The Stretch – Shifting Gears: How Toshiba's CHRO is Driving HR's AI Transformation

Jason Desentz:
Honestly, how much tolerance you have for change.

Kevin Fyock:
We, believe it or not, are gonna touch on cars and skincare, which are more connected than you think.

Jason Desentz:
It's like buying a Ferrari and then you get the automatic, but you, you know, you just go real slow, like twenty miles an hour.

Kevin Fyock:
And then we're gonna talk about Toshiba and how it brings over a century of legacy to its cutting-edge technology and use of artificial intelligence.

Jason Desentz:
Our whole base, one word, is innovation. We were born from someone who was an inventor.

Kevin Fyock:
Today I'm really excited to be joined here by Jason Desentz, who is CHRO at Toshiba. Jason, thank you so much for joining us.

Jason Desentz:
Yeah, thanks for having me.

Kevin Fyock:
Toshiba is a household name. Most people know what you do and how you do it, but maybe not the depth of what Toshiba is.

Jason Desentz:
Yeah, I didn't know the depth until I got the job.

Kevin Fyock:
Well, well, why don't you, for the benefit of our listeners, tell us a little bit more about Toshiba? You and I, before we sat down, had an opportunity to talk about how diversified you are. So indulge us. Tell us about that.

Jason Desentz:
Yeah, so Toshiba really started off as, I mean, we're, our whole base, one word, is “innovation.” Okay. We were born from someone who was an inventor. Who created and encouraged people to bring anything that you wanted to turn mechanical, this is 150 years ago, into something that he could build for you, and he did it. So just keeping that in the theme, Toshiba then started branching out and actually working, we're very similar, from a US company to Japanese company perspective, like General Electric, where we're diversified in multiple industries.

I always like to say, we’re industry agnostic. We'll try anything if we can innovate it or reiterate it because not always you're in innovating things, you're sometimes making it better.

Kevin Fyock:
Yep.

Jason Desentz:
And, and Toshiba does a really good job, but we're in everything from oil and gas to quantum to cyber, you know, all, all kinds of software stuff we're in, but obviously people mostly notice for consumer products.

Kevin Fyock:
Yep.

Jason Desentz:
So the TVs, the, the laptops—by the way, Toshiba was the very first laptop, if you didn't know.

Kevin Fyock:
Really?

Jason Desentz:
Yep, really. I've actually seen it in Japan and I actually touched it, I probably shouldn't have, but I did.

Kevin Fyock:
Is it behind a lock and…

Jason Desentz:
No, no, they got this really, they, they're like, they're known for like world first. So like in the museum they have world first if it's something they created.

Kevin Fyock:
Oh, that's so cool.

Jason Desentz:
Like, yeah. So they're very innovative and we have this, one of our core values is create together. So we love to create with others and trying to inspire others to innovate more.

Kevin Fyock:
Yeah.

Jason Desentz:
But we're, we're in so many different diverse industries. It is, it is interesting. And in Houston, where I'm at, we have four different factories, including automotive, where we do stuff for hybrid electric, which I didn't tell you. We do stuff for Ford Motor Company. We build in so many different ways that we're always trying to think for the future.

Kevin Fyock:
Well, okay, so maybe this is an obvious and maybe a softball question, but you're the CHRO and you think about innovation, like how do you lead with innovation in your role?

Jason Desentz:
So in my role I'm, I always want people—we've gone, I think, in society from curious to cautious.

Kevin Fyock:
Yep.

Jason Desentz:
So I want us to go back to that curious. So I'm, I'm encouraging, and I kinda always have done this with my teams, is I'll get in a room and I'm like, all right.
Here's, here's what we got in front of us. Who has ideas on how we can do this better? And usually it's crickets because no one's like, I don't know who this guy is. I mean, is he really asking? Does he really want our opinion? But once you start to get the flow, and then I create new projects. We have, when I first got here, I did a full audit of all the HR processes. And I said, okay, I want to understand what can we do better, what are we out of compliance with first off? We got to fix things.

Kevin Fyock:
Yeah.

Jason Desentz:
More importantly, how can we move towards a digital transformation? Right? Everyone says that, yeah, but we really are doing it and creating AI agents to try to play around with it, and I'm also giving my team room to play and then encouraging others by inspiring and showing them what we're doing so they can do it with their departments.

