So, AI is here. Now what?

Back to future

This week I visited the excellent hired!bcn conference in Barcelona, Spain. For me, it was part of revisiting the passion I have always had for talent management in organisations, ever since I first started working with bp in the mid-2000s on their then new talent acquisition solution. Since, I have seen the evolution of the recruitment business to it becoming ever closer to the core of what organisation do.

My personal experience is with large corporate organisations, and it was certainly refreshing to talk to many in the talent acquisition arena for the tech industry, with its own specific challenges. To observe both the differences and the similarities between large, more conventional, companies and new, emerging (often start-up) businesses.

A key theme was the emergence of Artificial Intelligence in business and also in the talent management arena, kicked-off by the inspiring Hung Lee and followed by multiple other speakers at the conference. It is clear that this theme will dominate the conversation in the recruitment industry and the wider business for sure.

The future is already here. But do we know to what extent?

One key reflection for me is what this means for our businesses, their digital maturity, global AI capability and the tension between new emergent ways of working and staying in control of the business.

What does AI mean for our businesses?

A couple of years ago, when the pandemic triggered an accelerated digitisation drive, I already reflected that digitisation doesn't mean that the core principles of how to design, run and manage a business changes. With the fast emergence of AI, that remains as true today as it was then.

What seems to me an emerging problem now, though, is that the AI revolution happens so fast, that basic operating models cannot keep up.

Just look at the image below that shows how fast the take-up of ChatGPT was compared to other well known technologies...

... 5 days from launch to 1 million users...

Many people are using this AI site to produce outputs in minutes that otherwise would have taken hours or even days or weeks to produce. These people are most likely many people working for our business!

It is clear that the potential of greatly improving the productivity of key areas of your business is an unmissable opportunity. So, clearly, C-level execs are very excited about the prospects, but... some key questions come to mind:

• How can our business cope with the extremely high levels of possible change in our ways of working?
• Can we maintain the required level of control of our business with the new fast developing changes? Who is in charge?
• How does this new emerging technology fit into our evolving operating model?
• What will AI maturation journey in our business look like, from the infancy it seems to be in today?
• What does it mean for the investment in our IT portfolio? In our basic architecture and/or the long term, expensive investments we need to make in our core, like our ERP?
• What does the potential increase in productivity mean for the people in the business? The skills they need, their compensation, their working hours
• How does the potential of this new technology change my future talent requirements and management activities?
• How do we know that our deliverables produced with the help of AI are actually better, or even based on factually correct inputs?
• And so on and so forth...

I would like to open a conversation around these challenges of this ever-expanding theme and aim to address them in the coming weeks and months.

What are some challenges that you can see?