Sarah Franklin, CEO at Lattice

HumanX partnered with Jared S. Taylor of Slice of Technology to produce a podcast interviewing our expert speakers. Enjoy the following transcript of this groundbreaking conversation.

Jared S. Taylor: For those unfamiliar, could you briefly explain how Lattice is using AI today and how it integrates within your people management platform?

Sarah Franklin: I'll start with Lattice and the data that we have because AI is nothing without great data. We collect data around all of a company's employees and their performance, their career growth, their career planning, all of their learning, all their enablement, all of their feedback, all of their engagement insights and survey data. We’re using AI to summarize this information, to get insights from it and to really help everyone perform better within their roles, help improve management, and help CEOs do better workforce planning. Then we take it even a step further towards compensation to ensure fair, unbiased compensation, removing bias from all of your processes as best we can. So ultimately, AI is really helping democratize and make work better for everyone within Lattice.

Jared S. Taylor: We often hear of companies implementing AI because it's the cool thing to do, but you have a practical use case–one that makes total sense given the information you collect. You were not late to the party; you were actually ahead of the game, and I'm always curious when companies are ahead of the game. What type of discussions happened internally for you to say, this is something that we need to implement?

Sarah Franklin: Are we creating large language models that render blue aliens walking through a magical city you've never heard of before that's cinematic and incredibly imaginative and creative? No, that is not what we are doing. Some may say it's more boring, but like you said, boring is practical and it's real–what we're doing is real AI. 

Everybody in this world that has a job understands that you want your job to be better, your manager to be better, and your company to understand you and get you. And so this is what I think is really important with AI–that we look into real use cases and how we can effectively use them. Also, as AI comes into the workforce, we should look at how we govern AI and how we help ourselves be better people with AI.

We are still in charge, but AI can help us be better, eliminate tedious work, and really help us achieve our true human potential because we have these incredible tools and effective use cases.

Jared S. Taylor: You've been very clear in your messaging about AI; it doesn't necessarily take away a job, but helps people become more efficient in what they're doing. 

What I really wanted to dig into is some of the specific features, specifically performance reviews, because these can be very stressful for managers and employees. How are you leveraging AI for this?

Sarah Franklin: When you're looking at something like a performance review, it’s often something very personal and includes significant career milestones. Every company has different processes and best practices for performance reviews, but AI can help summarize information, give better understanding to managers, and give all the ins and outs on a person’s role.

However, AI is not humane and it is not a person, so we don’t encourage AI to score individuals’ performances. We still need that aspect of human judgment. Therefore, it’s very important that the AI is helpful, but it is not determinant in its outcomes.

Compensation is another big area for us. There's so much to take into account; not just one’s performance level, but their peers, the benchmarks for their industry, what other accolades they may have, their race, their gender, the languages they speak… and we need to collect this information to eliminate bias. At Lattice, we've used AI to help write the performance reviews and remove bias, but we ultimately know that a human should be the one that makes a determination. 

Stefan Weitz: What are some of the challenges that you've seen with your customers in deploying AI-powered solutions, and how do you overcome them? 

Sarah Franklin: One question that’s on every CEO's mind right now is: how do I implement AI within my product, within my company, and across the board? Most CEOs are being asked to grow revenue without growing headcounts, so the question also becomes, how do we grow more efficient and productive? And there's two really huge things that people are facing. 

One: there is a lot of fear around AI and what it means. So many unanswered questions, like what does this mean for me? What does this mean for my job? What does this mean for the future? Unanswered questions induce fear. 

Two: There is an abundance of fear matched with very little education, so people think that AI is still a set of pre-programmed statements with predetermined outcomes. That makes people begin to question, what if it's wrong? What if it says something that I don't agree with? What if it's not aligned to my values? What if, what if, what if… And so that huge amount of fear matched with a lack of education is the thing that really needs to be solved. And the only way that you can do that in my opinion is by having courage as a leader to guide your team and to be willing to experiment. Take things step by step and be very transparent with your team, your customers, and all of your stakeholders about what you are doing.

It's not going to be a perfect road. We do not have all of the answers. And so we have to have courage to go into this new world together. We’re used to seeing new technologies, and this is just a new technology that we have to embrace with the same amount of courage and governance in place at the beginning.

Stefan Weitz: What are the emerging AI trends that you're most excited about? 

Sarah Franklin: There’s so much happening in AI. It's across every industry, every dimension you can imagine… I think that some of the most important innovations are yet to be out there because this technology is just rapidly getting so much better. And what is not keeping pace is the education and governance surrounding it. So, to me, some of the innovations that are most exciting are going to be the boring things because they're the ones that are going to really set us up for success.

I imagine a world where, for example, I go shopping and I don't even have to shop. I give my AI a budget, tell it where I'm going, and it handles every detail for me. But then I also want to know that my information and privacy are safe. So overall, I’m most excited about innovations in governance, management, and education so that we can use these technologies freely and without worry. 

___________________________________________________________________________________

HumanX is the #1 AI event of 2025, designed to connect the most influential executives, innovators, and decision-makers in AI. To learn more about our inaugural event and its commitment to inspiring the next wave of AI innovation, visit https://www.humanx.co/.