Veckans avsnitt är på engelska och vi möter Burak Bakkaloglu, en ledande expert inom HR-teknologi och analys på Telia. Burak planerar, utvecklar och implementerar HR Tech, people analytics och AI strategi, och hans resa från ingenjör till HR-ledare har gett honom en unik förmåga att kombinera teknik och människor, för att driva innovation inom HR. Vi utforskar hur företag kan ta steget från traditionella HR-processer till innovativa, datadrivna lösningar, samt hur man hanterar utmaningar med integrationer och framtiden för generativ AI inom HR. Burak ger oss konkreta insikter om hur teknik, analys och AI kan förändra vårt arbetssätt och betonar varför svenska företag måste våga ta klivet för att leda utvecklingen.
Som Burak uttrycker det: “Det finns så mycket potential inom svensk HR som ännu inte har uppfyllts – vi kan bli världsledande om vi bara vågar satsa på innovation och teknik”.
Lyssna på avsnittet, för att ta del av Buraks resa och unika erfarenhet inom HR och Tech!
Som omnämnt i avsnittet finns här också namnet på den rekommenderade boken som är: Ethan Mollik's Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI
Transkribering av avsnittet:
Anna Carlsson: Idag får ni spetsa öronen då avsnittet är på engelska då min gäst är Burak Bakkaloglu på Telia. Det är få förunnat i Sverige som både får planera, utveckla och implementera en HR Tech, people analytics och AI strategi, men det får Burak arbeta med. Burak har två jobb, samtidigt. Han leder både HR på affärsområdet Products & Services och samtidigt ansvarig för enheten Group HR Technology and Analytics, Systems and solutions.
Burkas resa från ingenjör till HR-ledare har gett honom en unik förmåga att kombinera teknik och människor, för att driva innovation inom HR utifrån det värde de olika delarna skall bidra med. Vi diskuterar hur Telia genomför sin resa och vilka råd Burak kan ge till andra, OCH hans eget val av strategi och varför. En stor del av diskussionen ägnar vi också åt AI inom HR och ger förslag på prioriteringar.
Och känner du att du vill ha stöd i ditt eget arbete med er strategi så vill jag påminna om min och Thomas Eklöfs kurs som startar om två veckor. HR tech och AI för HR proffs som ger dig grunden för detta. Eller så hör du helt enkelt av dig till mig för en diskussion på anna hrdigi.se.
Anna Carlsson: Welcome to HR Digitaliseringspodden!
Burak Bakkaloglu: Wow thank you, thanks for having me. I was looking forward to this one.
Anna Carlsson: Yes, me too. I mean we met, I think it was about a year ago when I understood you existed. And as there are not that many in Sweden who really work in a Swedish company with HR, tech and data and strategies and everything. I've been so much looking forward to having you here on the show.
Burak Bakkaloglu: Well, thanks for having me. I'm looking forward to this conversation here.
Anna Carlsson: So then everyone probably wonders, who are you then? Who is this person?
Burak Bakkaloglu: Yeah, I can talk about myself a little bit. My name is Burak, and I am right now, uh, working on Telia. I have two jobs. One of them is as a straightforward head of HR job for our group CO, the technical units. The other job that I have is for the group Telia ahead of HR, technology and analytics. So it's everything about HR tech stack and analytics of HR and talent analytics. So that has been my job for the last two years. Before that, I'm an engineer by background. I spent 7-8 years in an HR consultancy company called Hay Group. I think many of our colleagues would know that now acquired by Korn Ferry. I learned a lot about HR, like leadership development, assessments, grading and reward and performance. That was my school. And after Hey Group then I've been to a few more companies. But one of the informative companies in my life is Ericsson, where I spent ten years of my life. And 've done I think in ten years, four different roles there. Two of them were like a head of HR role for a regional HR job. It's roughly 1920 countries, like full scale HR functions with their subject matter expertise. And then my last job at Ericsson was a more SME role where I had talent acquisition, talent management and HR analytics. In together three of those SME worlds. And the interesting thing for that for me was it was all of Europe and all Latin America. So, it was a unique constellation of roughly 85 countries we had. So, during those years at Ericsson, I've learned a lot. So, I'm very, I have a lot of gratitude around that. And then I moved to Telia for those two roles. Which is, if you look at the scopes there Telia is a very Nordic here. But also, like very eager for innovation, kind of culture and nature was there. So, I moved here two years ago. So that's roughly my background. I have like HR business partnership in my belt, consultancy. But I'm also very keen on building systems and solutions for talent. So that's here I am.
Anna Carlsson: It's an interesting combination. And, that you say you're an engineer from the beginning?
Burak Bakkaloglu: Yeah.
Anna Carlsson: And then Hey Group, how did that happen? Maybe that's too long ago, but it's just why do you take the step over to that type of role? Why did you do it?
