Unless you are living under a rock, you are more than aware that AI is happening NOW and the world of work is forever changing. HR is at the center of this revolution in a multitude of ways, not only in the impact to our own function, but also in leading the change with the business on how to think about the future of work and organizational readiness for a world in which AI is an inevitability.
As specialists in Total Rewards and HR Operations, we at Nua see a major risk for HR organizations if they are not prioritizing their own AI readiness now. While there are strategic choices for HR to make around the use of AI technologies, what worries us is the current state of some of the foundational building blocks necessary for HR to operate in a world of artificial intelligence.
Many HR technologies are already incorporating AI today and some of the new technologies being deployed bring exciting new capabilities that have the promise to significantly increase efficiency and improve the employee experience. But, at the end of the day AI capabilities depend on being fed information, whether that is data, knowledge or process. Many of the companies we work with suffer from one or many of the following foundational challenges:
Multiple HR systems each running different processes and housing different data
Cumbersome processes that still require significant manual intervention
Data integrity issues
Without addressing these challenges, the risk is not just an inability to leverage AI in the future, but more so that AI ends up exposing and exacerbating some of these challenges. As explained by Avivah Litan, at the Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo conference, "most will tell you that the benefits of GenAI outweigh the risks, and I'm sure they do. But all you need is one bad incident to change that equation."
What would happen if an AI powered chatbot was deployed in your organization to answer employee questions starting tomorrow? Would the right answers be surfaced for your employees or is there a risk of misinformation gathered from multiple or outdated sources of information? What if your organization pursued an enterprise data analytic initiative? Would you be able to contribute structured and accurate people related data on a real time basis? If the answer to these questions is no, here are a few initiatives to start thinking about pursuing now:
Rationalize your HR technology landscape
Clean up your HR data infrastructure
Close gaps in your data integrity and related processes
Build and organize your knowledge management
Reimagine your HR Operating Model to enable greater employee self help
Build the right capabilities within your HR team, especially in HR Operations & Technology
Want to learn more about how to approach each of these initiatives? Send us a note at hello@nuahr.com.
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