The Future Still Needs People with Jay Kattel | Ep. 56

On this week’s episode of The True North Show I am joined by Jay Kattel and we dive into AI and how it plays a part in human resources, business and leadership.  Jay shares many examples of the work he is doing with clients at the moment and how he is helping them to build AI tools that can help them with simple processes that then frees up the HR experts to work in other areas of the business.  He also reiterates throughout our conversation how important human connection is, how it is always been important and how it will continue to be a vital part of the human race and for business.

Bio:

Jay Kattel is the Director of LUME Partners, a business transformation consultancy built on one powerful idea: simplifying human resources so that people and organisations can truly thrive.

But Jay’s story didn’t begin in a boardroom, it began across four countries, three languages, and ten schools, a childhood that gave him something no degree ever could: the rare ability to see problems from multiple perspectives and connect with people from all walks of life.

With twenty years of experience across private and public sectors, Jay has operated at the highest levels of some of Australia’s most recognisable organisations.

Today, through his own business LUME Partners, Jay works with organisations navigating some of their most complex challenges from integrating AI into HR models, to organisational design, leadership development, business transformation, and everything in between.

At his core, Jay is a problem solver who believes that when you get the people side of business right, everything else follows.  He is passionate, practical, and genuinely committed to helping organisations and the people within them succeed.

Social Media:

Website:         www.lumepartners.com.au

LinkedIn:         http://au.linkedin.com/in/jaykattel?trk=public_post_feed-actor

Transcript:

[00:04] Megan North:
Hello and welcome to the True North Show. I’m your host Megan North. Today I am really excited to welcome a returning guest to the show, someone who is not only a colleague but a really good friend of mine. Jay Kattel is the director of Lume Partners, a business transformation consultancy built on one powerful idea: simplifying human resources so that people and organisations can truly thrive.

But Jay’s story didn’t begin in the boardroom. It began across four countries, three languages, and ten schools, a childhood that gave him something no degree could, the rare ability to see problems from multiple perspectives and connect with people from all walks of life.

With twenty years of experience across private and public sectors, Jay has operated at the highest levels of some of Australia’s most recognisable organisations. Today, through his own business Loom Partners, Jay works with organisations navigating some of their most complex challenges: integrating AI into HR models, organisational design, leadership development, business transformation, and everything in between. At his core, Jay is a problem solver who believes that when you get the people side of the business right, everything else follows.

He is passionate, practical, and genuinely committed to helping organisations and the people within them succeed. And he has also got a really good sense of humour.

Jay, welcome back to the True North Show.

[02:18] Jay Kattel:
Thank you. Great to be back.

[02:24] Megan North:
It is really great to have you back. Jay has sat at the executive table of some of Australia’s most recognised companies, helped list a business on the stock exchange, and is now at the forefront of one of the biggest conversations in business today: how do we bring AI into the workplace without losing the human element that makes it all work? Stay with us, because when we come back that is exactly where we are going.

Welcome back to the True North Show. I’m here with business transformation expert and director of Loom Partners, Jay Kattel, and we are about to have a conversation that every business owner, leader, and employee needs to hear right now.

Jay, it has been nearly a year since you joined me for your first official conversation on the show. What has been happening in your world and in your business since that time?

[04:08] Jay Kattel:
In my world, I’ve had kids grow up a little more. My eldest has gone from primary school to high school, which has been a massive shift just watching him navigate that and all the demands that come with it.

From a business perspective, it has been great to see some of my clients return, which tells me they are happy with the work. I am also getting really clear on the type of client I am aiming to service through the business. And I have been establishing some key partnerships, because I do have a clear sense of where Loom is going in five years and each year is about adding the right building blocks.

I have also been getting my hands very involved with AI. Not just watching videos, but actually learning how to create apps, what tools to use, and how it all fits together. That has been genuinely interesting.

[05:17] Megan North:
And I love that the clarity around the right clients is already a top priority in year two. Because when we start a business, there can be that panic of just taking anyone because we need the income. The fact that you are already so clear on your aligned client is really important.

[05:52] Jay Kattel:
Absolutely. And you quickly know which clients value your work and what you bring to the table versus the ones that don’t. When you get asked for a proposal, you know where you’re going to invest your time. I keep a tracker of all proposals out, and the ones I know I’m going to win, I am going to win. The ones I’m half-hearted about, I know it’s not going to come through, because I think it’s your spirit telling you it’s probably not the right thing for you anyway.

And in Australia, I think what we’re seeing now with all the questions around the big consulting houses, it’s going to be more open for boutique consultancies like ours. Because those large consultancies, I don’t think they’ve got a competitive advantage anymore because of AI. So it has been really valuable to get involved in all of that and learn a lot more.

