Is AI Making Your Team Lonelier?

00:00:07 Mark Smith
Welcome to AI Unfiltered, the show that cuts through the hype and brings you the authentic side of artificial intelligence. I'm your host, Mark Smith, and in each episode, I sit down one-on-one with AI innovators and industry leaders from around the world. Together, we explore real-world AI applications, share practical insights, and discuss how businesses are implementing responsible, ethical, and trustworthy AI. Let's dive into the conversation and see how AI can transform your business today. Welcome back to the Microsoft Innovation Podcast. Today, we're heading to Istanbul, where our guest is helping reshape how hybrid teams thrive inside Microsoft Teams. Full links are in the show notes, as always. Please welcome Emre to the show.

00:00:59 Emre Ok
All right. Hi, Mark. It's awesome to be here, and I love that intro. I love that we're helping hybrid teams across Microsoft Teams. That's awesome.

00:01:09 Mark Smith
That is epic. I mean, there's still so many hybrid teams, right, since the pandemic. And so I'm keen to unpack this and your views on AI. But before we start, food, family, and fun. You live in a city of amazing food. I've been there, thoroughly enjoyed it. But what do you consider the best things when it comes to food? What do you do with your family and what do you do for fun?

00:01:32 Emre Ok
Well, even though like I live in a hub of like, Turkish food, just, you can't beat that. That's something in and of itself. However, if we're talking food, what I'm the most comfortable with, what makes me really happy, I love a very good burger from a very shady and unsanitary place. The worst, if I'm in there and in my head, if I can picture like the chef just kicking rats in the back while smashing my patty, like that's I know that burger is going to taste good. So for me, that is like the ultimate, ultimate, ultimate comfort meal. Love it. Yeah. What I do with my family, well, I live very, I live a bit far away from my family. I don't, we live a bit distantly, but I have a brother who is 16 years younger than me. So we have like a weird, you're kind of an older brother, you're kind of an uncle at that point. It's kind of odd. It's kind of odd, but he's also discovered cooking lately. So I just love just getting in the kitchen and cooking with that guy. And he's really stoked about it. And I like it when he teaches me stuff. So that's something that I love doing with my family. And for fun, I like doing stupid things where I can actually get hurt. If there's something tall, I'll climb it.Am I very good at climbing?

00:03:01 Emre Ok
I'm not, but I'll climb it. And If there's a big wave, I'll surf it. Again, I'm not the best surfer, but I'll do it. So yeah.

00:03:09 Mark Smith
I love it. Adventurous. I was just on a podcast this morning with someone from America saying about his daughter wanted to go for a balloon ride, you know, up, you know, somewhere. And I was like, listen, Cappadocia, and I don't know if that's how you pronounce it in Turkey, is the safest place in the world to go for a balloon ride. Have you ever been there?

00:03:32 Emre Ok
I'm not sure if it's the safest, because I don't know if they're like, are there like balloon riding accidents all around the world? Is balloon riding known to be like?

00:03:41 Mark Smith
Man, just in the last month, there's been some massive ones, people falling out of their balloons as they're burning on fire and falling to the ground. And in my country alone, I know of at least two major catastrophes and balloon accidents. And I was just saying in Cappadocia, like they put up 200 balloons a morning. every day of the year, pretty much, because it's the mecca of the world when it comes to balloon rides.

00:04:07 Emre Ok
Yeah, exactly. And I've been on one of those balloons and it is one of the most beautiful visuals that you'll ever see. It's just something else. It is magical. But I didn't know. I didn't know that balloon riding was so dangerous. Here I thought I was so ********.

00:04:24 Mark Smith
If you just jumped on perplexity and did a quick, tell me about all the balloon accidents in 2025, I reckon you'll at least get two. Like major people died in them type thing. Yeah.

00:04:37 Emre Ok
Unbelievable. Why are we still talking about Boeing these days? Just let's talk balloons all day.

00:04:42 Mark Smith
That's a different level of tragedy. Hey, as we jump into here, just give us a bit of your background. How did you come to your place in tech? What do you do? What's your day job? How did you get there? What have you seen?