Kevin Fyock:
So, when we think about artificial intelligence, it had to come up, right? And I'm sure we'll spend some time talking.

Jason Desentz:
I'm learning how to spell AI stuff.

Kevin Fyock:
That's right, it's, it's really difficult. Yeah. So the, the spectrum of curious to cautious. Do you sort of sit when we think about the emerging language model space? Do you think the advent of every LLM out there, has that made us more curious or more cautious? Because I, I could potentially see both, especially with how I use it in my role, how I use it with my kids, but what do you think?

Jason Desentz:
It's no different than when you, when you change something, like when the internet first came out. Remember the old joke, “yeah, it's on the internet, it must be true.” Yeah. Right? I mean, I think where there's a little skepticism no matter what we do, but that's okay. That's where compliance comes in, right? We gotta, we gotta put up—
I don't like to use the word guardrails because I think innovation can get stifled when there's too many.

Kevin Fyock:
It sure can, yeah.

Jason Desentz:
So I, I really think you just have to be a stewards of whatever you're putting in place and making sure you're compliant and you're still, you know, you're always having that in the back of your head, but it's not stopping you from moving forward. It's not stopping you from trying something new, but making sure, like, the risk, you guys gotta be, make sure you're talking about the risk and the effect it can have on the business.

Kevin Fyock:
Yeah. And, I've always said, especially in my role focusing on innovation and doing so much work in, in the AI space, you know, the human has to be at the center, and maybe by an extension of that, HR needs to be at the center, right? Like when I think about Aon and what we've done, the tools we've built, how we've scaled different solutions within our organization, outside of it, our chief people officer and our HR segment has been at the center of that. So, I imagine you're doing a lot of the same things at Toshiba.

Jason Desentz:
Yeah, I, I firmly believe that HR should be, or, excuse me, AI should be led with, with HR. We've done, we've done that in the past with other things. When, even when the computer came online, I mean, yeah, I was an IT tool, but they didn't go to IT to say, “hey, how do I restructure my org? How do I, let's change my job description?” No, they're going to HR.
So this shouldn't be any different, but I'm finding more and more HR people are just afraid to raise their hand and say, I'll, I'll be the leader, I'll be the champion. For some reason there's this skepticism because they're like, “well, that's IT, that's not us.” And I, I completely disagree with that. And I think you'll find HR people will fizzle out and you're gonna find those that rise.

Kevin Fyock:
You know, we, we've done a lot of surveying with our clients around AI and where they think the opportunities to adopt it within the sort of HR space, you know, what is prevalent, what is, maybe they're a little more cautious with. Things like performance management, compensation, I feel like there's more readiness to say, “let's lean in there,” but, you know, I sit in our health business. Health continues to be an area, and benefits at large continue to be an area where I think there's a lot of cautiousness.
And, and I'd love to see employers maybe be a little more bold, of course having the right compliance framework in place, but when I think about HR sitting in the middle, particularly in the way we can engage people in their health, there's a huge opportunity there in so much white space.

Jason Desentz:
Well, we, again, are the stewards for these types of things, and, and any, any benefit program I bring in place, there's always an element of I'm testing the waters to see its value.

Kevin Fyock:
Yep.

Jason Desentz:
Right? So it's always about whatever I'm implementing, what's the value that the employees are getting from it, right? So I, from time to time,we're still looking and asking, we're not trying to be paternalistic. We're asking our employees, you know, “do you find value in this?” And we've added a bunch of benefits and some we realize really not that great. So we're gonna pull them back and then we're gonna add others. But the point is, I think we need to start changing things to be more—I talk a lot about generational differences. And there's even more so the gaps these days. I mean, just thinking of training and development, I mean, the average attention span of Gen Z is eight seconds.

It’s ridiculous. Like, I'm like, “say what? Eight seconds?” I can barely get a sentence out in that. But the, the challenge is, is how do I capture them because they're the growing population when you got the folks at the other end of the population retiring at a faster rate even more so than ever. We, we gotta speed things up.

Kevin Fyock:
Yeah. Well, I think one of the beauty of whether it's the, the commercial application of, of these emerging language models or the enterprise facing opportunity, I do think there's an opportunity to span generations as well, right?

