and the remote workers ranged from sales & marketing, accounting, payroll, legal, and procurement. Their HR tech stack consisted of an integrated HR & payroll system acquired in 2017 and a standalone time & attendance module, introduced in 2020. I had been given the impression there were a lot of manual workarounds. A site visit had been agreed for the week of Monday 13th. And, no, I’m not superstitious, but I decided on Tuesday. Monday is usually a day for the unexpected! My smoked salmon and cream cheese bagel was delicious. I added a couple of slices of toast with their homemade marmalade. The coffee, as always, was a mellow Colombian roast. I could drive to Cambridge easily enough, but I prefer to arrive fresh. I started to organise my rail tickets for Tuesday 14th on the CrossCountry app.
Pilar revealed that she had some assignments lined up in the UK for 2027 with a well-known large consultancy that handled FTSE100 and some public sector work. The projects were all AI-related, and teams were already conducting investigations at the client sites. headlong rush to adopt AI, but at the same time, futurists were saying it was an error, and all work had to be re-evaluated. In order to get buy-in, AI should be used to automate routine work and get workforces comfortable with it, or culture shock and possible rejection could easily follow. Funnily enough, we were both writing articles on AI for HR industry publications, and we were able to compare ideas. All in all, it was a great meeting, and we hoped We agreed on this: HR was caught in a it would be the first of many. Pilar was staying
at the Metropole, so I saw her to her Uber and then headed to Liverpool Street in a black cab. The requested call I had, to contact the HR manager I met at the Festival of Work, was an assignment to kick off a thorough system review for a fast-growing, mid- sized engineering firm based in Cambridge that was struggling to monitor project hours and remote- worker compliance. Additionally, it turned out that the company’s leadership wasn’t keen on AI because of the ‘hallucinations’ and bias they’d read about everywhere. The outline was: 1,800 employees, various engineering products and services One main location: office and production 1500 based there permanently: 150 were hybrid, 150 were remote. The hybrid population was a cross-section of designers, field service and testing personnel,
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ISSUE 26 GLOBAL PAYROLL MAGAZINE
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