Artificial Intelligence (AI) represents a terrific opportunity. The consumerization of HR technologies has brought AI to the forefront of innovation in HR. From recruitment to employee experience, and talent management, AI has the potential to transform HR.

Recently in People Matters TechHR India, John Sumser, Principal Analyst and Founder, HRExaminer covered the successes, failures and learning processes the AI (or intelligent machines)  industry has experienced so far.  iHe further talked about where we are right now with Intelligent Tools (AI and Data) in the HR in the times of the coronavirus pandemic. John covers the key points companies need to understand about AI and other intelligent tools to successfully implement systems and gain their full benefits.

Here are some critical lessons from the session, which probably you haven’t heard or learnt in any other course:

Leadership is like driving a car in a fog:

John shared a perfect analogy that cannot be ignored. He shared, “One of my favorite ways of thinking about leadership has always been that it is like being at the head of Alliance cars, driving across bridges in a fog.” He says you can’t see the sides of the bridge. You can’t see the end of the bridge. You can see a little bit of pastor headlights in front of you. It looks like that picture of the top left.

Given the crisis we are all living in, leadership can very well be related to the situation like driving in the fog. John shares,”We are all driving in a fog and great leadership today would be  understanding that we are driving at an appropriate speed and trying to see a little bit further out in front of where the headlights will take us so that we can make sure that the next step gets us lined up for the right outcome comes down the road, get used to having no big picture for a while.

Where intelligent tools can guide us and where they cannot?

John shares intelligent tools can be the headlight of the car that can help us drive through the foggy weather. Machine learning can help us  examine data to discover repeated patterns.  John shares, “ And there are a thousand things that you can’t predict every moment when you heard the challenge and you can’t predict it, the ball that comes bouncing out of nowhere, the cat that runs across the street or the way that people are double parked in the middle of a skinny little alley. And so machine learning is not solving the problem for.

Intelligent tools are great for seeing patterns across resumes. It’s how you distill skills out of large quantities of resumes and job descriptions. Very very useful. The whole idea is that if you find a repeated pattern, you can use that repeated pattern to make a prediction. All of that is based on stable, repeated history.

These tools can offer a remarkable opinion about what’s going on, but there will always be just that and opinion if offered a point of view. 

How to get the right tool?

John shares that it’s a remarkable opportunity to embed the tools necessary to build for the future, a fully data driven decision making process.And it has a number of do’s and don’ts. The first step is to get your data in order. One has to get this whole process done one step at a time, but John underlined that one can’t let solving the prices get in the way of coherent decision making for the long haul. “Even if you can’t see where the long haul takes you and you do that one step at a time, you are, you get very wary of short term fixes and bandaids. You designed with ethics in mind. So now is a perfectly wonderful time to start thinking about the ethical consequences of your decisions and you learn how to argue with machines.”

Another point that John shares is to avoid the temptations to track everything because that’s a way of coping with uncertainty and it’s more important to track a few things.