To mark Israel's Memorial Day in 2021, the Israel Defense Forces musical ensembles collaborated with a company that specializes in synthetic videos, also known as "deepfake" technology, to bring photos from the 1948 Israeli-Arab war to life. They produced a video in which young singers clad in period uniforms and carrying period weapons sang "Hareut," an iconic song commemorating soldiers killed in combat. As they sing, the musicians stare at faded black-and-white photographs they hold. The past comes to life, Harry Potter style. For the past few years, my colleagues and I at UMass Boston's Applied Ethics Center have been studying how everyday engagement with AI challenges the way people think about themselves and politics. We've found that AI has the potential to weaken people's capacity to make ordinary judgments.

We all know about the paradigm-changing use of AI for Netflix recommendations, chatbots that impersonate customer service agents online, and the dynamic pricing of hotel rooms. Such efforts are the value creation engines of countless large, successful companies. But organisations can also adopt a decidedly less splashy and, at face value, more pedestrian use of AI--to process documents faster and simplify operational procedures. Although this use is aimed at reducing costs rather than transforming industries, 'boring AI' is actually quite exciting--because it confronts issues that all companies wrestle with, and because the gains in productivity are real. Recent research by PwC on automating analytics found that even the most rudimentary AI-based extraction techniques can save businesses 30–40% of the hours typically spent on such processes.

People are vital from one business to another. It's strange how the notion continues to persist, even though a massive number of human jobs are being broken down into hundreds of mini-tasks in a manner where machines can be made to do the same. The intersection of the human resource concept (people at the core of the business) and the artificial intelligence concept (machines as smart as humans) creates fascinating possibilities, both positive and negative! In this guide, we are going to focus on the positive -- the tremendous improvements artificial intelligence can bring in to a crucial human resources responsibility -- hiring people. Yes, in your next job, you may be hired by AI.