Burak Bakkaloglu: I get this question so, so many times. People somehow don't understand why and how I ended up in a in HR. But Hey Group back in those days were, they called me and then sold the whole work as a management consultancy. So, I didn't know it was HR. They were like, yeah, we're doing management consultancy here. It was a little bit about like performance management and leadership, but it's mostly a management consultancy. And I was a new graduate. So, I was like let me try it out. It was like wonderful people. Then I stayed, I learned a lot, I worked with roughly 300 companies as a consultant. It was wonderful. Then I decided to stay. To stay. I like talent space; I like doing good by people.
Anna Carlsson: Because I don't know if you know, but in Sweden when you look at the population working in HR, it's above 80%, 87 % if I remember correctly comes from a specific background, from a specific university education. Personalvetarprogrammet, have you heard about?
Burak Bakkaloglu: Yeah.
Anna Carlsson: Yes. And behavioral science. So, everyone is kind of very into the people side, and not so much into the technology side.
Burak Bakkaloglu: Yeah.
Anna Carlsson: But I find that those that have maybe changed the organization's view on technology usually come from the way you came in. Like with a combination of engineering and then loving working with the people aspect, the leadership, the talent and so on.
Burak Bakkaloglu: True. Probably I think there's something there that with that background of engineering and a little bit more systemic thinking or analytical thinking, helps to deploy these more systemic solutions. And I think it's easier to switch from an analytical background towards a more behavioral and organizational science. Versus the other way around is a little bit difficult. I don't know why it becomes when people have the behavioral science or like psychology as their background, it becomes a bit more difficult for them to switch to full on analytical sides. But it's very personal, I guess. I just love where I am because like, systemic HR can do good by 20,000 people in one deployment. I think that's very powerful. There's a way that a good HR leader can impact a leadership team and executive team in a way that they become a more cohesive team so that the whole organization becomes a more peaceful and cohesive organization. So those are very powerful stuff. Which kept main the business.
Anna Carlsson: Yeah. And do you see a difference between, I mean how much of the HR people do you meet here in Sweden, do you see a difference in the organizations that you meet? I mean Eriksson, I don't know if they are typically Swedish? But I guess they are here.
Burak Bakkaloglu: Here they are. I meet a lot of people, I've met a lot of wonderful people here in HR. And I think there are very similarities. So, I can't really compare countries because there there's a range, right? In every country HR people have their ranges. In Sweden that's the same. And I think there's a difference where the organizations that HR people work. If they are international and multinational, then there's a different flavor of that. When we're talking about a more like a local companies here, then the HR functions tend to be a little bit more on a local legislations. And like unions become a bit more dominant in the agenda. But I don't see a significant difference from like here between like Sweden versus Germany versus Netherlands. There's a little bit of a difference in UK than Europe. And there's a completely different world in US in terms of HR. I think those are a little bit kind of the schools of thought. That's why whenever I read an HR book, they usually come out from a US based or US originated author. And I feel like and my colleagues here as well. Yeah, it's a little bit too American and there's something different there of course. But I wouldn't say there's too much difference in Sweden and the other countries. What I am, and I say that quite often, is that there's much more potential in HR and the HR people here in Sweden than they're fulfilling. Because if you look at everything else in Sweden, like the startup. For context the startup world is very vibrant, right? We have amazing startups here, amazing scaleups here, and amazing companies like a famous Klarna and Spotify's here. Where I think that's like world leading innovation. And I think there's potential for HR to be that world leading innovative HR to be here. I don't think that potential is being fulfilled now. So, there's potential to be world leading HR in Sweden.
Anna Carlsson: I agree. And I see that in these tech companies, the innovative tech companies, not only the big ones you just mentioned, but all the other smaller ones, they have the innovative thinking. And they don't really understand that the rest of the community do not have that.
Burak Bakkaloglu: Right.
Anna Carlsson: So, when companies that want to sell their solutions into Sweden come to me and ask, okay so how do we reach the HR community? And they have something very innovative. I say usually that maybe you should focus on the tech companies, because they are the ones who can really understand. They are already there, they have the infrastructure, they started to do analytics, they are utilizing on top solutions and so on. Where we see that still the majority of the Swedish organizations and HR teams are not.
Burak Bakkaloglu: True, true. There’s some potential to be there, to be to be discovered, to be grabbed there. And I think that we can maybe discuss that at length at some other episodes. Then there's the scale as a very important variable. So, the company can be very forefront, very innovative tech company, etc. But then not much of an innovative HR can be done with 800 people. It's very difficult to be in the forefront of HR with something like internal talent marketplace. So, you almost know everyone with 800 people. So, is there really need to have all of these like deploying of like powerful technologies? Probably not. So, there's this, scale factor there that some companies do lack. Even though they're very innovative and tech savvy. But it's a rabbit hole we can discuss for an hour.
Anna Carlsson: But it's also that you can utilize interesting point solutions for your recruitment, for example, when you're a tech company. So yeah, but we shouldn't. Let's talk about what you're doing.
