AI adoption starts with trust: Nathan Strum on human-first AI in practice (Video)

AI adoption is often framed as a technology rollout. Nathan Strum’s experience at Abby Connect suggests a different starting point: employee confidence.

When AI began reshaping customer service Abby Connect could have led with tools, efficiency and automation. Instead, the business began by helping employees understand AI, experiment with it safely and see how it could support their own work. For Strum, the first step was earning trust before introducing an AI receptionist or changing frontline processes.

This was important because customer service is one of the areas most exposed to automation. Abby Connect’s response was to ask where human work was becoming stressful, repetitive or inefficient, then explore how AI could support people at those points. One example is legal intake calls, where receptionists need to listen empathetically while capturing detailed information accurately. By using AI to help fill out forms during calls, the company aims to reduce cognitive load so receptionists can focus more fully on the person they are speaking to.

The video also includes a clear warning for HR and business leaders: AI should not be used uncritically to rank candidates or make judgements about people. Strum argues that AI can help categorise information and reduce administrative burden, while human judgement remains essential where fairness, bias and opportunity are at stake.

Key Takeaways from this In Practice video:

• AI adoption starts with employee trust, not technology rollout
• Customer service roles can be redesigned around human-machine collaboration
• AI can reduce stress by taking on repetitive or cognitively demanding tasks
• Leaders need to be honest about why they are introducing AI
• AI should support hiring processes, not rank candidates or replace judgement

Watch the full video above to hear how Nathan Strum is putting human-first AI adoption into practice at Abby Connect. And read the full story How one CEO introduced AI without damaging trust.

Nathan Strum - Transcript

I think one mistake that I want to point out and I want to help people not make this mistake, because I think it's serving a disservice to our society, is relying on AI to screen resumes. I think it's very dangerous. I think there's a lot of bias.

And I think that you're going to be overlooking a lot of good candidates. And I understand the reason for it. know, every time we post a position, we have hundreds and hundreds of applicants and there's just no way to ask your staff to read through every single resume. You can use AI to help you categorise certain things in the resume and put them into different buckets and pull out certain information. But do not ask it to give you an opinion and rank these candidates. You're doing a disservice to yourself, you're doing a disservice to the candidate, and you're doing a disservice to the society.

So Abby Connect has been in business for 20 years. I know I look young, but ⁓ it's been a long 20 years, and we've learned a lot along the way. And so right now we have just about 100 employees. We're based in Las Vegas. We all work in office, 95% of us. And we've just opened a new office in San Francisco where the innovation and AI have really taken the whole world by storm.

Back in the olden days, 2022, we saw the revolution happening like everybody else did, kind of was caught off guard a little bit, knew that it would happen one day, but didn't realise it was going to happen in 2022. And so we understood how powerful the technology was, but we also knew that customer service was going to be a big talking point as far as a possible industry that could be affected and so we knew that we needed to tackle this head on and not put our heads in the sand. We believed at that time, and we still believe now that there is a great, powerful world in customer service where humans and AI work together.

And I know that that's a lot of things that people talk about now, but I believe that we've been able to put this into practice, and I'm proud of the way that our company has handled this. And the first thing that we did was instead of going to our receptionists who answer phone calls and tell them, hey, by the way, we're launching a new AI receptionist, we knew that we had to earn the trust of everybody in the company. And so we started by talking about AI and how we use it in our personal lives and becoming more familiar with the technology and just making it a little bit less scary to everybody. And that was the beginning of AI at Abby.

So our secret sauce, which isn't very secret, is a great culture. It's a very simple thing to say, but it's a very difficult thing to actually execute on. And so from the very beginning of the company, when we launched our receptionist service, answering calls for small businesses, we knew that we needed to have a work environment where people felt inspired and felt good about coming to work. And so anybody that's answered phones for any company knows that it can be stressful. Dealing with customers on any platform can be stressful. And so we knew that we needed to make a work environment that was collaborative and had a great culture. 

So everything that we do is first thought about of how do we protect our culture? How do we promote our culture? How do we make our culture even better than it was yesterday? And so AI did seem as if it could be a threat to culture. And so we said, hey, listen, instead of it being a threat, why don't we turn this into something that we can make as a plus? And so building confidence around AI that it doesn't have to destroy your career was a big part of that. And so the way that we did that was this first step, as I talked about, was talking about it in your personal life. 

And then the second step was introducing courses and teaching everybody about AI and how to use it, not only in their personal life, but now in their work life. And so one thing that's very important to us is growth. And as counterintuitive as it is, we love when somebody outgrows Abby and moves on to another career.

And so that we just think that's wonderful that they were able to learn the skills that they did at Abby. And so we took this into AI and said, listen, we think that we're going to be able to provide a lot of jobs in AI in the future. But if not, we still want to equip you with this new skill set. And that's the way we build confidence.

We hired our principal engineer a while back and he came in and looked at everything and he said, hey, listen, I want to make this receptionist job a little bit less stressful. And I said, ⁓ okay. I'm shocked because usually you engineers want to build technology. And I thought you were going to get excited about the AI receptionist. And he said, yes, I'm excited about the AI receptionist, but I'm also excited about helping your human receptionists do their jobs better and have less stress. And so now we're looking at every point of stress for the receptionist on the human side, and we're going to introduce AI to help them. 

So our June 1 release, we'll have AI listening to all of their calls live on the call. And then it will do certain things. So one thing it'll do is help them fill out forms. So our clients, take a law firm, they want us to do an intake form. So if somebody calls in, they've never talked to the firm. They need help with a criminal matter. The attorney wants us to find out, okay, what was the crime? You know, what state, what city? You know, tell me what happened here. Do you have an attorney? Have you spoke to somebody? And they want us to collect all this information. 

And it's a lot of typing for the receptionist. They have to go back, they have to correct their grammar, they've got to focus on spelling. There's just a lot of things happening on that call. Whereas after we introduce our new feature, they'll be able to sit there with their hands up and the AI will fill in the form for them and take all that stress off their plate so that they can focus on the call and they can focus on connecting with the caller.

The first thing is you've really got to believe what you're saying. This goes in any HR type of environment, anything you're talking about with your employees, but especially with AI, you can't think one thing that, hey, I'm going to go and I'm going to save a bunch of money in the company and it's going to go straight to the bottom line and then tell your employees something else. People are smart and they can see right through that. So you've really got to believe what you're saying. That's number one. 

Number two is think about the people first. And I know that's a very common catchphrase. But what I mean by that is you start with the people systems, and then see where those people systems fail and where are they less efficient and then build AI around that. Instead of coming to the table and saying, hey, here's this nice shiny object, this AI function, I'm going to put that into my business. So that's the second part. And then the third thing, I believe, is you've got one end of the spectrum saying AI is going to save our company a bunch of money. 

And then you've got the other end of the spectrum saying it's going to help us grow the company. It's actually a little bit more complicated than that. And the way that I simplify it is I say it's a rebalance of expenses. So, yes, save a lot of money over here by changing these systems and invest that money over here by improving these systems. And that's how you can best maximise AI.