Jason Desentz:
One hundred percent.
I think the way in which you do it is super important. But we don't think about it in those contexts. We're always about like “here's for everybody, here's how we're gonna, what we should be doing,” in my opinion, is breaking it up and saying “here's how typically, that, the value is here, here's typically the value.” But we still love to hear from you. Are we wrong? I mean, I think for them there's so much study out there. It's, it's, it's interesting. But I wanna give back enough what people find valuable to them to want to stay in, and it's not just retention in the, in the reality. It's just I wanna make a better workplace because the reality of it is we spend more time at work sometimes than we do at home.

Kevin Fyock:
We do, that's right. I think what I find particularly fascinating, and then we can move off the AI topic, because I think we could just talk about this for an hour, Jason. Yeah. Is when we, when we talk to our clients, about 50% of them are very much leaning into the language model space. “We want to roll it out for this benefit program or this LD program or this compensation program.” So 50%, but then when we survey employees and we say, “how are you using it in your day-to-day role?” like 90 plus percent of them are like, “I'm using it every single day.” And so there's this disconnect between what we're doing at the organizational level, and then how employees are using it and so, like, how do we bridge that gap between the two?

Jason Desentz:
Well, even, we're Copilot shop, so we did a utilization and most of the utilization is for email.
And it's sad because we spend millions of dollars on a product that we're not fully using its capability. It's like buying a Ferrari and then you get the automatic, but you, you know, you just go real slow, like 20 miles an hour, versus getting the six-speed Ferrari and then you're like really crushing it because you know to use it. I like to use the full six speed, to be honest with you. But we gotta, we gotta teach people.

Kevin Fyock:
Yeah.

Jason Desentz:
So that's why at Toshiba, we, we launched Toshiba University last year with our learning model, and we have, we're getting people AI ready. What does that mean? It means we're teaching them the basics. What is AI? It's everywhere, but no one really sits down,
and tells you the different learning models, the different enterprise applications of it. We're gonna get into that.

Kevin Fyock:
Well, we're on the floor of Transform here, but maybe next time we do a podcast, let's do it in a driver's seat and passenger seat of a Ferrari. And not at twenty miles an hour, maybe at two hundred miles an hour.

Jason Desentz:
We can either do Ferrari. I got somebody that owns a Lambo with a Huracan. We can do that, too.

Kevin Fyock:
I'm, you know, listen, I, I'm good with all of those options, Jason.

Jason Desentz:
Vipers, I used to work for Chrysler, I have a few people.

Kevin Fyock:
Nice. Yeah, I, I grew up loving Vipers.

Jason Desentz:
I love the Viper.

Kevin Fyock:
We can nerd out.

Jason Desentz:
Connor, Connor Assembly, that's where it was built.

Kevin Fyock:
Yeah, very cool. So, you know, we've talked about AI and we've hinted at workforce transformation. So tell, tell me about what you've done, and again, we're sitting at Transform, so, so what an apropos transition.

Jason Desentz:
Sure.

Kevin Fyock:
What's your experience been in workforce transformation and, and what has that looked like in the past couple years?

Jason Desentz:
So I've always approached it being in, the, coming up in the autos, Lean Six Sigma. I'm a process guy, right? So I approach things from a process perspective and workflows and waste, right? Looking for waste, looking for efficiency improvements, which then leads to ROI, which then leads to productivity improvements. So my approach is always starting with that and then leveraging digital transformation to try to mitigate the low-hanging fruit. Right? So then that way, because we need to go from, we need to be more advisors. So our roles are gonna change, to be more advisors, and then it allow us to create new things. I think we're stifled sometimes because the mundane, business as usual stuff. That, I mean, we just, these AI agents with my teams, and we had fun with it and played around with it. And we came up with, all right, let's fix, let's figure out how to find ways that employees can, can go to, rather than going to you specifically, can they go to an AI agent and get the questions answered? Let's just get that stuff out of the way. So we have, we're coming up with Payroll Princess for—we have an agent for that that has all your payroll questions, we got Time Tamer, that answers your attendance questions, and, and now I had the payroll people create that.

Kevin Fyock:
Yeah.

