8 months in: How Rolls Royce and Conagra HR teams use gen AI for talent development

Rolls Royce, the aerospace and defense company ($21 billion annual turnover), and U.S. consumer goods maker Conagra ($12 billion annual turnover) have both been piloting an HR-centric generative AI bot for the last eight months.

The tool, called Galileo, was created by the Josh Bersin Company, specifically to act as an HR “copilot.” It contains thousands of articles, research, and interviews with thousands of companies and vendors amassed by the HR consultancy over 25 years, creating an extensive library of best practices, vendor information, benchmarks, case studies, and professional development tools for HR. It contains 50 pre-defined prompts to help those using it with topics like hiring, onboarding, performance management, training, building skills taxonomies, workforce planning, and implementing pay equity.

Until now, the tool has been ring-fenced around Josh Bersin Company data but last week it opened up the ability for HR teams licensing it to upload their own documents. The future goal is for Galileo to be used by organizations as their own in-house HR employee assistant that is customized to their own business and strictly protected. Just over 60 clients are currently trialing the tool.

Here’s a look at how Rolls Royce and Conagra HR chiefs are using the tool. 

Rolls Royce plan to invest in HR teams’ skills

Jet engine manufacturer Rolls Royce has approximately 400 internal HR professionals within the organization — which has around 42,000 employees globally. So far a handful of people have access to Galileo but there are plans to scale that this year. For now, the tool is being used to upskill HR professionals within the company.

“Coupled with the general pace of change around the world, companies are really grappling with the question: ‘How can we help create an environment within our organizations where our people have the right depth and breadth of opportunities to continuously build out their skill sets, but at a greater pace than ever before,’” said Mary Glowacka, global head of learning and leadership development at Rolls Royce.

In practice, that means finding ways that help evolve skills and behaviors on a daily basis, she added. She is currently treating Galileo as a day-to-day “thinking partner” for the HR professionals using it within the business.

Skills and knowledge sharing can be sped up and shared with other HR leads across the business, who can then pass it on to employees in need of it. For example, if a manager tells their HR business partner (the head of HR in their section or department) that they want to put their team through some communications training, rather than take half a day researching that and writing a framework for that manager, they can get Galileo to do it. The tool can access the HR resource data and write an extensive framework that can be tweaked to how the company wants it, within half an hour.

Using the tool has helped skirt legacy issues large HR departments often have, where expertise is siloed in specific functions. “[Using it means] I’ve got a safe space for ideation, for creating some content quickly,” said Glowacka, latter adding, “I can be quite self-sufficient at that moment because I have a generative AI assistant that can help me along the way.”

The breadth of functions HR has to be across has grown exponentially, with the result that in larger legacy businesses HR departments are often complex and sprawling with specialists in dozens of functions from talent recruitment to well-being and performance management. “We have to redesign the HR function so it operates in a more integrated way,” said Josh Bersin, global industry analyst and CEO of the Josh Bersin Co.

Galileo has been designed as a tool to help stitch together different functions, to help HR professionals train themselves across other areas. For example, a well-being or compensation or benefits specialist can use the AI tool to help determine (outside of their normal expertise area) why the company’s sales department isn’t performing well.

“It means HR professionals themselves can become what we call full-stack HR people — more rounded, complete, functional experts,” said Bersin. “Then the HR department feels like a powerful consulting organization because when the CEO or another person comes to HR and says: ‘We’re opening an office, I don’t even know how to get started. Where should we hire? What should the leadership be? How much should we pay people? — you can amass a group of HR people to work on that as a group, as opposed to saying, well, here’s our comp specialists, here’s our hiring specialists, here’s our global employment practice person,” he added. 

Galileo has been designed so it can evolve to ingest an organization’s data to create custom versions of the bot. While the potential is huge, so are the potential risk factors, especially for a company like Rolls Royce which has significant defense and government-type work. 

That makes it a target for cyberattacks. In fact, it’s one of the top three companies in the world with the highest number of cyberattacks attempted every day, according to Glowacka. For that reason, the use of the tool will be meticulously planned and un-rushed. “Organizations around the world are really more in an experimentation phase with how a tool like Galileo can be connected to multiple data lakes and data sources across your organization, so that it creates that entire ecosystem,” said Glowacka.

Conagra using gen AI to modernize talent development 

Conagra has been another early adopter of the Galileo HR AI assistant. The Chicago-headquartered consumer goods company, which produces food brands like Banquet, Birds Eye and Healthy Choice, has an 11-person HR talent transformation team, that feeds into roughly 75 other HR business partners. Each HR business partner is head of HR for a specific business function, like sales, finance, legal, and supply chain.

Conagra has 5,000 salaried employees (and 18,000 hourly workers), so determining how her 11-person centralized team can support that number of people has been the biggest priority and challenge for Lisa Evans, senior director of talent management who leads the transformation team, reporting to the CHRO. “We love what we do, it’s exciting, cutting-edge work, but we just don’t have the bandwidth. So we’re finding ourselves tapped because the strategic priorities we put in place at the start of the year were stretched,” said Evans.

The plan is to use Galileo to help speed up the team’s capacity to respond to the avalanche of requests for guidance and information they receive from across the business while providing content and guidelines that are centralized and in sync with the wider organization’s values, leadership approach and objectives. Currently, that’s been difficult to do with a team of 11, she stressed. “We don’t want five different versions out there, we want one, constant way,” she added.

Currently, Conagra has 100 licenses for HR staff to use the tool, so its HR business partners and HR generalists have access, but it’s being used mainly by the HR talent transformation team. 

She says it’s been remarkable watching the tool get smarter since the first time she used it last year. Initially, she would ask it for simple tasks like benchmarks for how much the average company spends on leadership development programs per leader ($500 each, more for executives.) That helped her put together a business case for growing some of Conagra’s leadership development programs.

Lately, she has used Galileo to help her come up with a framework for overhauling the HR operating model to become a center of excellence in talent development.

“I was super impressed with what it [Galileo] turned up. It gave me an example of a framework for talent development, a CoE [center of excellence] operating model. It outlined the whole thing in steps. Then it gave me guardrails around how to be data-driven, agile, and adaptive, with a focus on capability.”

Evans is planning to use the tool’s most recent capability and upload her own documents. Those will be only visible, and the data only accessible, to people within the business with a Galileo license.

Internal succession planning

Another priority at Conagra is updating the succession planning framework. Currently, when succession planning occurs across the organization, it gets documented in separate Excel spreadsheets. Nothing is centralized. Evans wants to make that data visible to all the HR personnel within the organization to help with internal succession planning and visibility into where skills and experience lie within its workforce.

The company has been building a skills framework and has so far added 720 of the salaried workers and defined the expectations for their role, and the 12 skills required within it. Once their proficiency reach that predetermined level, they can then talk about their development and identify the next opportunities for them within the company. If there are gaps in the skillsets, they can be developed.

“We’ve taken all this data and now we want to be able to put it all into one place that our HR business partners can access — which is the problem,” said Evans. “We want to make more data-driven decisions in our talent practices and that can do things like eliminate bias. So I was able to use Galileo to help me put that succession planning framework together by asking questions around, how do we put this all in practice,” added Evans.

Using generative AI could just be what helps the business accelerate its ambitious plans for talent development, without needing to find new resources it doesn’t have.

“We want to recognize that we have great talent in our organization, and we need to invest in the talent that we have, and so let’s spend money to give them the skills that they need, because we know the workforce is shrinking, it’s drying up,” said Evans. “It’s going to be harder to find candidates and people to bring in on the outside. We need to leverage the wealth of talent we have in the organization,” she added.