Is AI Taking the Human Out of the HR Department?
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Amazon q business is the generate A I assistant from A W S, because business can be slow, like waiting through mud, but amazon q helps streamline work, so tasks like some mary zing monthly results can be done in no time. Learn what amazon q business can do for you at aw 点 com。 Ash, learn more.

Perhaps you or someone you know has expanded in dismay. A, I is going to take my job. B 的 critics .

fear the rapid growth of， A, I could threaten jobs or be used for malicious purposes. Another concern is, could A I take job that's focus now on A I S impact on the way we work? One of the biggest worries people have about A I is would take our job IT.

Turns out some companies are already using or considering using generated A I internally. According to a gardener survey from june twenty twenty three, most organizations appear open to adopting new hr attack. Only fifteen percent of the H.

R. Leaders they surveyed said they had no plans to add general A, I to their H, R processes. So whether you're an A I optimist or pessimist, generate A, I is likely coming to your workplace. If it's not, they are already .

a lot of ceos are going to their teams and saying, okay, you work in marketing. How are you gonna G, A, I, to sell Better, to Operate faster and cheaper?

That's W, S, J. Reporter chip cutter. He covers workplace management and leadership issues for our corporate bureau.

Some companies, for example, say that they think they can give up doing photo shoots for their products. Why kind of you just have, you know, very sort of A I tools do that for you.

From the wall street journal, this is the future of everything. I'm charlock garden burg. Today we're looking at our A I H R future, how close IT really is and what sorts of generating A I resources might become common place for human resources. Stay with us.

Amazon q business is the new generative A I assistant from A W S, because many tasks can make business slow, as if waiting through mud a help.

Luckily.

there's a faster, easier, less messy choice. Amazon q can security understand your business data and use that knowledge to streamline task? Now you can summarize quarterly results or do complex analysis in no time.

Q, got this. Learn what amazon q business can do for you at A W S dot com flash. Learn more.

A, I, in H, R, has been a thing for a while, but it's getting more widespread. We reported in twenty eighteen that nearly all fortune five hundred companies were already using some form of automation in their hiring process, whether that's robot avatar's interviewing job candidates or computers waiting out potential employees by scanning keywords and resumes. Last month, W S.

J. Reporter chip cutter went to the world economic forum in davos, switzerland. After talking to ceos and company leaders. He says that we're likely to see lots more A I in human resources very, very soon to what have been the present coins of this kind of A I use in H R. Well.

IT helped a lot of companies be faster that they have been involved. Do more with less. For example, of your screening, millions of resumes in a large company probably need automation software to help you do that.

Otherwise, it'd be really hard for one person to sift through all that. So that's been around for years, right at the ways to figure out the right candidates to interview, a ways to, for example, look at who might be a at risk of quitting. The companies often times have built a complex, often are to see who's been in and a role for for a given at a time who maybe is in need of a promotion and hasn't got one.

There's all these ways companies can kind of get a sense for, for whether someone's a flight risk. So that's been one way that companies have used some of the technology in the past. But right now, I think, are on the cusp of a lot of change. And many companies, many ceos are telling their age r chiefs and all their department heads. You need to think about sort of how gena I is gonna change, how we work.

You are just a dovo. So I wanted talk specifically about generative A I because it's being more integrated into workplaces. What have you been hearing?

You could not walk down the promenade, the main street and dovers without just seen one display after the next. About sort of how A I is going to transform corporate america. Every interview with ceos would somehow come back to generate A I and how they were trying to use IT within their companies, some organizations, to have a real plan.

Others are sort of earlier and their efforts. But a lot of ceos are going to their teams and saying, okay, you work in marketing. How are you gonna gena I to sell Better, to Operate faster and cheaper? Some companies, for example, say that they think they can give up doing shoots for their products.

Why can you just have, you know, very a sort of A I tools to do that for you? But then A I N H R was a big discussion as well. So for example, one hr chief at a large tech company told me that SHE has done an interesting experiment with jai, and there was a case in her company where a manager and that person's direct report were not getting along.

And so SHE said, with both people's permission, can we upload the chat logs between them and see what happened? Like, why aren't they getting along? And so they ended up uploading pages and pages of logs, and they came up with some sort of interesting answers.

And one was that the employee was asking way too many questions, and then the manager was going to be frustrated by this. And the manager also felt that the manager wasn't being heard. And so just having that information, they are able to go back to these people.

And they said the ration actually improved afterwards because both sort of new. Okay, this is what's bothering the other person. So it's almost like A I as corporate psychologist that wild.

that to me, was the AI .

example that I remembered the most, and that stood out to me as the most distinctive in a week full of conversations on this. But to me, IT shows that hr chiefs are thinking, could gena I really change how we Operate? And if you think about this example, would be really boring for a person to go through pages and pages of logs and try to see, wait a minute, one of these people not like each other, what's happening there, but a machine can .

do that pretty easily. But who might have an objection to having A, I play that role in H. R.