Jason Desentz:
And they're like, “wow, I created an agent.” Like, “yeah, we showed them how to do it.”

Kevin Fyock:
Yeah.

Jason Desentz:
So, but we got a long way to go, but it's a start, right? We're playing. I think we gotta give more room for play.

Kevin Fyock:
Yeah. I, well, Payroll Princess is quite playful, so I like it.

Jason Desentz:
It wasn't my idea. The, the team came up with it, and I, I said, “Great, now you gotta get a logo.” And they're like, “what?” I'm like, “go ask AI.”

Kevin Fyock:
That's great. So, I think you used the term before – FOBO, if I remember correctly, right?

Jason Desentz:
Yes, yes I have. Fear Of Being Obsolete.

Kevin Fyock:
So, “fear of being obsolete.” We know FOMO, but “fear of being obsolete”. So this has been the, the topic du jour across every industry, right? My parents are talking about this and, you know, friends of mine who have kids in college, like AI job elimination. What does that look like? So, tell me about your thoughts on, on FOBO, or fear of being obsolete.

Jason Desentz:
Yeah, it, you know, it's context because this is not new. Yeah. Automotive put the horse out of business. Sorry. So, AI's gonna change things a little bit, right?
It's rather than being afraid, I like to approach it with, “okay, what can I learn from it? And then how do I get past it, or how do I improve my skill set, so that way I'm gonna be a valued asset to the organization?” So, it's all about perspective and context. Your parents you just mentioned, they were around when automation came out. That's right. We don't have robots building everything in factories. We have a lot of robotics. Yeah. We have a lot of machines, but we also created new jobs.

Kevin Fyock:
Yeah.

Jason Desentz:
We have people that fix those machines. We have people that train on those machines. I think you're gonna see new jobs that haven't even been created, yet. I think the way in which we work will just shift again. But it's not going to replace the human worker. I mean, because at the end of the day, even AI needs human interaction and intervention at certain ethical times. I'll use payroll as an example, right? You need, when you're gonna make major payroll changes, you want a human to finalize and check off on that. You don't want it to be all automated.

Kevin Fyock:
You know, in its optimistic view, so I know that you're a motor city guy and we have, we share similarities and love of cars, it sounds like.

Jason Desentz:
Through and through.

Kevin Fyock:
I was just talking to a friend about this when we think about, like, when the Model T came out and Henry Ford perfected the assembly line.

Jason Desentz:
Yeah, my hometown, Dearborn.

Kevin Fyock:
Yeah, it, like, what an amazing way we saw the car being built. And yes, did it put the horse and buggy out of business? To an extent it did. But I think we're seeing this new form of revolution, and I, I, like you, am quite optimistic about what it'll do for the worker. It's just gonna require us to be maybe a little more nimble than we've had to be in the past 20 years.

Jason Desentz:
And I think speed is gonna be different this time around because AI is so fast.

Kevin Fyock:
Yep.

Jason Desentz:
Again, your, your org chart, we were talking about it before we got on. That, that slide about—not org chart, excuse me—the slide about timeline, it's, it's scary when you really think about it. You're like, “wow, that's fast.”

Kevin Fyock:
It is fast, it is fast, but, you know, I, you know, when Alan Turing coined the term artificial intelligence, for the most part, back in the early fifties, I, I wasn't working at Aon at that point, not yet.

Jason Desentz:
But unless you're —yeah, I want your skincare product if that’s it.

Kevin Fyock:
It's, it's amazing, yeah. It's a reverse aging, amazing. But when we think about sort of, yes, it hasn't been that long, but as far as our careers, it, it actually has been a long time, right? Yeah, I think. And the, the, the topic is not a new topic at all. And the way it's morphed from the idea to, you know, these machines beating people at chess to helping it to support radiologists, I mean, I, I'm excited for the next five, ten years and what it's gonna do for our industry and what's gonna do for our roles.

Jason Desentz:
Well, I, I think health is a good example. My younger son had a heart transplant at age three. So diseases, health care, let it go on all of that, in my opinion. Because with the advancement of where my son's at, I mean, if he had been born five years prior, he wouldn't have made it.

Kevin Fyock:
Yeah.

