Meet the HR executive who created an AI chatbot to give Gen Z career advice

Good morning!

HR leaders are used to dealing with a ton of costly and clunky HR software.

But the recent explosion of AI tools means that not only do HR executives have different technology options at their fingertips—they can even create their own tools. And Kathleen Pearson, global chief talent officer at McDermott Will & Emery, a law firm with more than 1,700 attorneys operating in seven countries, did just that.

Pearson was an early adopter of mainstream AI tech, and quickly discovered that OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot developer allowed anyone to create their own bot. She decided that supporting Gen Zers and offering career advice would be a good area to start, considering the high demand and a dearth of resources for young people.

“Gen Z itself has a harder time, sometimes, connecting with career counselors,” she says. “They're super expensive, [and] the path to entry for that is hard sometimes. You don't necessarily know who to call, you don't necessarily know what advice you're gonna get, all that stuff.”

Earlier this year, she rolled out “Ask Jane” to the public, a bot made to offer career advice and feedback to young professionals. While it only took an hour to build initially, Pearson says she has spent “considerable time” refining the bot since. Ask Jane is free to use, so long as you have an OpenAI account. It can compare a resume to a job description and give a match probability, conduct mock interviews, and work in several different languages. The bot also has memory capabilities, so if a user returns more than once, it can ask follow-up questions about their previous interaction.

The chatbot also offers advice. For example, someone can write, “I made a mistake at work. Can you help me?” The bot will offer advice while always telling the user to talk to their manager about the issue as well. Pearson says this makes it less intimidating for young employees to seek help about an issue.

Pearson’s foray into HR tech with AskJane helped her and other members of her team understand that they didn’t need to be coders to build the kind of tools they wanted. The HR department at the firm later partnered with the IT department to host a “prompt-a-thon,” in which employees pitched their own AI solution ideas. The company is planning to continue the tradition.

“Once you develop a big use case for something and [demonstrate] how easy it is to build something—because I'm not a programmer, I'm not a developer—you can come up with a way to use this stuff,” she says. “You can actually build these things that can really be impactful and change the way people interact with data and interact with each other.”

Paige McGlauflin
paige.mcglauflin@fortune.com
@paidion

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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com