content and you wanna reach out and chat after, you know where to find me. So I'll get going to leave some time for questions. So really what I'm focusing on today is that there's a mixed message for leaders right now. What I mean by a mixed message is that leaders are expected to do a lot of different things right now at the same time.

And one of the things that we're expected to do is expected to be thinking about the well-being of our employees when we're being bombarded with messages about automating jobs. So you can imagine how leaders and even our own teams are feeling right now. So the burnout data has been coming, I would say, consistently since mid COVID, which is that, you know, I'm using some Canadian numbers because I'm sitting here in Canada, is that, you know, the percentage of people being burnt out, the percentage of Gen z employees who don't wanna become managers because they assume that they're gonna be burnt out from a job that doesn't have that much value.

This is what we were asked to solve, I would say, if you go back to 2022. We were looked at the mental health crisis, the great resignation. And there was this idea that we don't have enough talent, and our talent is tired. And how do we treat them better? Now you fast forward a couple years from 2022, 2023 in the talent crisis, And then you find out that you're being bombarded with this idea that we're entering the post work era. What do I mean by the post work era? It's this concept that we actually are not going to need all these people. So if you think of the irony of this crisis of everyone retiring and not enough people entering the workforce, and then bam, a couple years later, it's welcome to being replaced by automation. And this is not helping. And I would call it our CEO talk track right now.

So if you're like me and you look at the different headlines daily and you're looking at all the, LinkedIn posts, what you see is some fairly major brands making pretty, I would say, damning statements about what's gonna happen to the future of employees. So you have burnt out employees, think of it this way, who were like, I have too much to do. I can't get it all done. I don't know if I even wanna do this. And then on the flip side, you have CEOs of major brands saying, we don't even need managers in the future. We're gonna have tiny teams in the future. Now that is such a a a contrasting statement when the lived reality of people today is that there's too much for them to do, and then they're getting fed messages that they are no longer going to be needed. It's no wonder that we feel that dilemma of what we're supposed to be doing.

And I just combed through some of the the articles I can find, and, you know, you see Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Meta, and all of them are talking about how they was anticipate having major layoffs of their employees. Now many of you might not work for one of these brands, but I'm sure you're feeling that kind of pressure of the idea that automation somehow has this side to it that means that we don't need to take care of our people because we're gonna be reducing our headcount. When at the same time, the day to day reality of our employees is that they have a lot of of needs in terms of having balance and feeling healthy and wanting to do meaningful work. So here we are in our current place, two different messages, two different conflicting messages, unless you think maybe there's a way we could talk about automation and well-being at the same time. So what do we do? Are we investing in people? Are we placing them? Or are we doing both? Now, Brian Weiss had a really interesting comment here and he talked about job replacement isn't the story. It should be job evolution.

It's this idea that we're joining the machines. They're not going to replace us. And so how do we look at the reshaping of roles with our employees so that people can do more valuable work? Now, if you know anything about the human psyche, one of the things that creates a sense of well-being is doing work that's meaningful. We often think if someone says, hey, I'm burnt out, right, really have too much on my plate, that is a question of the quantity only of work. But it's also about what kind of work are you doing. If you're doing the work you love, the work that puts you in the flow state, you're less likely to feel overwhelmed by work than if the work you're doing isn't meaningful work for you.

So as we look at automation as this way to reduce certain tasks to increase people's well-being, you can see future where automation and well-being are actually on the same page. So instead of us thinking, am I focusing on well-being the message of 2023, or I'm focusing on my message of today of automation, I would say think about integrative thinking, which is this either or kind of thinking actually challenges you to not think critically. I try to think of both of these things together that you can be thinking about both of them. So how do you think about automation and well-being together? So I call this launch and learn, which is what cocreation is, meaning that when you're doing something for the first time, which I'm gonna say we're all doing right now, there's two ways you can go about it, probably more, but I'm just gonna touch on two. One of them is to have a committee of executives and leaders sit with a committee of people from technology and in a room with closed doors, map out all the jobs and tasks they think that can be automated to create a list while the rest of your employees are sitting there wondering what's gonna happen to them because they're reading the same headlines that I've just showed you.

