Is Workforce Planning Obsolete?
Recruiting Future is a podcast that helps Talent Acquisition teams drive measurable impact by developing their strategic capability in Foresight, Influence, Talent, and Technology.
This episode is about Talent and Foresight.
We’re no longer dealing with a world that’s simply volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous – we’ve arguably entered something far more challenging: a reality that’s brittle, anxious, nonlinear, and incomprehensible. This shift is turning traditional workforce planning completely on its head. Three-year strategic plans become meaningless when entire job categories disappear in months, when AI capabilities jump overnight, and when market conditions change faster than planning cycles can adapt.
So how can employers develop effective talent strategies in highly uncertain times, and how might talent acquisition step up to take a strategic role?
My guest this week is Toby Culshaw, VP of Strategy for Talent Intelligence at Lightcast. In our conversation, Toby explains how real-time talent intelligence is needed to build talent strategies that can respond to rapid change and why TA teams are uniquely positioned as invaluable sources of business intelligence.
In the interview, we discuss:
• Moving from a VUCA world to a BANI world
• Dramatic change with significant compound effects
• The implications for long-term planning
• Why it is now easier to better align TA with workforce planning
• Signals and real-time talent intelligence
• The shortening half-life of job skills
• The anxious workforce
• Surfacing insights from TA
• War gaming and scenario planning
• The importance of data
• What might the future look like?
Follow this podcast on Apple Podcasts.
Follow this podcast on Spotify.
00:00
Matt Alder
Are we moving from a VUCA world of work, which is volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous, to a banny one where things are brittle, anxious, nonlinear and incomprehensible? If so, what does this mean for talent strategies? Is workforce planning now obsolete? And is this finally an opportunity for talent acquisition to provide measurable strategic value? Keep listening to find out. Support for this podcast comes from smart recruiters. Are you looking to supercharge your hiring? Meet Winston Smart Recruiters, AI powered companion. I’ve had a demo of Winston. The capabilities are extremely powerful and it’s been crafted to elevate hiring to a whole new level. This AI sidekick goes beyond the usual assistant, handling all the time consuming admin work, so you can focus on connecting with top talent and making better hiring decisions.
01:01
Matt Alder
From screening candidates to scheduling interviews, Winston manages it all with AI precision, keeping the hiring process fast, smart and effective. Head over to smartrecruiters.com and see how Winston can deliver superhuman results. Hi there. Welcome to episode 712 of Recruiting Future with me, Matt Alder. Recruiting Future is a podcast that helps talent acquisition teams drive measurable impact by developing their strategic capabilities in foresight, influence, talent and technology. This episode is about talent and foresight. We’re potentially no longer dealing with a world that’s just volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. We’ve arguably entered something far more challenging, a reality that’s brittle, anxious, nonlinear and incomprehensible. This shift is turning traditional workforce planning completely on its head. Three year strategic plans become meaningless when entire job categories disappear within months, when AI capabilities jump overnight, and when market conditions change faster than planning cycles can adapt to.
02:36
Matt Alder
So how can employers develop effective talent strategies in extremely uncertain times? And how might talent acquisition step up to take a strategic role? My guest this week is Toby Culshaw, VP of Strategy for Talent Intelligence at Lightcast. In our conversation, Toby explains how real time talent intelligence is needed to build talent strategies that can respond to rapid change and why TA teams are uniquely positioned as invaluable sources of business intelligence. Hi, Toby, and welcome back to the podcast.
03:13
Toby Culshaw
Thank you for having me. Great to be here, Matt.
03:15
Matt Alder
My pleasure. Now, you’ve. You’ve actually shifted role since we last spoke, so for the benefit of everyone.
03:20
Matt Alder
Really, can you introduce yourself and tell.
03:22
Matt Alder
Us what you’re now up to?
