David Yang is an amazing serial entrepreneur: he has launched twelve companies, beginning when he was in fourth grade. David initiated training as a physicist, to follow in his parents’ footsteps. He won math and physics Olympiads; then his first entrepreneurial detour “distracted” him from his studies for a while and sparked his passion for computer science and AI - it is seriously worth hearing the story from David’s own voice, specifically his concern of possibly disappointing his parents even as he was launching a hugely successful entrepreneurial and scientific career.

 

Yva, David’s latest creation, is an AI-powered people analytics platform - a striking example of the powerful role that AI is starting to play in the workplace, with the ethical implications that quickly come to the fore.

 

Yva’s neural network can mine and examine workers’ activities across numerous work applications: email, Slack, G-Suite, GitHub. With these data, the AI can find a treasure trove of nuanced insights about employee behaviors: how quickly an employee responds to certain types of emails; or the tree structure of her communications: how many to subordinates, how many to peers or superiors, how many outside the company; and much more.

 

These insights can provide value to an organization in two main ways:

 

First, in discovering which employees have high potential to be great performers or strong leaders. The company explains to Yva which individuals it at the moment considers as best performers; Yva’s neural network determines which behaviors are characteristic of these top performers, and then finds other employees who exhibit some if not all of the same traits. It can notify you who has the potential to grow a top salesperson, or an extremely effective leader; and it can tell you which characteristics they already possess and which ones they need to develop.

 

Second, Yva helps decrease “regrettable attrition” by distinguishing employees who are a high resignation risk. A plan to resign never comes out of the blue. First the employee will feel more and more disappointed or burnt out; then she will become more open to consider other opportunities; then she will actively seek another job. Each stage carries subtle changes in our behavior: maybe how early we send out our first email in the morning, or how quickly we respond, or something in the tone of our messages. We can’t detect these changes, but Yva can.

 

For big companies, minimizing regrettable attrition is Yva’s top contribution: losing and having to replace precious employees represents a substantial cost. This, notes David Yang, makes the Return On Investment from deploying Yva a piece of cake to identify. For smaller companies, particularly in their growth stage, attrition is less of a problem and the greater value comes from the way Yva helps them build talent and leadership from within their ranks.

 

Given the common questions that technology will eliminate jobs, it is refreshing and comforting to hear that Yva instead proves its value by boosting employee retention. Yva can also help the individual worker; it can create your personal dashboard with ideas and suggestions on how you can transform your behavior to grow more effective and successful. There is a trade-off. By default, Yva will respect your privacy, working on anonymized data. But the more individual data you are willing to share, the more Yva can help. The choice is yours.

 

David Yang remarks some interesting geographic differences in the share of employees who opt in; he also notes that across the board, approximately one employee in five remains adamantly opposed to unveiling her individual data.

 

Privacy concerns are fully understandable when faced with an AI that can drive important HR measures. But is it smart to trust humans more than AI? David Yang notes that AI can help get rid of the human biases that often influence hiring and promotion decisions. Provided - he stresses - that the AI gets trained in the right way, only on final outcomes, on objective performance criteria, without feeding into it intermediate variables such as race, gender or age, which could create a built-in bias in the AI itself.

 

David Yang, unsurprisingly, is very optimistic on the role that AI can play in people analytics and in our lives. Bullish, but very convincing and thoughtful, and willing to put himself on the line - at the end of the podcast discussion he talks of the role that Morpheus, another AI, plays in his personal life.

 

David believes that in the future smaller companies (500 employees or less) will depend totally on AI-powered people analytics platform; he believes that AI will play a major role in leveraging the creativity and efficiency of individuals, while HR (human) professionals will focus on business-specific HR-partner roles. He has a horse in the race - Yva. But there looks like little doubt that whatever role AI takes in HR and people analytics, it will be one of its most powerful influences in our professional—and personal—lives.

 

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