#03 - Tech Talk and Real Talk: Jean Olive on Balancing AI and Human Touch

Yeah, I’ve been in technology my whole career. I was spending most of my career in engineering, studying Raytheon Technologies where I worked for more than 20 years on everything from design, development of new technologies.

I also did a lot of work in supply chain and operations. One point, I was the communications lead for the head of engineering and technology, and then I landed in IT, being part of a major transformation going into one product life cycle management system for the company. So that brought me into, I think the fun of IT and technology really enabling people to be more efficient and effective with technology but also learning a lot about change and change management, and that was very interesting. Then I went to Phillips Healthcare and after two years became the Healthcare CIO and that was really a great opportunity to work in a large global organization and supporting the business groups and the many factories across the globe that we had at Phillips.

Then I went to Schneider Electric and did another business transformation. Really focused on energy management and that was all during COVID. So that really brought me back to learning. Yeah, that was COVID. We stood up a large scale, going to S4 HANA across all the United States, a $6 billion business getting off a legacy system that had been there for many years.

It was very high risk and then COVID hit and the good thing I learned about that really is that Agile’s ways of working, and if you have a strong governance and cadence, we were able to actually have our first go live on November 1st in the middle of COVID, with really great risk management and operational excellence, and did that.

And then I kind of had an itch to get back into the health space. My dad had congestive heart disease and his last four weeks of his life were pretty rough, probably the last three to four months were pretty rough. But what I realized is it was during COVID and he was put in the hospital.

And even my mother, they had been married more than 60 years. My mother couldn’t even go see him in the hospital. So technology was good because we could FaceTime and talk to him, but the human interaction and connection is so important. And that’s when I had an opportunity to go to Best Buy and be the Chief Technology Officer for their health business, where we really were focused on enabling care at home, where you can get remote patient monitoring and if my dad had that, not only would have been better for him, peace of mind with my mom, there with him taking care of us and all, the children, but we would have had him more access. The doctors would have really known what was going on with him, monitoring his vital signs and been able to take better care of him virtually instead of having him get to a point that he had to go to the ER and be hospitalized for a week to be really managing and monitoring the same vital signs that you can do at home.

So I did that and then I started to realize that so many people in the United States, especially, we have an amazing healthcare system, but in one way it’s broken because for 4.3 trillion that we spend on healthcare 90 percent of that spend is on 10 percent of the population, which is the chronically ill and mental health.

And I do believe if what brought me to John Hancock is our focus on healthier, better lives and if we can improve people’s health span by managing and tracking and behavior change, we could shift that parameter and we could get people to live longer, healthier lives. Because it’s at a point you may live longer, but you’re not living your best life.

And can we do that? I really believe there’s four things. It’s you’ve got to eat well, sleep well, move more and take care of your mental health. And in many cases, especially in the older populations is that connection and looking at the loneliness factor. So that’s what brought me to Hancock.

And it’s a great company and I’m really happy. I celebrate my one year this week on Wednesday. 

Wow. Congratulations. 

It’s been a very fast year. Yeah. 

Yeah. Amazing. Amazing experience. Lots of experience, Jean. Lots to learn from you.

Yeah. 

Let’s dive in and talk about how to balance the use of advanced technologies that all of us are talking about, it’s a breakthrough technologies like generative AI with maintaining a strong human connection in customer service area like yours now. 

Yeah, I know. I think it’s so important.

It’s human connection, not only customer service, but in everything in the way that we act and interacting. One of the things that does frighten me is even with my children, I have three children, they’re all grown now, but when we started to bring in technology into the home, I remember when we first had the first desktop, paranoid as a mother and it was right in the kitchen on a little desk and you monitored them and watched what they were doing, because I think that connection technology is great, enables us to do with, we can be things so much faster and so much easier, but it can pull apart that human interaction, which is so important for each and every one of us.

And I think really just setting those guardrails and guidelines, and I think it’s very sad. I noticed this all the time, you can go out to dinner or we were on a cruise and there’s this family with two little boys and they’re sitting at dinner and the boys have their iPads, and these plastic totes and the parents are on their phone and I was like, that is just so sad because you’ve got to shut one, you’ve got to shut your brain down, but you’ve got to have those conversations and that dialogue and that interaction and how do you separate them?

