People and Culture Director at Spark New Zealand

Heather Polglase

You would be hard-pressed to find someone working in the field of human resources (HR) who isn’t currently thinking about AI and how it will change the way we work. And if you’re not, you should be. 

The scale and pace of change that AI brings with it are significant, and it’s a topic that we all need to understand, no matter our role or what ‘work’ looks like for us today. 

While it may feel new and daunting, the reality is that AI has been around in various forms for quite a while now. If you’ve ever watched a show based on recommendations on what you may like from Netflix or asked Siri for assistance, then you’ve used AI in your day-to-day life. But there is no doubt that the capabilities of this technology are now accelerating rapidly. 

This acceleration brings significant opportunities for businesses and our country. New Zealand is a small nation of just over 5 million people, and our country's productivity challenge is well documented. New Zealanders generate significantly less output than developed countries despite working longer and harder. Spark recently released a report alongside research consultancy NZIER, which revealed that just a 20% uplift in advanced technologies could increase industry output by up to $26 billion in the next decade. This is not an opportunity Aotearoa can afford to ignore. 

As New Zealand’s largest telecommunications and digital services provider, Spark has naturally been using AI for some time now. It has helped us to deliver personalised customer experiences, boosting our conversion and the efficiency of our marketing. It has also helped us with ‘right planning’—which is about making sure our customers are on the right plan for their needs. Our AI-enabled ‘Made for You Review’ looks at how customers use broadband and create personalized recommendations based on this. This is really just the beginning of how AI can improve customer experiences. 

So, what is the role that People and Culture teams (aka HR) play in this arena—now and in the future? In my view, the first step is for HR leaders to understand how to transform their own HR technology and systems and model how we need to think about workforce productivity in the future. This is an opportunity for HR professionals to be co-pilots of AI and to ensure this technology serves the people they serve. 

In our People and Culture team at Spark, we made the conscious decision in 2020 to start utilizing technology more purposefully to support our HR strategy and deliver more value to our people and customers. We started using an AI-enabled ‘blind recruitment’ tool called Sapia.AI, which reviews job applications for roles in our frontline teams (stores and call centres) and removes the unconscious bias that candidates from gender and ethnic minority backgrounds can sometimes face. Over 17,000 candidates have been through the AI-driven chat interview process since its launch.

"In our People and Culture team at Spark, we made the conscious decision in 2020 to start utilizing technology more purposefully to support our HR strategy and deliver more value to our people and customers. "

In 2022, we launched an internal career marketplace platform—Spark Gigs—which enables our people to build an online profile of their skills, experience, and aspirations and then uses AI to match them to available opportunities and mentoring. 

We also partnered with Culture Amp, using their AI-enabled survey platform to measure employee engagement within our business. The platform’s easy-to-navigate user experience has been supporting our leaders in simplifying key engagement drivers and identifying priority focus areas that will enable better retention of team members.

In the last six months, we have launched our first Generative AI ‘bot’ for HR—which curates drafted responses to common questions we field from the business, using the data that already exists in our policies and systems. 

The point I am making is this—HR needs to lead the change, not just manage it. AI will undoubtedly influence the workforce of the future, and if our profession is going to guide businesses through this change, we need to walk the walk and understand what this means in practice. 

We also need to consider how that transition is just. AI will remove some types of roles and create new ones, too. How we get from where we are now to an AI future matters, and we need to actively shape it. 

We need to equip our people to navigate the adaptation and adoption of new ways of working and skills arising from AI—both today and for future career pathways. The approach we are taking at Spark is to purposefully drive that up-skilling, cross-skilling, and re-skilling, through our skilling hub Te Awe. Through Te Awe we are establishing learning cohorts in areas such as data and AI and actively driving these skills through our business.  

For example, we created a Data Accelerator Programme in FY23 for people working in our frontline teams, which saw them intern with our data teams for two months and receive on-the-job training. The return on that investment was clear—with a +90% placement into roles in our Data and AI teams following participation in the programme. In FY24, our focus is on an AI and Generative AI learning cohort of 200 Spark employees, who will be upskilled and ready to co-pilot AI in our business. In the future, our ambition is to utilise Te Awe to also drive greater inclusion in these highly skilled areas of the business by bringing diverse talent to these learning cohorts rather than hoping they find their way to us. 

If there is one thing that is clear from the acceleration of AI, it is that companies will need to reimagine how they work and prepare their people for a future of work that is most definitely here now. None of us know how to do that because no one has done it before – but my two cents are that it is up to HR leaders to lead and proactively shape that change to serve the business and the people who make that business what it is. 

Only then will we be able to explore the opportunities and challenges ahead of us and what this means for the shape and skills of Aotearoa’s collective workforce.