Artificial Intelligence – the Future of Automation in Workforce Management

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has already started to influence processes and automate decision making in manufacturing, health care, finance and customer service industries. By many measures, HR appears to be next on that list. While the technology is still nascent, the building blocks exist to suggest that machine learning could ease the burden of complex analysis, surface insights, and trigger actions on behalf of managers in the workplace. One way is by comparing real-time data to historical data or benchmarks to identify statistically significant deviations from the norm. For example, if scheduled labor hours as a percent of sales is significantly higher than the norm in a group of stores, the system can detect this and send that information proactively to management. Another way is to take a series of interrelated decisions and use algorithms to model scenarios.