Being tired of hearing about artificial intelligence will do you no good, quickly change your mentality going forward. It will become the only way to succeed with your career most especially being an HR professional. Artificial Intelligence has altered the way we work and is gradually becoming an integral part in HR technology trend and streamlining. This rapid evolution needs to be incorporated into the practice of HR.
The learning process will assist in quality decision making and ensure an effective human resource management administration at all levels. For this reason, organizations and decision makers must equip its staff by means of training. Integrating the usage of AI requires huge investment in the acquisition of the technology and a proper training mechanism to empower HR practitioners. AI and the mechanization of systems, processes and procedures could fundamentally transform the workplace and the entire face of human resource administration.
The adoption of AI is a strategic approach and gives you an edge over your competitors, with a well-equipped workforce and professionals – increase in employee morale, motivation and convenience is assured. It will be very much appropriate for HR to lead this transformation with this digital skills gap – with the advantage of data, HR should be able to design a comprehensive training program which will be in line with the organizational strategy. Interfacing the old and the new however, requires a lot of interventions ranging from investment to training as well as an effective integration.
The workload and expectation of HR is so huge and burdensome to the extent that meeting deadlines and achieving goals almost become impossible sometimes. Greatly enough, emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and process automation assist in relieving this burden and workload. Interestingly, it offers additional time for HR professionals to concentrate on HR strategic. According to gartner.com, analyst predict that AI augmentation will recover 6.2 billion hours of worker productivity by 2021 and that one in five workers engaged in mostly non-routine tasks will rely on AI to do a job by 2022. Are organizations and business owners going to position themselves for this change or wait to be over taken by events? The choice is yours. Let us consider a few things that would prepare HR for the adoption of AI;
- Perform a workforce analysis
- Encourage – or mandate – ongoing learning and development
- Enable skills diversification
- Design competency assessment metric for skills identification and development
- Integrate and automate existing HR processes and procedures
- Match current skills & learning content to skills gaps
- Design parameters for candidate scoring
There is the urgent need to recognize all job roles to accommodate the full potential of AI – this should be a major consideration for HR practitioners. Personnel must be trained on how AI will impact HR and the business at large. Organizations need to start building HR teams that will partner with IT and Digital Transformation teams to provide information on HR data and how to integrate them into AI metric. HRIS is a function of HR and therefore will not be out of place to create an HR Tech role that will interface with IT/digital teams on happenings in the AI space.
HR is pictured as an extension of a company’s brand and image, people look up to the HR practices in forming their opinion about the business and its people. The face of recruitment has changed significantly with the emergence of social media. Most job adverts are conveniently placed on official social media portals of the organization and some form of initial screening is down through the use of these AI systems. HR must therefore equip itself with any development that happens on such platforms just to operate within the approved standards and learn how to navigate through such platforms for work. According to hrtechnologist, HR will soon need to create HR marketing positions responsible for building brand awareness in the hiring sphere to stay on top of the competition.
The future of HR will be a team approach, one in which humans and machines work together to find solutions – therefore skills required to be in HR and to work in the entire organization must be upskilled to be compatible with the demands of AI. With the introduction and integration of AI, HR will have more time for the “human” side of their work and allow AI do the routine tasks as well as the many other activities that will not require human interventions. AI is the newest tech on the block and it is therefore necessary that HR gets a much better understanding of its usage and benefits to the organization. The fascinating aspect is that it has potential of analyzing data, realignment of jobs as well as predicting the future of the organization. The use of chatbox, webinar, podcast, live streaming, tweeting and getting instant feedback amongst others on customer request is an indication of the way forward leading to the full adoption of AI.
In a few years from now the narratives will change – syllabuses will be affected in terms of programmes to be offered in schools, it therefore means getting well trained professionals will require a proper collaboration between industry and academia. Academia needs to understand the labour market so they can train the right people with the required skill sets. There is the expectation that HR practice and AI will be harmonious and rather ensure a peaceful co-existence amongst them – this sounds refreshing and brings relieve to those who hold the view that AI is taking over the work of HR.
People and job will be affected, downsizing, job enlargement and total scrapping of certain job roles will happen but the good and stimulating news is that organizations will still need humans no matter the interventions by technology. HR will still have to lead this change process but it depends on its preparedness for this evolution. If HR wants to maintain it relevance, it must immediately position itself for this change and take absolute advantage of it. Companies can set themselves up for long-term success strategically if they recognize this change and embraces it – some organizations have understood the importance of AI and are investing heavily in it. There is the inertia for change in humans but we are faced with the challenge of technology and therefore needs to be awaken to this trend and align.
Source: Bright Ampadu Okyere |Tel. #: 0244204664 | Email Address: hrtoday@gmail.com