00:04:56 Emre Ok
Oh, I took the scenic route. Let's just say that. I took the scenic route, getting into the world of HR tech. I'm the least techie tech person in the world of tech that has ever teched. I come from a literature background and I was just working odd jobs teaching and chasing academia. I am a huge nerd, anything sci-fi fantasy. I was just chasing all those, seeing how I can turn those into a living. And then one day I discovered, I can write content for a living. That's interesting. So I spent some time writing for like a BuzzFeed-like website. If you know Screen Rant, they have a huge YouTube channel, they have a huge movie website. I used to write listicles for them, like, which Avenger are you? Or like, what does your birth month say about your yada, yada, yada, Lord of the Rings, something, I used to write lists like that. And then I took like the next copywriting job that came my way, which happened to be in the world of, HR tech. And oddly enough, writing about it, getting to know it more, I said, this is actually like, this is actually interesting, the way this is shaping the world of work. That's very interesting. So I'd like to do more for this company, this company called Team Flect, just performance management, software as a service solution in the world of Microsoft Teams and Outlook. So I said, okay, I want to do more. So then I started filming videos and then I started hosting a podcast. And the more I got involved with this entire community, the more I got involved in this landscape, that's how it became ingrained in me. So I'll say like I took a very long road to this.

00:06:50 Emre Ok
I took like the longer Rd. I came in from the outside looking in. So yeah, that's how I got into it. Now I'm leading the content marketing side for Team Flex still. The company has grown immensely. We have tons of clients all around the world, from startups to enterprises, and just seeing how they are using our solution. to just manage their teams remotely from all around the world is just showing me, oh, there's still so much to be achieved in this world of workplace technology overall. So it's pretty exciting. And these are exciting times, Mark.

00:07:30 Mark Smith
So HR tech, like as a category, until I met you, I'd not come across it. What typical software are people touching in their work lives that come under this umbrella of HR tech? Is it the the HR system, where I raise my leave request and things like that. What really, what fits under this umbrella?

00:07:52 Emre Ok
Oh, it is, it is, like you said, it is an umbrella. It is HR tech is an umbrella term. And you'll find a whole bunch of different tools just in that umbrella. I mean, you have your standard HRS systems where like all the employee information is kind of logged in, like everyone's attributes, how long they've been in the company, their salary, their wages. But these tools can also host like, oh, look, this is how much they're going to be paid. Let's run compensation through these tools as well. Or they can be like, yeah, like you just said, oh, let me log in my vacation days. So yeah, I can take time off. And then the side we do is the performance management and employee engagement side. It is where, you know, oh, How about those performance reviews? How do we conduct performance reviews in our organization, right? Because performance reviews get such a bad rep, Mark. Performance reviews get such a bad rep, especially when they're like an Excel spreadsheet, when they're done poorly. Don't even get me started. I'll get started at some point, but not now. So our side is conducting performance reviews, setting goals for your employees, assigning tasks every once in a while, or sending 360 degree feedback where you say like, hey, Let's gather some feedback around Mark. So, okay, well, Mark's managers can give feedback to him, but also Mark's peers, Mark's direct reports, and hey, who is this guy outside of this company, this independent contractor that Mark worked with?

00:09:23 Emre Ok
Let's ask this person too to get the full picture. So that's kind of like the broader umbrella of HR tech, everything related to the employee, everything related to the employee experience. But again, there's so many different solutions out there in the market. And people are doing such creative things these days that it's not just about performance management and employee engagement. I've seen people, there's an app called Coffee Pals, and I just like what they're doing very much. And what they do is they randomly match up employees who are like remote. And they say like, Hey, it's time for you two to have coffee together. The hour is set. It's time for you two to have coffee together. So people are doing really exciting things in the world of HR tech overall.

00:10:12 Mark Smith
So in that scenario, that's a virtual coffee, right? And I've always wondered, how do virtual coffees go down? Do people literally have coffee together on a Teams call? And how do you make that a really good experience for employees?

00:10:27 Emre Ok
You make that a good experience. You don't ask people what's in their mug.

00:10:31 Mark Smith
Yeah.

