AI IN HR - WHAT IS THE EFFECT OF AUTOMATION AND AI ON HR?

Good afternoon everybody. So, so far today we've started to hear about these themes of artificial intelligence and automation and what I'm going to be speaking about is what does all of that really mean for HR and what are we seeing out there in terms of the technologies that are available and what's really going on how can we start to understand the difference between hype and reality so to do that first of all what we need to do is to take a look at the world of consumer technology that we're using every day and think about how quickly that has changed so if you look on this slide you can see that platforms like LinkedIn Facebook YouTube and Twitter came around in very short succession all about 15 years ago and we got used to this idea of putting information out onto the web and using the web to get information back again and then all of a sudden the iPhone launched in 2007 and the world changed again we changed from thinking about this in terms of web-based platforms to thinking about the power of the mobile phone and how we could have a computer in our pocket and then we suddenly discovered this new wave of technology which was app based and mobile oriented and so suddenly you saw Airbnb Instagram uber snapchat and many others explode very quickly onto the scene and if you think about the short timeframe here that's gone about 15 years ago none of these platforms existed five years ago you probably didn't use half of these and now many of them you're using every single day and billions of people across the world are using them every single day and so what does all of that mean and where's that kind of leading us and the reality is as Callum mentioned earlier that AI is now everywhere now some of it is not as advanced as often you read about or you might like to think and we will see this increase exponentially over time but there are elements of machine learning, natural language processing and other components of AI that are prolific in our lives every single day if you use platforms like Netflix or Amazon or listen to music on Spotify then there are types of algorithms behind the scenes there that are starting to allow you to have a more personalised experience and that's the piece that I'm really going to explore today is how this is changing our experience in our consumer lives and how in turn that is changing the expectations of the workforce the expectations of all of you and of all of the employees that work in your companies because every day we are using these types of technologies and then what happens we come to work and we have a very different experience we have the type of experience that we were having 15 years ago in our consumer lives however this is starting to change and we as an HR function need to prepare for that to be ready for that and to embrace it so what is happening in the technology market for HR and is HR ready for it well there was a survey run by HR.com last year and they asked the first question here that you can see around do you think that chatbots will be an important interface for employees to get answers and what you can see here is that 79% of the surveyed respondents said yes they agreed and that's not really surprising because every day we are using some form of conversational interface it might be that we're using whatsapp it might be that we're using slack or a messaging service or we actually might be using a chatbot or using Alexa or Siri or Google and having a conversation that way but either way we are getting more and more familiar and comfortable with chatbots and conversational interfaces so 79 percent agreeing there, not a huge surprise however less than half of people felt that they'd even be using AI at work in four to five years in 2023 and so immediately you see a drop-off there where people can kind of see it it's in the future but they don't necessarily believe it's in the near future and then the last stat on there only 14% of people strongly agreeing that they're knowledgeable in the area of AI and that's not surprising and it's the biggest area that I think as an HR profession we need to tackle which is not only do we need to think about how do we upskill our employees and our workforce and help them to deal with the future of work but we also need to think about how to upskill HR and what are the skills that HR needs to be successful in this new word of work so let's also look at how HR technology is starting to disrupt things and change things and when we look at all of the different types of HR technologies that are out there and there's now hundreds of them by the way hundreds and hundreds of vendors many of them startups that have some form of machine learning or AI at the core of their platform and have an HR use case and I imagine all of you will be starting to get inundated with all of the business development and marketing messages that comes with that because we're seeing this massive explosion of HR technology now and one of the biggest areas that we're seeing it is in recruitment over a third of all of the vendors that are out there that are using some form of AI in their platform are doing so to try and disrupt recruitment and the ways that they're doing that are in a few different ways one is around Augmented writing, has anyone here heard of that or seen an example of that so this is if you're using something like grammarly or if you use Gmail and you can start to see suggestions are now coming up well there's a company called Textio and there's a few others that are now using this technology to actually challenge how we write job descriptions to help us to understand the impact of the language that we're putting into the written form and to try and make it more gender neutral or more friendly from a diversity perspective and so augmented writing is an area that we're seeing grow exponentially at the moment and I'll expect that to continue to happen the other is around the sourcing area so many of you I'm sure will have to deal with the applicants that come in to your organisation's and apply but also going out and looking for passive candidates whether that's on LinkedIn