Corey Shaw, assistant vice president of talent acquisition at Canada Life Assurance Company, adopted a recruiting AI platform a few years ago for high-volume roles, such as work in a contact center. The firm employs about 11,000, and recruiters were sometimes overwhelmed with resumes. The company has had enough experience with Ideal, which uses AI to conduct an initial screening of candidates based on their applications, to know that its product would work, Shaw said. But adoption of the software has ushered in other changes as well. The introduction of AI recruiting tools is having two significant impacts on Canada Life's recruiting operations.

At SAP InnovationX this week, one of the first break out talks was delivered by Cloda O'Dea, Human Resources Executive at EY. She spoke about the experience of implementing SAP SuccessFactors across the EY global business. This was a massive undertaking considering that EY employees 260,000 people in 150 countries across four service lines. Her role is the Transformation Director within the internal HR team. They were assisted by the EY SAP SuccessFactors practice.

One of the biggest trends in employment is finding ways to make work easier. In this hot job market employees are quitting their jobs in record numbers, and studies show that the voluntary turnover rate is now over 15%. At the same time, people are working more hours, undergoing more stress, and feel less productive than ever. In fact productivity in all mature economies is slowing (output per hour worked) and most economists can't even agree on the cause. I believe much of this is just the shift to new digital ways of work, but it's clear from all my research that much of this is our companies adjusting to a highly networked, contingent, always-on way of getting things done.

AT&T held its third annual IoT Civic Hackathon recently, bringing together some 600 developers, first responders and law enforcement personnel with the aim of developing applications for the FirstNet app ecosystem. FirstNet is the federal government's dedicated public safety network. Taking home the $2,000 first prize for "Best IoT App" was "DeafHack," a project that alerts those who are deaf and hard of hearing to emergencies by using a light pattern through Philips Hue Lights. Through Node-RED, on-the-clock weather updates are sent to the Hue lighting system to enable these features, according to a press release. Second place, and a $1,000 prize, went to ONSET (On Scene Equipment Tracking), which tracks equipment and consumables in EMT bags.

If the competition was responsible for the 19.0% SAP has increased its investments in researching machine learning and other emerging technologies. Management is betting that a breakthrough in those areas can help the company create the most intelligent enterprise applications that could drive sales and allow it to steal market share from the competition. SAP reported a net profit of 730.0 million euros in 3Q16, compared to 898.0 million euros in the same quarter last year. But revenue rose 8.0% year-over-year to 5.4 billion euros in the latest quarter.

SAP has announced it will use text mining and machine learning, based on the SAP HANA platform, to build new capabilities within its SAP SuccessFactors HCM Suite to help companies identify and track where biases exist in talent acquisition and management processes to address workplace biases. The company added it will also explore applications for mentoring group to help people from historically disadvantage groups develop their careers, as well as provide tools to encourage better work-life balance. The initiative will be run by the group's recently established Diversity and Inclusion Customer Advisory Group, which will work with customers and diversity inclusion specialists to identify how technology can be used to support workplace inclusiveness. The diversity inclusion specialists will include Elisabeth Kelan, professor of leadership at Cranfield School of Management; Tinna Nielsen, founder of Move the Elephant for Inclusiveness and young global leader at the World Economic Forum; and Tanya Odom, director of innovation and executive coach at The FutureWork Institute; while some of the partnering customers include Erste Group Bank, McCormick & Company, New York Life, Royal Bank of Canada, and Varian Medical Systems. The initial focus for the group will be gender diversity, with Mike Ettling, president of SAP SuccessFactors saying the HCM solution will help organisations standardise their HR processes.