On May 20, 2017, Tom Haak of the HR Trend Institute, gave a presentation at the HR Innovation Day 2017, in Leipzig. The title of his presentation was: "Artificial Intelligence: threat or opportunity for HRM". His presentation was recorded, and the video can be found here. Tom Haak is the founder and director of The HR Trend Institute. Prior to founding the HR Trend Institute in 2014, Tom held senior HR positions in companies as Arcadis, Aon, KPMG and Philips.

An engineer at IBM once told me that the future of information technology could be summed up in a few key terms: mobility, cloud computing, the internet of things, and automation and artificial intelligence. It is worth bearing in mind that automation and artificial intelligence are becoming more and more prominent topics within the public sphere, especially with the emergence of powerful AI like IBM's Watson and DeepMind's AlphaGo. These forms of artificial intelligence, also referred to as robots or bots for short, don't necessarily take up physical space. Instead, they are programs, stored on a desktop or a cloud, that have the ability to learn and adapt to different situations as opposed to earlier programs that were more rigid. Because of their learning capabilities, these robots can perform tasks that were deemed impossible by earlier programmers: Robots can write stories, they can understand human speech, and they can diagnose a patient better than their own doctor can.

Spend half an hour checking out what people are writing online (especially in the business niche) and you will inevitably stumble across an article on how artificial intelligence (AI) is the future of this and that. For one reason or another, AI has once again caught the attention of people who, in most cases, know little to nothing about artificial intelligence. This can also be seen in many an HR-oriented article where AI is used in broad strokes that feel more like a plot of an 80s B-movie with Rutger Hauer, than a serious piece of writing on this potentially exciting proposition. If we were to answer this question in this article, we would probably all receive some kind of a prize for solving one of the most hotly debated questions of the last 70-odd years. Namely, when discussing AI and what it should encapsulate, it is only a matter of time before the debate grows extremely philosophical in nature and various theories, limits and questions of ethics arise.

Spend half an hour checking out what people are writing online (especially in the business niche) and you will inevitably stumble across an article on how artificial intelligence (AI) is the future of this and that. For one reason or another, AI has once again caught the attention of people who, in most cases, know little to nothing about artificial intelligence. This can also be seen in many an HR-oriented article where AI is used in broad strokes that feel more like a plot of an 80s B-movie with Rutger Hauer, than a serious piece of writing on this potentially exciting proposition. If we were to answer this question in this article, we would probably all receive some kind of a prize for solving one of the most hotly debated questions of the last 70-odd years. Namely, when discussing AI and what it should encapsulate, it is only a matter of time before the debate grows extremely philosophical in nature and various theories, limits and questions of ethics arise.