AI is gaining an increased prominence in the workplace. Research suggests that AI assistants would replace humans as travel agents, office assistants and tutors over the next five years. AI and other emerging technologies are promising to transform the workplace and even replace managers and advisers. In an age where data-led-decision making is more trusted than human biases, employees in leading organisations are willing to be led by robots.

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A recent Oracle & Future Workplace – AI@Work Study highlighted that 64 percent people trust a robot more than their manager. Some other interesting results from India (a sample size of 450 respondents) include:

60 percent employees are excited to work with a robot co-worker

90 percent would trust a robot manager

87 percent world turn to a robot for advice rather than their manager

I spoke to Shaakun Khanna, head of HCM Applications, Asia Pacific at Oracle and one of the core members who designed the study about the implications of AI@Work. What stood out to me was that the age of the knowledge worker is now passé, it is the age of the learning worker. Edited excerpts:

What is the future for AI@Work?

AI is becoming increasingly important and will be an integral part of the workplace soon. AI will disrupt the current way of working, displace certain tasks and most importantly, create numerous new jobs and roles. AI is essentially a set of algorithms that enable machines to collect data, analyse, comprehend, act and learn. AI has tremendous potential for enhancing human cognitive performance without getting tired.

From the mundane work like document processing to highly creative work like designing, AI is enhancing human productivity and effectiveness in all aspects of work.

AI, through conversational interfaces that include Siri, Alexa, and other personalised chatbots, makes it possible for humans to interact with machines in a more human way. Underpinning simple looking features today’s workplace applications have sophisticated technology and data that have countless applications and implications for workplace.

I believe that HR, as a corporate function, has the most untapped opportunities to use AI. From pre-hire talent pool creation, talent attraction, assessments, on-boarding, organization design, planning and budgeting, compensation, coaching, engagement, succession planning, retrenchment and then to redeployment, the entire talent cycle can be enriched by using AI. As AI matures, HR leaders will be able to leverage it to augment more subtle aspects of culture like ‘empathy’ and ‘intuitiveness’ using AI. AI will significantly help in removing heuristics and biases from workplace decisions – a problem that has caused billions of dollars of business value depletion.

In the next few years, AI is going to bring yet another revolution at the workplace, much like machines for mass production, or computers for automation. This time, the pace of change will be much faster and will be much more dynamic. Adopting AI at work, therefore, will not be a choice for HR leaders, but a survival imperative.

Is HR as a function at the risk of being replaced? What should an HR professional gear up for?

That the HR function will become redundant, is a flawed statement; HR is becoming more important. HR is becoming the most important organisational function today, perhaps followed by finance. However, it is being reinvented and it is not the first time. This time around, the pace of change and this cycle for reinvention is much quicker.

HR actually started as IR – industrial relations to manage unions, and then there was a time when ‘personnel managers’ were responsible for managing workplace compliances and facilities. There was a time when talent acquisition became the forefront role and KPI for HR. Then came the whole new cycle of talent development and L&D as a subject. All that is gone today, yet HR is not replaced – it is as I said reinvented. Therefore, we can say that today HR is undergoing its 4th or 5th reinvention. The transactional part of any business is going away and more strategic things are becoming the fundamental KPIs or KRAs of HR leadership. There was a survey about 3-4 years ago which said that a typical HR leader spends only about 15 percent of his or her time on real strategic things that are important for the business – which is changing today. In modern time, HR function is supposed to give actionable insights to the leadership team to help them in making business strategies.

Three top skills of the future.

Learning Agility: The most important skill of the future will be the willingness to re-skill and upskill. The nature of the jobs will change. Machines will take care of repetitive and mundane tasks, which will give the people an ample time for more value adding activities. People really need to upskill themselves in order to be ready for the future of work. In my opinion, people analytics will be an important skill. This would include stakeholder management along with soft skills, a solutions-oriented approach, agility and negotiating abilities. Lastly, a Digital HR is the need of the hour in order to ramp up the competencies and HR technologies to speed up.

Age of knowledge worker is gone, now is the age of learning worker. Knowledge worker was someone who would acquire knowledge in a domain and leveraged that knowledge to create a career for himself and value for the organisation. New competency in demand is learning worker, someone who is exceptionally good at learning new things very quickly taking their learning to a level that can be monetised. This is a completely different paradigm from a knowledge worker who used to be a deep expert in a domain and remain like that throughout. There would be shallowness in knowledge but there will be much more variety in the knowledge.

Technology orientation: HR, like never before needs to understand the impact of technology on socio economic makeup of the talent pool. At the same time, it needs to understand the possible application of technology to mitigate the emerging challenges. HR also must learn about the threats that technology poses and the side effects that it can create. Finally, it needs to understand the way technology is all evolving to keep pace with changing times.

Business Skills: An abysmally low number of HR professionals really understand the businesses they serve. That needs to change. The future HR professional will be a Business Managers who has a deeper understanding of the people aspect of the business.

Talk about the Oracle study and some insights that astonished you.

Oracle is at the forefront of developing applications that are embellished with Artificial Intelligence not just in the HR space but the entire product offering. Oracle also happens to be the leader in space of HR therefore it was obvious for us to look at the implication of technology, specifically how AI is invading HR and how this shift is enriching work. This is the second year that we have done the study with our partner -

I was very closely involved in the designing and data mining of the study. There were 2-3 things that I found very fascinating.

First, India was rated as no. 1 in terms of willingness of employees to accept and adapt AI, one would expect western countries to be leading that and it was fascinating to see India leading the pack.

The second thing was that around 64 person of people trust a robot more than their manager. It goes back to the earlier point of biases as the general perception is that AI is not as biased as a human being, that also manifested itself in terms of the trust. Majority of people said that they would trust AI more than a human being as a manager.

The majority (65 percent) of workers are optimistic, excited and grateful about having robot co-workers and nearly a quarter report having a loving and gratifying relationship with AI at work.

Men have a more positive view of AI at work than women with 32 percent of men optimistic versus 23 percent of women.

How should large enterprises reskill their staff at scale?

Reskilling cannot be just the responsibility of the enterprise. Employees have an equal obligation to upskill themselves if they have to stay relevant in the world of work.

Organisations must:

Be proactive and provide a visibility to the employees on the emerging skills requirements and the roles that are likely to get created.

Provide content and a platform to the employees to consume that content. Skill building needs to be a easy process that can be done any time, anywhere, on any devise. Therefore, organizations must have the right learning tools and technology provided to the employees.

Incentivising self-learning with growth opportunities will be a definite asset for large enterprises to reskill their staff at scale.

Leveraging the passions and interests of the individuals to spark interest in them for self-initiated learning.

Lastly, investing in good leadership and managerial talent – the age-old panacea of talent development in the corporate world, will continue to give great results.

First Published:Mar 8, 2020 7:40 PM IST