This week Lightcast, one of the largest providers of people, jobs, and labor market data, acquired Rhetorik, a leading data collection company. Since this space has become highly strategic and ever-more essential to HR leaders (and it’s just getting more important with AI), I decided to try to explain the space.

In this podcast I explain the difference between data collection companies, data enrichment companies, and talent intelligence companies.

As you’ll see this is a massive multi-billion dollar space, and the quality of this data is now vitally important to your company’s recruiting, hiring, internal development, and planning strategies. The market for job and skills data is also collapsing with the salary data market, which is disrupting salary surveys. And now these companies are combining this data with real-time business information, economic data, and highly proprietary company intelligence.

So there’s a lot going on, and it’s important for all HR, marketing, and business leaders to understand it.

More to come on this topic, listen up and read our new research on this space, as well as our industry by industry Global Workforce Intelligence studies, all available in Galileo.

Additional Information

People Data For Sale: How The Talent Intelligence Market Works

This week I had a variety of meetings with companies and looked at some new research on the impact of AI in the workplace. Despite all the positive things going on in the economy, a strong signal came back about fear. A large percentage of workers are fearful for their jobs and the impact of AI, so I unpacked the topic this week.

(Note: this podcast was recorded on a long walk so it’s slightly warbly but I cleaned it up pretty well.)

I know you’re all going through change and AI transformation work right now, so let us know if we can help – the issues in this podcast are important ones to deal with as you reorganize, push, and encourage people to move faster in the direction of AI.

Some Interesting Reading

From “The Information” this week, discussing Meta’s AI team.

“In his essay, Blankevoort wrote that “Meta has a culture of fear,” created in part by its performance review system and rolling layoffs. Meta in February laid off 5% of its staff, or about 3,600 people, and said those cuts were based on performance. The company also said at the time that it might use future performance reviews to cut low performers as well.”

“Instead of being motivated by our mission, or an aspiration to build something great, many people I’ve talked to are motivated by the fear of getting fired,” Blankevoort wrote. “This attitude runs through the company like a metastatic cancer.” It has led to a culture of “every person for themselves,” as well as “land-grabbing, project-sniping, stealing work,” he added.

Prompting is Programming: We’re All Software Engineers Now!

One of the most explosive changes in our new world of AI is this: every one of us can now “program” our AI assistants as if we were engineers. In other words, the “prompts” we conceive and use as queries are actually instructions, so we, as non-engineers (I am an engineer, but long ago), can now “program” and direct our AI friends to do what we want.

Not only is this an enormous shift in empowerment (yes, you’re a Superworker), it also lets us create, innovate, and share our “creations” with others.

It’s not unlike the amazing birth of spreadsheets and macros that started in 1981 with spreadsheets. You, as a business person, can “create things” that solve problems, improve productivity, and ultimately become complex systems for your team.

For AI vendors, this shift means you’re no longer just building applications, you’re also building tools – tools for your customers to “fall in love with the problem” and extend your product to meet their personal needs.

Galileo®, our AI platform for HR, is fueled with 300+ “prompts” which are essentially mini apps. You can use these prompts to build and extend Galileo to do more and more for your job and your company. The opportunities are endless, and this is just beginning!

Additional Information

Galileo®, the AI Platform for HR (visit the Success Center for videos)

OpenAI’s Prompt Engineering guidelines

Google’s Prompt Engineering guidelines