Burak Bakkaloglu: Yeah, let's do that.
Anna Carlsson: We can talk so much, yes. So. So you're now at Telia since two years. Do you want to describe where you are? And I mean, do you see anything that has to do with this maturity levels and so on? Where were you when you came? Were they already work on going, or have you changed the agenda somehow?
Burak Bakkaloglu: Well, I think everybody wants to believe that they leave a legacy behind. But I will focus on more around HR technology and analytics piece. Because apart from that in my HR head role, we've done fantastic work about like leadership frameworks, deploying a new cultural framework and skills, etc. But I'm just going to put that over on the corner there and then focus on the HR tech stack and analytics.
Anna Carlsson: Can I just stop you for a second? Because I think that it's good for the listener to know, what size do we talk about your organization? How many employees?
Burak Bakkaloglu: My HR, like HR role is looking after roughly 4500 people. They're like business partners of like 15-20. In that role. In HR technology and analytics, that's again, roughly around 15-20 people when we talk about analytics as a smaller piece. But we have a fantastic workday related team. So, it's like 15-20 people in each team roughly.
Anna Carlsson: And the total organization is how many who gets touched by this tech?
Burak Bakkaloglu: Yeah, it's the whole of Telia. That's 19,000 people as of today. We're operating in five and a half countries. We sold our Denmark operations, but we have still people on the ground. So, it's five countries, 20,000 people is the scope of the of where the whole HR technology is touching. And that's group wide technology and group wide analytics. So, whatever we do in workday is valid for Norway and Estonia, Sweden all our footprint. So that's the scale. Thanks for clarifying that. Maybe it's a good point for everyone to know.
Anna Carlsson: So, let's get back to the HR tech stack and analytics. Yes.
Burak Bakkaloglu: I would love to talk about the journey that we've been on. But also, it's good to acknowledge the market dynamics there. Like there's a significant speed of change in HR technology in the past 4-5 years. I think your listeners are very familiar with how things are evolving, or the at least at a notion the of the speed. There are a lot of startups or companies that are very interested in air technology. Because for the last 6 or 7 years, companies are investing in those areas. There's a lot of Capex and OpEx going to that area. That means that there's money in that sector. And then we could see that venture capitalists and even in Silicon Valley are pouring money to these HR startups. Which is fantastic for us. Then we see a lot of choices there. But it comes with a complication in the market. Now we have too many products and too many companies. It's almost like when people are like, let's just say ahead of talent management in a big company. When somebody is a head of talent managing a big company, then there's endless amazing products and product demos. Like it's just like they're in a in a candy shop. So, want to do an internal talent marketplace. And there's companies like Eight Folds and gloats with amazing products. And then if you want to do like hiring an application tracking systems, there's like another five amazing companies there. So, there's been a lot of good companies and products coming out. That's kind of the dynamic of the market, but it's getting more and more difficult to integrate and manage that ecosystem then. So suddenly then, I'm talking about like if you are the HR technology responsible in the company. Suddenly the head of hiring wants to have two applications. Talent management wants to have one. Learning and development wants to have two LMS platforms. And people sometimes underestimate the amount of work it needs to go to integrate and then keep that or manage that ecosystem. So that HR tech stack becomes more and more complicated because there's a lot of amazing products out there. My personal strategy, and it's not liked by everyone. But I do want to stick to 1 or 2 major players. Preferably an HCM or like human capital management or HR system like workday, where we can just. My motto is like have everything that workday can offer, if only like the last resort is to buy something outside the workday and integrate it. So that's my strategy. So, I very much like to consolidate everything under one roof. Because with the legislations of like wonderful legislations of privacy, GDPR, and now AI is coming integrations, APIs, getting all those um verifications is is just too difficult. So, managing a HR tech stack of 2025 products is almost impossible. So, my strategy has always been, let's consolidate, let's pick a good partner. Like who's really a good partner to delivering good services for us. And Workday has been like that for us. And I want to thank everyone that we work together there. And once we picked that partner, then we go all in. There is of course like lock in type of uh disadvantages there. Once you're in you're in all those things. Yes. But the other side of managing a complex ecosystem is not something that I favor. So that's my kind of small, giving the context about what's happening in the market.
Anna Carlsson: Can I just ask a question about the integrations? Because what we've seen also the last few years, are these integration solutions specifically for HR. Because there are other organizations that decide on a best of breed. It's not so common here, but there are companies who choose the best of breed solution strategy. But most of them all, as I see in Sweden, like you what do you call it? The sunflower. Big piece in the middle, and then small things on the outside that you need to add on.
