IBM Talent Business uses AI to rethink modern business

4 Dec 2018

As artificial intelligence (AI) promises to transform both the HR function and the future of work, IBM announced IBM Talent & Transformation, a new business to help companies and their employees flourish in the era of AI and automation.

IBM Talent & Transformation provides not only robust AI-skills training, but also helps companies drive the transformation necessary to use AI to empower employees, eliminate bias and build a modern workforce.

While CEOs and employees agree that AI will transform the workplace, recent IBM studies reveal that few feel prepared to take advantage of AI’s potential:

In the next three years, 120 million workers in the world's 10 largest economies will need to be retrained and reskilled as a result of AI and intelligent automation.

While two-thirds of CEOs say AI will drive significant value in their business, only 11% of chief human resource officers report their organisations to have the AI, data science and machine learning skills needed to fulfil that potential.

82% of employees believe AI is a competitive advantage, but half also believe their companies are not ready or that culture will be a barrier to adoption.

With the help of IBM Talent & Transformation, AI becomes the catalyst for HR organisations to evolve from a service function to a growth engine, helping companies to attract and retain a diverse and highly skilled workforce that drives and evolves with the future of their business.

IBM Talent Business uses AI to rethink modern business

"Making data-driven decision insights, creating new products and services, and penetrating new markets require more than a skills revolution," said Mark Foster, senior vice president, IBM Global Business Services. "IBM believes that building a workforce to compete in the era of AI is as much about culture and specialised expertise as it is about technology.”

The IBM Model, Enterprise Ready

IBM’s new AI tools and related training initiatives are drawn from methods and technologies that IBM applied to drive its own workforce transformation. These services harness the power of AI personalisation to guide employees in developing skills and pursuing opportunities to grow within the company. They also allow HR teams to measure flight risk for proactive retention and use sentiment analysis to spot and address employee concerns.

New bias reduction capabilities flag bias in recruitment efforts, such as language in job descriptions. When applied to IBM’s own HR function, these services drove more than $300m in benefits to the company, $107m in benefits in 2017 alone; and resulted in significantly better candidate, employee and manager satisfaction.

By outsourcing talent acquisition, talent development or HR operations to IBM, organisations gain access to high-performing services that will transform their human capital strategy. AI can complement employee skills, redefine tasks, and increase productivity, but that requires training, development and new ways of working.

IBM AI Skills Academy, a new service offering and educational program will help businesses plan, build and apply strategic AI initiatives across the enterprise like evaluating AI roles and skills, building the necessary skills, and creating an organisational structure in support of AI strategy, all while being supported by IBM’s expert resources.

The offering is aimed at technical and business professionals, from front-line managers to senior executives in areas including marketing, HR, legal, finance and operations. The curriculum covers areas essential to AI initiatives, including deep learning and machine learning frameworks, applying algorithms, open source technologies and data visualization, and will ensure that businesses make decisions less on “gut” intuition and more on data-driven analytics.

To help source the right talent and manage existing employees, IBM Talent & Transformation helps companies like Shire plc apply the IBM Watson Talent Suite. Developed by experts in behavioral science, AI, and industrial-organisational psychology, the IBM Watson Talent Suite leverages analytics and the predictive power of AI through the following solutions:

Watson Recruitment: Analyzes an organisation’s employment history and external data sources to determine key attributes for success in any given role and then uses AI to surface the most qualified candidates without bias.
Watson Candidate Assistant: Sifts through job-seekers’ employment and educational history, infers skills and matches a candidate to openings that are the best fit with recommendations that might never surface with traditional applicant tracking systems.
Watson Career Coach: Serves as a virtual coach and infers employees’ skills, interests, and eminence and provides personalised advice to lay out a path for career opportunities.
Watson Talent Frameworks: Defines the competencies and skills needed for a successful talent strategy today, and future-proofs organisations for tomorrow’s workforce in ways customized to their specific industry and needs.
Adverse Impact Analysis (AIA): Leverages Watson AI to analyze, identify and address unconscious bias across an organisation’s employment history related to gender, race, age, education and previous employment.

To gain an AI advantage, companies must also change how they work, where they work and what principles they use to guide their work.

To facilitate this change, IBM is introducing IBM Garage, designed to develop agile working capabilities and transform work. Inside the Garage, IBM experts sit shoulder-to-shoulder with client employees to develop new ideas, then rapidly test, discard or advance those ideas. In environments designed to be a break from the everyday, traditional silos and barriers are eliminated - employees are encouraged to learn-by-doing, fail fast and iterate often, inspiring organisational change and buy in. Companies like McLane are already working in IBM Garages around the world to create cultures of open collaboration and continuous learning.