Well, you could see workers being frustrated this done in the case where they don't know about IT or they haven't given their permission. And if we're using corporate chat tools, we've given up our permission like our company is able to sit through that. But in this case, everybody knew this. This was going on. But you could see down the road where some might think this feels a little bit like big brother.

What have you been seeing in terms of more high level attitudes about generative A I in hr?

yeah. So many H. R. Executives are optimistic about that. They do feel they want to use that to some extent. And it's often times cases where companies might roll out, for example, a chatbot that helps people so an employee could more easily ask, like how many vacation days do I have left? Or what is our policy on x, the type of questions where someone might go to an H, R, person and ask them some H R.

People think, like why can't we just build a tool that answers the more easily? That's one area where a lot of looking, uploading policy manuals, uploading benefits guides, all of this stuff where IT just might be easier to have genre sort to be an aid that helps employees navigate the company. overall.

Hr, like a lot of, like a lot of function to corporate america, is being asked to do more with less. There are companies this is this as we're continuing to sea order of an era of layoffs, kind of White color job cuts in particular. So it's not that H, R, teams are going to get tones of additional people this year. So if if you're in an H, R, executive, you're trying to figure out how do we do more with less. And many are thinking, J, I could be helpful here.

So what stands in the way of there being more generative? A I N H R, in the future part .

of IT is cost. I mean, the companies might think they'll save money with this eventually, but not in the short term. It's gonna cost h money to set this up into you know uh to be able to do this.

That's that's one immediate barrier. And the other is just technical know how companies are at all different stages on this. I mean, some executives are really immersing IT.

Some companies, for example, have have out sort of Mandatory genii training where you know, for example, by march, everybody in the company has to complete this multi hour course on geni. You're up to speed on IT experiment with you're thinking about how could back your job. And then there's a lot of other companies that are saying this is still hype, it's still improving.

We don't want to be an early mover on this. Let's hold back. So IT really, I think, depends on the attitudes the executives hab towards this technology to.

Yeah, I I got that impression a bit from this gartner survey from this past summer that found that only five percent of H R. Leaders were reporting that they were already implementing generative A I, and only nine percent of those surveyed we're currently conducting general AI pilots, which seems low to me, very low. Is this gonna take off soon? Or you keep hearing that .

while twenty twenty three was the year that we experiment with the and four, the year I has rolled out at scale at companies and and I mean that that's what executives some executives are saying. But then you look at numbers like you just shared, it's clear a lot of companies are still very early on all of this.

We may be in the early days of generative A I being used in H. R, but according to the founder of girls who code and moms first, the focus should be on tech innovation and mitigating risks. Next up, rush man john y tells us about her organizations new chat pot and why she's optimistic about how A I will be used in the future of that work and beyond. That's next.

Amazon q business is the new generative A I assistant from A W S. Because many tasks can make business slow, as if waiting through mud help.

Luckily.

there's a faster, easier, less messy choice. Amazon q can security understand your business data and use that knowledge to streamline task? Now you can summarize quarterly results or do complex analysis in no time.

Q got this. Learn what amazon q business can do for you at A W dot com. Ash, learn more.

W, S, J, reporter chip cutter told us we are already seeing chatbot being developed to help employees navigate company policy and answer questions. Rahma, john's founder of girls who code, recently helped launch a clear chatbot. To do just that, her goal was to reach further than just one company.

Paid leave at A I, A chatbot designed to help people pass the patrik of laws affecting paid family leave in new york state went online in december of last year. The tool was launched by the johns's other organization, moms first in partnership pe, with novy and cragged newmark philanthropies, when SHE first came up with the idea. So Johnson says he contacted OpenAI, founder in C.

E. O sam alen. SHE says he put her in touch with the team behind ChatGPT, who provided early technical advice in support.

They connected her with novy, a developer that is part of the OpenAI service alliance, who developed paid leave that A I on OpenAI tools. The goal of paid leave out A I to answer questions about leave policies in plain language. I began by asking rush man john y to take me through how the website works.

So let's say you're pregnant and you gonna paid leave that a ee and was going to tell you is in my algic how much money out before, and it's gonna give you an action plan. When you go to the government website, they don't really do that for you. Um and one of the things I love about the site is IT gives you a bunch of kind of easy prompt because maybe don't know what you're supposed to ask for.

IT doesn't just answer your questions. IT will draft you an email to H. R. If you need one, IT will let you email yourself in action plan or a checklist. You can save IT and send IT yourself and continue to work on IT.

So do you see this as a model for other kinds of chatbot being used in H.

R. It's very interesting because you can tell and pay leave IT ai. Where's the traffic coming from? Most of the traffic coming from linton. And if you look and see, it's like it's literally at our professional sending IT to to one another.