The other way is to co create, meaning to create an AI enabled culture that itself evolves into automation of certain processes, but not on top of your employees, but with your employees. So this is the line I took from hr.com, which I think is really interesting here, which is this is the intersection of technology with people. Meaning that technology is not a support function, but a cocreator in employee experience and productivity. So as opposed to thinking of who owns the technology or who owns AI, we have two groups that are equally invested in using what they have in front of them to the best of their abilities. We have a workforce of amazing people, and we have these tools that enable them. What's the intersection of how we work together to enable our people so that we get the outcomes that we're looking for?

So Syntax is an IT services company, and so we were able to start our AI journey earlier than most because we're in the tech field. At the end of twenty twenty three, Gandalf, which is just so you know our internal name, we don't know that name, was first launched as a Teams employee. So if you think of how fun this is, he just popped up in Teams. And he was really the original kind of Copilot before Copilot even existed. And it was really used as a conversational bot that you would just do what you normally do now with any LLM you're using, where you ask questions, you upload attachments, and you use it for day to day productivity and critical thinking. Now when we launched Gandalf, it was at a global town hall where our CTO said, here he is, and then started to share these heat maps of which teams were using Gandalf more. And this was interesting because if I take you back a couple of years, at first, people were nervous that if people saw you using AI, they would think you were cheating.

And then we moved quickly to if they don't see you using AI, then you're not adapting. Things move fast in the AI world. And so our version of Gandalf started out, I'd say gently. It was a recommendation. It was excitement. We had our executives, myself included, sharing often what we were doing with Gandalf. And we were inviting people to cocreate the AI journey through testing. We also did hackathons. So we started our first hackathon. First one was submit your ideas for our technology team to build. So imagine that you understand your LLM or your chatbot enough. We had some education for the all company meeting around what is a Gentic AI and what are chatbot assistance and just to understand the framework. And then we invited different departments and people to submit their ideas to win having their processes automated.

Now if you think about how interesting this is, it wasn't fear around it. It was people hoping to get their their ideas built. My team submitted over 20 different tasks or roles that they felt would be good to automate. When we followed up with our twenty twenty five hackathon, I'll show you that we had given enough information that you can now build your own. But this is a really fun way to introduce innovating and thinking differently through AI without having it be something mysterious. So I can show you some of our back office results. We had several that were built, but from a people and culture standpoint, we had time management assistant, consultant bio assistant, because we have to put all our consultant bios in one format.

And then our favorite, his name is Cristobal, our employee onboarding assistant. So this was an example of how every function one having certain processes automated. And I would say it became clear to our teams that automation was not your enemy. It was something that you were excited to have happen because you could participate in what you thought should be automated. And this is the cocreation piece where your teams are interested and invested in the strategy so that they themselves can contribute to the strategy. And this is what reduces fear and increases engagement and adoption is that involvement and that transparency. And that was important for us because at the end of 2024, this is probably no surprise, getting into last year, we were hearing the same messages that everyone here is hearing, which is we have to go faster.

I could ask because I, you know, hear stare in the polls for who here feels that they're behind on AI. Just raise your hand or put a note. Who here feels that they they themselves or their organizations have fallen behind? Just wondering here. Feed me. So I'm just looking here. I see Thelma, Natalie, Mandy. What I can say is that I've asked this to a room about 800 people, and I'm gonna tell you every hand went up. It's not possible that we're all behind, but that's how we feel right now. And so in this rush to accelerate AI adoption, one of the things we haven't done is we haven't necessarily paused and said, this is what AI adoption looks like now because it looks different. AI adoption back in my 2024 was just fiddling and getting used to using an assistant. AI adoption in 2025 was like build your own agent.

