Anand is the CEO & Product Owner at Amoeboids. The overnight changes the pandemic brought to work life over two years ago would have been a lot more difficult if not for digital tools. Employees appear to agree; according to an Oracle and Workplace Intelligence report, 82% of employees surveyed believed AI can support their careers better than humans, and a whopping 85% wanted technology to help define their future. But what is HR's role in this? Using people analytics in HR functions can bring about positive change--but only if employers cultivate the right approach for their organization.

There is a severe knowledge gap. Business leaders' and HR practitioners' quantitative abilities are based on the descriptive or inferential statistics that we all learned. Machine learning is entirely different. To understand it and evaluate it to the level of dealing with potential risks, let alone algorithm auditing, a systematic approach and a practical methodology is needed. Part of my continuous learning, collaboration, and contribution, which hopefully lead to an articulation of a solution for evaluating the Ethics of workforce AI, is a comprehensive resource list that will be updated monthly.

AI and People Analytics have taken off. As I've written about in the past, the workplace has become a highly instrumented place. Companies use surveys and feedback tools to get our opinions, new tools monitor emails and our network of communications (ONA), we capture data on travel, location, and mobility, and organizations now have data on our wellbeing, fitness, and health. And added to this is a new stream of data which includes video (every video conference can be recorded and more than 40% of job interviews are recorded), audio (tools that record meetings can sense mood), and image recognition that recognizes faces wherever we are. In the early days of HR analytics, companies captured employee data to measure span of control, the distribution of performance ratings, succession pipeline, and other talent-related topics. Today, with all this new information entering the workplace (virtually everywhere you click at work is stored somewhere), the domain of people analytics is getting very personal. While I know HR professionals take the job of ethics and safety seriously, I'd like to point out some ethical issues we need to consider.