But I find a super interesting that you've talked to H, R. People that are like, yeah, bring on the chatbot.

We've been Operating in a state of fear that we need to move through that. That doesn't mean that we should be like there's no risk, so good, you know but that means so that we should be mitigating the the risk, but still thinking about the innovation.

right? So let's look the risks in the face here. What are the risks of creating a nature chatbot?

I may think one of them is that it's gonna replace workers. And so I think that there's a lot of fear that like a tool like this will make IT like you don't really need a human to help you navigate this process because now you ve got a chat pot to do IT.

I've been the second thing is IT will give you the wrong answers, which is terrifying right when IT comes to this life, momentous events that you really need to know, how much money am I gonna get? What do I need to say for and and so these risk are these fears are real um and people really feeling them and I it's funny started this project first one whose nations do I have to hire a human? You would mean to make sure that they're looking through all the answers. And as I duggin, I learned so much right about how this particular use case of paid leave he have the same safety risks. Because the language models are limited.

this particular large language model, or LLM, helps mitigate potential hycy ation. So what data went into the training of this chat pot? R.

A, I is trained on the new york state paid leave law, unlike like ChatGPT is not pulling from the internet and collecting kind of date a from a bunch of different sources. That's when the AI boats are encouraged. Actually make things up.

Did you weigh hallucination against how much information you could possibly make a fail?

absolutely. Listen, I mean, like I said, this is one of the first use cases of doing this. So I did not want to set a sub to fail. And so I was interesting is because there is like again, A A limited alam on this, there's less safety in risk issues.

So with the large language model you're training at all and it's a limited to new york, say law yeah that helps get rid of of some or get around some of the possible quote holus instance correct. But then we do have the the risks of like is this going na replace humans, the ones that you mentioned? How do we deal with those things?

I don't know. I don't know. I mean, it's so funny again. Member, I spend my life teaching girls to code, and i've had moment like which should they still learn how to code? You know, because there is perception, right, that that the skills that you're really going to need in this artificial intelligence moment is creativity, like you could actually need to lean more into the liberal arts, that because the boss will code for you. So I think that we have to see in many ways how this kind of place out.

But I still worry about IT in the future. I mean, if we see more chatbot replace hr employees that I I won't be able to interact with a human being during the time that's pretty sensitive IT. IT feels potentially dehumanizing like like i'm just data relating with data IT might.

But what's the what what we can do is here is here we're stuck in this conversation of like domes day, and it's is preventing us from really capturing all the opportunities to use cases of A I. Every conversation that we're engaging on in A I is, is a good as a bad. Is he going to destroy us or not? Is he going to like replay workers or not? IT here.

IT is here. And so now the question is, is how do we use the technology in a way to help people, to preserve jobs, right? To like to solve covet cancer climate, right? To do good things? Yeah, you know, not having access to pay leaves a major driver of women live in the workforce, or downshifting. And so like, if I can actually navigate having time off money, my pocket, the resource I need, maybe to hire a care worker or to get sorted, right? I'm gonna a stay in .

the workforce. So what's the bigger picture here? Where where do you hope paid leave that A I goes from here?

We're going to expand. The goal now is I want to approve that, generate A, I can actually increase the uptake of benefits and fear out exactly how to do that. So that means I gotto have a handful of governors that are partners. So we can work with the department of labor to understand what are the pain points, is our tool solving for those pain points? And now what's the uptake of benefits now that we have this tool?

I'm noticing this trend of higher are talking about things. I think one of the things people think about A I is like that IT is the solution in itself that the product to the AI, the chat pot is the end point. You seem to be talking about IT in that way. You seem to be talking about IT is this is the next step in the journey towards other thing.

absolutely. I think it's like a tool, a friend, a helper. I see this from an activist prospect like my soul. Laser focuses to get pay leave in child caire past.

And so i'm thinking about all the different ways, all tools that we can have to do that part of, I think this got so much attention. IT was IT was unexpected. IT was an unexpected use case of generated vi. And so I think as we're looking at what are those what are the use cases of general air, go to the unexpecting, go to the most vulnerable.

Like the next place I want to go is like how my helping military vets access to benefits, how are helping people who need food stamps accessed benefits? How are helping people are medicare accessed benefits? Who's the most vulnerable? And how do we build? You know, a is for those communities to help them change the quality of our lives. That's where we need to begin.

The future of everything is a production of the wall street journal. This episode was produced by me, charla garden burg. Thanks for listening.

Amazon q business is the new generative A I assistant from A W S, because many tasks can make business slow, as if waiting through mod a help.

Luckily.

there's a faster, easier, less messy choice. Amazon q can security understand your business data and use that knowledge to streamline task? Now you can summarize quarterly results or do complex analysis in no time.

Q, got this. Learn what amazon q business can do for you at A W S dot com flash. Learn more.