Event Details
Register via the URL and you will receive the Zoom link. This Zoom virtual event will feature industry thought leader, Phil Verghis, presenting "Time to Smile: Fixing the Second Job Your AI Can't See!"
Agenda:
1. Welcome & HDI News (10 Minutes)
2. Presentation by Phil Verghis (40 minutes):
"Time to Smile: Fixing the Second Job Your AI Can't See"
3. Questions & Answers (10 minutes)
4. Wrap Up
We look forward to getting together!
Presentation Abstract:
There's work happening in your operation right now that you can't see — and it's a big reason your numbers look as good as they do.
The pattern is simple. Inside one team, things mostly run. But every time work crosses to another team, a department, a vendor, the task makes the trip, and the customer's intent usually doesn't. A few crossings in, every group is hitting its targets, and nobody is holding what the customer asked for. The work still has to come out right, so your best people rebuild what got dropped. That's their second job: unofficial, uncompensated, the work of making the job they get paid for doable at all. And it's written in invisible ink — the personal runbook, the rewritten handoff notes, the call that replaces the ticket.
Now your leadership is pushing AI into that operation. The pilot shines, and the rollout stalls for the same reason: a pilot lives inside one team, where the official record and reality nearly match. The rollout crosses the seams, where the real work was never written down. So, AI speeds up the process as written. The second job, where it could help the most, stays invisible to it - unautomated, still on your best people's shoulders.
Phil Verghis has watched work lose its meaning between groups since 1994, from the help desk to the boardroom. For thirty years, the second job had no fix: you couldn't see it, so you couldn't act on it. AI changes that - it doesn't fix it for you, but makes it findable: for the first time, the patterns of invisible work can be surfaced, read, and acted on at scale.
Phil calls the destination Time to Smile: the moment a customer gets what they wanted, and feels it, without grinding your people down to deliver it.
In this session he'll show you how to surface the second job in your own operation using data you already have, how to read the one clock your customer has been running while your metrics said green, and how to start shrinking it at your most painful handoffs between groups inside your own organization. Surface it, shrink it, and the invisible work becomes work your AI can finally see - and help carry. You'll leave knowing where to start.
Speaker Background:Phil Verghis learned service and support at the desk, answering the same question for the fifth time and wondering why. When he went looking for guidance on running a help desk well, there wasn't any. So he wrote it himself and shared it. It became one of the first help desk FAQs anywhere, spread to over a hundred countries on its own, and brought him into the HDI community, where he became one of the earliest chairs of HDI's Strategic Advisory Board. Thirty years later, he's still here.
Along the way, he ran global support, network, and IT operations at Akamai through crisis and hypergrowth, worked with teams at Red Hat and HPE whose results earned a business-school case study and CFO-verified savings, and served as the first Chief Customer Experience Officer at LuxCreo, the 3D-printing platform behind medical-grade dental devices. Today he leads Verghis Group (https://verghisgroup.com), helping leaders see the second job their best people are absorbing to get the work done, and what AI is about to do with it.
At this year's HDI Service & Support World, he was part of the opening keynote. This session goes deeper.
