Gartner at Eightfold Cultivate: HR, ‘you don’t need to be a tech guru’ on AI

“I would challenge all of you to really take a step back and fundamentally rethink how to change the face of HR” with the help of AI.

That was the message from Microsoft’s GM of HR Digital Strategy Prerna Ajmera at Eightfold Cultivate Europe in London – Eightfold and Microsoft are partners in the AI and HR space.

Now is not the moment to be incremental, stated Ajmera – “You’ve got to really fundamentally push yourself”, and change your focus.

Instead of focusing only on the productivity gains of AI, she called on HR leaders to actually think about how AI can transform the world of work for the better.

Prerna Ajmera (Microsoft) on stage at Eightfold Cultivate Europe.

Deloitte Partner Christoph Gerhold also spoke at Eightfold Cultivate Europe about the mindset shift needed for HR (and organizations more generally) to drive real progress with the help of AI.

Deloitte, like Microsoft, is a Eightfold partner.

It is not the technologies, but our mindset, that hinders us from really moving forward”, he shared.

It’s time for HR to move away from being a siloed function and become “boundaryless” – that’s the major theme of Deloitte’s recent Human Capital report, which UNLEASH delved into here.

“HR needs to be careful to remain in the driver’s seat”, and to implement guardrails that not just look after the business, but also support humans to help them be better at work.

“Who is driving innovation? Humans”, not machines, stated Gerhold.

Ultimately, “we’re just at the beginning” of this AI journey, and “we should just be happy and also grateful that we have the chance to work” and live in this technological era.

HR needs to work to get a seat at the table on this topic. But AI must not just be a top-down endeavor, “we should do it together with our people”.

Employees need better AI tech

In line with Gerhold from Deloitte’s views that humans need to be at the center of the AI revolution, he also noted that organizations “owe” it to workers to make their lives easier with AI.

For Gerhold, there are no more excuses to not do this, and companies need to learn from the consumer world if they want to get this right.

Ashutosh Garg, Eightfold Co-Founder and Co-CEO, also talked a lot during his opening keynote of Eightfold Cultivate Europe about the need for a seamless front end when it comes to AI.

Currently, HR and employees are facing too much pain from their HR tech – we need the tech to work for us, not the other way round.

This thread of practical AI use at work continued through the rest of Eightfold Cultivate Europe.

It was a major theme of customer panels, as well as the show’s closing keynote from Gartner’s Eser Rizaoglu.

Rizaoglu kicked off his keynote by reminding the audience about the generative AI “big bang” last year; even “your cousin who doesn’t work in tech was talking about it”.

But this AI boom was not a flash in pan – “it’s had some staying power” – but when it comes to AI, “there’s no best practice in HR yet”, stated Rizaoglu.

In order to sustain the hype, HR needs to demonstrate real life business success from AI at work.

The key here is to create a strategy – “you don’t need to be a tech guru” to do this, but HR can lean on their vendors and IT function to help them.

This strategy must be a “living document” that evolves with AI (“these technologies are advancing at a such a rapid pace”).

The strategy must also define how the organization plans to govern AI – HR needs to ask themselves questions like: “What are you comfortable with? What are you not comfortable with? What are the risks and ethics?”.

Plus, HR’s AI strategy must keep business value, which, for Rizaoglu, means employee experience and candidate experience, top of mind.

“Setting a technology strategy is tedious. It is hard work”, but it is so worth it to reap the huge rewards from AI.