Covering Disruptive Technology Powering Business in The Digital Age

image
Power Struggle Between Humans And AI Can Be Solved With Proper Training Of Employees
image
March 22, 2018 News HR Analytics

 

If businesses are expected to speed up their processes and go to market strategies in this digital revolution, then human resource needs to improve in double that time. That was the sentiment shared by Ybhg Dato’ Vignaesvaran, Chief Executive, Human Resource Development Fund (HRDF) Malaysia. He said this at the first APAC HR Analytics Summit held in Sheraton Imperial Kuala Lumpur.

HRDF currently has 2.2million users registered and is targeting to increase that to 7million users in 5 years. An arduous task but he seems determined and well prepared to achieve it.

To illustrate his point, he shared an experience from his past job, where they had to order parts for their equipment five years in advance. Only through extensive research and analysing immense amounts of data manually, could they come up with the numbers necessary for their management. But with the current state of analytics today, it would be easily accomplished. That’s the power of analytics that’s changing the world.

However, the state of human capital isn’t so easy to handle. As AI and digital economics become more advanced and cheap to adopt, workers who make a living from those jobs are in a predicament.

Dato Vicks shared an example of how improving workers’ skill sets can actually benefit both the company and the staff. “There was a company that was upgrading to use AI in place of three employees and asked me if they can let those three staff go. I said don’t let them go. We sent them for training, and now their salary has tripled,” he shared. That’s the value the company is able to gain from those employees.

The critical issue here is HR needs to start thinking how to address the soon to be power struggle between what technology can offer and what humans can offer. Even lawyers and doctors will need to re-think their roles as AI and Machine Learning become better adept at those specialised jobs than humans.

Dato’ Vicks also shared that it was his hope that HR heads will play a proactive role in making sure their staff are given the skills and training required.

The HRDF uses analytics to find the most effective training that is productive and gives money back value. This he said will show companies the true value for the training they send the staff for and training companies at the same time get to adjust their capabilities to improve their syllabus.

“We recently started with Oxford to build an eco-system. So what we want to do is, we want to see what kind of training actually gives best productivity ranking. Currently, we train close to a million people. We currently have 2.2 million in our workforce in our database, from 32,000 companies. Hopefully, if everything goes well, we’ll have 7 million people in our database in 5 years’ time.”

(0)(0)

Archive