03:24
Toby Culshaw
Yep. So, Toby Culshaw. I do talent intelligence stuff. Basically, I’ve got a very small and tight Some area of expertise, I guess. But now Lightcast, which is, I guess, the world’s biggest talent intelligence vendor. We’re US based, came from the forming of MZ and Burning Glass and a few other acquisitions through the years. But, yeah, I’m over there. I’m the VP of strategy for talent Intelligence. I’m helping them craft their talent intelligence offerings and get things out the door and helping customers think about talent intelligence and move things forward a bit more because it’s still quite a nascent field. Obviously, I came from Amazon previously, where I led talent intelligence for their stores division, but there’s still a lot of companies and a lot of people that are sitting there thinking, I want to be doing this.
04:10
Toby Culshaw
I just don’t really know how to get started or what I should be doing. I know it’s difficult, but I don’t even know how to get into it. So I’m here to kind of help our customers and potential clients to get around that and work out what they should be doing, how they can be moving things.
04:24
Matt Alder
Cool.
04:25
Matt Alder
I mean, let’s start with a really basic question. How do you define talent intelligence?
04:28
Toby Culshaw
I think it’s a brilliant thrill. I completely fell into it, I guess, for myself. Like, I fell into it decade ago when I was doing running sourcing teams and trying to get my recruiters and sources to make more placements. And we kind of went through the funnel conversion analytics and realized there was a whole load of these decisions that were being made that weren’t conducive of making hires. So we started using sourcing data to try and influence those decisions. And that kind of spiraled. And I realized, well, actually if I can get earlier in that decision cycle, I can influence the decisions more, which means downstream it’s way easier. It’s way easier to affect decisions upstream than change things downstream. So I started doing that more and more.
05:06
Toby Culshaw
And that kind of spiraled into me starting a talent intelligence team at the Dutch tech company Philips, which started myself, ended with a team of 25 of us, 22 of us, something like that, as internal consulting. We were working with M and A and strategy and business transformation and all these different functions to use labor market data to affect change and try and set the tone for what we’re trying to do as a business. And obviously, just as I mentioned, do it with Amazon previously and then Lightcast now. For me, I think it’s a fascinating field. Every leader will say that the biggest restrictor for their growth is access to the right talent. And that kind of shifted narrative, to access to the right skills and capabilities, but so much of that still driven around people.
05:53
Toby Culshaw
And so for me, without understanding that external lens, without understanding the external labor market intelligence, you’re making all your decisions kind of blindfolded. You’re just kind of making them with the internal data and just running and hoping for the best. So for me, it’s fundamental that we get it right if we really want to have a reasonable stab. Everyone talks about HR having a seat at the table. For me, it’s one of the core things you’ve got to really understand if you want to do that.
06:20
Matt Alder
No, absolutely. And you published an excellent newsletter around talent intelligence.
06:24
Matt Alder
I recommend to everyone.
06:25
Matt Alder
The reason we’re talking, actually, is the email that you sent this week really kind of resonated with me, and I was sort of very keen to discuss it with you, and I thought it’d be great to do that on the podcast. So you were talking about broken crystal balls and workforce planning and really kind of summing up quite well the incredibly intense, crazy times that we live in at the moment, where things like AI, I mean, everything is crazy, but I mean, AI is shifting so quickly. You know, I literally log onto a tool having not logged onto it for a week, and it can do a million more things than I thought was ever possible by technology. We’ve got incredibly volatile political and economic situation everywhere.
07:04
Matt Alder
And the interesting thing is, you know, we’ve been using the word sort of VUCA to describe this for a very long time. But I’d heard the term that you. You were then talking about BANI, or for another way of describing it, for a long time, but you broke it down really well. So tell us what’s going on.
07:17
Toby Culshaw
What.
07:17
Matt Alder
How moving from a VUCA world to a BANI world. What do those even mean for people who’ve not come across those terms before?
