*How AI and the CHRO can shape the future of work*
By Patrick Evenden, EMEA Staff Writer
HR leaders around the world are already seeing the benefits of AI and ML, but there’s lots more to be done. Here’s how the CHRO can shape the future of work by harnessing AI.
At Workday Elevate, we spoke with Richard Coombes, Partner in the Human Capital Consulting Practice at Deloitte, and Richard Doherty, Senior Director Product Marketing at Workday, to understand how companies are already benefiting from AI and ML, as well as the potential they have to transform both the world of work and the CHRO role.
How will AI and ML transform the future of work?
Richard Coombes (RC): I genuinely think at the moment, we've designed a world of work where people are too busy. They're too tired, unhealthy, unhappy and yet productivity's flat. There's a real opportunity if we stop just applying it to existing work. But if we take a step back and think about how we can fundamentally redesign work to benefit from the use of this technology, we can change and redesign roles to be more inherently human. This means people are healthier, happier, spend more time with their family and with society – and drive productivity in the workplace at the same time.
We should take that opportunity to design a better future of work for everybody.
Where are CHROs currently using AI and ML and what are some of the advantages they're realising so far?
Richard Doherty (RD): From my perspective, there are three main areas. The first is around recommendations, suggestions and personalising the experience. With all that data we have, we can start pushing content to the employee, a manager or an executive that's going to be relevant to them and help them get their job done.
Secondly, it's anomaly detection. For instance, if I'm a manager in a retail store and I need to approve staff's time submissions, do I have to go through every time submission? Maybe I've got 20 people working for me. It takes forever. No, you shouldn't have to do that. With AI and ML, the algorithms can scan through those entries and identify those that you need to have a look at. Just speed up that whole process and actually make the process more accurate.
And then finally, it's about automation. A great example of that is chatbots and using natural language processing. Rather than having to navigate through an application to get an answer or to book a holiday, I can talk to the application and the application understands what I'm saying and initiates the business process.
What are some of the things organisations should be wary of amidst all the hype around AI and ML?
RC: I think there are some basic change management issues with implementing AI and ML. Do people really understand what AI and ML are? We need to do some education more broadly so people aren't scared of them.
There's a fear of job losses. If you look at the data, sure, jobs will be impacted, but also way more jobs will be created through AI and ML. It's a chance to redesign jobs to be better and healthier for humans. I think clearly, there's a skill shortage. People who truly understand and can implement and build AI and ML tools are scarce in the market, so organisations are struggling to find that.
If you ask ChatGPT what the future of AI is, it will give you a definitive answer. It doesn't at the moment say it doesn't really know, but here's its best guess, like we as humans might.
I think people want explainability. Where did that answer come from? How did the algorithm build the answer? What dataset was used? We want transparency over that.
With AI and ML, Workday is able to manage skills data and curate that data automatically on behalf of our customers. All customers need to worry about is actually encouraging their employees to start sharing what skills they have.
How is AI helping organisations with the shift to becoming skills-based?
RD: Skills are nothing new. Organisations have wanted to know what skills they have in the workforce for many years, but the problem has always been managing the data because there are tens of thousands of different skills and they're changing all the time. New skills are appearing, often technology-driven skills, but also older skills are becoming obsolete. Most organisations kind of gave up trying to manage that data.
With AI and ML, Workday is able to manage that skills data and curate that data automatically on behalf of our customers. All customers need to worry about is actually encouraging their employees to start sharing what skills they have. They don't need to worry about the actual maintenance of the skills data.
And then we can use ML to start making recommendations. We can recommend to employees what learning activities they should pursue, what internal job opportunities there may be, perhaps even what mentors would be good for them to help them develop specific skills. So AI and ML are creating a revolution in organisations' ability to deploy skills-based people strategies.
Ethics is top of mind when it comes to AI. How do you think organisations should be approaching that?
RC: It's interesting. We're clearly going to see some legislation. And you saw Sam Altman, the founder of OpenAI which created ChatGPT, talking to the Senate, pleading for legislation around AI. And I think there's a definite need for that. But that will take some time.
Businesses need to take a stance about how they’re going to use AI ethically and set some guidelines – and a lot of that is based on transparency. What data are we using? What algorithms are we using? How are we using it? What's the explainability? And if we go into it with transparency and a positive outcome in mind, I think we're heading in a more ethical direction.
My advice would be, don't wait for the government. It will certainly be legislated, but actually, that will probably be too slow and too generic for organisations. Have a set of ethical rules for yourself. Be hugely transparent about what you're doing. Check and balance yourself as you go through the process. There will be ethical dilemmas as you go, but learn and improve.
