Market View
Navigating the AI transformation journey: How global service providers are reimagining value creation
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Bram Pauwels
Director of Operations at PageGroup
About Bram Pauwels
Bram Pauwels is the Director of Operations at PageGroup, overseeing Staff/HR Operations for the Temporary Workers segment across 14 countries. He manages teams in Barcelona (80 staff) and Buenos Aires (15 staff) that collectively support over 15,000 temporary workers and freelancers through four different business models. With nine years at PageGroup and three and a half years in his current role, Bram focuses on delivering exceptional support while driving organisational transformation through effective communication and meticulous people management.
How is AI currently impacting PageGroup's service operations, and what challenges have you encountered in implementation?
We're experimenting with AI in several niche processes and leveraging capabilities from our service providers. We use Fresh Desk's built-in generative AI for our ticketing system and SiteTrade's predictive analytics for credit collection to determine which clients we should prioritise contacting.
One valuable implementation has been sentiment analysis in our ticketing solution. We can track the sentiment when tickets reach us and when we close them. Our data shows that the vast majority of all tickets coming in has a neutral or positive sentiment, but unfortunately there´s a portion of tickets where the customers use a language that points towards negative sentiment, Of those we manage to convert roughly 10% to positive and 10% to neutral, while 80% remain negative. This helps us understand our impact on customer satisfaction and net promoter scores.
However, articulating the return on investment remains challenging. We've been strategic about licence purchases, providing AI tools to select team members rather than everyone. During recent appraisals, none of the team members without AI licences complained about being judged on the same KPIs as colleagues with AI support—suggesting the technology hasn't yet proven transformative enough to create a noticeable advantage.
We're also in a transitional phase where we assume these AI capabilities will eventually become standard offerings from service providers. It feels unwise to invest heavily in additional licences now for capabilities that might be included in base packages within a few years.
As job descriptions are increasingly written by AI and candidates craft their CVs using AI, we face a self-fulfilling prophecy where human judgment becomes even more essential to filter out the noise and evaluate cultural fit.
How do you see AI evolving to enhance service delivery in the recruitment industry?
The future potential is quite exciting. My IT colleagues discuss how AI could monitor human agents as they perform tasks to identify best practices and optimise processes. For instance, AI could analyse which sequence of activities yields greater efficiency, which communication styles are most effective, and what the optimal response timing is for different types of queries.
This analysis could transform how we establish service level agreements. Currently, we somewhat arbitrarily set SLAs—like responding within 48 hours—but different queries have different urgency levels. Some questions require answers within 12 hours, while for others, a response within a week is sufficient. AI could help us determine these nuances and drive meaningful efficiency in our workforce by establishing data-driven, context-specific response times.
Another opportunity lies in workflow optimisation. By monitoring various agents handling similar tasks, AI could identify the most efficient processes and automatically suggest improvements, reducing the subjectivity that often comes with process analysis.
As recruitment becomes increasingly AI-enhanced, how do you see the human role evolving?
Interestingly, our CEO believes recruiters are somewhat protected from AI disruption. As job descriptions are increasingly written by AI and candidates craft their CVs using AI, we face a situation where everything matches perfectly on paper. This creates a self-fulfilling prophecy where human judgment becomes even more essential to filter out the noise and evaluate authenticity.
When we interview candidates for internal positions, we conduct Excel tests—not necessarily to assess technical skills, but to identify who has used ChatGPT to answer questions. You can spot the patterns: identical jargon and structure. What we truly value is the ability to use AI resources intelligently while still displaying unique personality and adding value beyond what AI can provide.
The human element becomes increasingly critical in assessing cultural fit. Is a candidate better suited to a startup environment with fewer rigid rules and more entrepreneurship, or a large corporation with clearly defined responsibilities? Finding the chemistry between a company's culture and a candidate's preferences is where human recruiters must focus as AI handles more of the technical matching process.
What we truly value in employees is their ability to use AI resources intelligently while still displaying their unique personality and adding value beyond what AI can provide.
Everyone was very impressed with ChatGPT initially, but as you continue to use it, frustration bubbles up—it's more clever than Google, but it's not as clever as the average person sitting next to me just yet.
What foundational changes are needed to fully leverage AI in service operations?
For AI implementations to succeed, data quality is paramount. Our IT teams have invested significantly in aligning data structures across different software applications to ensure AI can extract meaningful insights. Without relevant, well-structured data, AI initiatives simply won't deliver results.
Another critical foundation is comprehensive documentation. The AI we implement can't tap into the worldwide web for answers because our processes are unique. We need to create knowledge articles for the AI to draw from, which means writing detailed standard operating procedures. This foundational work is substantial and often underestimated when planning AI initiatives.
An exciting possibility is using AI to document our processes automatically. I've read about implementing AI on human agents' machines to monitor activities for a period and then automatically document process flows, identify best practices, and suggest optimised approaches. This could dramatically accelerate the foundational work needed before more advanced AI implementations.
The transition requires balancing expectations too. Senior leaders sometimes wonders why we still need so many people when we have AI. The reality is that AI still needs training and human oversight—it's not yet as intuitive at corporate scale as it might seem when a one-off user gets an impressive response from ChatGPT.
About PageGroup
PageGroup brands are made up of specialised recruitment teams that operate across 25 disciplines from actuarial to technology. Page Executive is the executive search division of the Group specialising in search, selection and talent management of senior professionals on a permanent or interim basis. The Michael Page team specialise in the recruitment of temporary, contract and permanent roles typically at second and third job level upwards. Page Personnel is a recruitment partner for businesses requiring clerical support. Page Outsourcing harnesses the power of the PageGroup brands and offers a recruitment outsourcing solution to help grow client businesses.
About Enate
Enate is the leading SaaS solution for business services. Enate orchestrates work from start to finish, giving clients the visibility and control needed to deliver better services. From email management and data analysis to intelligent document processing, Enate also offers a host of touch-button AI features designed to slash the time spent on manual work. Trusted by global service teams, Enate ensures smooth, consistent operations that help clients perform at their best.