Professor Sir Cary Cooper, ALLIANCE Manchester Business School surveys the potential impact of AI and asks if it will fulfil its promise.
A few months ago, the National Forum for Health and Wellbeing at Work launched their AI Report on the potential benefits and obstacles of AI in the workplace. Surprisingly, it found that many believed it could enable them to do more of the ‘important things’ at work, relieving them of the more mundane aspects of their job. There were concerns, of course, over their job security, but not as worrying or serious as I had anticipated. I suspect this is because we don’t know about the extent of AI’s capabilities in the long term.
The worry is that technology goes even further in undermining the in-person aspects of HR.”
So, will AI alleviate the more routine or mundane task of HR professionals and senior HR leaders over the coming years? I think, if implemented appropriately, it certainly has the potential to deliver ‘more for less’, enabling HR managers and leaders to concentrate on more strategic issues (eg talent retention and attraction, workplace culture and wellbeing, real engagement, future proofing training in an AI world, etc.). The potential downside of this is that AI just increases our reliance on technology, to the extent that the world of HR becomes a virtual world where our face-to-face relationships decline as we try to free our time and efforts. We already see how online training apps in the health and wellbeing arena have created a relationship gap between employee and HR training providers. The worry, therefore, is that technology goes even further in undermining the in-person aspects of HR, as it confronts the challenges of engaging with employees with the fast moving AI world, job security, mental wellbeing, engagement, gender issues, and the like.
HR has a real opportunity in the AI era to help organisations engage their staff for the next decade of more rapid and substantial change in the workplace. This means greater engagement in understanding and integrating AI, and future technologies, in our everyday lives without resisting change. Giving employees ownership in technological change, engaging with them closely, is critical here, which plays nicely into HR’s major contribution in this context.
The challenge of initiating change
Change is rarely easy in organisations, as Machiavelli wrote in his book The Prince: “It should be borne in mind that there is nothing more difficult to arrange, more doubtful of success, and more dangerous to carry through than initiating change. The innovator makes enemies of all those who prospered under the old order, and only lukewarm support is forthcoming from those who would prosper under the new.”
Senior HR leaders can be helped as early adopters of AI, so they can concentrate more on future-proofing AI and other strategic issues in the future, Leading by example, engaging staff in decision making and supporting those who are threatened is the job of HR leaders in a never fast-moving workplace. As the old euphemism goes “change is here to stay” so HR leaders have a significant role to play. Or, as Mark Twain once wrote: “If you always do what you always did – you’ll always get what you always got”.