or other more local platforms and the reality is that recruiters are now spending most of their time searching for candidates and trying to engage passive candidates and that's where we're seeing a lot of technology in this space starting to come in as well how can we automate that process of understanding the critical keywords the types of attributes that we should be searching for how can we automate the way that we're going out and finding niche talent in places where actually normally we haven't been able to uncover them and so we're seeing a lot of platforms coming on in that space as well and then the third under recruitment is around selection and assessment so we've had psychometric testing for 70-80 years we've had long-form questionnaires that people have filled out IQ tests but what we're now starting to see is technology trying to improve the experience of that do people really want to take a test or a questionnaire that's 30-40 minutes long or an hour long can we try and get the same amount of information by playing a game for 15 minutes or asking far fewer questions on your mobile phone now the reality is with this technology is it's very early days we have 70 to 80 years of academic studying around the impact of psychometric testing and how it can predict performance and we just don't have that legacy for some of the more game based technologies but they are coming in and they are something to look at and to explore and we expect that whole area to certainly grow as time goes by the second one is around employee experience so I'm not going to talk about employee engagement here and engagement surveys what I'm talking about is the experience that people have in your organisation using HR technology I don't think there are many employees out there that enjoy the experience of going into a typical HR system that's been around for 10-15 years using ATS' and some of the more traditional platforms like that some of them haven't changed to evolve in the way that we've seen cloud-based and then mobile native applications coming on board and so the technologies feel very old-fashioned and what we're starting to see in the experience space is tools like chatbots starting to disrupt the way that we actually engage with technology the way that we get information and the way that we provide information now that could be in the recruitment experience as part of the candidate experience whereby I can ask questions and get an answer straight away via a chatbot instead of just not being heard from from a recruiter I can be guided through the onboarding experience similar to some of what we just saw where I can start to understand what's neither of me you can even have chatbots prompting managers to order laptops and do other tasks that they need to do as part of onboarding and then when we think about the employees some of the simple tasks that they have to do every week or so maybe like booking a day off or maybe finding out something about the pension policy all of that can be done through a conversational interface or a chatbot platform and we can meet people where they work we don't have to make them go to an intranet portal we can have them use slack or the messaging app that you use within your workforce and have them ask the questions there and those are the types of tools that they're using to interact with their other colleagues and that's the place that they should be using to get information and deal with some of these tasks the third areas around learning and development so when we think about platforms like Netflix and we think about the personalised experience and the millions of personas that they're now creating to really understand everything that you're doing the different ways that you're clicking on the screen when you pause what you watch what types of shows you like on the weekend versus during the week all of that can now be applied to the learning environment at work where we can start to track some of those interactions with some of the new learning experience platforms that are out there and we can start to really understand the types of information that people are trying to consume we can try and infer the skills that they have and the skills that they're looking to grow and we can make sure that we're giving them a personalised experience back and that's really going to transform the way that people consume learning in the workplace and then the last one is around people analytics people analytics is a huge topic and is gaining huge popularity at the moment and we're seeing a lot of maturity coming into this area as well we hear a lot about predictive attrition models and that's certainly one way that we're seeing companies start to think about how to use machine learning and to be more predictive with the datasets that they have the other piece that we hear a lot about is around natural language processing how can you start to understand all of that text-based data that you have out there in your organisation either coming through your engagement survey maybe through Q&A chat panels your intranet wherever it might be how can you do more continuous listening of your employees understand what it is that they're saying and use that data to then surface trends and take action that's going to make their lives better there are many great examples of companies now using NLP to really understand things that their engagement survey just hadn't told them in the past where answering these traditional questions once a year was not giving them the information they needed but by turning on more of a continuous listening program they were able to glean insights that they just hadn't had before and then the last one is around organisational network analysis so this is how can you start to understand the activity that's going on across your organization when you look at calendar data when you look at email metadata and think about how individuals are collaborating and interacting with each other and what can you start to do to then push back to the manager or the employee to help make the individual's life better and to understand how people are working together and to improve that one of the best