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For thirty years, Integrity Data has
built HR and payroll software out of Lincoln, Illinois, a town of
about 14,000 people. We're family-owned, with about 30 employees,
and we've spent three decades in enterprise HR and payroll
technology doing the essential work of making sure people get paid
correctly and on time.
None of that sounds like a company that would be on the leading edge
of artificial intelligence. But that’s exactly why I think our
experience is worth sharing.
Over the past three years, we went all-in on AI across the company.
Not because we had to, and not because someone told us it would be
the safe move. We did it because we could see that it made our
people better at their jobs and helped us deliver better outcomes
for our customers.
In an age where fears are mounting about AI making human workers
obsolete, the contrast couldn’t be sharper from where we’re sitting.
Take a strategic partner located in Bermuda who needed marketing
materials on short notice. With permission, a member of our team
recorded the partner call and used an AI tool to turn her vision
into draft assets. The deliverable landed in the partner’s hands
within 30 minutes, and only minor tweaks were needed.
That same kind of project used to take about six hours. The employee
didn't lose any of her creative ownership or expertise. She still
exercised her skills and judgement, but what she gained was the
capacity to take on an urgent request without letting the rest of
her workload or customers suffer.
We’ve seen the same results across our services. One of the legacy
systems we've long supported is being phased out by its provider,
and a number of our customers still rely on it. Migrating a customer
off it used to take as much as 40 hours of tedious, manual work. We
built AI tooling in-house that understands both the old system and
the new one and handles that data transformation work for us.
Migration efforts that often took almost a full week of work now
take three to five hours on average, freeing our service delivery
team to focus on customer relationships, where their time and
expertise are most valued.
We knew that adopting AI across our business would make us more
productive, but we underestimated just how much. This year, we
challenged our team members to find a 3-to-10-times productivity
gain by leveraging AI. Today, some of our team members are already
closer to 100 times on specific tasks. They aren’t working more,
they’re working smarter.
[to top of second column in this letter] |
This
proves a point I make often: you don’t have to be afraid that AI is going to
replace you, but someone who knows how to use AI may eventually have an
advantage over someone who doesn’t. The best thing anyone can do these days is
move past fear, learn the tools, and figure out how they can make you better at
what you already do.
There's an old idea in economics called Jevons Paradox: when something gets
cheaper and faster to produce, people don't do less of it, they do more. That's
what's happened here. Since going all-in on AI, we've hired more people, not
fewer. We’ve even stood up a small internal team to build an entirely new
product from scratch that wouldn't have been financially possible for a company
our size two years ago.
As a provider handling sensitive HR data like payroll, compensation, and bank
accounts for a living, our AI use inside our company is strictly governed. Our
systems are developed and deployed responsibly, and one of our core values is
“own the outcome,” which means no AI output goes to a client unedited. Moving
quickly does not mean lowering our standards. It’s possible to adopt AI quickly
and responsibly. We've had to do both.
I understand why AI provokes skepticism. It's a significant shift, and the
instinct to wait and see how it plays out before making a move is a natural one.
But in our experience, waiting doesn't protect a business. Rather, it puts
owners and operators in a position where they need to play catch-up.
We didn't wait for Silicon Valley or a bigger competitor to prove out AI before
we moved. We don't think other small and mid-sized businesses need it either.
The real risk isn't the technology. It's falling behind the people and the
companies that learn how to use it well.
Tom Franz is the Director of Customer Experience for
Integrity Data, a family-owned, AI-forward HR & payroll solutions company
serving businesses across the world for more than 30 years.
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