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Borderless AI founders Willson Cross (l) and Sean Aggarwal (r).
Photo courtesy Borderless AIWill an AI ‘agent’ for HR make it more efficient to hire people globally?
That’s the hope of Borderless AI—a new startup that emerged from stealth this week with a $27 million seed funding round. The startup adds to the crowded market of “employers of record,” which aid companies in hiring workers in different countries through a network of local entities, with the help of an AI ‘agent,’ rather than typical AI assistance. What that means: Instead of an HR leader just being able to use AI to quickly query, say, local parental leave laws in Mexico or tax documents for hiring an engineer in Sweden, the AI will complete the employment contract or onboarding documents for you.
I chatted with Borderless cofounder Willson Cross and others about the new startup and its implications for HR. With a funding round led by Susquehanna and Aglaé Ventures, the venture arm of billionaire Bernard Arnault, and a partnership with the large language model Cohere, it will be interesting to watch whether Borderless can make the kind of inroads in HR that, say, Harvey has made in legal.
One thing is certain: AI is fundamentally reshaping the work of human resources, making some of the technology’s promise to take away some of the drudge work a reality. But will AI free up HR leaders to do more of the “human” work of human resources—focusing on learning and development, say, or ways employees can be more creative—or will it simply eliminate more HR jobs? That’s a question I discussed with Wharton professor Ethan Mollick (see below) about his new book, and some of the ways he sees AI changing work. A couple of my favorite insights: “Learning and development is your only bulwark against what’s about to happen to apprenticeship and learning” and “Your employees are your R&D lab right now.” HR, he suggests, is only going to become more important.
Read more below, and hope it’s a great week.
COMPANY CULTURE
Federal Aviation Administration chief Michael Whitaker criticized Boeing’s safety culture in an interview with NBC last week, arguing the company has prioritized production rather than safety. Whitaker said that Boeing's priorities have “been on production and not on safety and quality,” citing a culture survey of Boeing and the FAA’s audit into the company. The company has been under regulatory scrutiny since January over the incident in which a Boeing 737 Max 9 door plug blew out in the middle of an Alaska Airlines flight. On Monday morning, amid the ongoing safety and quality issues, Boeing CEO David Calhoun said he would be stepping down at the end of 2024, with a couple of other executives leaving their roles.
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Mustafa Suleyman is leaving Inflection AI, the maker of chatbot Pi, for Microsoft in a massive shakeup at one of Silicon Valley’s highest-valued artificial intelligence startups. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in a blog post last week that Suleyman will help form a new group called Microsoft AI, while most of Inflection’s 70 employees will join the group, a source with knowledge told Forbes. Inflection will focus now on providing an application programming interface, or API, to other businesses—a major shift for a company that had focused until recently on Pi, its chatbot alternative to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude.
HUMAN CAPITAL
Unilever shares rose after the company announced plans to cut thousands of jobs worldwide and spin off its ice cream business that includes brands like Ben & Jerry’s and Magnum. The British company said it will cut around 7,500 jobs worldwide—nearly 6% of its global workforce of 128,000 people—as part of a wider cost saving strategy Unilever hopes will save $868 million over the next three years. CEO Hein Schumacher's broader restructuring plan aims to jumpstart growth at the conglomerate, which makes products including Hellmann’s mayonnaise, Axe and Dove grooming products and Domestos and Cif cleaning products.
EDUCATION
President Joe Biden announced Thursday his administration is canceling $6 billion in student debt for 78,000 public service workers—including teachers, nurses and firefighters—the latest step the White House has taken to lessen Americans’ student loan burden through incremental relief after the Supreme Court struck down sweeping debt forgiveness last summer. Since Biden took office, his administration has provided $144 billion in student loan forgiveness, affecting nearly 4 million borrowers.
WHAT’S NEXT: AUTHOR ETHAN MOLLICK
Wharton professor Ethan Mollick, the author of "Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI"
Photo courtesy Ethan MollickEthan Mollick is the author of the popular Substack One Useful Thing, a professor studying innovation and entrepreneurship at Wharton, and a must-follow on LinkedIn for insightful updates about AI and the future of work. Forbes chatted with Mollick about his new book, Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI, which is publishing April 2. Excerpts from our discussion have been edited for length and clarity. A shorter version of this interview ran in our emailed Future of Work newsletter.
By now, I feel like everyone’s heard a CEO say AI is not going to replace your job; it's going to free you up to do the interesting parts of your job. I think people have a hard time believing that—not because they think their job will get replaced, but they think there will be fewer jobs. Are they right?
It’s really complex. The economists talk about how generally, technology creates more jobs than it destroys over the long term. The counterpoint to that is we don't know if that’s going to happen this time. When you read the history of the Industrial Revolution, living through it was a little bit rough. It’s very possible people say, ‘yes, this is ultimately for the best,’ but that doesn’t mean there won’t be disruption.
