Artificial Intelligence In The Workplace: How AI Is Transforming Your Employee Experience
Soon, even those of us who don’t happen to work for technology companies (although as every company moves towards becoming a tech company, that will be increasingly few of us) will find AI-enabled machines increasingly present as we go about our day-to-day activities.
From how we are recruited and on-boarded to how we go about on-the-job training, personal development and eventually passing on our skills and experience to those who follow in our footsteps, AI technology will play an increasingly prominent role.
Here’s an overview of some of the recent advances made in businesses that are currently on the cutting-edge of the AI revolution, and are likely to be increasingly adopted by others seeking to capitalize on the arrival of smart machines.
Before we even set foot in a new workplace, it could soon be a fact that AI-enabled machines have played their part in ensuring we’re the right person for the job.
AI pre-screening of candidates before inviting the most suitable in for interviews is an increasingly common practice at large companies that make thousands of hires each year, and sometimes attract millions of applicants.
Pymetrics is one provider of tools for this purpose. It enables candidates to sit a video interview in their own home, sometimes on a different continent to the organization they are applying to work for. After answering a series of standard questions, their answers – as well as their facial expressions and body language – are analyzed to determine whether or not they would be a good fit for the role.
Another company providing these services is Montage, which claims that 100 of the Fortune 500 companies have used their AI-driven interviewing tool to identify talent before issuing invitations for interviews.
When it comes to onboarding, AI-enabled chatbots are the current tool of choice, for helping new hires settle into their roles and get to grips with the various facets of the organizations they’ve joined.
Multinational consumer goods manufacturer Unilever uses a chatbot called Unabot, that employs natural language processing (NLP) to answer employees’ questions in plain, human language. Advice is available on everything from where they can catch a shuttle bus to the office in the morning, to how to deal with HR and payroll issues.
Of course, learning doesn’t end once you’ve settled into your role, and AI technology will also play a part in ongoing training for most employees in the future.
It will also assist with the transfer of skills from one generation to the next – as employees move on to other companies or retire, it can help to ensure that they can leave behind the valuable experience they’ve gained for others to benefit from, as well as take it with them.
Engineering giant Honeywell has developed tools which utilize augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) along with AI, to capture the experience of work and extract “lessons” from it which can be passed on to newer hires.
Employees wear AR headsets while carrying out their daily tasks. These capture a record of everything the engineer does, using image recognition technology, which can be played back, allowing trainees or new hires to experience the role through VR.
Information from the video imagery is also being used to build AR tools that provide real-time feedback while engineers carry out their job – alerting them to dangers or reminding them to carry out routine tasks when they are in a particular place or looking at a particular object.
One of the reasons that the subject of AI in the workplace makes some people uncomfortable is because it is often thought of as something that will replace humans and lead to job losses.
However, when it comes to AI integration today, the keyword is very much “augmentation” – the idea that AI machines will help us do our jobs more efficiently, rather than replace us.