00:10:33 Emre Ok
You don't check in. The thing is, you just try to keep it as honest as possible, and the way it works, I think the way it works in our team, and I've seen it done in other organizations as well. I mean, the example I gave with that tool is great, but... What you want to do is, you don't want to force it, but you want to encourage it. You want to encourage your employees every once in a while to call each other just to shoot the **** a little, right? Just every once in a while, have a call and just say, hey, dude, how's it going? And I've had, in my experience, some of the just best conversations I've had with my teammates have just been, hey, dude, let's check in a little, like, how are you doing? I've blocked sometimes half an hour off of someone's calendar. I mean, if they're free, I'll just like, I'll block half an hour from someone's calendar and I'll go like, hey dude, like, how are you doing? How's your day going? Oh, did you do anything interesting on the weekend? Cool. Oh, I saw this movie. Just as if you would have a normal conversation with them. That's what I discovered to be like the best way to deal with this. Because honestly, It's really hard to feel connected with your teammates sometimes when they're remote. So if you just knock down that barrier mentally and try to just get involved in their lives, and the most important thing is if you're actually curious about their lives, then that barrier, that screen behind you, it doesn't really matter. So if you just get curious, if you just get involved, if you ask questions, then you might find that, hey, they're actually leading interesting lives and you might want to be involved in them. So I think that's how I deal with the virtual coffee hours. Gossiping about the boss is always great. So yeah, just give it a go.

00:12:36 Mark Smith
I like this. I like this because it's something that I don't naturally do. And that's why I've kind of stayed on the subject for a little bit. For me, a Teams call is about discussing something that needs to get done. And I'm in the scenario where I live in New Zealand. My colleagues today are in Boston in the US. They're in Valencia. They're in Brasov, Romania. They are in the UK. Those are all my direct working colleagues. And I can't say I've ever called any of them just to shoot the **** as you say. Like, as it's always been, we're discussing this customer, we're working on this, what's happening next? Business, business, business, business, not, what's going on in your world type thing.

00:13:24 Emre Ok
Yeah, I don't know. Look, this might be, this is this not, is this the most positive example to give? I'm not very sure. But if you have a customer, if you have a customer you're talking about, so someone, you know, A fraternity helps, like having your own little fraternity helps. If you have like an us against the mountain situation or like an us against them kind of situation, and a customer is great for that, right? So every once in a while, if you just call someone, like let's call the customer Todd, every once in a while after like a call with Todd, even if you just call your teammates, they're like, can you believe what Todd did? And then just stay on that a little and just Okay, that's the negative example, but just overall, I think just going over their experience and just checking in is, it's a small thing. It's a small thing where you would believe, like, you'd believe, like, of course, yeah, it should help, but it's so easy to skip. It's so easy to skip.

00:14:30 Mark Smith
Yeah, I love the practicalness of this, but tell me about Where does AI enter the mix in HR tech? Because I tell you for me, a year or two ago, I worked for a very large multinational company, one of the oldest tech companies in the world. And I did these 360 degree views. And the minute ChatGPT came out, I quickly would take the profile of the people I need to do a write up on and put in their details, set the tone that I wanted to do, Give me 300 words. Boom, that looks good to me. It was glowing and I would take things out of things that we had discussed and that was in their performance plan or something like that. And it ended up that I then started to notice that the responses were also AI generated from the... And so I'm like, at the end of the day, do we just get AI talking to AI around somebody's performance?

00:15:33 Emre Ok
Yeah, I made a YouTube video about this. The second Microsoft made their announcement of Copilot, the initial Copilot trailer when it first dropped, and I know we're going to talk about it later on. But the second the initial Copilot video dropped, it was horrifying for me because in the video it showed... Someone just getting an e-mail and responding to an e-mail, just saying like, Okay, respond to this e-mail, and AI drafting an e-mail, and then responding to it, and like you said, my mind immediately went to, Okay, so what if the next person does that? And then what if the next person does that? And like, are we talking to each other at that point? And very recently, I had a guest on our podcast, the team check-in, and he said something that just stuck with me. And he said, is the tech you're implementing in your organization making your employees lonelier? And that is, I think, the essence of it, right? Is the tech, if you're implementing a technology solution, Does it make your employees lonelier? Does it affect their connectivity with them? Does it stop them from interacting with each other? And yeah, that was poignant.

