Amidst the AI revolution, e27 presents a new series showcasing how organisations embrace AI in their operations.
Aaron Goldsmid is the Head of Product at Deel, where he oversees connectivity and fintech products, along with a team of hundreds of global, remote product professionals.
Goldsmid brings more than 20 years of product and engineering leadership experience from companies like Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, and, most recently, Twillio. He joined Deel to help create the world’s friendliest worker platform, starting with the ability to work from anywhere.
In this edition, Goldsmid shares how Deel has embraced Artificial Intelligence.
Edited excerpts:
How do you perceive the AI revolution and its potential impact on your industry and workforce?
AI has and will revolutionise and reshape numerous industries and functions for the better, including the HR industry. There has always been much speculation about whether AI will eliminate jobs, but history has proven that false.
If we were to look into any time there has been a Newtonian revolution in technology, like the weaving loom, printing press or personal computer, it has only provided leverage. Humans didn’t get eliminated from the equation; they just became infinitely more efficient, and their tasks changed.
I believe that is precisely what we will see today with AI. It will allow humans to perform tasks more efficiently and scale faster.
In what ways has your company embraced AI technologies to improve operational efficiency or enhance business processes?
At Deel, we are building a system to understand our support volume and where it’s coming from, such as by identifying root causes and filtering them back into the product. We’re also leveraging predictive churn analysis and trying to determine how to be more efficient in marketing. These can be considered the newer aspects of the AI revolution, but it is essentially machine learning data science that many innovative firms are utilising now.
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I’m particularly excited about how we will help customers using AI and what new products we are building with AI. We will be announcing these later this year.
Can you share specific examples of how AI has been integrated into your workforce to streamline operations or drive innovation?
We’ve built arguably the largest global employment compliance database, allowing our teams to query across all our data. For example:
- What’s the average salary of software engineers in my organisation in Estonia?
- What is the parental policy in the Netherlands?
- What’s the prevailing tax rate?
Internally, we are now doing tens of thousands of queries against our knowledge base, saving us immense time.
Our data covers 120 countries, comes from expertise from over 100+ in-house Deel country compliance experts, and covers all of the typical questions and compliance law topics our customers ask us about. If used well, it could be a co-pilot to our employment lawyers or tax advisers.
AI takes on the repetitive queries, freeing our in-house teams to tackle the harder questions. It’s an oracle. It gives you the answers it knows and allows us to find and fill the current knowledge gaps.
What AI does as well is that it democratises that experience for everyone. For example, a business leader in a small organisation now has access to the answers to an HR or compliance question generated by AI within a couple of seconds, versus days later using human experts that they have to seek out.
What challenges or concerns did you encounter when implementing AI technologies within your organisation, and how did you address them?
The biggest challenge is trust and ensuring that data is completely secure. AI technologies are infinitely brilliant, but they are also incredibly naive at the same time. There is zero room for error when dealing with data as sensitive as employment data.
We solve this by creating sandboxes for specific data sets so there is no way for AI to access anything that is not supposed to. We have different logical instances with a specific set of permissions. Having the right guardrails in place is key.
How do you ensure transparency and uphold ethical considerations in using AI technologies within your organisation to mitigate privacy concerns?
We do this with assisted learning, where a human is involved. It can go awry with unassisted learning, where the computer tells itself whether it’s right or not. At Deel, we’ve ensured that there is human-assisted learning and that our centralised human experts are validating and training every query.
How do you ensure that AI technologies complement your workforce’s existing skills and expertise rather than replacing or displacing human workers?
There is much fear and speculation about whether AI might result in the eventual loss of the “human touch,” but we believe that it only enhances what already exists rather than fully replacing it because there are limits to the technology.
Even though AI continues to develop rapidly, it is still limited to the data that is made available to it. In this sense, there will always be a need for human intelligence or intervention to fill the gaps AI cannot.
How do you envision the future collaboration between humans and AI? What role do you see AI playing in augmenting human capabilities?
I and others see AI as a co-pilot. In flying a plane, a co-pilot’s job is to help manage the workload, filter the information and fulfil certain tasks so that the ‘captain’ can focus on what matters. This is how I see the collaboration between humans and AI.
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Many of the tasks we do today are repetitive, and many don’t always need a high level of expertise to complete them, i.e., responding to certain emails or filling out forms. AI will hopefully make us more efficient by taking care of some of these less skill-required tasks.
AI also reduces the barrier of needing to be highly technical and democratises knowledge. For instance, before cloud computing existed, one of the advantages for bigger companies like IBM and Google was that they had data centres.
For a smaller company to build that same type of data centre required an immense amount of capital. It also used to be that the bar for programming was incredibly high. This is the next version of that. With AI, small businesses can have the same capabilities as larger enterprises, which is exciting.
What advice would you give to other company founders looking to leverage AI in their workforce?
With the ongoing developments, the market is expected to be noisy and frothy for quite a while.
AI lowers the boundaries and makes things easier. However, the underlying needs of the market have not changed; we just have a new tool now that enables us to create something that’s much more accessible and will likely make us more efficient.
Every company should have an AI strategy, but what does an AI strategy look like for every company? I would start with the assumption of infinite resources and then ask how you would deploy the resource. How would that change your business? For example, what would an advertising agency do if they had a million more copywriters?
What should not be done is to wrap ChatGPT and call it a product simply, the products still have to be built. So businesses need to invest in the people with the skills to build the right products for them.
If I were looking to invest right now, I would be looking for things with enduring prospects, helping a human or business need.
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