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HR, Meet AI
Providing Leadership in an
Age of Smart Machines
Julia Kirby, Harvard University Press
Author, Only Humans Need Apply:
Winners and Losers in the Age of Smart Machines
@JuliaKirby
After the Robot Invasion …
After the Robot Invasion …
Who needs
HR?
Why that’s a Legitimate Question
We're at the very beginnings in the
world of seeing how you can take
AI, artificial intelligence, and
really provide business applications
around it. That's an area that we're
investing quite actively in: finding
opportunities to use AI solutions
and machine-learning solutions to
help us improve existing processes,
become smarter at our business,
serve clients better.
- Don Duet, cohead of Goldman
Sachs technology division
Welcome to the Boston Economy

Financial Services

Tech/Biotech

Medical/Health Care

Manufacturing

Fishing

Tourism

Education
Financial Services
“Robo Advisors” now
answer questions for
retail investors about
their optimal
portfolios and at
what rate they should
tap retirement
savings. Vanguard’s
Personal Advisor
Services serves many
thousands.
Tech and Biotech
Berg, a biotech
startup in
Framingham, MA
has developed
one of the
world’s first
cancer drugs
guided in
development by
artificial
intelligence
Medical and Health Care
“We now have the
ability to expand the
field of radiology
beyond its predominant
state of providing
visualization for human
interpretation.”
– Keith J. Dreyer,
Vice Chairman of
Radiology at
Mass General Hospital
Manufacturing
“There are
advantages to
machine intelligence
to augment the
capacity of
warfighters – the
same way Google
augments our ability
to process
information, or a
smartphone“
– Paul Scharre, Center for
a New American Security
Manufacturing
“In the next five years AI
will start moving onto
machines. Eventually, the
machines will be so
intelligent they will start
collaborating themselves
and optimizing things.
This is nirvana.“
– Achalesh Pandey,
GE Global Research
Fishing!
Tourism
“Otonaroid” is a
humanoid robot
“working” at
Tokyo’s National
Museum of
Emerging Science
and Innovation as a
very knowledgeable
guide for visitors
Education
Intelligent Tutor
Systems are
designed to track
the “mental steps”
of the learner
during problemsolving tasks to
diagnose
misconceptions and
estimate the
learner’s
understanding of
the domain
What Do These Have in Common?

All feature machines
doing the work of the
most highly educated
people …

Delivering the core value
of the enterprise

… and relieving the
people who did that work
of the hardest cognitive
work of their jobs
Where’s the Higher Ground?
Cognitive/
Analytical
Computers
Knowledge
Work Jobs
Transactional
Computers

Wave One took the
dirty and dangerous

Wave Two took the dull

Wave Three takes
decision-making
Admin/
Service Jobs
Mechanical
Systems
Manual
Labor Jobs
18th-19th C.
20th C.
21st C.
What’s left
for humans?
16
A Very Different Prediction

Human resources will
become even more
human-oriented

… and good HR will
become more
essential than ever.
Aim for Augmentation, not Automation
The
leverage
has to go
both ways
Augmentation Makes a Bold Assumption
It assumes that humans’
relative strengths …

Strategic
imagination

Empathy

Creativity

Curiosity

Passion

Taste
are highly leverageable
Five Possible Moves
to Make Room for Smart
Machines
►Step Up
►Step In
►Step Aside
►Step Narrowly
►Step Forward
20
Machines Advances Are Easy to Copy

Capital equipment
used to be the key to
competitive advantage

The human
contribution was
plentiful and fungible

But software-based
capabilities are
instantly disseminated

Now the human
element will be the
constraining factor
The “ATM Effect” Will Be Rampant

Inventor John
Shepherd-Barron
thought of the idea in
the bath

The first ATM was
installed by Barclays in
Enfield, June 27, 1967

Today there are about
3.5 million in the world

No enduring source of
advantage
Human Strengths Will Remain Key
 Hard
to copy
 Hard
to
scale
 Continued
source of
advantage
When Innovation is Essential

