As marketing director of Attensi, Anthony Wong helps people learn faster and better by making learning more fun and fruitful. ChatGPT has as many people scared as it does excited. Popular culture has many of us believe that the development of AI is akin to bringing dinosaurs back to life and that humanity's desire for progress will eventually be its downfall. The Terminator, 2001: A Space Odyssey and more recently Ex Machina, all depict an AI that goes rogue and turns on its human creators in a fantastically violent fashion. As is often the case, the reality is far less cinematic. The World Economic Forum, WEF, has predicted that more work tasks will be handled by machines in a "robot revolution," leaving many people out of work.

Companies are increasingly relying on automation to help screen candidates in the hiring process, a trend prompting scrutiny from local governments and regulators. Nearly one in four organizations already use automation or artificial intelligence (AI) to support hiring, according to a February 2022 survey from the Society for Human Resource Management, and usage is higher--42 percent--among large employers with 5,000 or more employees. A recent report from Recode detailed Amazon's ambitions to replace some of its recruiters with AI software that can fast-track candidates to interviews without any human involvement. Today AI technology can do more than just screen resumes. Companies may also use AI tools to monitor candidates' social media presence quickly and pick up on red flags.

Talent management's many challenges in keeping employees engaged are helping to define the future of work. Every organization is struggling to meet its need for experts who bring new skills, made more difficult by high attrition rates and a competitive job market. Chief human resources officers (CHROs) and the organizations they lead are looking to build the expertise they need by upskilling talent. Add to those challenges getting internal mobility right, providing employees with learning and growth opportunities, coaching managers to be talent champions, achieving less bias in hiring decisions and the future of work's growing challenges become clear. A data-driven approach to solving these challenges using AI delivers results, as the interviews and presentations at the Eightfold Cultivate 22 Summit showed.

After a career spent working at the intersection of technology and human experience, I know a couple of things to be true: good artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are incredibly powerful, and the human experience is absolutely mission-critical. So why don't we hear more about bolstering employee experience (EX) and human capital intelligence using the power and possibility of AI and ML? When the quality of EX -- which, according to Gallup, includes "every interaction that happens along the employee life cycle, plus the experiences that involve an employee's role, workspace, manager and wellbeing" -- declines, the odds are good that your talent engagement and retention isn't far behind. And as Josh Bersin, global industry analyst and founder of Bersin by Deloitte, said in 2018, "Turnover is so painful with this job market that companies are realizing, 'I've got to take better care of my people or else I can't grow.'" AI might be the answer to this challenge.

Will the decade we just entered come to be known, once again, as the Roaring Twenties? Will it usher in an era marked by widespread prosperity, global tranquility and social congeniality? Or will it be remembered for something different? As we enter the new year, there are signs pointing in both directions. But no one ever succeeded by placing their bets on the world ending, so we choose to look at the optimistic side.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is covering up every aspect of our personal and professional life. At any organization, all functions are trying to make the best utilization of AI for optimum effectiveness and efficiency. Human Resources function is also not left behind in this race. AI is also helping organizations in retaining their employees by studying and analyzing their unique behaviors and past patterns of attrition. It is also helping in tailoring the learning modules and delivering them just in time.

It admittedly sounds a little like Big Brother, that a robot can tell significant things about your personality merely by looking into your eyes. Yet, that is the hiring territory that we are fast approaching – although we may not be sitting across from androids in interviews anytime soon. The use of artificial intelligence in making HR decisions is, while fraught with peril, not without its promising aspects. In an era when it is increasingly difficult for businesses to unearth the best job candidates, we may yet see the day when technology makes it possible to separate good from bad in the blink of an eye. Despite caveats about security and privacy, relying on AI would appear to be a method far superior to digging through a pile of resumes or asking ice-breaking questions like, "What's the last book you read?" Hiring good people – people who are talented, agreeable and work well with their co-workers – goes a long way toward nipping workplace conflicts in the bud.

For those who are unfamiliar, the concept of the technology adoption curve was popularized by Everett Rogers in his book Diffusion of Innovations. Although some HR tech writers have joked that the overall HR technology adoption curve looks markedly different, with a majority of HR tech buyers disproportionately disposed to the far left of the curve, the true speed of adoption of AI in talent acquisition tracks closely to the standard curve. Innovators and early adopters are exposed to the greatest amount of risk from adopting new often unproven technologies. However, due to the considerable competitive advantages that may be realized by implementing breakthrough technology, they also stand to benefit the most. While the innovators and adopters have a greater appetite for and ability to manage risk, for the majority of companies shooting to be part of the early majority is the most strategically advantageous way to implement new technology.

It admittedly sounds a little like Big Brother, that a robot can tell significant things about your personality, merely by looking into your eyes. Yet, that is the hiring territory that we are fast approaching – although we may not be sitting across from androids in interviews anytime soon. The use of artificial intelligence in making HR decisions is, while fraught with peril, not without its promising aspects. In an era when it is increasingly difficult for businesses to unearth the best job candidates, we may yet see the day when technology makes it possible to separate good from bad in the blink of an eye. Despite caveats about security and privacy, relying on AI would appear to be a method far superior to digging through a pile of resumes or asking ice-breaking questions like, "What's the last book you read?" Hiring good people – people who are talented, agreeable and work well with their coworkers – goes a long way toward nipping workplace conflicts in the bud.

The future of work will be driven by artificial intelligence, and HR is woefully ill equipped to make it happen -- at least according to many reports about AI and HR. IBM, PWC and Deloitte (among others) have all done surveys on AI's impact on HR in the last 18 months, and the message is clear: companies want AI, but they don't have the talent, leadership or confidence in their human resources team to make it happen. IBM predicts that 120 million workers in the world's 10 largest economies will need to be reskilled in the next few years to adapt to an AI-driven marketplace -- and that if companies don't get started soon they will quickly risk losing their competitive edge. Yet its "Unplug from the past" report found that just 28 percent of CHROs expect their enterprise to address changing workforce demographics with new strategies. Even if companies are gearing up for an AI reskilling evolution, roughly half of their employees don't think they can pull it off.