00:16:50 Emre Ok
It just stuck with me for a little while. And if you think like, that's, you know what, it's worse when you're the host on that podcast and you just freeze up a little and there's like a five  I had to edit that out. Jesus. But overall, getting back to your question, I think Everyone is rushing to implement AI in some form or fashion into their HR software as they should. It is, I will never, there's not going to be a day where I just disregard AI and consumer AI these days that we have that is just incredibly capable. But I think what we're getting a lot of the times is just some form of version of ChatGPT, which is fine. It's helpful. Like you said, using it to write your feedback is good. But then again, I think it shouldn't do that without your involvement. It shouldn't be generating the entire feedback for you. I mean, we in our tool, we added like a feedback summarization feature for it. where if you, because in large organization, you receive feedback from so many different people. If you just, in our tool, if you click summarize, it will just give you like, hey, these are the positives, these are the negatives, these are the things you should be working on. It will give you like a summary of it. Or again, if you're writing feedback, we have this feature where it's just like, hey, enhance my feedback with AI. So it doesn't write the full feedback for you. It just suggests like, hey, maybe you could have worded this differently. Sometimes we say like, hey, we have a button there called like check for biases, check for biased language, and it will do it for you. Yeah, I think the more it's an assistant and the less it's just doing all of your communications for you, that's better. But I've seen, you know, people doing very interesting things with AI in the world of HR tech, especially now with agents. That's where it's like getting before it was just like, hey, you know, Some form of chatbot, it was fine, and some form of chatbot kind of works.

00:19:04 Emre Ok
Some form of text generation, it's helpful. It is really helpful. But now, the more the AI embedded into HR technology has context about the company, And the more it can take action, that's where it gets interesting. And Mark, I mean, I've had one of the most interesting discussions I've had about agentic AI with you, with how you set it up, right? I know you have spent a lot of time training AI agents on, you know, just having context about you, your workflows, the way you operate and the way, just, yeah, the way you do things. So you, Of all, people know just how powerful it can be, right, having agentic AI that has true context.

00:19:55 Mark Smith
I find it interesting what you just said there about that feature for looking for bias, because I've just been doing a lot of writing recently, and I decided to run across a chapter I'd written around, did I use any bias language. And I found in three places I had, and they were, I had used some metaphor in regards to being blind. And it was a common phrase. I can't even think of exactly what the phrase was, but I was like, that's biased language. Like it highlighted, the AI highlighted for me that was actually biased towards blind people in the metaphor that I probably grew up with. And it wasn't something as obvious as blind as a bat or something like that, but it was just like, whoa, I actually went and rewrote those areas because it definitely, I've got very good around bias, around gender and things like that. But what it uncovered for me is biases in areas that I didn't think was bias until it was brought to my attention. I was like, actually, it is. It's a handy tool.

00:21:04 Emre Ok
Yeah, exactly. And the thing is, I mean, I can talk about bias all day, but the way it kind of works is it is so embedded in language. It is so embedded in language, especially societal biases and things that have just stayed with us. over time. I think what people, a lot of people, when they're talking about like, oh, everything is so politically correct these days. Oh, we can't say anything anymore. Everything we're saying is a word police. I'm sure like there's some extreme version of it where people are like always policing each other's speech. Yes, there are like extreme examples of that for sure. But do you know how biased we've been and how offensive our language has been over the years? Over the years, just I know that we're in 2025 right now, and I know age is creeping up, and I know we're all getting older fast, and time is moving so fast, but guys, the 80s weren't that long ago. The 90s weren't that long ago, and the way we treated people then, and the way people were, like, the privileges certain groups of people had, and, you know, again, the lack of opportunities other groups of people had, Those are not that distant and their repercussions are still going on. So yeah, the biases are just embedded in the way we speak. So checking them is always an option. Okay, Mark, I can derail this all day. I can just go on a...

00:22:34 Mark Smith
Tell me, how do people in leadership roles in an organization tell the AI hype from reality? Like where is it true innovation and where is it hype in your perception?