07:24
Toby Culshaw
Yeah, so VUCA is volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. And that was a term that was really being used to describe a whole period of uncertainty were facing as a world. And more recently, you’ve seen BANI coming out, which is brittle, anxious, nonlinear and incomprehensible. And that’s the one I’m kind of personally edging more towards nowadays. And they’re not massively dissimilar in some ways, but there’s some real key differences, really. One is the timescale, and it’s the speed at which things are changing. And the bit that I particularly think with the BANI piece is the anxiousness and the uncertainty and the fact that there is Inside the butterfly effect, you have a situation and then the compound effects downstream are massive.
08:14
Toby Culshaw
Whereas in the V model you have these things, but you can kind of see them coming, you kind of see what’s going on, you can kind of trend out and understand from a workforce planning perspective, all right, we think these are going to be the things that are changing the next three, five, ten years. Within a BANI’s model, you really don’t, you can’t really see that far out because the changes that are happening are so dramatic and so fast and so aggressive and the compound effects of them are so large. It’s much harder to forecast that far out. It’s much harder to look that far downstream because things are just so much more uncertain within that.
08:57
Matt Alder
And it’s kind of ironic as well, because I think that particularly talent acquisition. Talent acquisition is finally getting its head around workforce planning. A time when you can’t really plan for anything in quite the same way. But I think the most important thing here is that when it comes to the whole world of talent, things are not going back, they’re not going backwards, they’re not going back to how they used to be six months ago, a year ago, three years ago, five years ago. And I just think it’s really important that people understand that. It’s like these are fundamental changes and it’s just going to keep changing, isn’t it?
09:29
Toby Culshaw
Yeah, I think it actually plays into talent Acquisition’s hands in a lot of ways. So TA have had this workforce planning SWPP’s kind of thrown over the fence them for a few years now. And it’s really hard. And it’s really hard, full stop. But it also is really hard from a kind of a rhythm of business perspective for ta, because everything else for TA is around delivering near term to short term actionable delivery. It is putting bums in seats, it’s getting the workforce you need in the door. And obviously you got everything that supports that, marketing, tax, analytics, etc. Etc. But it’s really relatively short term deliverables you’re thinking of from a TA perspective. And then workforce planning obviously is quite often stretched quite far and you have different versions, you have operational workforce planning, strategic workforce planning, et cetera.
10:19
Toby Culshaw
But it’s usually quite a high level strategic piece. And I think there’s often been a disconnect between TA’s delivery piece and then the SWP strategic piece. And that line of sight between has been. That’s been difficult, if it’s been difficult. And I think the BANI model Because it brings everything much nearer term and it’s saying, well actually it’s so hard to do that crystal ball. It’s so hard to look that far out, don’t do it. Just get really good and really aggressive at short term, near term and medium term operational workforce planning or insights that I actually think it gives a much more tangible element for TA because they can see it and go, well actually I can see that, I can know the downstream impacts.
11:07
Toby Culshaw
So if we think about some banning events you might think about recently will be things like Silicon Valley valued banking collapse or the tech layoffs or the AI capability jumps. These are massive things we couldn’t plan for. We hadn’t seen any of this stuff coming. AI capability jumps. No one was sitting there thinking we’re going to have all this gen AI tooling, et cetera, et cetera. But it came really fast and really aggressively.
11:32
Toby Culshaw
Now don’t get me wrong, there’s still a lot of stuff missing with AI capability and integrating into tech systems and agentic AI and get a whole other conversation around how that’s not necessarily something that’s missing the boat at the moment, but the reality is that’s giving an environment that’s kind of very brittle because you’ve got the collapse of systems, you’ve got the anxiety around the workforce and not knowing what’s going on. You’ve got all the tech layoffs happening and the anxiety around that. We saw Microsoft doing more layoffs this week. This is kind of anxious workforce. Don’t really know how they sit within this. They all relocated due to Covid and remote and then they’ve all got to go back to an office and the anxiety within that the capability jumps are completely non linear and RTO completely non linear.