Burak Bakkaloglu: I think at that point there is no, I don't believe there's right or wrong in those decisions. Because some companies could be a little bit more tech savvy. They have a good team, technical team in the background who has good relationship with the system integrators. And then for them, it's a little bit easier to manage an ecosystem. Some companies don't have that luxury. Some companies are very limited in their resources and then they just need something plug in place. So that's why I think it makes sense that everybody has their own truths in there. But all I'm saying is that I think it's very easy to chase after an amazing product demo where the background is very difficult to integrate. Because I've been on the other side, like as head of talent management. I was like, we're talking with this company eight-fold again, wonderful company with almost like AI native company. I was like, we must have this. I was just like harassing everyone like we must have eight-fold, look at their product demos in this like hiring experience. Then later in life, I get to learn how difficult that is. So now I feel all those people who just kind of look blank on their screens, like now we have to integrate a huge new thing. So, I think I just want to let people be a little bit aware of how difficult that is in the background to integrate and maintain those integrations. And not every company is built for that. It's good to be humble first.
Anna Carlsson: Yeah. So now you can continue.
Burak Bakkaloglu: Yeah. But that's kind of where I am in my preference. And I think, I might be right, I might be wrong. But the journey what we had in Telia is pretty much based on workday now. Our HCM. Where we started in our journey is one, I wanted to understand to two things. One is the HR technology stack piece. And the other one is that we've built the HR analytics unit from scratch. The technology piece is something that I want to start with the purpose like, why do we have an HR technology? I think it's good to give a little bit of a thought to that. And the three reasons for me that I started our journey is that one of course, it's governance, right. It's like its better governance when we had one system defined processes and it goes across countries. Fantastic. The second thing for me was then the user experience. So, I think that's such an important piece that everybody talks about. But very few companies walk the talk. And when I talk about user experience, I'm talking about a consumer grade experience. There's a difference. When in our daily lives we buy stuff with one click in our iOS Amazon application. And then the moment we go into our HR systems, everything becomes 15 clicks. So that consumer experience and HR system experience is just too vast of a gap. And I think that user experience of an HR system should be as close as an iOS application. It will never be like that. But I think that should be the aim. And that's the second user experience piece. The third one for me is that enablement. And that's basically that technology enables us to do stuff like imagine again, going back to this internal talent marketplace. Right. So, if we didn't have the AI technology to store, assess the skills and match them with the opportunities. So that's a very complicated system. Without that system in place, nobody could talk about internal talent marketplace. So, I think those are the three things for me, very important for HR technology. It must be for good governance. It must be for good user experience, and it has to be good for enablement.
Anna Carlsson: I mean, one thing is to look at the governance and the experience and enablement. But the other is also what is the end goal? What do you want to achieve with the technology and with the data? Because you get a lot of data out of it.
Burak Bakkaloglu: True. That's a good point. And I think that's why the, I had the pleasure to have those both units next to each other and then because they're very connected. The analytics road map is also structured, but also not that easy. From analytics perspective, when we hear that from the market, we always hear things like. let's talk about predictive retention. Like all of these like fancy. But I mean everybody wants to talk about this. But to reach that place, there's a lot of work to be done in terms of preparing the organization, in terms of definitions, in terms of processes, data architecture, data pipelining. So that's something that we have done, that we are doing right now in Telia. And you know what the best thing that that is in Telia that is different than Ericsson is. Telia is a mainly B to C company. That is like we're serving individual consumers. That means we have a very strong marketing and analytics units. So that's such an amazing luck. Ericsson is B to B, so it doesn't need to have like that strong of like a CRM and analytics piece. So suddenly when I came here, at Telia there was like 300 data scientists and data engineers around. And they're wonderful people. And, and when you say like, hey I need help with data architecture. And they're like three world class experts coming in and helping you during their lunch time. So that was fantastic for me to see at Telia. So, we start from scratch when it comes to data and analytics. And we started from like very basic definitions. Like if you if you asked us promotions and in the five different countries that Telia has operated. Everyone had a different definition of promotion. So is that when they described something it was like, yeah, but that's internal hire. The job changed was like, yeah, but she got she got an increase. That's a promotion. I'm like, not really. So, we started on standardizing our definitions. Then we started with building our data architecture. So how do we formulate those definitions? Let's just say promotions. So, we we've written an example or a standard definition. Then we define a simple a very user-friendly process how to do promotions in workday. And then we define the data architecture, how that data will flow to our systems. Only after that we could talk about career planning and descriptive statistics about what happened last year. So, without standardizing those definitions and building the data architecture and data pipeline, it's impossible to start talking about predictive career moves of employees.
Anna Carlsson: Because then if you don't know what a career move is or a promotion is, then you can't compare. And then it becomes a different fruit.
Burak Bakkaloglu: Chaos. Exactly. It's because I've been there too. I think when it comes to analytics, this laying, I call that, like, doing the plumbing, the laying the groundwork is not glorious. I'll also want to say that as well. It's hard work. When you when you talk about, we have built the data architecture. Nobody claps you. Nobody is like, wow, amazing, fantastic let's post it on LinkedIn. Nobody cares in LinkedIn if you if you build a data architecture. But that is the lifeblood of everything else. So that infrastructure work is super important. And it's super fun as well. I've learned that in Telia. So, when you have good experts around the table building those infrastructures are very valuable. So that's where we are in our journey now. We have done our definitions. What's an organizational transfer? What's a promotion? What's a career move? What's an internal move? Direct appointment. And then we've formulated our processes and workday screens. And then they flow to our systems. Now we're waiting for the data to pile up so that we can do business applications for them. Because it also needs to start with the business needs. So, we don't want to do stuff on our own.
