Why HR leaders should ease workforce anxiety on AI

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The theory of Natural Selection proposed by Charles Darwin, and the AI robot apocalypse shaped by mass media, often hang at the back of a human’s mind.

Ken Goldberg, professor of engineering at University of California, Berkeley, and also the co-writer of Cognitive Diversity: AI & The Future of Work, suggests the threat of AI is unwarranted. With the help of HR leaders, AI can empower a workforce and improve the employee experience.

AI has the potential to discard mundane routines such as data entry, meetings scheduling, clerical paperwork and email filtering so employees can invest their energy on tasks they enjoy which emphasise originality, curiosity, imagination, human communication and many other traits that AI doesn’t possess so far.

For senior HR professionals, it is very likely that AI can optimise talent management. On talent acquisition, AI can create resume screening systems that analyse applicants’ strengths and weaknesses, and provide unbiased insights. On organisation transformation and talent planning, not only can AI track organisational cues and critical performance, but it can also strategically team up the workforce.

Professor Goldberg emphasises the importance of cognitive diversity in the report: “By building diverse teams through a combination of workers and machines, the number of new cognitive skills will be multiplied, increasing the ability to turn a problem around, look at it from different directions and deploy different skills to find creative solutions.

Artificial intelligence such as google maps and search engines has already slowly crept into our lives, and we have embraced it.

Since this technological advancement is constantly under development and is not ready to be fully deployed, the widespread agitation of AI taking over jobs will only hinder its growth. HR leaders hold the key to shift the workforce’s attitude towards AI.

Photo/The Wire