12:17
Toby Culshaw
It’s not like we had the industrial revolution where we had a long stable period of time with people coming to cities. This is really fast moving erratic stuff. It’s candidates and employee bases shifting really dramatically. Even what they want from a workforce post Covid, what they want from a job is entirely different. What the next generation down want is entirely different. Because they can’t get on the housing ladder, they’re not guaranteed job security, they’re not guaranteed skills development, et cetera, et cetera. So I think actually it’s incredibly uncertain, but with that uncertainty gives a level of actionability, if that’s a word. Not sure that is a word, but anyway we go with it.
12:56
Toby Culshaw
But TA can run with this stuff because it’s that nearer tone where we have to pull these levers aggressively, it’s not something we can sit on and wait 18 months, 24 months, 36 months downstream. It’s stuff that’s changing now.
13:10
Matt Alder
Yeah, 100%. And I think one of the really good, the Silicon Valley bank is an interesting example because I was interviewing a founder of a HR tech company as that was happening and he was getting messages as he was talking to me and he went from being slightly distracted to I think my startup just lost all its money. I’m going to have to hang up on you. And it was just like that was not on his list of things he was expecting to have today. So, yeah, unexpected. You kind of used. One of the examples you used was the rise and immediate fall of prompt engineering as a profession, which was interesting.
13:43
Toby Culshaw
Yeah. So I think that’s a great example of where we’re obviously shifting dramatically what the jobs are. And within TA we’ll have a whole bunch of jobs where it’s kind of Emperor’s New Clothes and we kind of paint things in different ways and give things different titles. But Prompt Engineer is a great one where if you look back 18 months, it was one of the fastest growing job titles, fastest growing skill sets. We said it was going to be the next big thing. And you know, you saw lots of people within the sourcing world in particular within TA that had got hit hard with sourcing because everyone was going to assume it was going to automated and they were refocusing themselves as prompt engineers because there are some very comparable skill sets there.
14:22
Toby Culshaw
Roll forward 18 months, don’t really see it as a job anymore. It’s not really a thing because so many of the tech systems are having a much greater deal of implication within there. And also there’s a kind of a maturity curve of how people are prompting systems where we as users are getting better. So you’re not necessarily seeing things like that as jobs in of themselves anymore. But I think that’s one of many we’re going to see. We’re going to see all these iterations of job titles and skills that will just shift. And obviously in talent intelligence, we do a huge amount around the skills base of organizations and the skills of workforce. Given the half life of skills nowadays, particularly on the tech side of things, it’s just churning so much faster.
15:07
Toby Culshaw
But having that real time understanding of okay, well how do our skills compare to the market? How do they compare to the other jobs that are out there? But that’s one of the reasons I’m actually More excited about this. At first it’s a bit doom and gloom. People are like, oh yeah, it’s terrible. You’re throwing everything under the bus. And it’s really not for me. All it’s saying is we just have to get much better understanding our data and get much cleaner, closer to real time data. The so that you can understand how skills are changing over time. It’s not a one and done deal. You don’t write a job description that’s one and done. It’s in the file for the next 10 years like it used to be.
15:43
Toby Culshaw
We’ve got to get better, we’ve got to get faster and more fluid with this because the system will move, it will move fast and it will move aggressively. And everything you’re looking for in a job might not exist anymore in a short time frame. Just because of the. The half life of job skills.
16:00
Matt Alder
Yeah, exactly. But I think it’s interesting because I think you can kind of relate back to patterns of things that have happened in the past because I think with, you know, Prompt Engineering as a standalone job, you could look at that. You could. And I kind of did this a little bit. You kind of look at it and say, well, actually this is a sort of a barrier to people using this technology. The fact you have to be good at this. And if we look at how technology breaks down user interface barriers over time. So I always use the example of MP3 players in the, you know, the early 2000s, where just getting the music into an MP3 format and getting it on the player was. Was a task in itself that required specialist skills nearly.
16:40
Matt Alder
And then you fast forward a few years and they’re just, you know, now we just, the songs are just there and we stream and we don’t even think about it. So it’s kind of that process. But I think what’s difficult is it’s now happening. What might have happened in five years now happens in five months. I think that’s the thing that really.