Anna Carlsson: You want to be ready for the request.? Or do you already serve requests from the organization?
Burak Bakkaloglu: There are two types for me, and I give this this example of one. The business challenge comes to us. And I think the important thing is like, really interrogate the business question. Because usually when there's a business challenge, people go to a solution in their minds and then suddenly people are leaving. Yes. Because of salary or let's do a salary survey. And somebody needs to say like, okay maybe some of them are for salaries, some of them are different. So, we need to question the business challenge in the first place. So that's one thing. But the other thing is also what I call as an iPhone moment, where nobody knew that they needed iPhones when Steve Jobs just came with a touch screen. And then suddenly they're like, oh, we needed a touch screen. So, there's also a lot of things that the analytics and HR teams come up with as a solution, that the executives haven't seen yet. So, we see a trend like, there's something there, and then we can do these kinds of improvements. What do you think? I think that's also a really good way of promoting solutions or actually kind of designing solutions.
Anna Carlsson: But is it also a way of showing how HR can be strategic by utilizing that? Showing that we will have data on this, and we could do this for you.
Burak Bakkaloglu: Yeah.
Anna Carlsson: So, create examples of possible. Not solutions, but how to kind of dig deep into a problem instead of doing what we've always done. We have already decided on the solution before us.
Burak Bakkaloglu: Exactly. Yes. I had this wonderful person in my team at Ericsson, called Matt in UK. I'll send this over to him. So, he's one of these very curious minds where he goes into the data and looks for trends. So, what's happening there. And I think that's a priceless skill. And one day he came, and he said like I've looked at the like key account managers and account managers. And I looked at their skills. And these are the four skills that we see in a good key account manager. And these are the three ones that are uu in the account manager. So, if you focus on these three skills with those account managers, they will become good account managers. And then he saw that purely from data. Well, he wasn't he wasn't on the corridors. He wasn't talking to the managers, but he saw that in the data. So, there's a lot of solutions buried in that data. It just waits for a curious mind. And then that suddenly then became a very strategic solution towards how we developed our key account managers. So, it was wonderful. But then I think there's a lot of good things that we can do for our people, employees that actually can come from HR as a very kind of proactive, stemming from the data. I'm very passionate about those things.
Anna Carlsson: Me to. So, I'm kind of a bit frustrated that we haven't moved further in Sweden and utilizing data. Understanding more or less, I see that many organizations are looking at their HR systems as their process support. Kind of moving the way they workday today, before and after. They just move it into a system and don't see what's the usage we can get out of this. How do we do it different? And how do we kind of co-create based on experiences and what we want to achieve? To find these unknown answers in the data. But then you need to collect the data to be able to get those.
Burak Bakkaloglu: That's such a good point. I agree. I think the at points I'm also a bit more. I was like, ah, we could have done so much from this data. and I think everything that is produced by that data has always been for the betterment of the lives of the people. I've never seen an HR analytics unit coming out with weird stuff that will make people miserable. So, everything that comes from there is just betterment of the people and betterment of the society. And I'm I think there's so much power in that.
Anna Carlsson: You can debate that because it's also basis when you need to cut down on resources. So, people could argue that it's used for that as well. But it's usually used to be a good organization to make sure that you if you need to get rid of people because you need to downsize, you need to find the right people to do that way too.
Burak Bakkaloglu: True. But also, they're very seldom applications like that. But even in those cases, the insights, the talent insights will make things more objective. They'll make things fair rather than subjective things. Like, I saw that guy over the elevator, so he's very energetic. He said good morning to me. So, he's a good guy. I think that's kind of the fairness element is actually on its own, very good. But that's kind of the journey that we have in Telia. I think there want to get a lot of insights and then manage intentionally or help people manage their careers, intentionally. Help leaders to manage their productivity intentionally. All of those things will stem from a good talent insight. We're laying the groundwork for that now.
Anna Carlsson: So, when you look at Workday today. Do you have other solutions outside of it? I guess you do. To come compliment. So what areas are you adding?
Burak Bakkaloglu: I'm going to avoid naming other companies. I think one of the good use cases is internal talent marketplace and ATS. A good platform should provide both of them. Because I think at the end of the day applicant tracking systems like hiring platforms should be able to also provide. Now they are providing a good internal marketplace. I think that's a good complement on top of Workday. A good complementing layer. And I know Workday is working on that, and then they're going to kind of upgrade their offerings. But for now, there's something there that to be complimented from outside.
Anna Carlsson: I think they're quired, but I don't remember because I've had holiday. Which company it was.
