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 is betting that artificial intelligence can help eliminate bias in hiring and employee performance reviews. The tech giant has been particularly vocal about improving gender and ethnic diversity, not exactly strange considering it owns human resources software company SuccessFactors. It even recently gave nearly 1% of its U.S. workforce, including some men, raises in order to close a pay gap. More significantly for the rest of the corporate world, however, are additions that SAP sap plans for its SuccessFactors HR management system, which includes applications for recruiting, performance appraisals, and career development. The new features include data crunching that flags potentially biased language in job descriptions that could unintentionally limit a pool of candidates, according to presentations that the company is making during its annual customer conference this week in Las Vegas.