Diane Gherson
Chief Human Resource Officer
IBM
How can HR leaders best make the business case for HR technology investment?
The most important place to start is the business pain point. In our case it was cost of replacing talent (this was self-funding and provided savings for other projects). Then it was investing in AI (skills inference, personalized learning platform, matching candidates to openings) to solve the skills gap (not self funding but strategically important). We funded that from using chat bots to take 40% of the volume from our HR service centers and by automating much of our operations, starting with payroll, travel reimbursement and HR controls.
In acquiring and implementing new technologies, what’s the one most common mistakes HR organizations can make?
We are now able to apply AI to employee data for social sentiment analysis, organization network analysis, skills inference, assessing flight risk, and so on. Just because we can look at our employees’ emails or social media activity or comments in Slack channels doesnt mean we should. Like all AI, we need to be transparent about where the data come from and what it is being used for. For example, our sentiment analysis can pick up tone, volume, and themes, but not what people are actually saying, or who is saying it. Email and social media activity are off-limits, for most of us that is an invasion of privacy.