What is AI adoption 2026? The goal post keeps moving. But if we don't explain that to our teams, they're also gonna feel behind. And just so you know, well-being and feeling behind don't go together. Well-being comes with feeling like you are inherently caught up. So if I look at how we broke down our AI journey, I think this is really interesting, is that we did the foundation in 2024. That's our platform, our governance, our tools. Most of us, I would say, have a set of tools. And then as we look towards adoption, which is that heat map I showed you, and our hackathons is how do we ensure our employees have the AI leveraged mindset? How are they AI enabled? And how are departments empowered to build out their own solutions so that they can benefit from that toolset I showed you?

Then the third part is how do we change our products and services and transform our ways of working? Now why is that different than number two? Is that as you probably have in your organization, there are those big projects. Those are projects where you've got developers on them, you have a strategy, a timeline, a steering committee, and then there's all that activity that's happening that's sometimes hard to quantify and capture. And what we have found is that a lot of organizations, and I don't know if you notice this, but I do, wanna go from tools to financial outcomes on p and l. They just wanna jump over number two, which is how do we ensure employees understand these tools and are using them? And if you don't have an AI enabled culture, you won't have big transformational success. And I bring that up because there's a lot of data that supports that.

Because when we say we need everyone enabled, I challenge you to ask yourself, what does that mean? Well, what it meant for us here is that we wanted people to know how to use the assistance that we had, our productivity assistance, and we wanted measurable productivity gains. We also wanted people to understand what tasks are possible to automate and create a road map to automate those tasks. This is what enablement means to us. And I would challenge you, can your leaders tell you what it means to them? And finally, enablement meant that there was a capacity internally to build solutions. It wasn't about necessarily buying solutions or asking our developers to develop solutions, but this is what the enablement the enabled culture look like at Syntax. And I asked this question because at the time where we were excited for everybody to be using things and building agents, I think we had about 300 agents that were just built organically by those excited people who build early and go in early.

I said, okay. Well, what if we want everyone enabled? What is everyone supposed to do? Now the last bullet point got me a little bit nervous because when it comes to technology, most people don't get to that level where they're builders. So it's a careful balance. So what do I mean by that? Is that many organizations have got this wrong because they're rushing to get as much AI they can in their their processes, but they're not getting that measurable impact. They're not seeing the impact of this. So there's the investment without the impact. And so if we're going to be good people leaders, we have to understand how do we create a mission where we have a human centric workplace that's built on digital tools.

So we have our digital tools, but we understand the human value of it. So our plan for that kind of enablement was to take a human approach to it. Now I bring this up because there was a point where I was even challenged in my field to say, why do we need to build our own internal enablement? There's so many things on YouTube, on different learning platforms. And I actually went with my team, and we looked at how would we teach AI, through a series of tools or products that we see out externally. And what I found was that while I could watch these videos, I really didn't have any sense of how they related to me in my field or me in my organization. And I felt that if we were looking for the transformation to go to an enabled culture that leads to major transformative projects, you know, YouTube clips weren't gonna work for me.

They work for people who I call early adopters, those tech savvy people who wanna try everything, but the rest of us need something more curated to us and and and fed to us in a context that we can relate to. And the argument I used for having internal enablement that was built on our own business cases was that whether you look at Excel, Outlook, Salesforce, anything, there are majority of users are basic users. Basic users meaning that they don't ever learn to do everything on that list that I showed you. They're They're probably just gonna be at the first bullet point of, like, chatbot assistant, but they're not necessarily gonna get to intermediate level, which is where I can break down a workflow and automate it. And they're not necessarily gonna be at the build level. But if you look at how AI has been discussed over the last twenty four months, we're acting like everybody's getting too advanced or they're no longer relevant.

And that's a pretty scary message to give to everyone in every single role when technology adoption doesn't look like that. So how likely are we gonna get that with AI? So the training or enablement program we're using here had an individual contributor and a leader, just two two small changes. But what we did is we said our level one, which is the level that's mandatory, I would say, it's almost like a basic language fluency these days, is productivity use cases. You should have productivity enhancements based on your AI tool set. Whether it's our AI tool set with our friend, Gandalf, or you're using Copilot or Claude, just so you know, I'm from Quebec, so I don't call him Claude.

