Digital HR Summit: AI / Bots

More from the Digital HR Summit, and a couple of good sessions yesterday focusing on digital technology, especially AI, both very smart eg Watson, and rather more simple, eg chatbots.

Geert-Jan de Konig from IBM took us through some of the opportunities for AI as well as the need for partnering with it (above).
 

We had a look at IBM’s News Discovery, Watson Explorer and Personality Insights (this is mine).

Geert also showed us IBM’s internal AI based pay tool which was called Cogni-Pay and is now the Cognitive Compensation Advisor and which they are thinking about bringing to market.
 

Of course, in any application like this, addressing ethical and other risks is going to be key.


Kiran Jadav and Steve Gill from EY then spoke and showed us some of their chatbots.

Their experience started by some of their partners getting excited about
IBM’s cognitive onboarding assistant CHIP and the development of their own bot, Buddy.

More recently they’ve built on IBM Checkpoint Bob bot for performance management 
and built a cognitive chatbot called Goldie (see picture).  

The benefits have included a better employee experience, business value (Goldie answered 0.5 million questions in its first month and provided a ROI in 7 days - also saving in calls to the service centre), brand and cultural change. On this, developing Goldie helped EY to move to a more agile, experimental and good enough approach, prototyping rather than piloting. In fact developing the global solution took just 31 days.


Note though, Kevin Mulcahy’s perspective is that this ‘one bot to rule them all’ approach may only be relevant to a large company like EY - smaller firms may need only need something much more simple.
 

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