use cases of this is actually Microsoft where they started to understand more and more about email habits and they were able to advise managers that when they were sending emails at the weekend there was then this mass of emails that then their team was sending over that entire weekend period the manager they'd got rid of their email out their inbox and they were off having fun with their family but everyone else was still busy working and by holding a mirror up to that and challenging that as a culture they were able to actually change that and prevent managers from doing that when it wasn't necessary so what does all of this mean and and how's this really gonna manifest itself across HR well I've talked a little bit about personalisation and I think this is a theme that we as HR professionals need to really focus on and use this technology to explore there is a real opportunity to move away from the way that we've delivered HR programs in the past where it's been one size fits all and a lot of the technology that we've pushed out or the programs that we pushed out have not been adopted as well as we might like we can move beyond that and now create an environment of one size fits one where we create a personalised experience where people are encouraged to use platforms and to provide data just like they do in their consumer lives because it then ultimately means that the system learns about them and helps improve their experience and personalise the experience back to them so personalisation is a massive theme that we're going to see as the years go by the other is around lifelong learning we've heard a little bit about this already today this need for constant upskilling and this isn't just about how you support your workforces when it comes to this and how you make sure that all of your employees are constantly thinking about how the changes in technology and the changes in the world of work are affecting their jobs and the skills that they're going to need to be successful in the future but this is also about how we as HR start to think about the need for lifelong learning and how we understand that things are moving so fast now and the half-life of a skill is getting shorter and shorter that what we learned 5-10 years ago is unlikely to be relevant in five years time and we need to be continually learning and we need to put the technology in place to help people really get the information that they need and reskill when they need to it's not just up to the employee to do that it's up to organisations to drive a culture of this to make sure that we are really promoting that and driving retention as a result and then the third one is user centric design so this term of design thinking that everyone's talking about now how does that apply to HR well the beauty of design thinking and taking a more user centric design approach is that you're putting the user at the center that's exactly what it's talking about and by doing that we start to design platforms and programs around the user and their needs and we don't just do that in a bubble anymore we don't just think about something that we need a piece of technology IT says it's a good idea HR liked it and we just roll it out we work with our employees with our candidates with our managers to understand what it is they need and we design it with them we iterate we prototype and then ultimately when you roll these things out the adoption is so much higher because people have been involved in the process of designing it and will continue to be involved as you continue to iterate so user centric design is going to be essential for us to make sure that as we start to bring in all these different tools and platforms we're doing it with the user in mind and we're making sure that we're not just staying focused on business value but value to the individual as well and so with all of that it does mean that HR needs to reskill we do need new skills to be successful in the future of work and there's six of them on here so we ran a survey at myHRfuture to ask HR professionals what skills they felt they were most lacking or most wanted to develop and you can see the first two there in green around people analytics and strategic Workforce Planning this need to understand how we can be more data-driven and put data more at the heart of some of our decisions rather than relying on gut feel and start to think about how we can create more agile organisations as well the second column is around HR technology and design thinking as I've just talked about how do we use those Design Thinking principles to influence the types of technology we think about and the ones that we choose how do we become experts in the technology that is out there for HR and then lastly none of that matters none of those technical skills matter if we're not good at consulting and influencing and stakeholder management if we can't get buy-in from the senior leaders in the organisation if we can't bring people on the journey and influence that what we want to do in HR is important and there's a reason to be doing this then none of that matters it won't be successful so in order for all of that other work all of the trends that I've just talked about to be successful growing those other skills around consulting and influencing and particularly in a world of AI and automation is absolutely critical that we figure out how to get better at that and to grow that at the same time so that's everything I wanted to share with you today if you'd like to learn more on this topic please do go to myHRfuture.com and there's a code there if you're interested as well and getting a discount on anything that we're doing thank you very much

Channel: myHRfuture

Views: 20,774

Keywords: AI in HR, Automation and HR, HR Technology, Digital HR, What is the impact of AI on HR?, What is the effect of AI on HR?, What is the effect of Automation on HR?, What is the impact of Automation on HR?, presentation on AI and HR, Keynote speaker on AI in HR, conference on AI in HR, HR tech, HR vendors, AI in Recruitment, AI in Learning, AI in People Analytics

Id: VILLRuDFBLc

Length: 19min 2sec (1142 seconds)

Published: Fri May 24 2019