What thoughts or feelings come to mind when you think about Artificial Intelligence (AI) in business? A common sentiment that some have is that machines will take over everyone’s jobs. In contrast, others see potential in AI as a way to eliminate mundane tasks freeing up time for employees to leverage their creativity.
Some business owners think it’s just too expensive to be practical; however, a study by Accenture recently found that nearly 75% of companies have already integrated AI technology into their business strategies. Of that 75%, 42% reported that the ROI from AI usage exceeded their expectations.
But does AI have a place in HR—the human-centric heart of an organization? At the recent Gartner® ReimagineHR conference, it was a hot topic for many attendees and there was a wide variety of vendors offering AI-powered solutions. AI can help organizations find top candidates for open positions without sifting through 100s of resumes. It could also automate scheduling systems to help managers build schedules that consider business needs, compliance (legal) requirements, employee availability and preferences.
In its robust research on the topic, Gartner® has some keen insights into how AI can benefit HR leaders, particularly in the area of human capital management (HCM). They recently released an infographic, “Artificial Intelligence Use-Case Prism for HCM Technology,” that highlights 22 use cases that are rated based on their feasibility and business value. TCP Software pulled the top seven use cases that offer high feasibility, high business value or fall right in a sweet spot, providing HR departments both high business value and feasibility.
1. Sentiment Analysis
Sentiment analysis is understanding the underlying emotions in communication. By dialing into body language and tone, you can determine what someone really means when they tell you, “Everything is going great.” AI takes sentiment analysis one step further by applying natural language processing to understand the sentiment behind the text, be it a tweet, email, or response to a survey.
Lattice is a tool used by HR departments to gather employee feedback via internal surveys. It has an AI-powered Sentiment Analysis tool that scans and analyzes open-ended comments to uncover insights and hidden employee issues quickly.
2. Recruitment Marketing Optimization
Recruitment marketing is a practice that communicates the employer’s value proposition to attract talent to an organization, not just a specific job posting. Essentially, you are continuously building a talent pool for when jobs need to be filled.
For example, Manatal uses an AI-powered recommendation engine to pull core skills and requirements from your job descriptions and cross-reference the results with your talent pool to find the perfect candidate for the job opening quickly.
3. Employee Virtual Flight Risk Analysis
Attrition is of paramount concern for almost any organization. Not only is it costly, but it impacts customer experience and organizational productivity. Companies and institutions are constantly looking for warning signs and finding ways to engage at-risk employees. But what if you could better choose whom you hire in the first place?
AI-powered tools like AssessFirst allows employers to assess candidates’ soft skills, something a resume will not show, to help ensure that candidate isn’t just the best fit for the job but the team and organizational culture.
4. Recruitment Virtual Assistant
AI doesn’t just help narrow your pool of qualified candidates. It can also help ease the burden of initial qualification tasks and manually scheduling interviews that your HR team is currently doing.
AI-powered chatbot software tools, such as the one Humanly offers, take on those rote tasks to move the process along much faster and ensure you don’t miss the perfect candidate because you were playing hours of phone tag.
5. Learning Personalization
Most organizations have training programs that include compliance, safety, upskilling, and onboarding. However, retaining that knowledge over time can be a problem for employees.
Tools like Trivie use AI to predict when an employee will likely forget something and send personalized reminders to lock in that knowledge. Trivie says this helps employees remember more than 90% of their training—even 12 months later.
6. Workforce Scheduling Optimization
This technology category falls right into Gartner’s sweet spot delivering a balance of both business value and feasibility. It’s one of our sweet spots as well. If you have shift schedules, you know how important it is to get them right and that they are fair to all employees.
TCP’s Humanity Scheduling leverages artificial intelligence to ensure the right talent is scheduled for the right shift at the right time. Humanity’s tool enables you to pick a relevant business metric and define staffing rules that will apply to that metric. It processes and forecasts an optimal schedule, based on the provided historical demand data. From there, it has an auto-scheduling feature that assigns employee shifts based on roles, availability, and compliance requirements. And, as with most AI-powered tools, the output: accurate, compliant employee schedules, get better over time.
7. HR Virtual Assistant
Employees generate an abundance of HR-related questions. Most of those questions can be easily answered or addressed quickly. However, the manpower dedicated to answering frequently asked questions can take time away from other duties that have more impact.
Tools like Druid serve as a 24/7 HR assistant to give your employees instant and accurate answers to common questions any time of day or night and across multiple channels.
This covers our top seven picks for artificial intelligence in HCM technology. As you assess budget and priorities for your organization, check out the full list on the Gartner® infographic, “Artificial Intelligence Use-Case Prism for HCM Technology,” highlighting these and 15 other high-value and feasibility use cases specifically for HR departments.