00:22:51 Emre Ok
I'll say this. I've run into this. I think I told you, I might have told you this story before, but I was in I was doing the digital nomad thing. I was in Bollywood, surfing and working remotely in like these little co-working spaces. You meet a whole bunch of cool people there, right? And I met this one dude, really chill guy, and he was asking me, because like I had just gone in the back room, recorded an episode of Podcast, he's asking me like, hey, what do you do for a living? So I explained marketing, and I said, what do you do? And he says, oh, I make apps and I develop apps. And I said, what kind of apps? And it just said, I just reskinned ChatGPT on a bunch of different things and then see what sticks. And yeah, I think that is kind of the essence of it, right? How much are you willing to pay? You can put a new coat of paint on a chat bot on like an API of ChatGPT all day. And if you sell it well, there are some people who might think, yeah, that's, Kind of pretty cool, but is it actually impacting your day-to-day? And again, like the thing is, it actually, making your employees feel less lonely? I think that's kind of, that's kind of where I get in, right? Is it just AI for the sake of AI? Are we, is it just large language model that you're using just so you're using it? Is it, does it add like an extra step to your process? Because if it does, then what's the point? And especially now with so many people are buying premises, but I was like, God, but this is gonna be so good. We got this coming up, we got this, we got this, we got this coming up, right? So people are just buying into what a product, what a tool might be in the future, but what it is right now, it may not be so operational.

00:24:51 Emre Ok
I'll just say this, especially in the world of, in my little corner of the world of work and just work tech overall, in HR tech, what really sets AI hype apart from an actual solid AI-based solution is context. Does this AI solution you're using, does it have context about your company? Does it have context on your people, on the way you operate, on the way you work? Because if it doesn't, you might as well just go to ChatGPT on another browser. It's just going to take another five seconds and you'll get your stuff sorted out. that way. That's what, Mark, we spent so much time, like our product team spent so much time on our, AI agent that is coming up because we were so slow on implementing AI features, which is we don't want to do it for the sake of doing it. But we don't want to have a chat bot that is just going to be another ChatGPT.

00:25:53 Emre Ok
We don't want to do it just so we can put like that little sparkly AI icon on our website. We didn't want to do that. So yeah, we have something new coming up that I'm pretty excited about. is where it's going to be an AI agent where you can actually, it knows your company policies, it taps into your entry ID. So it knows like everything about your employees. And you can just train it on and on about how you guys do things, your goals, everything about your company. And it can take actions for you within our software. So it can like assign goals, send surveys out on its own. And you can go to your team and say, Check, hey, who do you think is at the risk of burning out these days in my team? Or, who am I not recognizing and appreciating enough? And it will give you answers based on real context. That's what, like, that's okay, that's something real positive. And there are other people doing this, doing similar things as well, but the idea is... If it has context, if it knows your people, that's when it's real. If it doesn't, if it's just AI for the sake of AI, if it's just a call and response thing, then yeah, it's probably hype.

00:27:04 Mark Smith
It's interesting that you've built goals in there because I see in 2025, I think Microsoft's retiring, they've sunset Viva goals as they, I think they've sunset Viva topics as well. So a few of those Viva strands, which are definitely on the HR side of things, They seem to be phasing out. So it looks like you're grabbing a spot in the market there. As we go to wrap up, but tell me about a couple of questions I really have. One is what are you seeing is changing or growing or insights that you have around remote work, around hiring and for remote jobs? What are you seeing change in that space with the various customers you're working with?

00:27:49 Emre Ok
Yeah, I'll just tap into that Viva Ghost thing real quick because it is really interesting, right? You find a solution and you think it's going to be really reliable because it's Microsoft. It's Microsoft. How can it go down? How can, like, it's, yeah, it's going to be around. But sometimes with these, you know, mega corporations and these mega solutions, it's kind of like having that friend who has so many different hobbies. And so much free time, and he goes like, Hey, Mark, do you want to pick up tennis together? So, you pick up, you go to the store with them, get a bunch of rackets and headbands, and you're excited, and you start going, and it's like, Oh, I'll just move on to the next thing. Sorry, like tennis is done anymore. I didn't get what I wanted out of tennis, so it kind of... leaves you high and dry. So I think if you're picking a tool, it's best to look into their roadmap, look into like, hey, how many people are actually using it? Because if it's not adopted, and if it's a mega corporation, and if it's just like, hey, they have other places to go, we've seen it, they might drop it in a heartbeat. But now coming to your question about how remote work has evolved overall and changed the world of work is The talent pool is global now, and that is both exciting and frightening, right? Because now you can find the best person for the job, regardless of where they are. They might be on the other side of the world, and if you have the right working arrangement, if you've built your team around, you know, hey, we can work asynchronously, we can work, you know, in different time zones, and if we can make these arrangements, sure, why shouldn't I find the best person for this job who's in Iceland and who just sent a nice person? So I think that has given organizations a very wide reach, but it has also given talent a very wide reach, right? So people are not just locked into their region for jobs anymore. And there's a darker side to it for sure of that, you know, global talent pool thing where people are outsourcing and People are outsourcing work to where they're, my currency is worth a lot more in that country and I can just outsource it for cheaper lives, and then that you see like a slightly darker side to it, slightly less, let's say, positive approach to building a workforce, but I mean... Look, capitalism is the bad guy, guys, at the end of the day. But if we just take it back, again, I'm so prone to going off on a tangent. I can see the clock moving. So I'll just move things along. But it is allowed, especially with all the tech and all the tools we have these days, is it has freed companies from the office. The office just just isn't a necessity anymore. And it has given people the right ecosystems to just empower the people they have, saying, hey, you can work from anywhere. If you have the right tech stack, you can work from anywhere. You can do just as much work and you can get just as much done from the comfort of your home or from wherever you're choosing. So, and that is something brilliant. Having that option is magnificent. I know I've enjoyed it so many different times. That being said, it is also thin the boundaries. So suddenly your bedroom that you, sleep in and like is also a corner office. You have a table at the side of it. And it is thin that line where it's harder to detach from work, right? It's harder to detach from work.