Burak Bakkaloglu: They did, yeah, they did an acquisition.
Anna Carlsson: Yeah. One of the innovative AI ETS: s.
Burak Bakkaloglu: Yes exactly. And I think that was a really good move. By the way Workday doing really good moves. Now, they have also deputed a partnership with Salesforce about AI agents. And that I think we can talk, it's an interesting topic to talk about. I think workday is doing the right things. Their new CEO, I forgot his name, seems to have a good strategy and good Silicon Valley knowledge behind him. But the ATS and internal talent marketplace is one area. There still, I think the talent in size HR analytics world is also something that companies are looking for other complementary solutions. Like visors and all of those, other providers in the world. I think that's something that if your company is really advanced in analytics, maybe you might want to look at that. But I think like 70-80% of the companies should be comfortable with what they have with the HR systems.
Anna Carlsson: Or work with their common analytics tool that they have in the organization.
Burak Bakkaloglu: 100%, yes. And people shouldn't be too fancy there, in analytics piece. And I think Workdays module is good enough. But I think those are two areas that maybe Workday needs complementing. Probably there are a few more that I'm missing. The learning experience platforms. The standalone products or companies are so good, it's difficult for someone like success factors or Workday to keep up with these companies like degreed. So, they're like because they're like, it's their niche. They're working on those things like cornerstones degrees. Also then again, the question is like, do you really need that state of your art thing, or can you handle 80% of your needs with what you have?
Anna Carlsson: Yes, and that depends on what type of company you are, how advanced your learning activities and how hard you need to keep people and develop them, and so on. So, I guess it's all unique. Every time is a unique situation, how your organization looks like. But I want to give a shout out to all the Swedish solution providers. Because I'm not sure they are keeping up. With the ATS: s there are too few that really takes advantage of the value and the possibilities in AI, for example.
Burak Bakkaloglu: Hmm. What is a good example for you in Swedish? Because I’ve talked to Sana, and Joel.
Anna Carlsson: Yeah. That's true. But there is one learning, there's one recruitment that is good and so on.
Burak Bakkaloglu: Yeah. And I think they're again, I think back to my statement there. In a context that is so friendly to innovation, so encouraging to companies starting up, scaling up like Sweden, like Stockholm and other cities. I would have expected more. I think Sweden could have had like the top, like three of the top ten in the world of those areas. And I think that's something that needs to be, that's a potential that needs to be fulfilled. I agree with you on that.
Anna Carlsson: And it could be that we also have a culture of not testing too much ourselves. On our like, uh, you know we sell Volvos because they were secure and yeah. So, we do in many of the more traditional organizations, choose to take it slow and not take the most innovative and new stuff into us. We let others try. So, it's kind of weird unbalance maybe.
Burak Bakkaloglu: Well, what do you think about? Because when you when you say that I'm thinking in a way that I don't think that the CEOs or executives of the companies are too demanding in that area either.
Anna Carlsson: No. True.
Burak Bakkaloglu: So, there's not much of a pull towards trying out new stuff in talent area. Why don't we have this? Why don't we look at this challenge from a talent perspective and then have this kind of solution? I don't see that kind of a pull from CEO: s of the companies. I think there's something there that, if we can create that pull, then the HR ecosystem here can live up to that pull. There needs to be a bit of a pull there.
Anna Carlsson: Yeah, that's true. And we also see in some research that PWC did. That the utilization of AI or the push of AI from CEOs are quite lower in Sweden versus other countries. So, it has I mean, it has a probably a personality and culture thing as well. And our way of how we democratize our decision making and taking more, you know, being a bit more sensitive maybe in our traditional organizations. But there is a lot. I mean, we have so much. We could be the best of the best.
Burak Bakkaloglu: Yep 100%, I agree. But it's a good maybe segway to talk about AI a bit.
Anna Carlsson: Yes.
Burak Bakkaloglu: I would love to talk a little bit of AI.
Anna Carlsson: So, what's your view on AI and how we should use it? And generative AI. I mean people shouldn't confuse generative AI is a part of AI.
