HR In The World Of AI, Algorithms & Big Data

The digital exhaust people created with Cloud, mobile and social technologies has been the feedstock for much of the HR technology changes. But another wave of change is underway and its impact on work (not just HR) will be highly transformative

- Brian Sommer

The last big wave of technology change involved a slew of social, mobile and cloud capabilities that altered a number of HR processes. Mobile technologies caused all manners of recruiting, interviewing, travel expense reporting, time tracking and more to change. Employees and job seekers no longer wanted to be tethered to old fashioned desktop computers. Smartphones and tablets were now the preferred method of contact.

Social technology triggered big changes, too. LinkedIn, personal web pages and Facebook became go-to locations for recruiters to find passive job seekers. Web spiders and massive in-memory database technology could now do in milliseconds what old-fashioned recruiters needed weeks to complete.

The digital exhaust people created with cloud, mobile and social technologies has been the feedstock for much of the HR technology changes the last ten years. Cloud was the transport mechanism for all of this data and much of the data ended up in big data stores.

Now the innovation is leaping forward again.

The Next Wave

Another wave of change is underway and its impact on work, and not just HR, will be highly transformative. Here’s a preview of what’s coming:

People will work for technologies, not other people: Smart algorithms (powered by insights from Big Data) will predict imminent failure of home appliances, capital machine tools, automobiles, etc. Not only will the failures be predicted but the software will pre-emptively order replacement parts and schedule preventative maintenance. Workers will be dispatched by software, told what to replace/repair and sent along to the next repair — all without any human contact. This new reality is already happening in numerous firms, from railroads to caulk manufacturers. For HR departments: who prepares the performance evaluation when a worker never interacts with other human beings?