And then it goes into the workforce, right? With AI, take away the wasteful tasks, make it easy and efficient because you don’t want to get in these endless loops where you’re not getting your answer, right? It’s all speech interaction and then when you really need the customer to see such as one of the things we have is that lot of long term care plans that have contracts that are pretty complex, so we’re building out what we call Chat Long Term Care so that our agents can accurately and more efficiently answer the calls. Then the calls often come from someone like myself, who would be a caregiver of a parent, or it could be an aging person trying to figure out what do they have and what can they utilize,

because ideally, you want to keep people at home. So we have a lot of services to help people live better at home so you don’t have to get into a managed care facility, but it really providing that service quickly, but accurately. And that’s why I think the leverage of generative AI can really increase the speed to accuracy.

And that’s what we’re focused on. So, you don’t take the agents away, you get better agents and then everybody that manages customer service organizations knows this can be a high attrition rate. The opportunities address your attrition rate and then on the flip side, the opportunities within AI address your training, right?

And your ability to get those agents up to speed and up to par. 

That’s great.  I think  with these technologies coming in, it’s created a very good balance between creativity and accuracy. That is what we all have been waiting for these many years.  

I think I love that creativity, right? Because you still need to be creative.

You still need to have these ideas, but it also like it lets you do so much more to as a leader. For example, Friday, someone pinged me and said, it’s so and so’s 25th anniversary so, I was easy to get right into, Office365, generate a generic celebrating 25 years, tailor it for that person based on what they’re doing and post it on a team site in probably about five minutes. And I think without generative AI, it would have been like, okay, what do I say? What do I do? Or you could even ask your comms lead to generate something, but it enables us to do a lot more, especially for our employees faster.

And if you can do more, it takes those tasks, like generating a job description is excellent for that. That’s one of those things we’ve all spawned and then you try to search through, you know, and better search too, but you’re searching through and trying to find out, did I have one like this before?

And is there one on LinkedIn that’s similar and now it’s just bam!

I know

You get the foundation, you tailor it, and then you get the work done and you feel good about it.

Yeah, at the end of the day, yes, it saves time and adds more structure to your day to day work. 

Yeah.

That’s great.

So Jean, you’ve had a lot of executive roles in your prior experience, and even today you are heading a big company. How would you describe your leadership style and what strategies do you use to inspire and motivate your team? Especially during these rapid technological changes happening.

Yeah. I mean, I think my style is I’m extremely authentic. I have a lot of depth and breadth in experience and so I also, I’m not afraid to speak up and say the things that maybe other people in the room are thinking, but don’t want to say that’s the 360 feedback I actually get.

I’m a people first person. I truly believe that we are nowhere, even with technology, you’re nowhere without the people in your organization. And I want my team members, my teammates to be happy, right? We spent a lot of time at work.

Yeah.

We can’t say that we don’t, we want people to be happy and to have opportunities and I think there’s two things that’s why people leave or why they’re not happy is one that you see a lack of opportunity. And that doesn’t mean that a vertical opportunity, a lack of opportunity, and what can I do next?

And that we managers that we have not given them the right training and skills to be good managers. I do believe everybody gets up in the morning and is going to work and wants to be the best they can. Sometimes they get there and then, we, as leaders can screw them up.

I’m, extremely extroverted. Being on teams and projects energizes me, but I also realized too, that I try to be empathetic and compassionate that, especially in technology, we do have many introverts and this type of stuff sucks out their energy.

So how do we have that balance? But I think really making sure that you spend time with your teammates, that you promote a people first strategy and really people, they want to know that you care and give your time to them because that’s what we are.

That’s really what’s important as leaders is that we give our time to people and learn from them as well, because I think, especially in technology, we can’t keep up with everything, right? I will never be a cloud architect, right? I will never be an expert in cloud engineering, but I can learn from the expertise with my team, what I need to know. And that’s the thing is like the technologies are advancing so fast but I think we’re also at a point now that you know, ChatGPT, now it’s been two years, right? Or almost three. Yeah.

Yeah. They came out in 2019. 