16:56
Toby Culshaw
Tries me exactly that and what we used to have. I remember there was a really big article at the time for articles around Mark Zuckerberg when Facebook AS was got rid of their mobile division and he said, no, we don’t need a mobile division. Everything has to be mobile as well. And I think that’s the thing. A lot of these skills that we’re thinking about and looking at, it’s stuff that it will be as well, it’ll be integrated, it will just be part of using your job at the moment. We’re all using, you know, the vast majority of users are using some kind of geni thing, whether It’s Claude or ChatGPT or whatever. We’re all going to our individual little pages for it and they’ve got the separate websites. The reality is that’s not how any of us are going to use that stuff.
17:37
Toby Culshaw
When it’s actually integrated, it’s going to be fully integrated into our workflows. It will just be co pilots like Microsoft’s one or whatever. Like it would just be part of your work system and it will just be part of the DNA of how we work. But I think it will change things dramatically. But to your point, absolutely. It’s the pace that shift away from mobile took years and years. This isn’t taking years, this is happening rapidly.
18:05
Matt Alder
I don’t think it’ll be long before people just stop talking about AI. It’s like it’s just there. It’s a bit like the equivalent of going around going, we are online, we.
18:13
Matt Alder
Have a website, we are on the Internet.
18:15
Matt Alder
It’s just, of course you are, so of course you’re using AI, all that sort of stuff. Coming back to the banning stuff, I think the anxiety bit is interesting because I think a lot of anxiety comes from sort of lack of control and I’m not sure we’ve ever really had control, but there’s a sense that we might be able to kind of sort of plan and things like that. And I’ve done a lot of stuff around strategic foresight and how you actually kind of plan and look at the future and think about the future in these kind of sort of circumstances.
18:44
Matt Alder
And you kind of pulled an example quite well, which was like, you know, you talked just then about the agility to move quickly, the just, you know, having something that can respond really quickly, but also looking for signals about what’s going to happen. Some of those signals can be very fleeting and very weak and there’s kind of a bit of an art form to that, isn’t there?
19:00
Toby Culshaw
Yeah, I think there is and I think there’s two things. It’s whether you want to try and de risk those signals or whether you want to wait for those signals to become an issue and then address the issue really aggressively. So when I think about kind of a signal that’s coming through that’s been bubbling away for a while, but it’ll be things like getting rid of degree requirements. Okay, well we’ve been trying to push for that and the whole drive through for skills based Hiring, that’s been bubbling away for a while. But if you’re now having career conversations with your nephew, niece, child, whatever, saying, do you go to university? That’s a hard conversation to have because suddenly if you don’t need the degree, that’s a different conversation. But then things can flip, as we know we saw.
19:46
Toby Culshaw
And this was where the anxiety comes from because the decision making doesn’t necessarily reflect what the data is saying. So return to office. The vast majority of the data out there was saying workers were happy, productivity was up. Yes, there were elements that could be improved, but it wasn’t really a bad situation. We were having record profitability, record innovation, and yet companies returned to office aggressively. And that felt at odds with what were seeing from the research. We saw the same with four day week experiment, work week experiments. The four day work week proved a resounding success. It was a huge productivity gain, mental health gain, work life balance gain with.
20:25
Matt Alder
Headlines to match in the media and.
20:26
Toby Culshaw
All that sort of stuff, huge benefits, and yet you don’t see it rolling through. And you get told that it’s a really tough environment, it’s a tough economy, so you’re not getting salary increases, you’re not getting promotions, etc. But then you’re looking and think, well, we’ve got, had record profits and our stock price is higher than ever. Like, how did, how does this work? How does this fit together? You know, we’re having record profits and yet we’re making layoffs. It’s like, how does this fit? And so I think the triggers are there and you want to be able to look ahead.
