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Freddye Silverman, Silver Bullet Solutions
Bots ‘R Us “Hello Google, what time is the next showing of Guardians of the Galaxy? Siri, what Italian restaurants are near me? Alexa, please turn on the kitchen lights.” If I had asked you just six short years ago if you thought anyone could have an intelligent and verbal personal assistant on hand to answer questions, assist with transactions, and remind you about everything just like your mother does at any given moment, you might have thought it was nothing more than a gleam in an engineer’s eye. Let’s go back to the turn of this century (which, in tech years is probably that number squared). Back in the day, the technology you used at work was typically more advanced than what you used at home. Of course, PCs were ubiquitous, but remember how cool we thought Blackberries were? At my company, being issued a corporate blackberry (for email, not just the original pager) was truly the brass ring, and signified your membership in the upper echelons of management. Self-service apps at your workplace were also considered high-tech, and the words “consumerlike experience” weren’t yet in use. We were all still shopping at the mall…and still going to movie theaters. The pace of technological development continues to astound, and even those of us who work in the technology arena are often hard-pressed to keep up with the latest developments. (A confession…I’m a bit of a Luddite despite my years in tech. They had to pry my beloved Blackberry from my hands before I gave in and got an Android, which I thought was too big and much too complex for my needs. Now you can’t take my Galaxy away.) The work/home technology experience has significantly shifted over the past decade with business-to-customer and personal tech out-distancing the corporate tech arena by years. Many businesses are still waging the social network battle and attempting to prevent workers from using all of the technology that is available to them outside the workplace during work hours, clearly a losing battle. Well beyond the basics, the newest frontiers are the “emerging” technologies of artificial intelligence (AI), chatbots (intelligent assistants), augmented reality (AR) and drones. The quotes around “emerging” are intentional; while that term is broadly used, especially in HR, these technologies are, in fact, well past the cocoon stage. They are, and have been, fully developed
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July-September 2017 • Workforce Solutions Review • www.ihrim.org
butterflies for quite some time – just not in the HR world. That fact is even obvious in one of the names – it’s no longer good enough to simulate reality in a “virtual” way. Now, it has to be augmented, ratcheted up a notch or two for a truly wow experience. So AR is already clearly in version 2.0 or more. “Emerging” is a relative term – the technologies are not new, but their broad application in HR is. Artificial intelligence is moving farther along the transformational path, certainly at home and in work operations, but still in its early stages in terms of HR. Cognitive computing is the simulation of human thought processes in a computerized model that involves self-learning systems. These systems use data mining, pattern recognition, and natural language processing to function like the human brain. Chatbots are the user-facing channels, intelligent assistants with high-quality voice simulation and conversational ability. Competitors in this market range from IBM’s Watson to human capital management providers and many small startups that are targeting specific areas of HR, including recruitment, service center Q&A and personalized learning. Just as Watson ingested and analyzed all of Wikipedia in order to play – and win – Jeopardy, Bots/AI could scan all employee insurance policies to answer questions during open enrollment. We are in an era of post-mobile development where no device is necessary and search is no longer bound by text; instead, transactions are conversational. Google is investing vast amounts in machine learning and the belief that Alexis-like assistants will be standard issue, but via an implanted chip in you, your house and/or your car. SRI, the company that invented Siri, has developed a platform called SenSay Analytics, which can detect and respond to emotions. It parses through words, tone, volume, pitch and other characteristics of the human voice. When it senses anger, it can apologize, will speak more quickly when it senses impatience and will forward you to a human agent when it senses that you are on the verge of a major blowup. This would be a logical tool for an employee service center and be another branch of Tier 0 (along with self-service) since no humans are involved. Per SRI, the product can sometimes miss picking up verbal cues and get it wrong – but so do people. Odds are, it could answer