Yeah. And so I think, it’s really getting everyone across the organization, cause as CIO, I’m really responsible for deploying technology across my whole organization. Everyone is excited now about technology, even though AI has been there for a long time, right?

We were working algorithms and machine learning probably 20 years ago, right? None of this is really new, but the generative approach to it and the ease of use, whether it’s through generative AI or power apps, they’re all part of the whole AI. There is an excitement and now people, they’re not afraid. How many people want to go learn how to program in the past, right?

If you think about some of these program languages, we had to learn, they were very complex. But now there’s, with power apps and even Python is a very  easy to use platform.

Yeah, these tools have actually made the life of software developers a little bit easy  because earlier they used to spend a lot of time just bugging debugging codes.

That’s, yeah, that’s what our team is finding, especially in the early adopters, is that it’s a significant, I don’t know so much about, it’s when you’re developing the core code it’s helpful, but it’s no different than anything else, right?

It’s eliminating some of the waste because the debugging capabilities is significantly changing, and especially in developers we have a shortage of 500,000 developers in the US. So, we can enable our developers to do more, to be more efficient, take away that kind of burdensome work then we’re going to deliver more value to the business, which is what we’re here to do.

So I saw on a TV show, a leading executive was talking about who would want to be a software developer now? And I’m like, Oh my God, you can’t  say that. But I think that, people don’t understand. You will always need,  developers, right? We’re always going to need engineers.

Yeah, that’s how you can drive innovation with them. Yeah. That’s great to know. I believe you’ve dealt with moving your workloads, your entire life to cloud, you must have seen the challenges with the cloud and data security, especially. How do you deal with that with this increasing complexity of cloud services and third party dependencies? What do you think are the key challenges you face ensuring compliance? It is a challenge, whether you’re insourcing or outsourcing. I mean, you always say you’re only as strong as your weakest link. And now you don’t really know what your weakest  link is right?

And there’s so many variables. You get to a point that it’s not if, it’s really when. So you need to really think about what’s your resiliency and what’s your business continuity if something happens. And it’s, I mean, we did have a breach with a third party that we had to work through.

And that was very difficult. It’s on the public knowledge. And it was my first time I’d ever had an incident that you were almost like, I compared it to getting up, when you’re traveling a lot and you’re bouncing from hotel to hotel, and it’s in the middle of the night and you’re trying to get up and go to the bathroom is pitch black.

You think, where am I? I don’t want to walk in a wall or trip. And that’s how it feels. And you live through that. So, then it’s you have to find ways to protect your assets, whether they’re internally or externally. And it was funny because I had a ask me anything with my team.

And, I was like, I’m not concerned. Something like a Microsoft Azure, the cloud itself and the security of Microsoft is best in class. And the investments they have. So, you’re not worried about, but then, two days later, CrowdStrike hits, and even though, it was not, Microsoft had protected itself, but that’s, we’re all this big interconnected.

Yeah. 

It’s not just your house, right? You’re interconnected. You will probably be impacted externally and it goes back to how fast can you pivot and respond. And for even CrowdStrike, because in the financial services insurance business, we leverage many third parties because of our, we have a B2C to C to often C business and they were impacted.

Even though my employees weren’t impacted, we didn’t have any issues logging in or doing that, but the applications that they use were impacted. And then, you think about it too, and it’s like, it’s how quickly you can react no different than anything in cyber, right? How do you respond?

And now it gets to a point like when you respond, what decisions do you make? And I think about I’m a loyal Delta customer, but Delta like over canceled flights on a Friday in the summer where some of the other airlines, didn’t cancel, they just postponed and their impact was a lot less, even though Delta was back up and running, the impact wasn’t from the cause.

The cause was CrowdStrike, but the effect was because of the way they responded, right? Not your ability to respond or that your backup or whatever it is. And then in the airline industry, right, it just becomes crazy. So I think it’s really interesting. I think it’s one of those things,  nobody really gets excited about thinking about business continuity, planning and resiliency and the ability to react, but it’s in the world that we live in today, it’s probably one of our number one things to think about and to act on.

Yeah. Every day we see new things keep coming up and suddenly we have to stop everything and we have to just solve these problems on a day to day basis.