[06:53] Megan North:
Yes, and you feel the difference straight away. Working with a client that isn’t quite aligned is difficult. But the ones who are aligned: everything flows, everything is joyous.

[07:10] Jay Kattel:
Yes. And I think that is why it is called Loom Partners. I touched on this the first time we spoke. It is a partnering model. We are there to help clients succeed. It is not a pump and dump. We come in, do the engagement, and leave. I am quite invested in the clients I work with. We often have conversations after the work is done, and I do not charge them for that time. If they have invested in me, I have invested in them. I want to make sure whatever we built together grows and goes where it needs to go.

[07:48] Megan North:
That is true partnership. So in all your years working with people and organisations, what is the one thing you think will never change no matter how much the world around us does?

[08:08] Jay Kattel:
The need for connection and the need for belonging. And that is more important now than ever.

I was with a client earlier this year running an offsite with their board, their executive team, and the leadership layer below. One thing that came out was: you have to be comfortable picking up the phone and having the conversation. Because if you do not, you create silos, you waste time, and there is no sense of belonging. You have to invest the time to be connected, because you all need to be wired up for the same purpose.

And it cannot be all work either. There has to be a personal connection. If you do not make the effort, it does not happen. And more and more, because of emails and text messages, people go straight to: I’ll just text them. I’ll write an email. That takes so much more effort than picking up the phone and having a ten or twenty-minute conversation. When you write an email, you sit there festering over every word. Whereas a phone call just happens naturally.

That need for connection will never change.

[09:38] Megan North:
Yes. The old water cooler conversations, meeting someone in the kitchen while making a cup of tea. You and I worked together before COVID and then COVID hit. I miss that. As a business owner I have actually made a decision to join a shared workspace because I miss being around people. How was your weekend? Do you want a cup of tea? That stuff is just gone now for a lot of people.

[10:24] Jay Kattel:
Yes. And I think we are so programmed around when to connect that we need to break that. Why does every meeting have to be sixty or thirty minutes? Why can’t it be forty-five? Why can’t it be fifteen? We have to challenge those assumptions. And we have to be clever about wiring our day: block out time to pick up the phone and have a conversation with no fixed agenda. You never know where it will lead.

I think we are so programmed that people start meetings from nine to five, and then all the work they were supposed to do during the day gets taken home. Block out your time. Make space for connection. Because I am talking to so many people at the moment who hate their job. And most of the time it comes back to how the work day and work week has been programmed. We need to break free from that.

[11:51] Megan North:
Yes. And you know, you and I had lunch a couple of weeks ago and I think we sat there for three hours just chatting. And you got your laptop out and were showing me all these things. That kind of connection you just cannot beat. When we see each other, that first hug, that how are you going, that is something really special.

[12:27] Jay Kattel:
Absolutely. And sometimes the connection is even richer on the phone because when you’re face to face there are expectations around how to behave. On the phone, with no expectation, you can just talk and see where the conversation goes. That connection will always be there and the need for it will only get stronger.

That is where I’m seeing opportunities in my business too. A lot of the work is around: how do you create connection in the team? How do you make the team run more effectively? How do you allow space for connection? How do you encourage people to pick up the phone?

[13:42] Megan North:
Yes. And I have gotten a bit over texting. I often leave voice messages now and the most common response I get is: it was just so nice to hear your voice. It feels more personal and connected.

[14:24] Jay Kattel:
Absolutely. And it goes back to the connection piece. I don’t think that will ever change.

[14:28] Megan North:
So in your conversations with business leaders, what are you seeing with organisations and AI as it relates to HR?

[14:42] Jay Kattel:
It really depends on who you talk to. The big banks, the big firms that have the headcount, the resources, the time, the money to invest, they are actually a bit further along in experimenting and augmenting or automating their services through AI. But in that mid-tier, there is still a lot of anxiety and hesitation. Especially where there is an older workforce leading a particular business unit, they can be quite reluctant.

There is a trust element. They still do not know. And I completely understand that.

What blew me away was talking to a client recently, someone very senior who runs one of the biggest operations in this country. They have an enterprise licence to Claude and they are pumping everything into it. And I still think, regardless of whether you have an enterprise licence, you are still training the model. You are dumping your confidential information into Claude, and while it might not directly tell a competitor what you are doing, it has still learned from what you fed it and will give insights in that direction.

From a HR perspective, it has been a really interesting few months. I have had conversations with several chief people officers in medium to large enterprises. What they are seeing is employee relations cases spiking. One told me his cases had gone up seventy percent in the last twelve months.

