It’s late on a Sunday evening in September. By rights, you should be lost in the latest binge-worthy series, sprawled comfortably on your couch. Despite the gripping plot twists unfolding on screen, though, your usual end-of-weekend escapism is failing to captivate you because you can’t get out of your head the daunting prospect of the coming week.
Tomorrow morning, 15 graduate recruits are all starting on the same day, all to be set up on your systems, all desperate for support and individual attention, all needing to be productive and chargeable to clients before the year is out.
Yes, you’re part of a team, but there are limits to what you can offer these new employees on a one-to-one basis alongside the demands of an already sizable workforce.
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This anxiety-inducing scenario – or variations on the theme – will be familiar to anyone working in HR.
Of course, it’s not all bad.
On one hand, two reassuring things are likely to be true: 1) you or others in HR will have had time to speak to them all individually during the recruitment process, and there will be future opportunities to do so again too; and 2) they’ll expect some of their training and day-to-day queries to be handled entirely on internal online platforms and without human input.
But on the other, there’s a vast grey area of activity for which the more personal touch, while not essential, would be very much a nice-to-have, and something the best employers offered – if only you had the resources… which many departments don’t.
AI already in use in HR today
The good news is that – whether it’s used to provide reactive material to supplement your knowledge bases or intranet, for proactive training or assistance in the recruitment process, information for managers, access to IT, forms for holidays, performance reviews, pay portals, expenses, whatever, you name it – advances in artificial intelligence (AI) are starting to make the life of time- and cash-strapped HR professionals’ immeasurably better – even though this technology will never and should never replace you altogether.
And there’s certainly an appetite for the transformative potential AI could bring to HR, employee training and upskilling, one that could reshape workforce management and skill development; Gartner recently found, for example, that more than three-quarters (76%) of HR leaders believe that if their organisation doesn’t adopt and implement AI solutions, such as generative AI, in the next 12 to 24 months, they’ll be lagging in organisational success compared to those that do, while 34% of HR leaders participating in the tech research consulting firm’s January benchmarking session said they were exploring potential use cases and opportunities when it came to generative AI.
So what are those potential use cases? Three broad areas have caught my eye in the past year or two:
Recruitment
When it comes to recruiting and hiring, AI-driven automation of repetitive manual tasks is significantly reducing the time HR teams have to spend in dealing with and vetting candidates. By generating customised communication sequences, and using large language models (LLMs) to create seemingly bespoke job descriptions and interview questions, such technology can improve engagement and response rates. AI can also be used to track and analyse conversion rates, helping hiring managers identify and refine their outreach strategies, focusing only on those that deliver.
Monitoring
Monitoring performance, engagement and behaviour to provide instant insights to HR teams is a core strength of AI today. By analysing the type of employee data that’s stored in your systems, such as email, Teams or Slack chat, and information on work patterns, these systems can flag up negative indicators. Catching these early and putting interventions in place before they escalate is clearly in your company’s interests.
Internal mobility
The best companies recruit upwards from their own ranks. The trouble is, the process is all too often prompted only when an employee happens to spot an opening and reacts, rather than the relevant parties encouraging them to apply, meaning opportunities are often missed. Exploiting technology similar to that used to monitor employees, AI-assisted systems have plugged this gap and are making internal selection suggestions to busy HR teams, saving time and the cost of external recruiters.
The list goes on, with impressive applications on the market in other key areas like onboarding, and in learning and development, but they all have these benefits in common: improved efficiency, decision-making that’s more reliable and better informed, and, of course, reduced spend – not to mention the positive experience that your colleagues will enjoy, which aids retention.
So what’s the catch?
Future innovations
Well, this brings me to the future of AI in HR. There’s no catch as such; we’re on an upward trajectory into a world in which AI in general and generative AI in particular will make our lives easier.
But I do have a word of caution: the problems of AI aren’t what it can or can’t do. OK, there are still teething issues in the drive to reduce ‘hallucinations’ in text output and reproduce hands in images that actually look like they belong to humans. But there’s a whole education piece for users that needs to be nailed: we’re not yet in a place where we always know exactly what has and what hasn’t been produced by AI, and that has the potential to be dangerous. It’s crucial that we cultivate a culture of transparency and honesty about AI-generated content.
Whether it’s in recruitment materials, internal communications, or any other HR-related documents, we must be upfront about what has been produced by AI. This transparency not only builds trust but also helps in setting realistic expectations about AI’s capabilities and limitations.
On that note, I’ll finish with a brief namecheck of Rapport and how its technology is helping to revolutionise employee development through its animated avatars – creations that nobody could ever think were trying to fool users into thinking they’re real.
They do, however, bring a fresh and invigorating experience to certain types of interaction.
Take a common use case, training and upskilling. Employees expect to have conversations with chatbots during the course of their training and other interactions with HR systems. What they’re less used to are virtual interactive personalities – or VIPs. With automatic speech recognition and built by Rapport users on a simple-to-use platform – with simple plug-ins and integrations with the likes of ChatGPT and users’ own systems – VIPs are given tailor-made, user-defined facial expressions, accurate lip-syncing and natural gestures, along with the ability to detect and respond to emotions.
They draw on the same information as other AI-enhanced systems – your information. But the game-changing difference is in how they energise the employee experience.
More specialist, perhaps, is this use case: HR professionals conversing with animated avatars that represent employees with whom they’re engaged in a difficult conversation – a tough review, a disciplinary hearing, letting them down about a promotion they’d applied for, that sort of thing – and for which they need to practice and train before doing it for real.
Innovations like these represent the future of AI; in this exciting period of infancy, they also represent the present.
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