Automation and personalization, although very different in meaning, are very closely connected and go hand in hand with each other. A good question to ask ourselves in this context is – what happens if one interferes with the other?
When we talk about the development of businesses, personalization, automation, tools and devices that will take the way we do business to a whole new level, we realize that there is a need to automate personalization more, while customizing automation. This is where automation vs. personalization issue arises.
In the context of Artificial Intelligence and Human Resources, automation and personalization are intertwined as well as these two areas. That is why we are going to present you with what AI means for HR and ways to find the perfect balance between automation and personalization to get the best out of them.
The intersection of AI and HR
AI is nowadays transforming both our personal and professional lives. At their homes, 1.8 million people worldwide are now using Amazon’s Alexa to unlock their cars, switch the lights on and off or for some other simple actions. In the business environment, AI has evolved into an intelligent virtual assistant enabling us to work more effectively.
The majority of businesses, regardless of their area of expertise, are now implementing these intelligent assistants – chatbots, which are designed to simulate real life human conversations in order to perform a vast number of tasks and processes, such as answering HR-related questions, recruiting new employees, and personalizing learning processes.
Until not so long ago, these chatbots were expensive and available only for professional developers. Luckily, nowadays there are free chatbot platforms available, such as SnatchBot, which is one of the leading platforms thanks to which everyone can create a chatbot regardless of their coding skills and implement it to a variety of communication channels.
IBM Institute for Business Value has conducted a survey of about 400 chief HR officers, according to which half of them acknowledge the immense capacity of cognitive computing in transforming key areas in HR, such as Talent Development, Talent Acquisition, and HR Operations.
Moreover, both HR leaders and marketers have recognized the power of chatbots when it comes to transforming the employee experience. As a result, investments in AI have increased by 746% from 2011 to 2015, and are continuing to accelerate at a rapid pace each year.
Consumer brands have started to implement AI to their production for the sake of immediacy – reportedly, 22% of millennials expect not to wait for a response longer than 10 minutes upon contacting a certain consumer brand.
That is why such brands decided to use chatbots that will be engaged with consumers, their needs and their questions, offering a 24/7 service. However, it is not just the millennials who demand immediate responses, as we are all becoming a part of digital consumerism. The fact that supports this is that 2 billion USD in online sales in 2016 were earned solely by using digital assistants.
CEO of Kaiser Permanente, Bernard J. Tyson, said: “I don’t think any physician today should be practicing without artificial intelligence assisting in their practice. It’s just impossible (otherwise) to pick up on patterns, to pick up on trends, to really monitor care”.
That is the reason why many medical institutions are using AI. For instance, IBM uses Watson in order to transform the way healthcare works. Watson has the ability to treat numerous rare childhood diseases, as well as to quickly read all the necessary medical literature in order to help doctors come up with treatment solutions.
When it comes to HR leaders, chatbots are giving them an opportunity to advance talent acquisition, enhance online learning experiences, and improve all other processes by increasing efficiency and offering better consistency when answering HR FAQs.
Regarding the process of answering employees’ FAQs, chatbots can provide answers to a wide range of HR questions in real time. In addition to this, some of them are designed to help employees with some benefits they might not even be aware of. Companies are constantly coming up with new benefits but are usually lacking an effective way to promote them.
Chatbots also have an ability to monitor employees’ issues and address them in real time. Thanks to them, when the system is not working properly, HR leaders can discover where the problem lies and solve it quickly, before it becomes a full-scale issue.
Furthermore, chatbots can facilitate HR areas such as talent acquisition and onboarding processes by providing data to schedule interviews and develop candidate profiles, and thus make decisions about job candidates. This is why these intelligent assistants are becoming real advisors to HR leaders, saving them valuable time and enhancing employee experiences.
Research Director of IBM Institute for Business Value, Eric Lesser, says: “More than half of the CHROs surveyed believe cognitive computing will affect a wide range of roles in the HR organization, ranging from senior executives to individuals working in service centers”.
The benefits of AI for HR
Although we tackled the relationship between AI and HR and the ways they influence one another, let us put more focus on what exact benefits AI brings to HR operations and how it can transform them.
Learning – The skills required for any type of business are constantly evolving. At the moment, vendor software systems are available which can give carefully assessed suggestions of videos to watch or learning programs to use, based on that type of job you do, your previous experience and your associates. We even have software that can read and analyze documents and produce micro-learning programs as well as programs that can read, analyze and interpret a person’s handwriting.