And I think I can tell you why. Rather than people having a conversation, they read a situation the wrong way, go to an AI tool, say hey, I am having this issue at work, how do I deal with it? They get a script. They draft an email. They send it to the manager. The manager then takes it, pumps it into their own AI tool, asks how to respond. So it is Claude versus ChatGPT, two AI-generated scripts going back and forth. Something that was small turns into something big and then escalates. Rather than just picking up the phone and saying: did you mean this by that? People are moving away from that and getting too dependent on these models.

I said to this CPO: you probably need to rethink your model. Because that tactical nature of the job, the rising ER caseload, it is not going to go away. So how do you build capacity to deal with the volume while also creating a culture where people are having real conversations?

[19:04] Megan North:
Yes. And as you said, if someone had just picked up the phone, you can usually hear in someone’s voice whether they are genuinely stressed or if something else is going on. A common human response right there.

[20:16] Jay Kattel:
Absolutely. That gets missed altogether. We are so over-reliant on electronic communication. And the need to train people to have difficult conversations, that was always a need even fifteen to twenty years ago. Now it is amplified.

[20:48] Megan North:
Yes. And I always thought it was interesting in HR that we trained people to have difficult conversations. Why weren’t we just training them to have conversations? The moment you put the word difficult in front of it, there is immediately stress. Whereas if you just frame it as: I am going to have a conversation and give some feedback, it has completely different energy.

[21:15] Jay Kattel:
Yes. And look, no matter how much you train people, they only grow from practice. So as a business, rather than rolling out another program on how to have a conversation, you need to think about your operating rhythms as a team and a business. How do you create the forums and opportunities for people to practise those conversations?

How often do you bring your teams together? How often do you create a forum for sharing ideas, giving feedback? That is far more powerful than putting people in a room for a day and expecting them to change.

Think of it like a kid learning basketball. You can show them all the videos you want, but unless you take them to the court on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and give them the ball, nothing changes. Businesses need to think about what that court looks like for their people. How do you remove them from their normal environment, put them in a learning one, and then encourage and reward the behaviour so it gets reinforced?

[22:56] Megan North:
And the leader has to lead that too. Are they walking the talk?

[23:06] Jay Kattel:
Absolutely. And even with leadership programs, sometimes you get little sound bites where people implement things temporarily. But if you really want to change an executive team and how they work, it all goes back to connection. Rather than locking people in a room for an offsite, I think you are better off going somewhere like Uluru for three days, designing an experience that tests how they work together as a team, getting them out of their environment with no distractions so their guards come down a bit. They experience something new together, and that becomes the anchor for changed behaviour.

When a business is having issues around silos, around working to the same vision and purpose, that is what you need to do. You have to design and curate an experience. AI is not going to do that for you. You have to move people away from their natural environment and give them a shared bond they can reference.

[24:50] Megan North:
Yes. And there is science around this too. When my husband and I go for a walk side by side, we use a different part of our brain because we are walking and in nature. My conversations with him side by side are completely different from face to face conversations. And in the car, because one of us is driving and concentrating, sometimes the most surprising things come up because you are out of your usual environment and there is no confrontation. The brain is just doing something different.

[25:51] Jay Kattel:
A hundred percent. And people let their guards down and end up being their true selves. I remember leading a team where one particular person was always guarded at work, always felt she had a point to prove, was quite difficult with stakeholders. Then one day we had a bring your kids to work day, and I saw her with her children. She was such a beautiful, warm human. And I thought: how do we bring more of that to work?

As a leader, how do you create the environment where people can show up as their best selves? And again, it all comes back to connection.

[26:55] Megan North:
Yes. One of the best work activities I ever did was ten pin bowling as a group. Nobody talked about work. You started to see who was competitive, who got frustrated, who was funny. People were talking about things I had never heard from them before because we were usually doing dinner or drinks. An activity completely changes how people show up. You really see who that person is.

So as AI gains more and more momentum, how do you think it will impact work for the younger generation?

[27:58] Jay Kattel:
This is one of the topics that is not getting the airtime it needs. Because we are still very early in our AI journey in Australia.

As bigger organisations start to automate remedial tasks, the boring entry-level things that people traditionally do when they start out, you need to think very deliberately about what that means for young people entering the workforce.

Those boring tasks were not just tasks. Filing taught you how the organisation worked. Running things taught you who was who. You learned what to say versus what not to say. Those things sound trivial but they were how people learned the system of an organisation. As those get automated, organisations need to be very deliberate about designing onboarding experiences that replace what used to be absorbed by osmosis.

