The Corporation of London is calling on employers to re-skill female workers not currently in technical roles. The Corporation of London is calling on employers to re-skill female workers not currently in technical roles. 'Mid-career' females also being sidelined by rigid hiring processes, says City of London Corporation Women working in tech and financial services are at greater risk of losing their jobs to increased use of AI and automation than their male peers, according to a report that found experienced females were also being sidelined as a result of "rigid hiring processes". "Mid-career" women - with at least five years' experience - are being overlooked for digital roles in the tech and financial and professional services sectors, where they are traditionally underrepresented, according to the report by the City of London Corporation. The governing body that runs the capital's Square Mile found female applicants were discriminated against by rigid, and sometimes automated, screening of their CVs, which did not take into account career gaps related to caring for children or relatives, or only narrowly considered their professional experience.

"At every major inflection point, there has to be an evolution," says Humera Shahid, chief diversity, equity, and inclusion officer and head of talent development at Intuit. "That means the way that we're organized is different, [and] the skill sets that we need are rapidly changing, especially in technology," Shahid says. Intuit has undergone many iterations since its inception in 1983 as a digital checkbook to help people pay bills, later known as Quicken. Over the past four decades, the $13 billion software firm has repeatedly reinvented itself, notably selling Quicken in 2016, then pivoting from operating solely as a tax and accounting platform to a more holistic financial platform for individuals and small businesses. It recently made two big acquisitions in Credit Karma ($8.1 billion) and MailChimp ($12 billion) as part of its data play.

When the European Commission released the long awaited white paper "On Artificial Intelligence - A European approach to excellence and trust" on February 19, much of the initial public reaction focused on potential AI regulation further challenging the EU's position in light of fierce technological competition from China and the United States. Few discussed the European Commission's document mention of gender and ethical guidelines. Importantly, the white paper calls for "requirements to take reasonable measures aimed at ensuring that [the] use of AI systems does not lead to outcomes entailing prohibited discrimination." This is not simply about a theoretical approach to discrimination. It is largely also about saving (women's) lives - and ensuring that essential products and services meet the needs of both women and men.

The workforce is about to undergo a technological revolution: Over the next 10 years, 1.2 billion employees worldwide will be impacted by automation and artificial intelligence (AI), with 50% of jobs being changed by the technology and 5% being eliminated, according to the World Economic Forum. While many industries will change in the next decade--82% of HR leaders predict their role will be unrecognizable in 10 years-- IT professionals will see some of the biggest shifts in job function, led by growing tech innovations, said Michael Solomon, co-founder and managing partner at 10x Ascend. The year 2020 alone will host a bevy of technological innovations. This year will also bring advanced use cases for AI and machine learning systems. These changes will not only impact people's lives, but their jobs too.

Artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms are complex packets of code that strive to learn on given training data. But when this training data is flawed, not well-rounded, or biased, the algorithm quickly spirals into discrimination too. For women and minorities, these systemic AI issues can quickly become harmful. Bias in AI algorithms doesn't only occur because of problems in training data. When you dig deeper, it becomes readily apparent that bias often comes from how an AI developer frames a scenario or problem.

We've seen predictions about the "death of the resume" for nearly a decade now. So many things have promised to take its place, from social media profiles and personal chatbots to futuristic "brand bios." Still, nobody's knocked the resume off its throne for over 70 years, but will that change in 2019? New and advanced HR companies are aiming to replace resumes with a variety of data tools and interactive tests, and their results are promising. One approach that's been popular and effective for some years now is the skills test.

There are those who praise the technology as the solution to some of humankind's gravest problems, and those who demonize AI as the world's greatest existential threat. Of course, these are two ends of the spectrum, and AI, surely, presents exciting opportunities for the future, as well as challenging problems to be overcome. One of the issues that's attracted much media attention in recent years has been the prospect of bias in AI. It's a topic I wrote about in TechCrunch (Tyrant in the Code) more than two years ago. The debate is raging on. At the time, Google had come under fire when research showed that when a user searched online for "hands," the image results were almost all white; but when searching for "black hands," the images were far more derogatory depictions, including a white hand reaching out to offer help to a black one, or black hands working in the earth.

In the past few years, machine learning (ML) has become commercially successful and AI firmly established as a field. With its success, more attention is being paid specifically to the gender gap in AI. Compared to the general population, men are overrepresented in technology. While this has been the case for several decades, the opposite was true in the early days of computing when programming was considered a woman's job. Diversity has been shown to lead to good business outcomes like improved revenue.

AI is becoming more prevalent across digital aspects of business, but not every customer is thrilled with the new technology. In its fourth annual "Creepy or Cool" survey, RichRelevance found that only 32 percent of respondents felt OK about AI. The vast majority, 81 percent, believe organizations have an obligation to tell customers when and how AI is being put to use. That means any company hoping to benefit from AI's capabilities and retain customers needs to be transparent about the technology fueling its platforms. The biggest opportunity most organizations have is prioritizing their data to find the right balance of customization.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is becoming one of the most important business disruptors of our times. As we move from digitalisation to the digital era, it is critical to change mindsets and move away from a focus on threats to a focus on opportunities offered by cognitive technologies. HR teams need to play an active role in embracing this new technology and turn it to their advantage. At the heart of artificial intelligence is the use of data to analyse patterns, and in particular patterns of behaviours. At Walking the Talk, we define culture as "the patterns of behaviour that are encouraged, discouraged, and tolerated by people and systems, over time."