Everywhere you turn, AI is taking over. It’s ability to mimic human capabilities such as learning, problem solving, and perception has made it valuable to many functions in the organisation. While AI applications are still in the early development stage, studies show that it can benefit various departments and functions of almost every type of industry.

You will be surprised to know that HR is one of the primary areas of integrating artificial intelligence into company operations. It can help to bring about a paradigm shift from traditional processes to the recent agile development approaches and ensure continuous innovation. AI can speed and automate data collection, make preliminary observations, classify HR issues and segregate customer and employee profiles, final decisions and corrective actions.

The potential benefits of adopting Artificial Intelligence for HR operations are tremendous. Firstly, organisations can ensure work is done around the clock, eliminate human error and reduce human dependency to save costs and drive revenue. Secondly, embracing new ways to create higher levels of process efficiency for outdated operational models will increase competitive advantage and create new business models.

Some areas where company HR teams can apply AI include

1)   Measurement of employee performance levels:

Measurement of employee performance at any given company are based on the set of people hired and lack of information about candidates who were passed over—or weren’t even interviewed—who may have, say, produced more in less time. Aggregating data from many customers, can reduce bias, but the problem remains that different companies may not track the same variables in the same way, and subtle but important ones are likely to be missing. AI can ignore demographic-related information about a candidate’s age, race, and sex. It is best suited for collecting and compiling data quickly and without human error.

Companies have enhanced their ability to process huge amounts of seemingly endless data and forecast the rapidly changing demands and expectations of their markets . Earlier this would have taken data analysts weeks to process this to extract meaningful insights. All this can now be done in minutes; allowing people to take more accurate and informed decisions.

It’s no surprise that many companies are turning to innovative technologies that enable them to be smarter and more effective in their data analysis efforts. They’re under more and more pressure from competitors and customers to adopt advanced technologies and reduce overall efforts and increase accuracy.

Yet, due to lack of budgets and reluctance to break the status quo organisations haven’t been able to plug this gap.

2)   Emergence of chat-bots:

For employees, chat-bots deliver an unmatched level of employee experience, from real time answers for HR questions to personalized learning and development. In addition, they are critically important to the workforce, who work remotely at least half time and do not have easy access to an HR department.

For HR leaders, chat-bots are well suited to improving talent acquisition and on-boarding processes by increasing speed and providing greater consistency in answering frequently asked HR questions, improving the talent acquisition process, and enhancing the online learning experience.

Talent acquisition and new hire on-boarding are ripe areas where intelligent assistants can tap multiple data sources to develop candidate profiles, schedule interviews, and make decisions about prospective job candidates.

For all its promise possibility of AI adoption raises a number of issues. Some are evident today, in the early stages of adoption, while others may take time to become clear. Companies will now have to connect their employees with the relevant information and AI will continue to provide better complex designs, functions and more advanced quality service and safety in order to help humans in their daily operations.

There is a lot of fear that soon machines will take over but there is still the consideration that there are some things only humans can do. While AI can replace the delegation aspect of management it won’t be able to replace soft skills that empower, motivate and develop employees. This is where leaders will still be in demand.

Suggestions and comments welcome