We’re now in an
innovation-based
economy

Machines’ strength is
producing yesterday’s
innovation more
efficiently

Humans’ strength is
imagining and pursuing
the new new thing
Your Mission as an HR Leader
First:
Augment
Your Own
Team
Your Mission as an HR Leader
Second:
Advocate for
Augmentation
throughout the
enterprise
Your Mission as an HR Leader
Third:
Help people
find the right
“steps” for
them
Your Mission as an HR Leader
Fourth:
Apply all you
know about
change
management
Your Mission as an HR Leader
Fifth:
Hire for
Human
Strengths
You’ve Been Hiring for Digital Strengths


Lake Highlands High School Slide Rule Team, 1969
You’ve had to hire for the
hardest parts of the job

Computational capabilities

Protocol adherence

Dispassionate judgment

Analytical power

Speed and Efficiency

Single-minded focus
… while hoping for the
“user interface” to go along
with these
Now You’ll Hire for Human Strengths


You’ll look for qualities
that will provide an edge

Ingenuity

Empathy

Creativity

Ethics

Courage

Taste

Humor

Passion
… while hoping for
sufficient digital acumen
Your Mission as an HR Leader
Sixth:
Focus more
training and
development on
“soft” and “right
brain” skills
Think Bigger
Instead of asking:
what work will
digital labor take
away from us next?
... we need to ask:
what work will
digital labor enable
us to take on next?
Thank you!
34
The So-Called Robot Invasion
The World of Smart Machines
Level of
Intelligence
Human
Support
Repetitive
Task
Automation
Context
Awareness
and Learning
Self-Aware
intelligence
Analyze
Numbers
BI, Data viz,
hypothesis
driven
analytics
Operational
analytics,
scoring, model
mgmt
Machine
learning,
neural nets
Not yet
Digest Words,
Images
Character and
speech
recognition
Image
recognition,
machine vision
Q&A, NLP
Not yet
Task Type
The
Great
Convergence
Perform
Digital Tasks
(Admin and
Decisions)
BPM
Rules engines,
RPA
Not yet
Not yet
Perform
Physical Tasks
Remote
operation;
Industrial
robotics,
collaborative
Robotics
Fully
Autonomous
Robots,
Vehicles
Not yet
And It Really
Is a Wave …

Driving

Marketing

Financial Advising

Drug Discovery

Radiology

Legal Services

Insurance Underwriting

Business Writing!
A Scary Prospect
►
►
►
►
“I am in the camp that is concerned about
super intelligence…I don’t understand why
some people are not concerned.” (Bill Gates)
“The development of full artificial intelligence
could spell the end of the human race.”
(Stephen Hawking)
“Advancing machine intelligence is the most
important problem facing the world today.”
(Nobel economist Robert Schiller)
“We will soon be looking at hordes of citizens
of zero economic value. Figuring out how to
deal with the impacts of this development will
be the greatest challenge facing free market
economies in this century.” (Michael Malone,
Bill Davidow)
Why Bring This on Yourself?

To ensure your competitive
advantage

Which will remain (or revert to) your
human element

You don’t need fewer people. You
need people more focused on what
only people can do.
What’s Left to Humans?

You have answered this in the past by saying: the next,
harder level of cognitive hard work. That’s still true.

But you’re thinking about things wrong now if you think
“harder” refers to greater feats of computation, pattern
recognition, or memory recall

Ask an AI developer what’s “harder” and they’ll say
empathy, creativity, humor, taste …

Why are these harder? Partly because they are
unstructured. Partly because people actually won’t
accept them from machines.

Yet it isn’t enough for your people to claim these realms;
they have to keep getting better at them.

The point of your digital labor investments must be to
allow people to focus on raising their game.
But the winning
enterprises will
win only if they
have augmented
these strengths.
41
How You’ll Manage Augmentation
1: Identify
High-Impact
Decisions
How You’ll Manage Augmentation
2: Track
Technology
Developments
How You’ll Manage Augmentation
3: Consider
the
Constraints
Placed on
Machine
Autonomy
How You’ll Manage Augmentation
4:
Build Your
Augmentation
Solution
How You’ll Manage Augmentation
5: Manage
the Change
How You’ll Manage Augmentation
6: Embark
on a
Project, but
Envision a
Platform
How You’ll Manage Augmentation
7: Put
Someone in
Charge