00:31:42 Emre Ok
You're having coffee in your living room and then you get a text from your boss. about work. So your house, it's kind of gets more associated with work and it's up to you to draw those lines now. And I think now people are getting better at this because There were companies doing remote work before 2020, obviously, but post 2020, that expanded a lot. And it took a while for people to get the hang of it. Suddenly, you know, oh, work doesn't have to stop at 530 when people leave the office and go home. Because I mean, I've been texting this guy since, you know, I've been sending emails to this person or like Microsoft Teams messages to this person since, you know, 9:00 PM. So Why can't I send him another Microsoft Teams message at 9? Just sorry, 9, like just later in the day. So I think that has kind of blurred, but now there's more material out there to read. There are more people talking about it and if leaders, you know, educate themselves and if companies educate themselves on how to do remote work better, we're finding we're finding the healthy medium.

00:32:53 Mark Smith
My final question is around copilot and How are you seeing that being used effectively in the customers you work with?

00:33:03 Emre Ok
I've seen people do great work with it. I've seen, again, I've talked about this before, but I mean, Copilot, the hype was real, right? The hype was something else. Friend of mine, Nick DeCorsi, he made a video the second the Copilot trailer comes out, the title of it was Microsoft Just One Work. And that's kind of how it felt like, right, when it first came out. But I think The initial idea was it was hyped a bit too much. The initial trailer was something out of Iron Man. It was basically Jarvis, right? It did everything for you. It did all your data analytics and everything. What we got instead was it was a perfectly serviceable tool. It was perfectly serviceable, but it wasn't everything that it was hyped to be because It's still, like I said, it still didn't have all of that context. And that, I think, made it a bit of an initial disappointment. Now they're building on it. Now it's getting better. Having, I think, the ace up Copilot's sleeve is that how easily it is accessible inside Microsoft tools, right? It's how easily it is accessible inside Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel. It's kind of, it's right there where you're working. Do I love using it for PowerPoint? I think the end result is pretty generic. I'm not a huge fan of it. And I've discovered that when I try to generate something with it, the time I spend going back and fiddling with it, I said like, I could have just made it on my own and it could have, it would have taken less time. So I think we're still getting there. I think we're still getting there. The promise is there. The promise is there. And if any AI solution has enough context on the way you work and enough context on your company, it's copilot.

00:35:06 Emre Ok
It's going to be copilot. So I think the more it adapts to, the more they see how people are using it, the more they adapt to it, it's going to get better. Was it, did it live up to the hype? There was nowhere. There was no way anything was going to live up to that hype. But it is getting there. I'll say that.

00:35:26 Mark Smith
Emre, it's been great talking to you. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

00:35:30 Emre Ok
Mark, thanks for having me on the show, man. It's been great.

00:35:33 Mark Smith
You've been listening to AI Unfiltered with me, Mark Smith. If you enjoyed this episode and want to share a little kindness, please leave a review. To learn more or connect with today's guest, check out the show notes. Thank you for tuning in. I'll see you next time where we'll continue to uncover AI's true potential one conversation at a time.