I understand. 

I think about what privacy and data is there such a thing right now?  Yeah. I think a lot of companies are dealing with this. 

We all get letters in the mail, right? You get letters in the mail and you’re like, I don’t even know what this is coming from and then they don’t tell you what part of your data was actually compromised. So then you’re like, what does this really mean? You just have to stay on top of everything and watch and monitor. 

Yeah. I was talking with you earlier and it seems that you are a passionate advocate of DEI, Jean. So what do you see as the most significant barrier to diversity and inclusion in the tech industry today? And how do you think that can be addressed?  

Yeah, the tech industry is different. First of all, we have to be able to say it’s different in tech because we do not have, especially in the US. I know for India we do not have enough women going into technology professions.

India, it’s a different, you’re going in, you’re getting the degrees, then the challenges follow, right? Because of the culture and the expectations of women. So I think you have to realize, is this global differentiations, it’s cultural, but in the US we just don’t have the numbers of women going into tech.

So we need to step back and have to look at it through the whole life cycle, the process. Like how do you get more children excited about tech? How do we stop those gender biases? In those thinkings, like my daughter is super smart in math. She used to get in trouble because she could calculate.

She didn’t write everything down and she could give the answer and she didn’t have all the work done. I remember the teacher saying she has to write down the work. And, I think, I’m thinking like me, you figure this and that, and then, but then all of a sudden it became like I’m not smart in math.

Cause I wasn’t doing the problem solving right. And then it’s not cool to be smart in math and so I think that, you know, our education systems really have to promote math and science. We need to get children interested and aware of the opportunities that are presented in them.

And then I think we have to try to get the feeder pool, even with education systems and universities, we’ve got to stop this. I remember, when I went to school, you sit in the chemistry class and they’re like, look to the left and look to the right.

One of you won’t be here next year. And what kind of message is that to send. And that is changing. I see many universities, because it’s not about the interest People are interested and still going in math and science careers that the attrition rate drops. So UMass has like dorms that are focused on engineering students.

My nephew’s going to Oklahoma Tech. He went in two weeks during the summer for testing and getting him ready and making sure he’s prepared for the classes. He’s going ahead. So I do think as a society and an educational system, we are focused on caring of feeding of coming in.

I think then when we get into the workforce, we have to really make sure that we really address the conscious and unconscious biases and understanding what’s holding women back and also the challenges because I do believe the world is focused more on parenting and it’s great to see paternity leaves instead of just maternity leaves.

 It’s great, we are encouraging fathers to take these leaves as well because I think it goes both ways. But the end of the day for females, especially if we have children, we’re still the mother. They’re in our wombs for nine months. It is different. And I do believe it is different, but I think we got to look at it in the workforce is one women need to take care of women.

We need to help them. We need to promote them and we got to get rid of this mentality that I’ve seen that women think, well, it’s a hard knocks. It was twice as hard for me to get ahead and I had to do this or do that. Or in many cases, I didn’t have children so that I could pursue a career.

That’s your decision, but don’t hold other women back. We need to help women because we all have our own story and we need to leverage allies. And especially, when we need to get our peers speak up about these issues. I don’t have a problem calling it out like okay I just sat through two days at an executive briefing center and I didn’t see one woman presenting and representation matters.

And I will say that, but I do think it’s more impactful if one of my peers, who’s a man, says that, right? Because it becomes very defensive, wow we didn’t have anyone here. And you have to be very purposeful and you have to give doors and open opportunities to women. I’ve heard this time and time again from Hillary Rodham Clinton, it’s this kind of like fact that we think we have to have  9 out of 10 qualifications to apply for a role where males are, you will just jump and say, okay, I got 3 out of 10.

That’s good enough. 

Yeah.

I’m going to go for it. And so how do we encourage that like balance to get the right people? At the end of the day, you want to have the right people in the right role, regardless of gender diversity, but how do we help women and the underrepresented, it’s not just women, it’s people of color. The underrepresented need that help and support cause that’s a whole different challenge that’s even greater than what we have. You have to talk about it. You have to look at the numbers. You have to look at the attrition.

