About 150 University of Michigan students and faculty filled the Jeff T. Blau Hall Thursday afternoon to hear a talk from Tiffanie Boyd, global chief people officer of McDonald’s. Hosted by the Sanger Leadership Center as this semester’s Leadership Dialogues speaker series event through the Ross School of Business, Boyd spoke on how artificial intelligence has impacted business growth from a human resources perspective. Monica Worline, faculty director of the Business School’s Center for Positive Organizations, moderated the discussion.
Before the event, which was open to the public, Sanger hosted a private reception in partnership with the Black Business Student Association and Michigan Business Women. During the reception, Boyd said AI is currently incapable of replicating the people skills that strong leaders in the workplace need.
“Leadership is not just about managing projects,” Boyd said. “I often say you can’t just have managers who manage the work in the project — they have to manage the people. That means you have to get to know them, understand what motivates them, be able to see when they’re having a bad day and put an arm around them or offer a word of encouragement.”
In an interview with The Michigan Daily, Business graduate student Brandy Blackwell, BBSA director of alumni relations, said the reception was a valuable opportunity to better understand Boyd’s career trajectory.
“I think having experiences like these in intimate settings are extremely important because you not only get to know the person, but you get to know their journey,” Blackwell said. “Hearing people that have gone through certain experiences and have been able to ascend into the corporate ladder is really important as we aspire to be in their footsteps one day.”
Boyd opened the public talk by encouraging University students to take advantage of low-stakes classroom environments to develop themselves as leaders.
“There’s no better place to practice your leadership skills than where you are now,” Boyd said. “The reason is because none of you are working for the other person, so there’s no payment for your service. If you can get people to work hard for you for free, when they have lots of other choices around how they spend their time … you’re going to be so far ahead when you’re in a corporate setting, because that’s what the job is going to be all about.”
Boyd said AI has supported human resources at McDonald’s by automating routine processes like those on the McHire recruiting platform, explaining this shift can help employees prioritize doing work that AI cannot.
“One of the things that we see as a real benefit of AI is how do you help individual people better manage their own workload and prioritization?” Boyd said. “This is a tool that can help you spend your time on the things that are more value-added, more important and the place where humans can make a big difference.”
One task that requires human oversight is fact-checking AI output. Boyd said treating AI responses with caution can help avoid poor decision-making and build critical thinking.
“If we get too complacent and just assume what comes at us, then we’re giving away our agency and ability to think critically about whether or not what we’re consuming is accurate,” Boyd said. “AI is built on a foundation that has to have accurate data. Sometimes that’s right, but sometimes it’s not, and it takes a person to actually dissect that to understand is it accurate or is it not?”
Business graduate student Dominique Gill, BBSA member, told The Daily Boyd’s talk was an important overview of how to work alongside AI automation in roles where its presence may feel threatening.
“Given where we are as a society with the implementation of AI in the workforce, people are concerned about their jobs,” Gill said. “People who do have jobs lined up, they’re wondering, ‘How does this impact the work that I do?’ When you think about AI, there’s the opportunity to use it as a tool, and there’s also the opportunity where we see automation to the point that you’re concerned about your role. (I liked) seeing different ways that you can integrate it into your work and how you can use it to be empowered.”
Daily Staff Reporter Thomas Gala-Garza can be reached at tmgala@umich.edu.