20:59
Toby Culshaw
But the reality is that the decision making is so odds with what we feel it should be, that anxiety is still leading to an entire workforce force that are just, they don’t know where to turn and they don’t know what the solution is. And my fear is also that I think a lot of government bodies don’t know how to address this either. So we’re in this very difficult situation and all you can really do is look for those micro triggers and as you say, look ahead and go, all right, these are the 10 options this could cause. Where do we think it could go? But equally, if it’s none of these, how do we react? Because the 10 options might be your traditional workforce plan, but in the BANI world where it’s not a linear decision, things can come from curveball.
21:47
Toby Culshaw
If none of this happened, what do we do? How do we react fast? How do we build these agile teams that can react really fluidly. If we suddenly lose a leader, how do we have a team and a strength that can reorganize fast enough so that when they leave to go to a new crypto startup or an AI startup or whatever, they don’t turn around and rip out their 40 best people? How do we move this stuff really fast and agile and nimbly to try and keep fluid in these situations?
22:15
Matt Alder
Yeah, and I think the other thing as well, I think particularly at the moment with talent acquisition in particular, there’s disruption, no one knows what’s going to happen, all of this kind of stuff. But I also think that there is also particularly building these kind of scenarios. There is the opportunity to influence the future to a certain degree in terms of saying, well, actually, this is where we’re going and it’s kind of like, let’s move towards that. And we know that there will be curveballs and unexpected things. We might have to change that destination. But there is a chance that people can actually influence the way that things move forward there.
22:47
Toby Culshaw
Both from, I’d say 2, 2, 4. Both from a TA perspective. I only care about TA with my TA hat on. Where, you know, if we don’t get proactive in terms of how we set the scene of what we are as a function in this environment, are we shifting from service provider mentality to a consultative business partnering mentality? Are we coming in and explaining to the business this is a vanity world? This is what’s going on with our candidate base, this is what’s going on with the workforce. This is what you need to be using moving forward is how our skills are shifting, et cetera, et cetera. We can either be proactive and get on the front foot with that stuff or not. And if it’s the or not, that’s still okay.
23:32
Toby Culshaw
If we want to run a really efficient, really effective recruitment process, but it’s not highly consultative. The strategic priority is time, quality, cost, it’s cheap, it’s fast, and the quality is of a sufficient standard. It might not be the TA function you want to live in. It might not be the one you want to lead. But if that’s the right option for your business, then that’s the solution that’s going to come through. But then equally compounding that is, how do we bring that to the business? How do we bring that to the broader hr? You know, we’ve got probably a bigger eye on the market than any other function in HR for sure, and probably a bigger eye on the market than any other function, full stop.
24:12
Toby Culshaw
You’ll talk to more competitors, more people in the market every week in your TA function than the rest of your company probably put together. How do we surface those insights? How do we get truly consultative back to the business and say how are we evolving for this? How are we shifting? How are we making playing this out? I think we really just need to. Which is hard because the reality is we’re all being asked to do more with less. You know, it’s not like T18s have suddenly got a surplus of resources and or people or anything else like were being asked to do more or less. So it’s getting your house in order and working out where is the value I’m going to bring within this process rather than the efficiency. Because you’re not going to out efficiency. That’s once. Yeah, our efficiency.
24:56
Toby Culshaw
Any kind of tech systems, the systems are going to beat you down every single time. So it’s working out. How do we bring this expertise and this thought process and challenge the business with it?
25:06
Matt Alder
And technology will beat you down in ways that we can’t even imagine at the moment. I think that’s the crazy thing about it. A couple of sort of final questions for you. So how would you sort of summarize your advice to leaders who are listening, who are out there now in terms of coping and thriving in. As you say, there’s a lot of anxiety, there’s a lot of challenges, but there’s also huge opportunity here. What would your advice be to people?
25:28
Toby Culshaw
Massive opportunities. First off, I don’t think you can do any of this stuff without data. Obviously I’m biased with this one. I come from a TI background. As I say, I work at the biggest labor market data provider in the world. Data is your foundation that gives you the ability to be able to play and change scenarios and experiment and look at what the options could be, what could be the downstream impacts. So getting a data foundation in place is going to be absolutely key. Whether that’s labor supply, demand, skills, you’ve got to understand what is the current state of play and the current layer of the land so that I know how things could change. Unless you know the current state of play, you’re never going to know how things could change.