Recruiting – There are numerous ways AI can be used in recruiting process. There are chat systems based on AI that are able to communicate with job candidates and quickly screen them. They are designed to help candidates choose the right job, and also to help recruiters save time on screening the candidates.
Video interviews – The majority of companies have decided to switch to video interviewing. These video interviews are stored in a database from which they can be analyzed by AI in order to figure out whether an interviewee is telling the truth, how they are feeling during the interview, and find out more about their education and skills.
Leadership – nowadays there are agents that can judiciously evaluate features and traits of high-performing managers by communicating with employees in order to intelligently determine the manager’s strengths, weaknesses and general capabilities. Managers can get personalized training and can compare the effectiveness of their management strategies to their peers by looking at dashboards.
Sourcing – Sourcing is a manual process that helps HR executives to discover candidates on the internet. Although helpful, it can be time consuming. Luckily, there is AI software that can search for candidates and match them with the company’s requirements and characteristics in an intelligent way, and ultimately communicate with them to check if they are interested in joining the company.
Sentiment analysis – Artificial Intelligence in sentiment analysis is another thing that will completely transform the way companies do business. AI can help companies who have enormous quantities of feedback and survey information by quickly noticing trends in the attitudes of employees. It can even help you find teams and offices who are under stress by tracking the sentiment of their conversations and messages. Further developments in this field are expected.
Challenges of using AI in HR
Although enticing, AI in HR doesn’t come without a certain number of concerns, the greatest of them being the quality of information gathered by the companies.
HR information is not handled adequately by most companies and it is scattered over a number of locations usually. For example, most companies usually have between five and seven different recording systems and, because of this, utilizing an algorithm for any one data set can often give inaccurate results.
A major problem for many companies is getting all of their people-related information in one location so that it can be properly analyzed. Another big problem is policy. The challenge is in how to explain to employees in which ways their data will be utilized and how to make policies to make sure that data is not misused.
In most cases, employees agree with companies accessing their data when they enter the company, their employers than notify them how the information will be used for positive goals. The key is staying true to these policies.
The third challenge is that there are no areas in HR that are black and white. When it comes to who should get a promotion or who is the best person for the job, there is almost never a 100% agreement on all sides.
Every decision made in HR receives at least a small amount of scrutiny. Because of this, many of these algorithms can be used to remove human bias, although this does not mean that they are entirely correct always.
Automation vs. personalization
From an employer’s point of view, automation of HR processes covers pretty much anything from search automation and picking candidates, to analytics and training. HR executives value automation because of a number of reasons – it facilitates the recruitment process, it lets you stock the candidate database quickly, provides constant updates of employees’ info, as well as an effective exchange of information.
On the downside, some dislike automation because using an AI system pays off only if a company has a certain number of employees. In addition, they would have to learn how to use it, and if something goes wrong, it cannot be fixed instantly.
In case of employees, automation enables them to gather all of their tasks and perspectives in one place, serves as a great mentoring system, and provides access to all the possible documents they’ve ever worked on.
On the other hand, like employers – not every one of them will be keen on automation, since it is necessary to dedicate significant amount of time to learning new technologies, and postponing any tasks or reports is no longer possible.
When it comes to personalization, employers like it because it saves their budget, it offers a possibility to establish strong personal relationships with employees, and some simply do not trust technology to be dealing with human work.
What they might dislike about it is that it decreases efficiency and a lot of time has to be wasted on the selection of the candidates, there is a sense of dependency between employees which may ultimately lead to issues with bureaucracy and bias, and company’s databases are not updated on a regular basis.
As for employees, personalization means personal communication, a more conventional approach than having to deal with a machine, and knowing who they are doing business with. Nevertheless, there are some cons for them as well – the human factor is always involved whenever a decision needs to be made, which can cause delays.
So, which one is better for both employers and employees and how to find the right balance? Try to imagine that automation is simply not personalized. In that case, you would lose the aspect of personal efficiency, along with the ability to find what causes a problem and thus solve it for a particular employee.
On the other hand, imagine what personalization without automation means. It basically becomes an archivist with endless folders.
Having that in mind, we can conclude that automation and personalization shouldn’t be considered opponents. They are, in fact, integral and interdependent concepts. Behind automation is always a human element involved. And that is why the key to establish the balance between the two is to always incorporate human approach into business.
To conclude, although both personalization and automation have their pros and cons, it is suffice to say that they are already changing the world of business as we know it, and chances are we won’t be able to fully predict the range of such a transformation.
That is why we should embrace the advancements in technology and learn how to make the best out of both personalization and automation to be able to keep up with the competition and stay relevant on the market.
