Artificial intelligence is already here in all facets of work life. Its integration into human resources is a necessary process which has far-reaching benefits. It may have its challenges, but to survive in the current Industry 4.0 environment and prepare for the future Industry 5.0, organisations must penetrate AI into their HR systems. AI can benefit all the functions of HR, starting right from talent acquisition to onboarding and till off-boarding. The importance further increases, keeping in mind the needs and career aspirations of Generation Y and Z entering the workforce. Though employees have apprehensions of privacy and loss of jobs if implemented effectively, AI is the present and future. AI will not make people lose jobs; instead, it would require the HR people to upgrade their skills and spend their time in more strategic roles. In the end, it is the HR who will make the final decisions from the information that they get from the AI tools. A proper mix of human decision-making skills and AI would give organisations the right direction to move forward.
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Most of us on social media and online purchasing would appreciate that when we visit a site for any random purchase or information, we find the same type of information popping up again on our social media accounts. Again, when we try to book flights, trains, hotels online, a chat box pops up, solving our simple queries. What is this? This is artificial intelligence, where the computers understand our interest and try to show the data and information related to our interest. How does this occur? It occurs because of the information fed in the machine, taking insights from our activities and making decisions.
Since the twentieth century, there has been a rapid transformation in the socio-economic environment of the business. Machine learning, Artificial intelligence (AI) and automation are now part and parcel of our day-to-day communications, online transactions and interactions, and everyday working lives. Artificial intelligence (AI) has been glorified for having the potential to endlessly provide opportunities to provide fast, readymade solutions to consumers. However, that is not the end. If AI can make the customers happy, it must possess the capacity to help and empower the employees.
According to Kaplan and Haenlein (2019) AI is the capacity of the system to understand and analyse the external data to find solutions and provide flexibility and adaptation in achieving the goals.
AI improves the intelligence of employees by helping them understand complex situations and take decisions (Bader and Kaiser, 2019).AI further improves reasoning ability, ability to understand the context, improves communication and self-organisation apart from creative thinking ability of individuals (Eriksson et al., 2020). Business all over the globe with experience and trained employees expect that AI would provide solution to many of their problems (Liu et al., 2020).
The fourth industrial revolution’s edition in fact started because of the growth of big data, AI and robotics. (Grover et al., 2020). These technological interventions act as a facilitator that complement the human effort and are not there to replace the human element as misinterpreted by many (Jarrahi, 2018). AI can employees can exist in a symbiotic relationship where they provide mutual benefit for each other. However, this changes the allocation and arrangement of resources that exist in the organizations (Xu et al., 2020). This may disrupt the association between organisation and individuals, leading to change in the individual-organization fit structure.
AI can be understood as decisions taken by machines from the data and information fed in it. The intelligence that humans possess is tried to be created artificially. Artificial intelligence (AI) has found to be affecting and changing our life styles since quite a time, but today its presence is more important in the arena of present industry 4.0 and the industry 5.0 which are started knocking our doors. The human resources (HR) division is facing the similar types of changes moving from traditional manual ways of working and moving to a stage where every process is fully digitalize. It improves the response rates and simplifies various process of HR starting from recruitment which give a lot of help and support to the modern workforce. It is predicted that almost one-third of roles would now be done by technology. In such a situation all eyes fall on the HR department and their management (Personnel Today, 2015).
While Industry 4.0 of today talks about digitalisation which consists of connected devices, data analytics and AI technologies to automate the processes further, the future, which is industry 5.0, consists of personalisation which would require cooperation between man and machine, as human intelligence and machine cognition will work for hand in hand. It is the concept where robots help humans in their work to get results. This is further enhanced with the advanced technologies like the Internet of Things (IoT) and big data. This concept adds human and personal touch to the industry 4.0 pillars which focus on efficiency and automation. For this, the employee needs to be upskilled, leading to mass customisation and personalisation to customers.