Jason Desentz:
So that, it's important that the technology's there, but I think there's so many positive applications. But people are just scared because they just don't even know what to do with it. “How do I approach it? How do I learn about it? How do I share my skills about it?”

Kevin Fyock:
That's right.

Jason Desentz:
I think that's where people, as humans, we're just trying to figure out, “what's my path?” “What's my yellow brick road?” Yeah. We got the Wizard of Oz over here at the sphere, so I just want to make a reference.

Kevin Fyock:
I love it. So, Jason, let's bring it all together. So, what changes and opportunities, so what do they mean in the context of transformation? We've talked about FOBO, we've talked about transformation, we've talked about artificial intelligence. So, what opportunity do HR leaders have in this space in the things we've talked about?

Jason Desentz:
I think I, I have a phrase I use all the time and I usually use it around influence, but I think people need to be more authentically vulnerable about this.
Let people know what you don't know.

Kevin Fyock:
Yep.

Jason Desentz:
Ask for knowledge in other areas. Enlist people to help you. You're not alone. I don't know why people think they have to do this on their own. There's so many people that talk about this. In fact, I'm, we're always talking about it. But I think you need to be authentic about where you're at and where you want to be and what, and what you're, honestly, how much tolerance you have for change.

Kevin Fyock:
Yeah.

Jason Desentz:
Because I, I always, I love saying this, but there's a great shirt I saw once that says, “I love change, you go first.”
Right? So, but sometimes you have to be the first one out. And also Peter Drucker, the, the godfather of leadership, once said one great concept, planned abandonment. So, there's gonna be some AI things you'll implement that you're gonna have to abandon because it's just not working. Be prepared to also have that perspective as well. No one's thinking really about that. But that's all the way back from Peter Drucker.

Kevin Fyock:
Yeah. So, Jason, I tend to end the podcast with our crystal ball question, and I ask our guests, like, “where do you see, you know, your industry, your idea, in the next five to ten years?” We have covered a lot. So, I don't know whether to ask you about where we see the automotive industry, where we see AI, where we see Toshiba. So maybe I'll just characterize it as in “where do we see the emergence of HR and HR adjacent technology being in the next five to ten years?”

Jason Desentz:
I mean, I, I'm excited actually for what's, what's ahead. I mean, I see folks all around here. One of the things I'm even looking at is AI coaching. Why is that different? Because traditionally coaching has been reserved for leadership, executive management, it's kind of more of a privileged right.
But if I can give AI coaching to all the masses, I mean, think of how much more developed and how faster we would develop if I had it earlier on.

Kevin Fyock:
Yeah.

Jason Desentz:
And I had the capability. So, I'm excited for things like that, right? It's gonna prepare us for the future, not just faster, but we'll be more holistically rounded than maybe one trick ponies and we will, maybe that'll break down silos.

Kevin Fyock:
Yeah, and democratizing things that, to your point, maybe the elite had access to but others can now.

Jason Desentz:
I mean, I had a top wait ten years to get executive coach. It’s terrible! But I mean, I had good mentors, but yeah. Yeah. I mean, really think about that. I mean, just the ability, and there's many other applications that HR's got coming out, right? Health being one of them, like, let loose on better ways to find plans that suit people's budgets, right? There's gotta be better ways we can think about health care. I think the paradigm of traditional healthcare, my opinion, is gonna be on a revolutionary change.

Kevin Fyock:
Yes, I 100% agree with that. And, candidly, it's probably the, we, the main reason why I come to work every day, because I think we're, we're trying to do that, right?

Jason Desentz:
It is fun.

Kevin Fyock:
It is fun. It is fun. Jason, this was a ton of fun.

Jason Desentz:
Yeah, thank you.

Kevin Fyock:
I look forward to, after the podcast, just talking about, you know, the Dodge Viper, among every other car it seems we have sure love of.

Jason Desentz:
I’ve got a few friends.

Kevin Fyock:
Nice. Well, again, thanks for joining.

Jason Desentz:
Thank you for having me, I really appreciate it.

Kevin Fyock:
And to our listeners, thanks so much for tuning in. This is The Stretch.
Again, this is season three, and we're doing things a little bit differently. We're gonna bring you fresh perspectives, new ideas, and real conversations. Thanks so much for tuning in and we'll talk to you soon.