The blending of artificial intelligence and human resources might sound like the ultimate oxymoron, but employing technology to orchestrate the workplace is fast becoming the way of the corporate world. Using AI, human capital, like any other essential resource on which businesses depend, can now be qualified, quantified, and leveraged as never before. Jeff Smith asserts that if properly harnessed, AI shows the promise of becoming the consummate solution for creating the ultimate data-informed user experience for employers and employees alike. “It’s critical to have exceptional technology to make processes better and more efficient, for governance and risk management, and to help provide data and insight to make decisions,” he says.
With his specialized subject matter expertise, Smith’s deep insights into AI’s monumental and groundbreaking potential were instrumental in helping BlackRock keep pace with emerging trends, as well as understand the emerging technology’s implications for the future.
How AI Is Already Influencing the Workplace
Jeff Smith acknowledges that over the course of the past year, AI’s seemingly limitless business applications have truly come into their own. According to Microsoft, “The data is in: 2024 is the year AI at work gets real. Use of generative AI has nearly doubled in the last six months, with 75% of global knowledge workers using it.” The industry giant further asserts that the tech disruption has reached the tipping point between experimentation and adoption, and it foresees a shift in the labor market in which AI will be a vital player. “Despite fears of job loss, leaders report a talent shortage for key roles. And as more employees eye a career move, managers say AI aptitude could rival experience. For many employees, AI will raise the bar but break the career ceiling.”
In a Mar. 31, 2024, Q&A with Forbes, Dan Beck, president and chief product officer for AI software solutions firm SAP SuccessFactors, listed the three critical arenas in which AI is already exerting real influence on the ways in which HR is using advanced technology to reshape the playing field: “One: AI-driven insights provide insight on workforce dynamics, which enables data-driven decision-making for talent management. Two: AI streamlines HR processes, from recruitment through onboarding to employee management, enhancing efficiency, and reducing administrative burdens. Three: Solutions using AI help craft personalized employee experiences to foster engagement by understanding individual employee needs, wants, and styles.”
While its proponents posit that AI has the power to transform the way business is conducted from A to Z, even as its myriad applications continue to evolve at dizzying speed, Jeff Smith cautions that in order to employ the tool to its best advantage, it’s incumbent on business leaders and human resource managers to keep a close and consistent watch on AI’s latest developments. “The technology landscape has never been more complicated, so it is not enough to just go with one of the established players without evaluation,” Smith says. “It’s [crucial] to evaluate new technologies and make smart strategic decisions to keep up with or get ahead of a rapidly changing landscape and make sure it fits your specific objectives.”
Jeff Smith on the Considerations for AI Best Practices
Although we’re more than two decades past the world imagined in 1968’s seminal sci-fi cautionary tale2001: A Space Odyssey, it’s only now that science technology reality is catching up to science fiction. Some business watchdogs pondering the larger ramifications of the seemingly ubiquitous AI juggernaut wonder if and when we’ll be faced with our own “Open the pod bay doors, Hal” moment.
Jeff Smith says just how much impact any given workplace will feel when AI conventions are introduced depends on the industry. “I think it broadly impacts knowledge workers and higher-paying jobs more than it impacts blue-collar jobs, although there will definitely be the automation of routine tasks,” he notes.
In a recent episode of the Harvard Business Review’s The New World of Work series, HBR Editor-in-Chief Adi Ignatius spoke with Karim R. Lakhani, a Harvard business professor who specializes in workplace technology. Speaking of the 2020 book Competing in the Age of AI, which he co-authored with fellow Harvard professor Marco Iansiti, Lakhani revealed that over a decade of research, they’d discovered machine learning and AI have changed the basic “table stakes” of doing business.
“What we observed was that the entire business architecture in many of these AI-first companies … in terms of business model — how you create value, how you capture value, and your operating model, how you deliver value, how you achieve scope, the number of customers you serve, the number of products you have, scale, the number of customers you serve, and learning — these fundamental parts of a business architecture were being rewired because of machine learning and AI and digital technologies,” Lakhani said.
Indeed, AI is becoming increasingly embedded into the very fabric of our everyday existence. However, experts including Lakhani don’t think generative technology will wrest control from humans altogether any time soon — if ever. “AI won’t replace humans but humans with AI will replace humans without AI,” Lakhani affirmed.
That said, with new table stakes come new game rules — rules Jeff Smith avows must be applied judiciously. “I [believe] the ethical and social considerations are huge and need to be thought through sincerely,” he declares. “Jobs will be displaced for sure [but] AI should augment human abilities and will create jobs as well. In its best form, [AI] will enhance decision making through providing insights and data analysis in a faster, more efficient way to ideally be processed and used by humans.”
