Reorienting your workforce in the age of AI

Using AI and real-time data to predict changes in the job market

Rapid advances in automation and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies have far-reaching implications for the enterprise, its employees, human resources leaders - and the C-suite in general. As the shape of talent needed to make enterprises competitive undergoes unprecedented change, CEOs and HR leaders will need to deal with the managerial, economic and social consequences of skill shortages at one end and redundant employees at the other. Thankfully, AI also offers the C-suite powerful new toolsets to develop comprehensive, future workforce planning strategies to address anticipated job displacement.

Labour dislocation barrier to harnessing digital opportunity

Artificial intelligence brings a seismic shift in the future of work - making some roles obsolete and enhancing others. Meanwhile, it is creating new jobs and even spawning new professions. Yet Genpact's multi-part study of 300 C-suite and other senior executives and more than 5,000 people surveyed in the USA, UK and Australia revealed that just one in four employees surveyed agreed that their company equips them with the skills they need to take advantage of AI.

What's more, only 38 per cent of senior executives say that their organisations currently provide reskilling options to address technology disruption.

The social and managerial consequences of the resulting labour dislocation will make harnessing the digital opportunity even more challenging for the C-suite. The HR departments of most organisations struggle with the magnitude and novelty of this issue as they lack of data-driven approaches to provide more thoughtful career paths to displaced employees.

AI can answer the ‘where are the jobs' question

Rather than simply viewing AI as displacing jobs, it is important to realise that the power of technology, such as machine learning used with large sets of data also can help answer a three elusive questions:

As a CEO, how big will be the social unrest created by the organisational changes driven by technology?
As an HR leader, how do I help the business by enhancing the agility of the workforce, especially in times of drastic change?
As a worker, if my current job is displaced and there aren't enough equivalent positions available, what are the types of job I can do close to where I live, and what new skills do I need?

Genpact, in collaboration with Boston-based jobs analytics company Burning Glass Technologies used AI techniques in a pilot study to examine a broad cross-section of career profiles. By analysing real-time labour market data, AI and machine learning algorithms can build a sophisticated database of jobs and the skills needed for the individual roles; jobs can be further weighted by employers' demand for the specific skills. AI and natural language processing can parse resumes of thousands of employees, and analyse their past job experiences and other factors to map all the skills they possess.

Consider the potential impact of this model. AI engines can scientifically match an individual's skills with thousands of jobs to identify possible (even seemingly unrelated) jobs with the highest overlap. Employers and job-seekers alike can combine data such as average compensation, time to fill the job in a selected region, and other factors to understand the relative attractiveness of redeployment options. Companies can further support this analysis with insights on most demanded skills to make the transitions and tailor employee training interventions to develop the targeted skills that are most critical to making the transition.

Beyond basic reskilling: managing talent for competitive advantage

Using AI in this innovative planning approach can help leaders assess the skill gap, uncover hidden talent pools, and nurture a future-ready workforce that can perform effectively with AI technology, and can provide data-driven decisions on training and hiring. The C-suite and HR leaders can proactively assess the impact of digital transformation on their workforce, plan to reskill employees to take advantage of AI and robots, and assist displaced employees to evolve their careers more easily.

Companies can offer employees career pathways that are uniquely suited to individual experiences rather than strait-jacketed role-based career paths. From our experience managing employee transitions at Fortune 500 companies, even in situations where letting an employee go is unavoidable, the retained staff can be appreciative of meaningful support offered to their affected co-workers for redeployment, and this can foster greater engagement and more satisfied employees.

This AI approach can augment HR partners in supporting employees in a redeployment scenario and proactively assessing the learning and development needs of the workforce based on evolving needs. The AI tools can perform data extraction and synthesis, e.g. parsing skills from resumes at a scale, with speed and cost savings not humanly possible.

Redeployment decisions are often guided by human intuition and experience alone. Human resources (and even displaced employees) take a short-sighted view of the redeployment possibilities based on limited experience and anecdotal evidence. Using data at scale improves the quality of decision making by removing the bias (and fear) by learning from millions of natural experiments.

Artificial intelligence brings a seismic shift in the future of work. Employees need additional skills to embrace the new job opportunities - and companies must respond. Businesses that will succeed in this new world will be those that ramp up fast to invest in the right AI tools and reskill their workforce.

Gianni Giacomelli is business leader, digital solutions and Prashant Shukla is assistant vice president, design thinking at Genpact, a global professional services firm focused on delivering digital transformation.