And then beyond that, how do young people make the leap to leadership roles if they have never had the informal foundation that used to build itself? That is something we need to be far more conscious of.

On the positive side, AI does offer real opportunities for learning reinforcement. Even for trades, where learning is mostly hands-on, you could build an app that is a quick reference guide for new starters on the job. Reduce mistakes, increase the speed to competency. There are real opportunities. But organisations have to be deliberate. It is not going to happen by itself.

[31:16] Megan North:
Yes. And I think back to being young and starting out as a legal secretary. I remember someone very senior walking into the kitchen while I was there and not knowing what to do when they said hello. That moment, I went back to my desk and thought: I just spoke to such and such. You are learning, you are absorbing, you are building confidence. That does not happen if people are never in the same space.

[32:20] Jay Kattel:
Yes. And it goes back to deliberate connection. You need someone curating that all the time. It cannot be set and forget. A lot of organisations do not see the value of an onboarding coordinator, but I would say if you have the resources, invest in one. Someone who creates those experiences, makes sure the things that are meant to happen actually happen, and keeps leaders and employees accountable.

[33:05] Megan North:
Yes. And at my husband Darren’s workplace, they have a program called coffee roulette. Every couple of months they get a random pairing with someone from a completely different part of the business they would normally never deal with. They go and have a coffee. He has met some really cool people he would never have spoken to otherwise. And he loves it.

[33:41] Jay Kattel:
Yes. And that is a great example of a curated experience. Because it also has a practical benefit. Darren ended up needing to reach out to someone in a team he would never have connected with, and he had already met them through coffee roulette. So he could go directly to someone he had a relationship with. That is the value.

People are fascinating. Everyone has a great story, their own experiences, their own way of seeing things. Once you understand what makes someone tick, you can work with them so much better. And again, it all comes back to connection.

[34:58] Megan North:
Yes, absolutely. So with AI, what does it do to critical thinking within businesses? And what assurance and oversight do organisations need?

[35:21] Jay Kattel:
I think organisations can use AI to either strengthen critical thinking or inhibit it, depending on how they approach it. The risk is getting the dependency level wrong. If you get AI to think for you, and then a real crisis hits and people need to respond immediately, and they have spent months or years developing a learned dependence on the tool, your business is in trouble.

So organisations need to be thoughtful. Which enterprise licence do you get, and for what? Also, depending on your business, you should consider a local AI model. You invest a bit of money to build and hold the infrastructure locally rather than sending everything to a cloud-based model. The reasoning will not be as strong as Anthropic’s or OpenAI’s models, but you can build agents that go out and fetch what they need and bring it back, without exposing your sensitive data.

From an HR perspective, I showed one client a tool I built that helps a lean HR team handle high volumes of employee queries. An employee or manager asks a question, maybe about bullying, or their leave entitlements. The tool picks up the question, generates three clarifying prompts, and then points to the right response based on the company’s own policies and documents.

But I also told them: you cannot set and forget this. You need to look at the back end. What are the trends in what people are asking? Is the advice it is giving accurate and appropriate? There has to be oversight with any AI implementation.

And it is not always about getting rid of people. If you have four or five people delivering a service and you augment with AI, maybe you now need three people instead of five, but those three can handle double the volume. And rather than getting rid of the remaining staff, have one person do oversight of the tool. That creates a smarter, more sustainable model.

For sensitive company data and anything that gives you a genuine competitive advantage, I would seriously look at a local AI model. Keep it within your own four walls.

[39:30] Megan North:
Yes. And I have seen that HR tool Jay built and it is genuinely impressive. Any small to medium or even large businesses that are interested, reach out to Jay directly. Having the HR background myself, when he was showing me, I kept thinking: this is fantastic. But you are right, there definitely needs to be oversight because it needs to stay current and accurate.

[40:46] Jay Kattel:
Absolutely. And it is a real opportunity for lean teams that get inundated with basic questions. Something like this can genuinely amplify HR service delivery and give the team back the time and headspace to focus on things that actually grow the business.

[41:11] Megan North:
Yes, no question. And for smaller businesses like mine, I have embraced AI. I am not as deep into it as you, but I love Claude because I am not great with a blank page. I pop some ideas in, get some starting points, and go from there. But do you think it is important that all small businesses at least have some level of fluency with what AI is and what it can do?

[41:53] Jay Kattel:
You have to have a level of fluency. You have to invest the time to be somewhat fluent. Because in a consulting business like mine, I can hand on heart tell you there is no competitive advantage that a KPMG or Deloitte has over firms like mine anymore. And you can see it, those large firms are cutting resources and augmenting their own models with AI. We are all using the same tools. We all have access to the same insights.

