Sarah Franklin joined HR management platform Lattice in January after 15 years Foreclosurethe tech giant, she says Assets, She joined when it was at a similar stage to Lattice’s current one.
“I really saw the scale, growth and opportunity that Salesforce brings to customer relationships and was passionate about building learning platforms for HR leaders there,” says Franklin. “Lattice has a great opportunity to do for employees what Salesforce did for customers.”
This comes as no surprise to the Salesforce graduate. “It’s an incredible time to be developing technologies that manage people and performance,” emphasizes Franklin. “Now, when you bring AI into the puzzle and consider the relevance of employee disengagement and companies’ confusion about workforce plans and strategies,” it’s high time.
Franklin joined Lattice two years after the company closed its last round of funding, a Series F round has tripled its value to $3 billion. From some estimatesAs digitalization and remote work become more widespread, the company could be worth $48 billion by 2028. Franklin replaced Jack Altman, the company’s co-founder, who left to start Alt Capital, an early-stage VC firm.
Franklin “knows what greatness looks like, having led all of Salesforce’s marketing and served as GM of both the Platform and Trailhead businesses,” Altman wrote in a memo announces her hiring. Not to be overlooked is that “during her 15 years at Salesforce, she has also worked directly with some of the software industry’s top executives such as Marc Benioff and Bret Taylor.”
According to Franklin, Lattice’s core product is essentially about managing people and their performance. “When you interact with an employee, you need to empower, engage and train them – just like you would when marketing to a customer.” The 20-year-old company makes its money through subscriptions and currently operates over 5,000 businesses of all sizes pay for its software.
The best human resources managers are those who help employees understand the value of not only their work, but also how they can improve and how their career path can develop. Additionally, AI is already capable of modeling workforce schedules, including determining how employees should be paid. Therefore, the natural next step is to include them in all HR decisions.
The parameters of HR management AI
The rapidly evolving, insurmountable field of AI has already ushered the American workplace into “a great era of augmentation,” says Franklin. “Whether it is an employee, a manager or an executive, it is paramount to eliminate the need for routine work and focus more on strategic, impactful, engaging and stimulating work.”
Lattice is a way to get there, she says; Companies can use AI to make the employee experience more “human,” not less. “It also really helps people be more productive – which makes them happier.”
It’s still a delicate balance. HR is an emotional part of work as it deals with people’s issues and not employees’ issues. As Franklin puts it, it is equal parts “complex,” “thoughtful,” and “complicated.” “This human factor will never be automated by AI,” she says.
A contradictory statement? Not from Franklin’s perspective. Person-to-person communication is of utmost importance; It is the routine work that should be left to AI. “For example, we run performance management processes on Lattice, but we believe AI should not create your performance evaluation.”
And what is the situation of the workforce? Just as strong as expected.
“Take all the hurricanes that happened at once – between the Pandemic, geopoliticsThe MacroeconomicsThe Big resignation. Every CEO looks at their organization and asks themselves, “Who do I have?” What do you do? Where are they? How high is my talent density? What do I need? What will AI do? Where should I invest?’” Franklin says. “There are so many fundamental questions, but no basis from which to truly judge.”
Therefore, it is now more important than ever to have data that leaders can deeply understand. “It’s like Swiss cheese when people leave, get hired and so on,” she says. “The average length of service at most companies is less than a year or two.” That makes questions about culture and upward mobility at a given company “deeply fundamental,” Franklin says.
The bad news? Most companies don’t have these answers. “Data is what matters: understanding what works, what works and doesn’t, what things will look like in the next three to five years and how AI will change the world of work.” And on a more detailed level: what are the costs for each individual employee?
This is where Franklin’s Salesforce background comes into better focus. “It’s interesting to go from a large company with 80,000 employees to a company with 1,000 employees and see that the same questions arise there,” she says.
Questions like: Should there be in-office mandates? Where do we hire? WHO Are we hiring and how many? “Obviously, businesses of all shapes and sizes are facing the same issues. And they all now have the opportunity to invest in the systems that enable targeted talent density creation in the places they want.”