It comes down in large part to what those CEOs are saying—is their money where their mouth is? You can view this as incredibly freeing technology. When we survey people about AI use, they inevitably say they like it because it frees them from drudgery, even though they're worried. But this is an individual decision at the level of CEOs and organizers about whether they use this to help people flourish and focus on the stuff they do really well, or whether they’re going to use this to cut the number of people down to keep [the amount of work] the same with fewer workers. Sometimes people view AI as a monolithic thing, when there’s actually a series of choices that we get to make.
I was at SXSW earlier this month, and the head of HR for IBM responded to a similar question by saying you can’t imagine the same amount of work will be done. You have to think about the pie getting bigger. How do you reconcile that with the instinct business leaders have to look for any opportunity to cut costs?
I think you’re asking the most important question. That’s the issue, right? The idea that you’re going to keep your productivity level the exact same—while everyone else gets a ten times multiplier—seems like bad business.
I ask four questions of organizations [about using AI]. What did you do that was valuable that's no longer valuable? What impossible things can you now do that you could not before? What can you democratize and bring down market? What can you do upmarket so you have new ways of competing? There’s new angles to follow. Your job is to figure that out. If you keep your productivity the exact same with less people, you're not going to win in a world where other people are getting productivity gains. You'll be out-competed.
You describe this phenomenon of “shadow IT,” of people being fearful of revealing they use AI, like they’re scared to say they’re using it for work. It’s a really big mindset shift away from showing you did everything yourself.
There’s a huge incentive for individuals to use AI, because it does a lot of their work. And it’s very easy for an individual user to experiment with ways of AI to make their work better. But it might be against policy. Or they know if they tell you about it, then maybe you’re not so impressed by all the amazing work they’re doing. Everyone is trying to not show that they’ve automated their work.
Innovation is not your IT people anymore. AI doesn’t work like IT, it works like a person. HR is your center of development right now. Learning and development is your only bulwark against what’s about to happen to apprenticeship and learning. These parts of your organization that you didn't care about as much are now a really big deal. Your innovations are not going to come from your IT department. They're going to come from employees using AI.
I'm a professor in a business school. We don’t actually teach people how to do jobs here. We teach them how to think, how to be good about thinking about multiple kinds of problems, how to do basic stuff. The way they actually learn through their jobs is an apprenticeship system. The first crisis that’s going to happen is going to be a learning crisis. Your interns are already getting shortchanged by people using AI right now.
How do you think the structure of organizations will change if entry level and early career jobs are not needed as much?
How do you get to be a good banker? You do models over and over again while someone yells at you. AI is going to require us to rethink what we want people to do and how we want to train them. The overall theme that comes out of this conversation is that organizations have agency, but they also have to realize they have to change how they operate. They can’t operate the way they did before. And structural change is hard.
Organizational culture is going to matter more too. Not-for-profits or startups in the growth space? It's not really a problem—everyone's sharing how they use AI all the time, because it makes them more efficient. Big Fortune 500 companies or competitive organizations—nobody's sharing. So I think part of it is culture. Part of this is about incentives. It's possible to imagine that you would give people $100,000 cash at the end of the week for whoever came up with the best prompt to automate their job and promising you're going to fire no one as a result of generative AI over the next two years.
Because that's how much potential AI has to lead to outsized financial results?
You have to show that it's serious and you shouldn't be afraid.
There’s a generally optimistic view in the book of what kind of impact AI can have. What are your biggest concerns?
That this could be a complete panopticon. … Can it [one day] look over my shoulder and know exactly what I’m working on and what time I’m wasting? A manager on everyone’s shoulder. A complete panopticon where it’s giving me advice and chiming in constantly on what to do. Infinite Clippys forever.
Rather than spending the effort to turn this into flourishing, that [CEOs] use this like other automation technologies. That they’d use this to make [their] lower-paid employees more productive and fire higher-end employees because they're too expensive. That rather than using this for growth and something that has to be co-invented by management and employees together, it becomes something that’s imposed as the latest cost-savings paradigm.
How do I sell that to my CEO, or the CFO who’s looking to just cut costs?
You want to be winning and not losing, right? You have well-trained employees who are really good at their jobs. You should be thinking about this as an investment. Your employees are your R&D lab right now.
FACTS AND COMMENT
Neurodiverse workers bring a unique and valuable perspective to their employers, but a recent survey of U.K.-based entrepreneurs reveals the sobering reality about the widespread discrimination neurodiverse founders still face:
96%: Share of respondents who reported experiencing discrimination due to their neurodiversity
64%: Share of neurodiverse founders who felt starting their own business was the only way they could earn a living
‘A superpower that fosters creativity, innovation, and unparalleled problem-solving abilities’: Connectd Founder Roei Samuel said of neurodiversity as a business asset
STRATEGIES & ADVICE
It’s not always the right time for a promotion. Here’s why you might want to turn one down.
A possible TikTok ban is moving through Congress. Businesses should be preparing.
Despite recent bad news, many CEOs are feeling confident.
If you see yourself as a leader, here are some skills to include on your résumé.
VIDEO
QUIZ
Workers at a Tennessee production plant for a foreign automaker have petitioned to hold an election to join the United Auto Workers, which could make it the first foreign-owned automaker plant to join the UAW. Which car company is it?
- Volkswagen
- Subaru
- Honda
- Toyota
