Artificial intelligence is the new electricity, a catalyzer of the changing processes that are transforming the new ways of working and the HR practices. Fabio Moioli, Head of Microsoft Consulting & Services Microsoft Italy, showed the way the AI is changing the organizational management at the HR Work in Progress event in Milan: a powerful tool with which “we can do anything”, but that needs human intelligence in order to find an ethical way of development.
They write poems, conduct a radio program, draw Rembrandt’s works of art that looks completely like the painter would have made it himself… and they can be a powerful tool to choose in an interview the perfectly right candidate for a job.
As Fabio Moioli, Head of Microsoft Consulting & Services Microsoft Italia, said, during the event HR Work in Progress (Milan, 30th May), IA is the new electricity.
The development of AI, intact, strongly recalls the second industrial revolution, when the electricity was primarily used “to do the same things in a better way” and later to do new things that would have been completely impossible without the new source of energy.
“Working with artificial intelligence, I see that companies are doing nowadays the same things but a little bit better. There are, although, companies that are starting to create new business models and services that were impossible before”.
First of all, IA is the most effective catalyzer of an already ongoing process, namely the changing of the organizational model form a strict hierarchical military one to a “learn and adapt” widespread leadership.
“AI is all about statistics, it is all about a bottom-up process. It is a completely opposite way of thinking compared to the top-down we are used to. It is not “I have a hypothesis to test”, but it is more like “I let the context talk to me”.
An example of an app that uses the artificial intelligence to foster a more fluid way of working is Meet Marcel, a digital platform that connects more that 80thousands professionals in the world, giving the chance to work through a cloud system.
Furthermore, Fabio Moioli has focused on how artificial intelligence is already helping companies to solve problems like talent shortage, profiling already the right candidates for the right company, and supporting the HR department in all the process of personnel organization: from the need of attract new talents, to improve their productivity, to their growth inside the organization.
“Companies will use more and more machine learning supported processes to select candidates. LinkedIn, for example, is already using artificial intelligence to better match supply and demand of work”.
LinkedIn aside, there are numerous AI-based applications and software that are currently used in staff selection.
Textio, for example, uses machine learning to help a company to improve its job posting, predicting the kind of application will be submitted form the words that are used.
Other interesting tools are Hire-value, that allows to better test the candidate in a video interview, analyzing his tone and expressions, but also what he says, transcribing it into a text and semantically analyzing it, or Pymetrics, that mixes neurosciences and AI, using 77 different metrics to pinpoint the ideal candidate.
Eventually, the AI’s critical issue is represented by the bias that artificial intelligence reproduces.
“Nowadays, artificial intelligence would learn to hire and promote white 45 years old male”, Moioli concludes. “There have been also cases in which AI has learnt how to corrupt”. In sum, “today with AI we can do everything, but it is up to us to make this technology ethically right”.
Text by Gabriele Masi.
Slides from Fabio Moioli’s presentation.
