Can AI really help us win the war for talent?Forbes library If you make a living identifying human potential, recruiting talent, or are interested in hiring the right people for the right role, there are good reasons to be enthusiastic about the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) as a recruitment tool. Anywhere in the world - and at any given point in time - labour markets are inefficient, with disengaged and underperforming employees in jobs that are a poor fit for their abilities, interests, and personalities; critical roles that remain vacant for a long time despite no lack of investment to attract and find suitable candidates; and people with real talent and potential who struggle to find work. Although such inefficiencies are partly structural, they are also the product of organizations' limited understanding of human potential, or at least their inability to translate their understanding into effective hiring practices. Here's where AI could help: by looking at a wider range of signals - including deeper signals, which escape even trained human observers and traditional talent tools - it may reveal the hidden connections between a person's background and their career potential, identify the fundamental "grammar" of talent, and ultimately upgrade the quality of our hiring decisions, making the job market less inefficient (and people less miserable about their careers). However, a prerequisite to enable this would be to first address five big hiring problems that we shouldn't really expect AI to solve: To conclude, there's no doubt that AI could vastly elevate our ability to fix our hiring problems, so long as we can first acknowledge and address some of the main historical limitations to our staffing processes, which are still very much alive today.