By Kelley Butler and Susan Anderson

“Vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity, and change.” –Brené Brown

In that case, Susan Anderson is one of the most innovative and creative change agents I’ve ever met. She’s been vulnerable enough to publicly admit her initial concerns about using generative AI (artificial intelligence) to provide HR and compliance support for Mineral’s more than 1 million small business clients. She’s also channeled that vulnerability to lead her nationwide team of Mineral advisors to create a blueprint that has the potential to transform AI-enabled productivity.

How’d she do it? That’s exactly what I wanted to know. Keep reading to find the answer to that–and so much more.

This post is the first in a three-part series that shares Mineral’s organizational journey to leverage generative AI to improve business efficiency and maintain positive client outcomes. Other exclusive AI resources from Mineral are available now on-demand at http://trustmineral.com/ai.

So, to set the scene, take me back to November 2022 and ChatGPT’s initial release. What were your first thoughts?

Our CTO called me back then and said, “Hey, have you seen this ChatGPT thing?” I took a look and let me just tell you, I experienced every single human emotion over the course of the next three hours. Here’s a tool that presumably could have conversational interactions to answer HR and compliance questions posed by our customers. That’s what we do.

I thought, “Holy crap. Are we going to be out of business?”

“Holy crap.” I think that’s the funniest–and most honest–reaction I’ve ever heard. What happened next?  

We started by creating a [ChatGPT] account. We started putting it through its paces. Some of my team felt excited, while others felt really concerned. I was feeling nervous anticipation, so sort of a combination of both. I knew there was something here we needed to explore.  

Meanwhile, my Slack was blowing up with our technology and our strategy team members asking if we could flip this into a widget that could take care of our clients, particularly those in the cases where they didn’t have access to our experts [such as outside of regular business hours, or on weekends and holidays].  

Then our CEO and I had a long conversation. We [concluded that] we were uniquely positioned to leverage this emerging technology in ways that other companies couldn’t, and we could pair it with our immense [human and data-driven] knowledge base to create something unique for our customers.  

And the rest, as they say, is history. Talk a little more about that “unique positioning” for leveraging AI to drive HR; it might be tough for some to see at first glance.  

Mineral’s mission is centered around bringing that enterprise-class expertise and solutions for HR and compliance to Main Street, to SMBs (small and midsized businesses) of our nation. We have tools [to help SMBs create and maintain their employee handbook and training programs] along with an extensive library of HR and compliance laws and best practices. 

My team of more than 100 compliance experts create and maintain this knowledge base every day. They are seasoned HR practitioners, employment attorneys, and everything in between. I’ll be the first to tell you we have the best team in this country at understanding every angle of the HR and compliance landscape, and making that complexity clear and easy for our SMB clients to act on.  

Every day we answer hundreds of questions from SMBs across the United States, leveraging our proprietary content library and our large pool of expertise curated over more than a decade, helping our customers handle various HR situations–to the tune of an average quarter-million interactions each year. If anyone would say generative AI is both a concern and an opportunity, it’s us. 

We’re here to talk about what we did, the learnings we had along the way, and what organizations might want to consider. 

Ready for more? Exclusive AI resources from Mineral are available now on-demand at trustmineral.com/ai.