This is a keynote highlight from the O'Reilly Artificial Intelligence Conference in Beijing 2019. You can also see other highlights from the event. Get a free trial today and find answers on the fly, or master something new and useful. Receive weekly insight from industry insiders--plus exclusive content, offers, and more on the topic of AI. Receive weekly insight from industry insiders--plus exclusive content, offers, and more on the topic of AI.

HR and recruiters don't tend to take things at face value. For good reason: we're called on to rely on our educated judgments. We find the best talent with the most potential for doing great things for an employer in the near future, and we do it over and over again. But we've been up for a turbocharge for a long time. A career path that is this intense, combining administrative, personal, and strategic tasking constantly needs sophisticated ways to advance above old archaic practices we no longer want to rely on. With AI, we have it.

HR is fast embracing the latest emerging technologies and transforming the way talent management happens. From cloud to social to Artificial Intelligence (AI), each seems to play a significant role in HR sub-domains such as performance management, recruitment, employee engagement and so on. Technology and HR are being integrated in a bid to make HR interventions more productivity oriented. After all, HR leaders must justify their value-add to business by optimizing every HR process, and aim to achieve the best from the least investments. Recruitment is one such area, where positions continue to remain vacant for months, as organizations struggle to find the right candidates.

Platform-based talent markets help put the emphasis in human-capital management back where it belongs--on humans. The best way to organize corporations--it's a perennial debate. But the discussion is becoming more urgent as digital technology begins to penetrate the labor force. Although consumers have largely gone digital, the digitization of jobs, and of the tasks and activities within them, is still in the early stages, according to a recent study by McKinsey Global Institute (MGI). Even companies and industries at the forefront of digital spending and usage have yet to digitize the workforce fully (Exhibit 1).1 1.See McKinsey Global Institute, "Digital America: A tale of the haves and have-mores," December 2015. The stage is set for sweeping change as artificial intelligence, after years of hype and debate, brings workplace automation not just to physically intensive roles and repetitive routines but also to a wide range of other tasks. MGI estimates that roughly up to 45 percent of the activities employees perform can be automated by adapting currently demonstrated technologies.

Platform-based talent markets help put the emphasis in human-capital management back where it belongs--on humans. The best way to organize corporations--it's a perennial debate. But the discussion is becoming more urgent as digital technology begins to penetrate the labor force. Although consumers have largely gone digital, the digitization of jobs, and of the tasks and activities within them, is still in the early stages, according to a recent study by McKinsey Global Institute (MGI). Even companies and industries at the forefront of digital spending and usage have yet to digitize the workforce fully (Exhibit 1).1 1.See McKinsey Global Institute, "Digital America: A tale of the haves and have-mores," December 2015. The stage is set for sweeping change as artificial intelligence, after years of hype and debate, brings workplace automation not just to physically intensive roles and repetitive routines but also to a wide range of other tasks. MGI estimates that roughly up to 45 percent of the activities employees perform can be automated by adapting currently demonstrated technologies.

From the increasing use of contingent freelance workers to the growing role of robotics and smart machines, the corporate workforce is changing--radically and rapidly. These changes are no longer simply a distraction; they are now actively disrupting labor markets and the economy. Three years ago, Deloitte introduced the concept of the open talent economy, predicting that new labor models--on and off the balance sheet--would become increasingly important sources of talent.2 Granted, respondents to this year's survey rated workforce management the least important of the trends we explored. At an even more basic level, companies are struggling to understand who (and what) their workforces are composed of and how to manage today's incredibly diverse combination of worker types.