Where previously you might have needed to employ multiple people, I can get away with not doing that to a certain point because I can rely on AI to run my business more efficiently. So AI is genuinely enabling smaller businesses. It gives people who have spent years in corporations building their skills and expertise the confidence to go out on their own.

But here is the critical thing. If you do not have the skills and experience behind you, you do not know what you are looking for in the outputs. AI gives you a lot of rubbish. You have to know what good looks like. And you need to know how to design the prompts properly.

You see all these things on LinkedIn: put these prompts in and it will build you an app. Sorry, it is not like that. My salary benchmarking tool is on version thirty-nine. That required over two hundred and fifty hours of investment. You need the subject matter knowledge to validate what the tool is producing and to know when it is getting it wrong.

So yes, get fluent. Invest the time. Build something that genuinely serves your business. But do not underestimate what that actually takes.

[45:44] Megan North:
Yes. And do not believe the LinkedIn version of it either.

[45:46] Jay Kattel:
Exactly. If you want a great app, invest the time. Especially if you are in consulting, it is something you cannot avoid. But done well, it will genuinely help your business.

[46:15] Megan North:
So what about purpose and the feeling of fulfilment at work? You touched on this before about the percentage of people who are actually doing what they really want to do. Do you think AI is making people look at what else they could be doing? Or is it just how we are evolving as human beings?

[46:34] Jay Kattel:
I think it is how we are evolving as human beings. There is a ground-level movement, and I find it particularly pronounced in people who are thirty-five and above. They spent the first twenty years of their working life doing what they were told, behaving the way they were meant to, and at some point they start asking: surely this cannot be the whole picture. Surely there is more.

And people fill their cup in one of two ways. Some chase it through their work. They find the thing they are genuinely passionate about and pursue it professionally. Others find it outside of work. They coach a sporting team, they lead a youth group, they volunteer for something that matters to them. It does not always have to be work-related. It just has to fill the cup.

And I think we have a genuine opportunity globally to look at how we school our children. We are still largely training kids for an industrial economy, training them to follow instructions rather than to think for themselves. That is not right or wrong, it is just subjective. But I feel like there is a global movement forming around purpose-seeking. And AI is accelerating that conversation, because when your tasks get automated, you start asking what you are actually for.

[48:27] Megan North:
Yes. And as you say, some people are genuinely happy with a nine-to-five job, and we are always going to need that part of the population. But more and more people are asking: is this it? And starting to explore. More and more of the clients I work with are in that question.

[49:14] Jay Kattel:
Yes. And big businesses are still absolutely vital. They do so much for the economy and for people. But as long as someone gets to fill their cup somewhere, whether that is at work or outside of it, that is what matters. Someone doing a nine-to-five job might also be leading an incredible youth program or volunteering for suicide prevention. Who knows? There are so many great things people do outside of work. As long as the cup gets filled one way or another.

[49:46] Megan North:
Yes. I love that. So I am going to start wrapping up our conversation. As a returning guest I have already asked you the usual question, so I am going to tweak it. Over the last twelve months, what is something you have been really grateful for?

[50:12] Jay Kattel:
For me it is simple. I am grateful that I can live a healthy life. My midnight snacking habits aside. But genuinely, the fact that we have the opportunity to live in this beautiful place called Earth, to cultivate connection with the people we want to cultivate connection with, to go out and just enjoy being here, because it does not last forever. The last twelve months have just made me reflect and feel really grateful for all of it.

[50:50] Megan North:
I love that. And I am really grateful for you. I love our friendship. We talk all the time, but there were things in this conversation that I have never heard you say before. There is always something new. You always fill my cup, both as a friend and in conversation. So thank you.

[51:25] Jay Kattel:
It goes both ways. I invest in this friendship because the quality of conversation is always exceptional. You are an out-of-the-box thinker. You bring something that is not normal to get from people. The conversations always go off on tangents but they are always great.

[51:51] Megan North:
Sometimes we sit there and think: how did we end up here? But it is good. Thank you for sharing all of this today. I knew when we caught up a couple of weeks ago that the AI conversation was something really worth bringing to the show. And you are definitely onto something with all the tools you are building.

[52:17] Jay Kattel:
Look, you have to be fluent, you have to understand it. But do not get too dependent on it. You do not want to give away all your critical thinking.

[52:29] Megan North:
Absolutely. And I would also like to thank all of my amazing and dedicated audience, my supporters, and always my sponsors. I hope everyone has a great week and I look forward to seeing you all again next week. And again, thank you so much, Jay.

[52:46] Jay Kattel:
Thanks very much. Good stuff.