Burak Bakkaloglu: Oh exactly. It's a good segmentation there. I think a lot of the things that we're seeing right now is generative AI. But that doesn't mean that like ChatGPT is all AI there is. Like the AI is has been with us. The terminology is like since 1950s. We already have a lot of AIS based machine learning, AI based applications in our companies. Where it just optimizes our supply chain or just, we have these AI based like hiring algorithms, etc. But generative AI is completely different. I think it's a completely different paradigm and it's a lot more powerful towards the business life. I've been lucky that in Telia we've been talking to select really good partners. And we are experimenting pretty much state of the art things that also in our consumer perspective and also in our HR side as well. We've been in conversations with Google's and OpenAI's of this world. And like OpenAI was here in our office with us in the past months. And this is actually something that we're very proud of. So, Microsoft, Google team, we're working very closely with them, especially in also in HR ideation and design. Google team here have a fantastic can-do attitude. Like how we can help you with our foundation model Gemini's and platforms that they're offering. So, in Telia we have a lot of exposure to that. Because we also as Telia want to try them in our consumer facing applications there as well. So that's where all of the companies start. Like that's where the famous Klarna example about their chatbot has been like a sensational thing. We can argue how much it worked, how much it didn't, but then seems to be doing quite well. But this is the first use case for every company. That means that everybody is trying to produce a good conversational chatbot that is powered by generative AI. And then where do we go from there? That has reflections towards HR as well. So, our roadmap in HR and how to use generative AI in HR is basically three steps. And I'm saying that like our roadmap, it's pretty much on a on a piece of paper. And then we've had like four people nodding on it. It's not like somewhere that's a formal roadmap. But our thinking around that is we want to have that like state-of-the-art experience that we want to provide to our consumers, with a conversational chatbot or helping our agents. We want to have the same thing for our employees as well. So that means that we will be talking about assistance internally, that actually have access to all of our knowledge base and can help our employees with everything that they ask. And this could be very simple stuff like, I want to take Friday off. Can I take Friday off? Do I have any holidays left? Which everybody is like, for example. But it could also be like, I have this person in my team acting for a leadership position. I want to give her an acting allowance. She's been there for two months. How do I do that? So, you know, normally you would ask that to your HR generalist or to your help desk. But these are the things that we want to provide to our employees by a conversational chat. And that means that it's basically the consumer experience replicated as employee experience. So that's kind of our first use case there. So difficult to achieve by the way.
Anna Carlsson: More difficult than you think.
Burak Bakkaloglu: Oh my gosh it's so difficult.
Anna Carlsson: Yeah.
Burak Bakkaloglu: So difficult. Because everybody thinks that when the experience, they go through with ChatGPT. You ask them and then they been talking about some of the like cool things that you've been prompting as well. We think that the internal chatbots will be like ChatGPT, that's far from it. Like you take the foundational model, like OpenAI's ChatGPT or Gemini from Google or Claude from Anthropic. You take those things and then to be able to train them in your company's products or knowledge is just a lot of work. There's a lot of retrieval will augmentation going in there like parameter optimizations, fine tuning and this and that. It's very difficult to achieve that. Those chatbots don't hallucinate to you. It's just like I want to give my person an acting allowance and then the chatbot doesn't find the right answer, then suddenly hallucinates. And why don't you give her three salaries? And then you don't want that to happen. So, to achieve that level of certainty and in good service, it's very difficult. It's very difficult for the consumer piece and it's very difficult for the employee experience as well. That's kind of the first stop. And I think we're talking about probably the next 2 to 3 years for that. Anything less than that would be like optimism. Let me just put it mildly. Mildly is optimism. But I think next stop is more interesting because now we're also seeing a lot of AI agents in place and a genetic AI. Where AI agent means that software that autonomously, execute a task. And we're talking about with generative AI, complicated tasks and like a bot capable of decision making. Let's just take the same example. So, I have someone acting for a leadership position, and I want to give her an acting allowance. So, in the first phase you would ask a chatbot, like, what should I do? What's our policy? And then it would say, like, our policy is to give 20% of her salary per each month. And then you need to initiate this form. So that will be our chatbot. The AI agent version of that would be, I have this person acting for the role for two months. Can you give her the acting allowance? And then the AI agent goes in, finds the policy, goes to Workday, initiates the forms, and then completes it probably in half a second and comes back and says done. Now that AI agents, there's still like a lot of good companies that startups working on that. That will be very powerful. That we're looking at probably 3 to 4 years’ time frame. But it will be very powerful. It will start with simple things like, can you open a requisition for me? I don't think it's simple, by the way.
Anna Carlsson: No
Burak Bakkaloglu: It's very painful process in every company. But that's AI agents is the second step. That is probably 3 or 4 years away. And we ultimately then want to go to the third stage of a trusted That's a co-worker where we will have AI as our, coach and mentor. Someone that we will ask questions. A good analyst next to us. It's a bit of an advanced five six years out. Depending on the trajectory of the AI: s. But that's something also, Sam Altman, the OpenAI's founders, when the founders and CEO said, as I think he coined that as an experienced worker. What I would like to call it trusted coworker. Wherever you need help with an analysis, or this is the data. This is the presentation. What do you think? Or this is the product portfolio. What kind of offers should we give to our customers? So that's kind of a coworker space. It's a little bit further ahead. But I think it's good to have these. at least directions and vision so that we as HR start talking about this, with the companies as well. I don't think those conversations are taking place as much as it should.
Anna Carlsson: No. And I'm just thinking, what about just utilizing it for my own work? I mean, just training yourself in. I mean building a chatbot. Before that the whole team probably needs to understand how this works and. So, there are also other parts that you have to have in your strategy, don't you? Or do you have that regulated? Do you use copilot to secure it or what do you do on that?
