Artificial intelligence (AI) in the HR world refers to technology used to do a task that requires some level of intelligence to accomplish, mainly to help humans do mundane tasks. AI is different from any ordinary software as it requires three core components to operate, namely high-speed computation, a huge amount of quality data, and advanced algorithms. Core AI technologies provide better accuracy and stability to everyday processes using an algorithm that connects quality data with fast computation services. AI technologies offer significant opportunities to improve HR functions, such as self-service transactions, recruiting and talent acquisition, payroll, reporting, access policies and procedures. HR experts have faith that merging AI into HR administration functions will benefit and improve the overall employee experience. This will provide more capacity, time and budget, and accurate information for decisive people management.

Smart HR people 

For years, organisations have been collecting data to gain insights to predict future behaviour. HR teams have a lot of catching up to do in leveraging these people analytics — what data to track, analyse, manage and protect. AI will play a larger role within HR to support smart people analytics in innovative ways to attract top talent. Technologies that enhance the candidate experience and meet expectations will help distinguish an organisation from all the others. In addition, a stronger digital IQ will bring a business deeper into what is referred to as an “unconscious level” of information. 

HR performance and succession data provide information on which employees are engaged and challenged. That gives a new dimension to strategic workforce planning to reduce employee attrition. It is a helpful tool to find the right mix of man and machine in the workplace, which skills and talents are key to maintain balance, and the best-fit candidates for the internal or external hiring process. 

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Barriers to adopting AI technologies 

AI helps efficiently automate many back-office functions for reliable HR transactions and service delivery. This document is focused on conversational AI capabilities for HR transactions and provides insight about intelligent automation via the technology-agnostic chatbot. Beyond the novel benefits of AI, we show how this innovative technology can be the best way to integrate and automate HR transactions in a robust manner.

Nonetheless, the cost of using AI might be a barrier for businesses, especially small-to-medium businesses to compete in the fierce marketplace. Financial barriers can be blamed for the lack of wider implementation of AI tools to assist in administrative tasks, said a survey. Thus, when senior leaders do not see the value in using AI for human resources functions, it can be hard to justify the cost.

Privacy and security risks posed by AI 

Although cybersecurity has traditionally been seen as part of IT tasks, HR data privacy poses a number of challenges for AI development in the workplace. With increasing cyber-related incidents, cybersecurity has moved from the tech silo to wider business frontlines, especially HR as a business front door. 

Employee data protection awareness is important, and appropriate governance guidelines need to be set up while dealing with AI. Such guidelines should address not only the overall technical and data inputting processes but also a number of legal and ethical issues. Organisations must get proper consent to avoid additional issues due to the complexities of AI and the training data involved. In some instances, the following tips might be applicable: 

• Provide a privacy notice to employees explaining why their data needs to be used for the AI solution to facilitate desired results. IT security departments should have policies in place to make it clear to employees what data is permissible and not permissible to collect for the AI solution.
• The chatbot solution should not store any personal identifiable information (PII) or confidential information during the processing of an employee request. PII and confidential information should be communicated via a secure internet or intranet protocol.
• Training data should be secure for machine-learning purposes and should not have any HR PII and confidential information.
• There is potential for a lot of PII information to be collected. Machine-learning solutions should have masking capabilities so that observers can’t learn specifics about other users.
• HR systems should only release authorized information to employees during conversational AI transactions. Companies need to make sure they have appropriate controls in place around HR data. If they don’t, then the output delivered by the algorithm will be flawed and lead down a path of wrong decisions.

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