I call him Claude. You know, or whatever tool you're using, you need to be able to make sure that people understand how to get the most productivity gains for whatever their role is. And then we went to this next level, which is my intermediates. You see, I'm following the same thing that I just showed you, where people can map professional activities, identify where their AI enablement could help transform a role, and then build a basic AI assistant or AI agent or at least participate in the building. And then for leaders, it was for them to look at their entire function and understand where automation fits in. And then finally, I'm gonna get to this part. We made a third level for a very small group of already tech enabled people where every function nominated an AI champion who was the person who was already in that 5%, a superuser of the technology of that function.

And we said, hey. You could go and do that with them. So what I think is really fun, and I'm looking at my time here, so I wanna stick to it, is that the Mastering Gandalf was actually using our own people and our own screens. We had a talk with myself and our CTO answering tough questions for people. And then finally, we had our own developer show you our own use cases using our tools. And people really, really were excited about that. Our level two used a roadmap assistant to help people break down their jobs, help people understand how to create a roadmap, help people understand basic building using our tools. And then we went to level three and said, if you don't know how to build those tools, but you already have a roadmap based on level two, you now have a champion enabled.

And that champion sits in your function, and they can help build the more challenging technical pieces. We did a boot camp for them. It was great. So the last thing I wanted to bring up of how you co create with people is that in 2026, we move to the final level of a fully AI enabled culture, asking everybody in their goals to have an AI productivity or an AI transformation goal. And this means that our goal setting process aligned to the AI enablement they had done the year before. There's no point in enabling thousands of people and then letting it die. So then we said translate that knowledge and create an AI goal for yourself. And what was amazing is we have 86% of people with their goals done year to date, and 76% have an AI goal. It's the first time we've ever seen that. The adoption of AI goals was really natural because they'd already played with it in their hackathon and with our heat map.

Then they were getting AI enablement for the whole company. And then we said, you need to have an AI goal productivity or transformation. And instead of people saying, I'm pressured and I don't know how to do it, they now see that these AI tools are actually helping them do their jobs, and therefore, they are participating. And the AI goal is just ensuring we get to that quantifying part that's really hard for most pilots. I can tell you as I wrap up that we have just done a day I sentiment survey to see how people feel. Overall, positivity was 78%, and we're a technology company in 15 countries. So there's a lot of different perceptive perspectives in this survey. And in the question syntax has done a good job of preparing me to be AI literate, 86%.

Now you can imagine that your perception of what AI means for your role is very different when you're AI literate to when you're not. And I understand the strategy, and I feel informed 86%. So not only are we talking about it, doing town halls about it, giving you enablement, pushing you to have goals, we're also making sure you're still feeling good about it so that we can have that, again, that sense of well-being with AI. And then this is the word cloud that I got out of the survey, which I thought is the exact word cloud you'd want from an employee base. They say it helps for repetitive. It's you see amazing. You see Gandalf, you see data, you see strategy, quality, customers. So our people are actually experiencing AI quite positively. And that's again, when I say we have created that intersection of technology and people where people understand that human centric workplace, but they're still using our digital tools.

I'll finish by saying this last thing. When it comes to people feeling well-being at work, they want to have autonomy, they want to feel they have the right to choose and pick your own goal. They want to feel connected, hence explain your strategy, share your strategy, involve them, and they want competence, train people. If you wanna have well-being at work and you go through your AI implementation with autonomy, relatedness, and confidence, you're gonna have a strong AI culture. We have a people pillar. It's in tax. It was to be the employer of choice. And this year, we added to our people pillar that we're gonna also be a market leader in AI enabled culture.

So, again, by having employer of choice and AI enabled culture in the same pillar, you can see that that's how we feel about AI and our own human, I would say, balance. And I can say that it has worked. We have managed to be a great place to work in all the countries where we, can qualify. So with that, I would like to thank you for coming to Balancing Humanity and Automation. I'm a couple minutes over. So if you do wanna reach out to me on LinkedIn, I would be happy to chat. And I wanna thank everybody at the Global Women in Tech Conference for inviting me and for you to come to my session today. Thank you very much.