The Future of Work: Three New HR Roles in the Age of Artificial Intelligence Posted on : Sep 25 - 2018

What will "the new normal" look like for our HR leaders as we approach 2020? It's been nine years since McKinsey & Company coined the phrase, ‘the new normal,” referring to the fundamental changes in the business landscape following the Great Recession of 2008.

We are witnessing revolutionary, not just incremental change. As Paul Daugherty said in his best selling book, “Human + Machine: Re-imagining Work in the Age of AI,” the workplace experience is changing in profound ways. According to research conducted by Accenture and the World Economic Forum, 87% of workers polled believe new technologies like artificial intelligence will improve their work experience and they are willing to invest their free time over the next few years to learn new skills to supplement their current ones. This emphasis on learning new skills in the age of AI is reinforced by the most recent report on the future of work from McKinsey which suggests that as many as 375 million workers around the world may need to switch occupational categories and learn new skills because approximately 60% of jobs will have least one-third of their work activities able to be automated.

For companies from IBM to Kraft Heinz and SunTrust, I am seeing this an interest an interest in creating new HR roles as companies leverage artificial intelligence in the workplace.  Three new job roles in HR provide a lens into how much HR is being disrupted.

Three New HR Roles To Create Compelling Employee Experiences

These new HR roles include:

IBM: Vice President, Data, AI & Offering Strategy, HR

IBM has taken a leadership role in creating new positions in HR aligned with Chief HR Officer Diane Gherson's vision of "Optimizing HR for speed, personalization, and democratization to deliver irresistible employee experiences." Executing on this vision has created a host of new innovations and job roles in HR. Some of the most interesting innovations in HR include the ability to use data to proactively retain IBMers by examining factors such as an employee's location, pay, skills, and job type. At IBM this is known as Proactive Retention and leading this effort is Anshul Sheopuri, IBM’s Vice President, Data, AI & Offering Strategy, HR. Anshul leads a team of data scientists, people analytics practitioners, and engineers who use data to transform the employee experience. Sheopuri was instrumental in developing the patent for Proactive Retention which uses analytics and machine learning to calculate the relative importance of retention risk factors, while maintaining employee privacy. The end result is a decision support tool for managers to proactively retain IBMers. The retention risk program has now saved IBM about $300 million dollars, as measured by the avoiding the inevitable costs of hiring and training replacements.

The next innovation, Blue Matching, is devoted to enhancing career mobility for IBMers with personalized job alerts by inferring their skills. This helps to boost their ability to find new internal positions, some of which they may not even know could be a fit. Recent projections from CEB Global indicate that employees are staying in their roles 30% longer today. This lack of internal movement means employees are failing to get the broad experience they need to further their advancement. And furthermore,  this lack of career growth is the number one reason employees leave their employer, surpassing compensation and the individual manager. IBM Blue Matching has provided more than 1,000 IBMers with the opportunity to grow their skills and land a new role within IBM. View More