50skills

Someone in the audience sends in a real HR process. A few minutes later it runs. That is my Day 1 session at Nordic HR AI Summit 2027 in Copenhagen 🇩🇰, 6 to 7 January. "Bring us your HR process: let's build it live in minutes." An attendee submits the process, an AI agent designs the workflow on stage, and the room guides it along the way. Nothing pre-built. If it gets stuck, you see that too. Day 2: "AI and automation in HR: what's actually working?" Real examples of the HR processes teams are automating with AI today, where it still falls short, and how to keep the right level of human oversight. Followed by a live demo. If you own a process you would like to see built on stage, I would love to hear about it. Read more and get your ticket: https://lnkd.in/eERJj5yA Nordic HR AI Summit - Powered by Sylvester & co, Christian Sylvester #NordicHRAISummit #HRAI #AIinHR

Hundred conversations at UNLEASH in Paris this week, and the question has changed. Nobody asked me whether they should do something with AI. They asked what people have actually built, and whether it worked. There was a lot of agreement on one thing. At the top of the funnel everyone looks like they're doing something interesting. Dig one level down and the ground is often shallower than the marketing says. So when the frog doesn't turn into a prince, the smart move is a smaller bet. Pick the problem you want to solve and one use case inside it. Run the pilot fast. If it fits, roll it out to the next process, then across locations and countries. The other big thread was where AI should and shouldn't be used. I heard it again and again from HR people. HR should be the ones deciding. They design the process and decide where a human stays in the loop, and where full automation makes sense, they go for it. My honest read on who wins: vertical players. If you can give your agent context and it knows more about the work than a general model does, you're on the winning side. If it doesn't, people could start building it themselves. And more of them are. I met a lot of companies building instead of buying, and wanting the interface they designed rather than the one that came off the shelf. Meeting Josh Bersin was a highlight. I've followed his work for years, and he's usually right about where this is heading. But even my favourite part of the week was dinner last night with some of the top thought leaders at the conference that Daisy Ilaria helped us put together (thank you Daisy!!!). Nothing beats the deep human conversations with peers that we should all focus on having more of and have let AI do the boring admin stuff.

We’ve raised $6 million to help HR teams and operators spend less time on admin and more time on people. The round is co-led by Frumtak Ventures, Swiss Post Ventures, Avant and DRD Investments. It will help us grow the 50skills team, strengthen our product development and expand into new markets. Over the past 12 months, our customers have completed more than four million actions on the platform. Behind those numbers are HR teams finding better ways to manage the work that supports their people. AI is changing how organisations create value. Our job is to make that practical for the teams responsible for people. We are building the operating system for people workflows, where HR teams design the experience they want for their employees and the platform runs it. The hard part is the balance: deterministic workflows where a process has to run the same way every time, probabilistic agents where a step needs interpretation, and human oversight, governance and security throughout. For HR and people operators that balance is not optional, it is the job. That is what we build, and this round lets us bring it to many more organisations. I’m incredibly proud of our team and the care they bring to building the product, supporting our customers and growing the company every day. Thank you to our customers, investors and everyone who has helped us reach this milestone. We’ve opened an office in Stockholm and are hiring across Iceland, Sweden and beyond. If you’d like to join us, explore our open roles or reach out to me directly. And if someone comes to mind, please pass this along.

In London 10 days ago we showcased a map. Four locations of a fictional retail and hospitality group: two stores, two hotels. 48 seasonal hires starting across eight different Mondays. Click a location and you see who starts when, what is signed, what is missing. Nobody asked about the map. They asked what was underneath it. Underneath it was a workflow. The hiring process, described in plain language, built into steps that run the same way every time. Right-to-work check, contract, uniform, system access, first-day schedule. AI where a step needs judgment. A manager where a decision needs a person. The map was just one way of looking at that workflow. It was built in an afternoon with a single prompt on top of our workflow layer, and works with any AI tool. That is the shift I keep trying to describe. For twenty years software started with the screen. Someone designed the interface and the process bent to fit it. Now you start with the process. You describe how hiring, onboarding or offboarding should actually work. You decide which steps must be identical every time and which need a human. Then you work backwards to whatever view you want: a map, a dashboard, a Slack message, a spreadsheet, nothing at all. The interface is becoming the cheap part. The process, the data and the governance underneath are what last.

When people say "AI agent" they are usually talking about one of these three things, and a fourth is arriving. The first is the one you talk to. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot, Grok. Most of us use one or two of these every day. Blank page, you type, it answers. The second is the vertical tool. Lovable builds your app. Gamma builds your deck. Suno makes the music, Synthesia the video. Each one is an agent that has learned one job very well without much more than a simple prompt as context from you. The third is the one inside the company. It knows who is asking, where they work and what they are trying to do, because the organisation has given it context. This is where every company I talk to is heading, and it is where we spend our days: an HR operator describes a process, and the agent builds a workflow that runs the same way every time, with judgment calls handed to an agent or a person where they belong. This requires a lot of context from the user - but once the context is in, it can actually provide so much more value. The fourth is what xAI launched last month with Grok Bot. Their argument: if you hired a new teammate you would not install them on your laptop and hand over your logins. You would give them their own computer and their own access, and you would give them jobs. I think they are right about the direction, even if the first version is rough. Today most agents log in as you. They act as you, with everything you can touch. That has always felt strange to me. An agent doing real work in a company should be more like an employee than a browser extension: its own identity, its own permissions, its own audit trail, and a manager who can see what it did. That is the direction we are building towards as well, so I am watching Grok closely (didn't even get to mention Instinct, but it feels like a simple out of the box version of Hermes/Openclaw that is going viral because it's invite only). How does your company give agents access today? As you, or as themselves? (And if you get what i'm actually talking about and could share thoughts about it in a conversation about what you have tried and tested, we are hiring. Roles in the first comment.)

🚀 The next generation of HR teams won’t fill forms. They’ll design workflows. For decades, HR has been buried in admin — collecting data, pushing papers, chasing approvals. Every new tool promised to save time… but most just moved the manual work into prettier screens. ✨ What’s changing now is 'agency'. AI and no-code platforms mean HR can finally 'design' how work happens — without waiting for IT. 📌 Example: An HR manager can now build a benefits request flow in minutes — the employee submits a gym receipt, AI validates the policy, and if it checks out, the system approves it automatically. No tickets. No forms. No waiting. 🎯 The shift is profound: HR moves from being process 'participants' to 'process architects'. They’re not pushing buttons — they’re designing how people, AI, and data interact. And when that happens? Employee experience stops being a slogan. It becomes the operating system of the company. 💡 The future belongs to teams who treat AI as fabric, not a feature. And to HR leaders who stop managing tasks — and start designing systems. #HRTech #AI #Automation #EmployeeExperience #ProcessDesign