Srikanth Karra is Chief Human Resources Officer at Mphasis.
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Proclamations have been made for a few years now about the emergence of a smart new technology—artificial intelligence—that would alter life as we know it. Today, that moment has arrived, and its presence underlies nearly everything. As with most new developments, AI is more visible in some industries than others. In particular, it's vastly transforming software development and tech companies.
Still, AI's presence and continued adoption in the workplace causes uncertainty. People have expressed apprehensions about its possible impact on jobs and how it could potentially overpower all that is human about work.
As someone who's been driven by bringing out the best in people in diverse work environments over decades, I find it important to say AI may be the technology that helps free up employees for the kind of fulfilling work they deserve. Its ability to automate some processes, thereby reducing mindless tasks, promises to restore an expanded capacity to the workforce in ways that may prove to be significant and historic.
1. Improving Employees' Productivity
One of the valuable outcomes AI makes possible is the automation of routine tasks and processes. According to a Salesforce survey, up to 89% of full-time employees said automation made their jobs more satisfying. Additionally, 91% said they found automation saved time and helped them develop a better work-life balance.
Employees across all areas of an organization stand to benefit from AI deployment. Consider, for example, how automation tools can help marketers achieve greater personalization and productivity. AI can analyze customer data to better understand preferences and purchase history. This would allow marketing teams to customize content, recommendations and ad campaigns to individual users, leading to both higher engagement and conversion.
In customer service, sentiment analysis tools can provide insights that allow representatives to follow customer conversations in a way that allows them to better understand whether it's a positive, negative or neutral interaction. These teams could then prioritize issues that require urgent attention and structure their time and responses accordingly.
Meanwhile, a recent McKinsey study found that generative AI can help software developers finish coding jobs twice as fast. This is significant since developers typically operate in a world of constant flux and are increasingly expected to turn around codes at exponentially high speeds.
2. Transforming The 'Recruit-To-Retire' Life Cycle
As an HR leader, AI’s relevance and applicability extend to you and your teams as well. Although we've come a long way from the events of 2020, the aftermath has triggered a chain of transformations that promises to improve how talent is viewed, recruited, sustained and supported and how employees view work.
Given the various modes in which work now takes place, HR leaders are compelled to recruit, manage and support their organizations’ teams differently. This can often mean being overstretched and not always able to make the right decisions at every stage of an employee’s "recruit-to-retire" life cycle.
However, when AI-enabled solutions are introduced, they can speed up time-consuming processes, such as administrative tasks around onboarding. This provides you with much-needed time to connect with new hires. When these newcomers begin their journey at your organization by spending one-on-one time with HR leaders, it helps ensure a sense of authentic connection at the outset. This can pave the way for better employee experience and productivity.
When you automate tedious, laborious HR functions, you're freed up to pay closer attention to improving the employee experience. For example, you might focus on introducing new initiatives around enhancing employee well-being or career development. Additionally, your teams can choose to use specific AI tools to configure the best match between employee profiles, their interests and upskilling opportunities.
3. Promoting Diversity And Inclusion
At the end of the day, technology is only as good as the people who make and use it. As it's often been said, many algorithms have been found to reflect the biases of their creators. Concerted efforts to ensure there is greater ethnic diversity and inclusion within software development teams and the entire development cycle can go a long way to ensure AI algorithms are ethical. These considerations should be at the foundation of any automated technology and embedded into the ecosystem.
For example, some HR platforms deploy algorithms to identify, measure, track and address key issues that have an impact on employees. This includes insights into recruiting and pay equity so you can find and retain a diverse pool of talent. Other algorithms can detect racial and gender-based inequities, while still others have the ability to diagnose and recommend strategies to help enhance your diversity, equity and inclusion goals.
Even a cursory look back at history proves breakthroughs in technology always generate a period of uncertainty. But they also lead to advancements, creating new opportunities and ushering in new industries and work environments. As we look ahead, it'll be important for organizations to view AI in this light and embrace it for all the promise it holds to transform, streamline and—more than anything else—expand human possibilities.
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