It’s the whole employee life cycles. That’s how I look at my DEI plans like how do we attract the talent? How do we retain, develop, engage, and recognize the talent as well? You can’t just bring in, get to a 50-50 male-women or get great diversity, people of color, but you’ve got to understand the cultural differences and always be mindful of it throughout your whole employee life cycle.

Yeah. I absolutely agree with you, Jean, on this and someday I would like to discuss it at length with you,  because I see-

This is what, it’s never going to stop. Someone said to me, when are you going to stop focusing on that, probably the day they put me in my box or whatever it may be because I don’t think I ever really thought about it a lot of it till we had to probably graduate a class above 40, there was about five women. You didn’t really think about it so much. That was for the chemical engineering. But then when you look back and you think about it and yeah, you’re always are swimming upstream but we want to be swimming downstream with everybody and just make it a lot easier for us all to be in the same lane and have the representation. 

Yeah, I agree with you. Coming back to the emerging technologies, Jean and I talk a lot about emerging technologies because that’s close to me and I’ve grown up with the emergence of active data in the AI world.

So I’d love to hear your thoughts on the no code low code platforms that companies are adopting, how do you see these tools are transforming business processes and especially enabling the non tech teams to contribute more to providing more innovative tech solutions.  

Yeah, you have to have a strategy.

In fact, I’m going to be meeting with my teammates from operation on that and I think that if you bring them in right up front, knowing that you still have to follow a software development life cycle and knowing there’s still going to be some backend connections, but really what is defining your strategy, right?

Are you willing to invest in this? And at me and your life, we are significantly investing in power apps and that platform. I think you’ve got a part, whoever your technology partner is, partner with them to have them come and help you work the strategy and then identify opportunities and get to those quick wins and you can get the quick wins.

But you’ve got to have that strategy and you’ve got to lay down some ground rules like we’re going to use this for this because right now there’s so much out there that now everybody has like their preferred partner choice, and it can’t be all over the map, right? You’ve got it because really for just for resourcing  skills and overall cost effectiveness, right?

So, getting that strategy defined and then getting some quick wins and engagement and excitement around it and this is the world today, right? You’ve got to let it go. No different than, years ago, when we first started having desktops, right?

We shared desktops, right? Yeah. Now you’re in a world that we’re pretty much completely mobile and everybody’s got their own laptop and you manage it, right? But you can’t have a company asset and just let any kind of, you’ve got to control, you got to lock down the laptops.

You can’t have people downloading and using whatever they want. So it’s the same. I think technology, even though it feels like it’s going so fast, it’s been the same story, right? Like it’s about a different chapter. Like we just keep building on it and going back to what you’ve learned from your past and how you’re going to implement that.

But it is exciting and nothing that we should be as CIOs fearful or my team members should be. A full stack developer is not gonna lose his job because we have low code, no code. 

Yeah, more importantly, I’ve seen with these kind of tools on the business side, especially the operations team, it’s giving a way to more selves of managing the processes and analytics behind it.

So, it’s giving them the power to decide things on the spot. 

Yeah. They have to have that. I’m doing that. We’re setting up a global customer service organization. It was a big idea because we had three people who were doing low code, no code work, move to that team and some people on my team were a little concerned about that.

And then I was like, this is going to help them just be faster and it’s provided new opportunities for them and to really help an organization that’s, to get to a global contact center. And my peer, this woman that was brought in from AT&T, we think it’s so fast and automated.

So she’s got the experience. She knows how to do this. So I wasn’t concerned that, we were trying to have someone learn on the fly, someone that has that experience and how support each other and setting up the organizations. And you can’t have a I have to build my empire mindset.

You really have to say, I need to enable business growth. I need to take out efficiencies. I need to make sure that my customers, if you think about your customers, that’s, you’re really trying to do it for your customers, right? Cause you want them to have the overall best experience.

Yeah we are on time Jean.

Thank you so much.

You’re welcome. 

Yeah, it was fun talking to you and looking forward to having more podcasts with you and discussing about other things as well that we could not cover in this session. So thank you very much for your time today. You’re welcome. Thank you for pulling me in, Monika. I appreciate it.

Thank you, Jean.