26:13
Toby Culshaw
Obviously our data provider, we grab a lot of data very frequently. We’re grabbing two and a half billion job postings every single day. We’ve got hundreds of millions of profiles that we look at every single quarter having a recency of data. So that you can say this stuff with a degree of authority of this is where we are at is going to be key. I think within that also though play scenarios out. I’m a big fan of war gaming, which is where you essentially will do a workshop, get your relevant stakeholders in a room and say, all right, this is the given scenarios, this is what the current state of play, this is where we’re at. In this scenario you’re going to be competitor A, B or C or whatever. This is your situation, what are you going to do?
27:01
Toby Culshaw
And they play it out and then you flip it on its head and go, right, well if were in those jobs in our competitors, this is what we would have done. Now we’re back at our company, how are we going to defend that position? Like if we suddenly go return to office and start coming for our talent aggressively, what are we going to do if they suddenly shift to a low cost country model and come for our talent in a low cost country? What are we going to do if they suddenly shift? We see their skills to the early warning threat you mentioned earlier. We see their skills shifting from on site sales to solution sales. That’s changing their business model. What are we going to do? And suddenly it’s getting people thinking of all right, how do we adapt fast?
27:39
Toby Culshaw
How do we move fast? How do we change fast? Rather than waiting for stuff to happen and reacting. It’s that productivity of mindset.
27:47
Matt Alder
And a final question. It always seems weird to talk about the future because I think we’re currently in the moment where we’re just trying to keep up with the present in terms of what’s going on. But what do you think the future looks like? I mean you mentioned agentic AI and all those kind of things. Things where do you think we’re going to be in a couple of years time? Obviously with all the caveats around everything that we’ve talked about in terms of not being able to predict things. But where do you think we might be?
28:10
Toby Culshaw
Yeah, it’s a, it’s a really great question. It’s a really hard one to answer because I think without, obviously in a banning world it depends like so much is going to change. But I think there’s certain things that if I assume the current limitations are in place, like we’re looking at lots of agentic AI, we’re looking at lots of automation. A lot of the stuff we’re looking to do with agentic is really just old school process automation that we just haven’t pulled the trigger on previously. So there’s probably going to be a lot of efficiency gains, a lot of AI built into tech stacks, et cetera. So we can have a lot of efficiency gains there. There’s probably going to be a pushback.
28:42
Toby Culshaw
The reality is if everyone does this with all of their tech, there isn’t enough energy in the world to survive to do all this. So unless the data centers and the systems get massively more energy efficient, there’s going to be an effect to this downstream. It could be that governments start actually charging for your AI usage or the energy usage. It could be they start taxing on that because obviously there’s a job income piece that gets affected by these kind of efficiencies. It could be that the energy piece is linked to your carbon credits and how much you use is going to affect. So I think you’re probably going to end up with somewhat two tier system.
29:18
Toby Culshaw
So the initial wave of efficiency and then a slump where people realize actually this freemium model that we’ve basically been getting now once they turn the pricing on full effect, that’s actually pretty expensive. So you’ll probably get a two tier system of companies with massive gen AI usage and it’s heavily integrated versus well actually we can probably still brute force this with people in a low cost country through an efficiency play. But I think the larger piece there is really understanding comes back to that value. Like what do we really want people to be doing in a job? It’s that innovation, it’s the creativity, it’s the business partnering, the relationship side of things. I think there’s going to be a dial up on that as the tech will take over the lower level transactional work 100%.
30:01
Matt Alder
Toby, thank you very much for talking to me.
30:03
Toby Culshaw
Thank you.
30:06
Matt Alder
My thanks Toby. You can follow this podcast on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. You can search all the past episodes at recruitingfuture.com on that site. You can also sign up for our weekly newsletter Recruiting Future Feast and get the inside track on everything that’s coming up on the show. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next time and I hope you’ll join me.
