Fuelled by unprecedented computing power and massive data analytics capabilities, Artificial intelligence (AI) has come into its own within the last decade. From a technology perspective, the advance of AI continues to penetrate across industry segments in an extraordinary speed, from improving the efficiency and quality of IT services to client interaction and personalization, to autonomous infrastructure and application service management to biometrics. AI is becoming a key factor that shapes the business and government competitive landscape and promises to enhance people’s lives in the future.

Influencing the HR function

The advent of such technologies has definitely influenced the overall human resources to function from talent acquisition to any people-based business decision-making. With innovation and transformational leadership being the need of the hour, the HR world is re-imagining itself by leveraging technologies like automation and AI to re-engineer, reskill, and support the overall development of the organization. From screening thousands of resumes to identifying the right candidate, negating human biases AI plays multiple roles in today’s HR arena.  Going beyond talent acquisition, currently AI driven Chatbots (like CHOTU by Unisys) help in seamless onboarding of employees even in remote locations.  

AI penetration in an organization in the HR arena moves several notches higher and like never before, with face-recognition, measuring employee’s psychological/emotional traits and predictive analysis offering insights into employee satisfaction, and throwing very different people perspective. AI coupled with human intelligence gives a holistic solution to the ever-increasing business challenges.

The industry-wide impact

According to a survey conducted by TimesJobs, where 2,900 HR professionals across industries participated, 37% respondents feel that tech and telecommunication sectors will become the leaders in the domain of AI and automation adoption, whereas 34% of individuals feel that IT sectors will be the next big adaptors. 46% of the professionals responded that companies will adopt AI at the medium level at their workplaces, whereas 42% responded that the adoption of AI at workplaces will be at a higher level.

The aforementioned data provides insights into a wide variety of industries that AI will impact, thus changing the business models. Technology advancement brings a unique set of challenges and threats to an organization. From concerns pertaining to cybersecurity to the sensitive aspect of data privacy and the lack of required expertise and infrastructure leading to employees’ resistance to embracing newer technology, and so on. Despite such drawbacks, the industry perceives the opportunities and benefits that come along with it. Increasingly, organizations are gearing up to accept the need to embrace newer and advanced technology for bettering not merely the business performance, but the very human race. Significant investments are being made by companies to leverage advanced technology, and HR is at the very center of such a huge transformation, creating a higher order value preposition to the talent and business landscape by way of coupling human intellect and artificial intelligence.