Balancing High-Tech With High-Touch : V. Krishnan

V. Krishnan, an independent consultant in the area of Leadership Advisory and Executive Coaching, shared his views on the changing landscape of the HR industry with the emergence of Generative AI. 

Prior to this, Krishnan held key positions as Chief Human Resource Officer at Havells India and Executive Director HR, India and SAARC at Dabur. 

Sharing his thoughts on artificial intelligence transforming the HR industry, Krishnan said, “AI has led to a rise of different cognitive technologies such as Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, Computer Vision, and Speech Recognition. At a very basic level, NLP helps in CV scanning, computer vision in face-recognition-based attendance, and machine learning in predictive talent management and sales forecasting. A combination of ML and NLP can be used as chatbots enabling HR self-service.”

With Generative AI, first-time companies are able to generate new content in the form of text, images, codes, and audio. 

Typically, HR teams tend to feel challenged in the areas of predicting attrition, well-being and work-life balance issues of employees, pinpointing learning and development needs, return on investments on L&D spends, and objectivity in performance appraisals. 

“If HCM and HRMS systems could be built around Generative AI platforms, a wealth of insights across many data points can be mined. It could help study the patterns and content of mails, meeting calendars, and other markers across IT systems. It can help HR teams to focus on future-proofing their initiatives. However, this needs to be done transparently and objectively, without employees feeling threatened about their privacy or feeling constantly snooped.”

While programmable and repetitive tasks will get executed with much more speed and efficiency, AI will not replace human judgement which uses quantitative, qualitative, and perceptive dimensions.

Highlighting the challenges, Krishnan shared, “The challenge remains to get AI to facilitate an employee to deliver their best performance. A significant portion of HR cost is salaries, and ROI on this spend is always an unspoken marker being tracked.” 

According to Krishnan, employee performance is a product of individual capability, workplace culture, and manager’s ability. If any one of these factors is zero, the performance of the employee remains null.