Bunnings pilots AI for its 55,000-strong workforce

Bunnings is piloting AI to better understand its 55,000-strong workforce, creating development and career pathways to keep talented people in the business.

Head of remuneration, people systems and services Jeff Rodway told a Workday Elevate summit that the retailer is “full-on into [a] great technology revolution” in its people and culture operations.

This is backed in part by a “significantly increased” investment in Workday, which has doubled the number of software tools that Bunnings can access, including newer AI software.

Rodway said the retailer wanted to position itself to staff as a “place to build a career”, but lacked insight into the skills, capabilities and aspirations of its people to make that happen.

“The number one reason for people leaving Bunnings was to go somewhere else and build a career,” Rodway said.

“We really value tenure, and we love people with experience.

“While we’ve got good retention [rates for staff], there were lots of good people who would leave, but we also know we’ve got lots of good people that we know nothing about.”

Central to building this understanding is Workday Skills Cloud, which runs on the vendor’s AI technology, which it calls ‘Illuminate’.

“Our skills journey is still in its infancy,” Rodway said.

“We’ve run a couple of pilots that have been successful. We’re really understanding how Skills Cloud works.”

The company is also using Talent Optimization and HiredScore – the latter to match existing staff to open jobs, or to build talent pools of previous candidates or applicants that could be reapproached when new opportunities arise.

Combined, the technology is expected to “significantly reduce time-to-hire and associated costs” with constantly looking externally for staff, Rodway said.

Rodway also flagged future implementations of two analytics tools – People Analytics and Prism Analytics – to help business and HR staff respectively understand the workforce.

“For so long, I think in many ways, particularly around people-related decisions, it was about who you know or gut instinct. We’re way too big for that,” Rodway said.

“We want our leaders to be taking [data-driven] action and making Bunnings a better place to work.”

AI chatbot for staff

AI is not only being used behind the scenes to aid people and culture processes, alongside the business’ understanding of the workforce.

Staff are also being given access to an AI chatbot that can help with operational queries such as leave entitlements, policies and procedures, so that these types of questions “don’t need to be answered by a person.”

Rodway noted that this represented a marked change for staff and for the Bunnings culture, which has traditionally emphasised “relationships” and “who you know”.

“All of a sudden, we’re now asking our team to go and self-serve,” he said.

“It’s actually a better experience for self-serve … but it is a bit of a change. People say, ‘It’s not the way we used to do it. It’s not really Bunnings’.”

Rodway said it would take time to build internal faith and trust in AI-powered tools and capabilities.

“We really need to be clear about our position with our team in terms of how we see AI being used in the business,” he said.

“There’s no doubt that AI is going to play a massive role in Bunnings, like it is in most organisations. We talk about it as removing the friction from everyday work, so how do we drive operational efficiencies and productivity through AI?

“From a people and culture perspective, we’re very excited about the possibilities, ultimately really to make more inclusive management decisions, [and] to further reduce our time-to-hire. 

“The work we’ve already done with Workday has focused around some of those things.”