According to Deloitte’s 2018 Human Capital Trends study, 42 per cent of companies believe that automation and machine learning will be widely deployed at their organisation within three to five years. One by one, industries are waking up to the capabilities of AI technology – and human resources is proving to be a prime testing ground.
Yet despite widespread belief that AI is driving transformation at multiple levels, it remains a difficult concept to grasp, let alone implement effectively. Everything from smartphone voice assistants to driverless cars falls under the umbrella of artificial intelligence. We may be familiar with the likes of Alexa and Siri, but where do businesses begin when setting their own AI strategy in motion?
Hiring 2.0
The latest stats published by Forbes reveal an average of 118 applications for any given corporate job advert. This presents hiring managers with a mountain of candidate data in the early stages of recruitment. Couple that with the pressure of filling an open vacancy as soon as possible and it’s clear that most companies cannot possibly assess the full scope of talent available to them.
Though perhaps the days of HR departments sifting through piles of CVs to find the best person for the job are numbered – and AI is the answer. Automated processes such as NLP (natural language processing) and NLU (natural language understanding) allow recruiters to scan and validate vast amounts of people data within just a few seconds, pinpointing key skills, experience, achievements and behavioural traits in the process.
There may be a few kinks to iron out, of course. The recent news that Amazon was forced to pull its AI hiring tool because it began to show a bias for male candidates shows that we’re not quite there yet. Despite this, the fact that multinational companies are beginning to experiment with this technology is at the very least a sign of things to come.
Gary Kildare, Chief HR Officer at IBM, remains optimistic that artificial intelligence will help to diminish any bias involved in the recruitment process: “Creating and training trusted AI technology with unbiased data is critically important. At IBM, we’ve been developing an AI system – IBM Watson Recruitment – that can identify instances of biases related to age, gender or race, assessing an organisation’s historical hiring data and highlights potential unconscious biases. This capability empowers HR professionals to take action against potentially biased hiring trends and, in the future, choose the most promising candidate based on the merit of their skills and experience alone.”
The chatbot revolution
Whilst the term chatbot seems a relatively recent addition to our vocabulary, the idea of an AI machine designed to simulate human conversation was first outlined by wartime codebreaker Alan Turing in his 1951 paper The Imitation Game.
Fast forward to today’s commercial world and chatbots have quickly become the norm for many progressive HR departments. From booking annual leave days to completing online training courses, AI programmes are now being used to walk employees through the full span of company policies and protocol. Memory science technology is at the cutting edge of this development and is even being used to address harassment and discrimination in the workplace.
“Chatbots are already increasingly part of our reality online,” says Dr Julia Shaw, memory scientist at UCL and co-founder of Spot, “And they may actually be better than a human for the specific task of reporting workplace issues. The challenge facing HR today is creating a private, unbiased, non-judgemental space for employees to record the details of a grievance – which is easier said than done.
“Talking to a human about harassment is hard. Talking to a bot can be easier because people can just express themselves, write for as long as they need, whenever they need and never feel like someone is assessing their account. Chatbots allow for anonymous reporting and quicker response to such reports. Only by providing better communication channels can we deal with our current under-reporting crisis.”
Keeping HR human
Top organisations seeking to streamline operations are already investing in AI tools to take the burden of administrative tasks away from talented staff wherever possible. That doesn’t mean artificial intelligence and human capability are mutually exclusive; in fact, it will be the combination of these two forces that frees up time for HR professionals to focus more on creative solutions, people development and strategic thinking.
As Matt Watts, Director of Technology and Strategy at NetApp, points out: “It all starts with education. The retraining and upskilling of employees should be viewed as a long-term investment. Staff will need to understand how best to utilise data-driven insights only made available through AI technology. This cultural change takes time, and helping employees adjust to collaborating with AI is not to be underestimated.”
Ultimately, it’s down to HR leaders to keep an eye on the evolving landscape of applications and programmes before deciding which has the potential to transform their operations, whether that’s a chatbot, automation software or hiring algorithm. And whilst most departments are only just beginning to scratch the surface of what’s possible, more than ever now realise that the AI revolution isn’t softly approaching on the horizon – it has already begun.
