AI Just Made HR Transformation More Palatable
- By Sheila Lam
- July 18, 2023
The buzz of generative AI is arriving at the HR departments of Asia businesses. On top of empowering customer services, more AI capabilities are extending to HR functions.
The State of HR Survey indicates 34.7% of HR professionals in Asia Pacific are investing in AI, ahead of investment in HR management systems (24.9%) and cloud-based technologies (23.8%). Gartner also noted AI is found in supporting recruitment by sourcing and scanning candidates and in learning and development (L&D) functions by designing self-learning platforms.
“It’s about intentionally exploring where, how and when employees learn, as well as what impacts their ability to learn effectively,” said Hanne Nieberg, director of Gartner HR practice.
AI is also seen as a tool to drive collaboration and foster relationships. Conversation intelligence has been used to support call centers to capture meaningful and actionable insights for customer experience. These functions are now being extended into employee experience, according to the web conferencing and collaboration platform Zoom.
HR tech embedding AI capabilities
Zoom recently announced extending Zoom IQ’s capabilities into Zoom Meeting and Zoom Team Chat for summarizing meetings, recapping conversations, and suggesting action items.
On top of Zoom, more HR tech providers are joining the AI bandwagon. SAP has recently announced integrating Microsoft's Copilot with SuccessFactors, aiming to help HR professionals fine-tune job description drafting. Copilot will also support employee L&D by creating personalized learning recommendations based on data and learning courses in SAP SuccessFactors solutions that align with the employee’s career and development goals.
Meanwhile, Oracle last month announced to embed generative AI capabilities into Oracle Fusion Cloud HCM, aiming to provide assisted authoring, like writing job descriptions and generating HR Helpdesk knowledgebase articles to efficiently complete HR tasks. The generative AI capabilities are expected to provide suggestions on employee survey questions that reflect the organization's language style and cultural DNA. It is also likely to offer insights by summarizing employees’ performance gathered from regular reviews and across the year from the employee, peers, managers, and customers.
Generative AI pros and cons
Despite the rising popularity of generative AI tools in HR functions, human talents remain irreplaceable. At Zoom’s recent Work Transformation Summit APAC, AI expert and author of Intelligent Automation Pascal Bornet said AI can only support two of three major tasks.
“About one-third of our tasks—those unproductive meetings and emails that don’t have any impact—can be eliminated," he said. “Another third of our work—the repetitive, transactional activities, the boring logistics—can be automated.”
With AI and technology replacing these tasks, Bornet said talents can focus on activities like providing insights, fostering collaborations, and making decisions. Technology can significantly impact these intelligent activities, but it is merely there to augment our ideas.
Bornet added generative AI tools like ChatGPT allows users to interact with technology, appearing to understand humans and with the wisdom to solve all problems.
“It seems to know things, but it’s just collecting words and putting them together,” he said. “We need to be aware of inaccurate or inconsistent information coming out of these systems because, at the end of the day, they are mathematical systems.”
The large language models (LLM) are trained using human data. Any bias or inaccuracy in data will be reflected, and sometimes inflated, in the use of technologies. Hence, the human factors—to bring critical thinking towards the AI suggestions and to build human relationships with empathy—are more critical than ever in the age of AI.
The human factor in technology
The HR transformation journey at Hong Kong Jockey Club (HKJC), the city's largest non-profit organization and horse racing club, perfectly demonstrates the significance of human factors in technology implementation.
At the recent SAP NOW Hong Kong conference Philip Wixon, HR transformation lead at HKJC, said the organization kickstarted its HR transformation initiative a few months ago, aiming to consolidate 20 legacy HR systems into a single HR platform with SAP SuccessFactors.
“Employee experience is no small thing for us,” said Wixon. “Our focus was [previously] distracted by the low value-added tasks. This project is HR's contribution to making our ways of working easier for everyone across the club.”
With more than 18,000 employees, and many of them working at non-traditional business functions like race day operations and charitable trust management, HKJC has a large, diverse, and complex workforce. In addition, more than 50% of the club’s employees are non-office workers, forcing HKJC to previously rely on paper-based processes in many HR functions, like leave applications and medical certificate submission.
One primary purpose of the transformation is to make things easier for the entire workforce with digitalized applications and mobile-enabled approval. This journey is ongoing and unique.
“The club has resourced this project in a way that I haven’t seen before,” said Wixon. Not only was the project started with a focus on its diverse workforce, but the technology implementation also focuses on the human factor.
Wixon said HKJC has hired new technical talents with deep knowledge of SuccessFactors implementation and invested heavily in change management. A team involving internal colleagues and external consultants is dedicated to change management, anticipating push-backs, managing expectations, and mitigating risks.
Human attributes in the rise of AI
This human-centric technology implementation practice is a testimonial of the significance of human factors amid the rise of AI.
Unlike computers, empathy is a powerful human attribute that allows humans to understand each other and our expectations. For this reason, AI expert Bornet did not expect AI to replace human talents.
Another essential human skill in the age of AI includes critical thinking, the ability to question the information given by AI with data bias and inaccuracy in mind. He added real human creativity—the ability to create new components instead of combining existing ones—is another critical skill to develop.
“Those three skills will make workers less likely to become redundant with technology. But the level we need to build those skills is almost to the point of recreating them,” Bornet concluded.
Sheila Lam is the contributing editor of DigitalWorkforceTrends. Covering IT for 20 years as a journalist, she has witnessed the emergence, hype, and maturity of different technologies but is always excited about what's next. You can reach her at [email protected].
Image credit: iStockphoto/Yutthana Gaetgeaw