By the start of 2020, in the technology industry, women had leadership positions in new-age technology areas such as software development, information technology, AI/ML/Data Science, Cloud, Big Data, IoT, Security, UI/UX, project management, and blockchain. Analyzing the software talent pool, among the eight roles identified, namely, DevOps engineer, Mobile engineer, QA engineer, Cyber security engineer, Frontend engineer, Backend engineer, ML engineer, Full-stack engineer, QA engineer is the most gender diverse role with 37% women in the role. However, the pandemic has impacted the significant strides women have made. The COVID-19 pandemic has disproportionately affected women, especially of color. Workforce planning must correct the impact on gender diversity.

With mission-critical operations, artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to produce incredible benefits – not only for businesses but also for the people they serve and employ. You see it when systems detect fraudulent purchases and keep a consumer's account safe. It's in autonomous and self-driving cars, which are programmed to help keep drivers safe and avoid collisions. In each of these examples, AI is a tool to learn complex patterns – including some that are practically undetectable. The result is more impactful and, with appropriate oversight, better and fairer decision-making.

Artificial intelligence already helps run government, with cognitive applications doing everything from reducing backlogs and cutting costs to handling tasks we can't easily do on our own, such as predicting fraudulent transactions and identifying criminal suspects via facial recognition. Indeed, while we expect AI-based technology in the years ahead to fundamentally transform how public-sector employees get work done--eliminating some jobs, redesigning countless others, and even creating entirely new professions1--it's already changing the nature of many jobs and revolutionizing facets of government operations. Agencies today face new choices about whether some work should be fully automated, divided among people and machines, or performed by people but enhanced by machines. Our latest report, AI-augmented government, conservatively estimates that simply automating tasks that computers already routinely do could free up 96.7 million federal government working hours annually, potentially saving $3.3 billion. At the high end, we estimate that AI technology could free up as many as 1.2 billion working hours every year, saving $41.1 billion.

India could emerge as the third-largest market in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region for IBM's artificial intelligence (AI)-powered workforce automation solution, launched in November last year. The Armonk-based software services giant expects large-sized and mid-sized enterprises from sectors such as banking, insurance and manufacturing to be among the first adopters of the solution. The solution, dubbed the Talent and Transformation suite of services, is one among several that have come out of IBM's global AI platform, Watson. "India is one of the largest markets for the solution in terms of opportunity after Australia and Singapore (in the APAC region)," Lula Mohanty, general manager for APAC at IBM Global Business Services, told TechCircle. "Only five per cent of chief executive officers (CEOs) think that they have embarked on a transformation journey, especially when it comes to human resources core functions and only 24% of CHROs (chief human resources officers) think that they have a lot of work to do in terms of improving their core functions. This is a positive change in terms of rising awareness in the country," she added.

The potential of people analytics is enormous but the risk of getting it wrong and losing employee trust – perhaps irrevocably – is high. All of those who work in the field have a responsibility to ensure that people data is used for good. Fortunately, with the growing trend of providing personalised recommendations and insights to employees in exchange for the personal data that they share with their employers, the field is moving in the right direction. Coupled with a surge in the employee wellness market, expect to see the growth in'personal analytics', whereby workers are given data-driven insights to make better personal and work-related decisions to increase exponentially in 2019. One of the best books I've read in 2018 was Jeffrey Pfeffer's Dying for a Paycheck, which provided a sobering and damning analysis on how our workplaces are literally killing people. Not only do modern management practices engender stress, damage engagement and destroy the mental and physical health of employees, Pfeffer also emphasises the massive harm it causes company performance too. This is why the field of people analytics is so important as is the focus on employee experience and wellness. The methodologies being employed to understand, design and measure employee experience are getting more sophisticated, more data-driven and more wide-ranging. These include active and passive listening tools such as surveys, ONA and wearables plus the analysis of unstructured data (e.g.

Many corporate human resources departments are such technological backwaters that they still rely on Excel spreadsheets or even paper documents for many of their tasks or services. But the vast majority of HR departments expect to make a quantum leap in their IT systems in just the next two years, with many of them embracing artificial intelligence to help with their functions, according to a new study from consulting firm Bain. "HR departments are rapidly adopting new technologies," Michael Heric, a partner with Bain's Performance Improvement practice, said in the report. It warned, though, that "the appetite of HR leaders for more digital tools may outpace their ability to absorb the tools." For its survey, Bain polled human resource executives and managers at 500 large companies in the US, Germany, and the United Kingdom.

Last week NAB kicked off its latest wave of job cuts billed as part of a restructure to "simplify" the bank. It's part of a three-year plan announced in 2017 to axe 6000 jobs while adding 2000 new technology roles. "As we simplify, we automate processes and things move to digital channels, we will need less people and as that happens we estimate that there will be 6000 less people needed in three years' time," NAB CEO Andrew Thorburn explained when announcing the cuts late last year. "Having said that, we're hiring 2000 people with different capabilities: data scientists, AI, robotics, automation, technology people, digital people, so the net [job loss] will be 4000 and that's just a reshaping that's going to happen." As machines learn how to perform tasks that would otherwise be done by humans, businesses will find themselves needing fewer staff to complete the same amount of work.

This is the second in a two-part series of articles about recruiting trends for 2018. This installment addresses data analytics and artificial intelligence. Advances in talent data analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) will provide talent acquisition professionals in 2018 with the tools they need to be more strategic and insightful when making hiring decisions and streamline the transactional side of recruiting. Over 9,000 recruiters and hiring managers across the globe identified these trends, among others, as being the most impactful when surveyed by LinkedIn for the professional networking site's Global Recruiting Trends 2018 report. LinkedIn found that most companies are already using data to some degree to solve talent issues and that most recruiting professionals expect AI will eventually transform their roles.

Let our Chatbot help--type your question above to explore AI topics. Artificial intelligence already helps run government, with cognitive applications doing everything from reducing backlogs and cutting costs to handling tasks we can't easily do on our own, such as predicting fraudulent transactions and identifying criminal suspects via facial recognition. Indeed, while we expect AI-based technology in the years ahead to fundamentally transform how public-sector employees get work done--eliminating some jobs, redesigning countless others, and even creating entirely new professions1--it's already changing the nature of many jobs and revolutionizing facets of government operations. Agencies today face new choices about whether some work should be fully automated, divided among people and machines, or performed by people but enhanced by machines. Our latest report, AI-augmented government, conservatively estimates that simply automating tasks that computers already routinely do could free up 96.7 million federal government working hours annually, potentially saving $3.3 billion.

Artificial intelligence already helps run government, with cognitive applications doing everything from reducing backlogs and cutting costs to handling tasks we can't easily do on our own, such as predicting fraudulent transactions and identifying criminal suspects via facial recognition. Indeed, while we expect AI-based technology in the years ahead to fundamentally transform how public-sector employees get work done--eliminating some jobs, redesigning countless others, and even creating entirely new professions1--it's already changing the nature of many jobs and revolutionizing facets of government operations. Agencies today face new choices about whether some work should be fully automated, divided among people and machines, or performed by people but enhanced by machines. Our latest report, AI-augmented government, conservatively estimates that simply automating tasks that computers already routinely do could free up 96.7 million federal government working hours annually, potentially saving $3.3 billion. At the high end, we estimate that AI technology could free up as many as 1.2 billion working hours every year, saving $41.1 billion.