Burak Bakkaloglu: We do have a more comprehensive and I think I mentioned a little bit more around like HR technology and HR. But overall, in AI we have a strategy around, we have our use cases, our strategy. And we also are working on Upskilling our people as well, because some of those things, the use cases, how our people will be using this will be just emerging, like our people will find their way with that. So, I think at some point we just need to enable them. So, we're working right now, of course, we're working with Co-Pilot, and then we have a good partnership with Microsoft and OpenAI on that. And then we have our own kind of a corporate ping chats and, and our own GPT: s. The thing that we really want to do is upskill our people so that they also understand by experimenting and experiencing it. We have this in June, two months ago in our, Lithuania centers where our we have 1000 people there. Our technical operations are partially there. We had one week with Google, with people from Google around an upskilling in in AI, generative AI and cloud. So, the good thing is that our hackathon, and this is like really nice. That we wanted to have a solution for a consumer use case. The team who won this was from procurement. Now that's fantastic alibi for the power of AI. The AI can imbue us with superpowers. So, like someone, a team of three-person team from procurement can develop an application that will serve our consumers. So, I think we would never think of that. But with giving the tools to our employees, I think those things will emerge.
Anna Carlsson: And they can also innovate because they are not bounded by if they are part of the delivery. They always think limitations. But if you are somewhere else, I've seen that in IBM. I come from IBM. You say you credit Ericsson for a lot of what you learned. I learned so much in in IBM. I always highlight that. And also, we did early things with AI there and had hackathons on what we could use it for in the beginning when nobody knew.
Burak Bakkaloglu: The famous Watson years?
Anna Carlsson: Yes, the famous Watson years. So, I've been part of that when they started to build like these drones that could look at fields and crops and stuff. Yeah. So that's, you know. And that wasn't really the team that worked with that. It was just people who were interested in and had crazy ideas and started to put those together, weren't crazy. They were good.
Burak Bakkaloglu: I think it's just. amazing to set people free and then just give them the tools. And generative AI is a fantastic tool about these ideas and design and ideation phases. But I also want to talk about a few risks to mitigate. I am an AI optimist. I believe in AI, and I believe in technology. But one of the things that apart from everything else around how much like energy consumption and compute. All of those things are significant threats. But one thing I want to grab our people's attention is the inequality when it comes to access to AI. And I've seen this firsthand when Microsoft gave companies a trial number of pilot licenses, And I think usually Microsoft gave like 20- 300 licenses to companies to just kind of try it out. So suddenly there's a team’s meeting there, Microsoft Teams meeting there. And then one person out of seven has access to copilot. And then he or she can suddenly get all of the decision points, meeting notes and everything summarized. And the other six can't. And suddenly the questions start arising, like, how did you get those meeting notes 30 seconds after the meeting? And then there's copilot, you click on this. And there's already they're starting a notion of why don't I have that? And this person has access to that. There's a company’s risk a lot of unfairness’s there. That's something important because at the end of the day, all our people will be evaluated by their impact and outcome. And I think it's a little bit unfair to give one part of the organization a powerful tool like copilot, and then not give it to the other and then have the same performance evaluation at the end of the year. Where it's just almost unfair that a very difficult decision expects for the companies. Because Microsoft Copilot is not cheap.
Anna Carlsson: No, I know.
Burak Bakkaloglu: So, it’s very difficult to give everyone copilot. But if people start selecting, then what's going to happen? So, I think that's a little bit of a dangerous, not dangerous, but it's just a little bit tricky decision-making path there. That companies need to be very careful about.
Anna Carlsson: And we're getting to the end of the time we are allowed to talk for today. Maybe we can meet again and discuss?
Burak Bakkaloglu: I would love that.
Anna Carlsson: So, I will just finish up with asking you with all the things we have discussed today. Do you have any advice to give to the listeners, uh, what to take on first and how to kind of where to start? where not to go?
Burak Bakkaloglu: Yeah, It's also a difficult question. Maybe one practical thing. There's a wonderful book from Ethan Malik. I don't remember the name because that's the downside of Kindle. Right. You don't see the, the cover of the book,
Anna Carlsson: But I can check it up and put it in the notes.
Burak Bakkaloglu: I think. Yes, that's a great start for people to start reading. Because it's about generative AI and the use of generative AI in the workspace, and as individuals. That's a great start from there. I have my own blog if interested. Maybe people are interested about that. And hopefully my book will come out in December, if I can agree with my publisher. So maybe starting with Eaton Malik will help. And I'm happy that I think we're going to. People can reach out to me on LinkedIn as well.
Anna Carlsson: Yeah sure, I will put all the details.
Burak Bakkaloglu: But that book is a good start, and I think that will trigger some conversations.
Anna Carlsson: Yeah. And then I'm looking forward to your book coming out. So, I will for sure read it. So, thank you so much for coming here and sharing all your experiences.
Burak Bakkaloglu: Thanks for having me. That was very nice.
