The next important HR Tech acronym: CALO
Tuesday, April 1, 2014 at 11:45AM
Steve in HR, HR Tech, SMB, Technology, Technology, robots

You already know all the big HR Tech acronyms - LMS, ATS, HRIS, SaaS, ERP, and on and on.

But the next big HR and workplace technology acronym you should start to become familiar with, as it promises to offer more for individual and organizational productivity and performance than all acronyms that have come before, is probably a new one to you.

CALO

CALO stands for Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes

Just what does that mean? 

Check the below from a piece on HBR titled, 'The Ultimate Productivity Hack Will Be Robot Assistants' :

The underlying technology behind all of the advances in robotic technology mentioned above is Artificial Intelligence (A.I.).  A.I., often referred to as the ability of computers to think like humans, has been a main goal of many computer and cognitive scientists for the last sixty to eighty years. And one of the principle goals of A.I. developers has long been to help humans be more productive.

The largest known A.I. project to date was instigated by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). In 2003, DARPA contracted SRI International to lead a reported $200 million, five-year project to build a virtual assistant. The project consisted of up to 500 experts in machine learning, natural language processing, knowledge representation, human–computer interaction, flexible planning, and behavioral studies who were tasked with building a Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes (CALO).

The goal of CALO was to become what the technology industry now calls a ‘cognitive assistant,’ – similar in function to what many of us think of as a personal assistant. This ambitious goal envisioned a software program that learns by ‘observing and learning from the past, acting in the present and anticipating the future.’ CALO would be able to assist its user with organizing and prioritizing information, mediating human communication, resource allocation, task management decisions, and scheduling and prioritizing.

Read some of the goals of CALO again - organizing and prioritizing information, mediating human-human communications, allocation of resources, getting tasks completed, making decisions, etc.

These are all things that you, and everyone in your workforce has to manage every single day.

Unlike an LMS that an employee may have to check in to once a year, an ATS that they never see once they are hired, or an HRIS that they only access once or twice in a career, (if they move or have a 'life event'). 

And don't get me started on the Performance Management system.

But a CALO? A tool or technology that would actually help with organizing and prioritizing information and making decisions?

Your employees would use that tool every single day, and all day long. And if it worked, it would actually help them in their jobs.

I am not (yet) smart enough to know just how these CALO tools will enter the workplace, who will make them, how they will first find a way onto corporate platforms but I suspect that the smartest people working on workplace technologies are already attacking those issues.

And I also suspect these CALO tools will have a much bigger impact and influence on worker performance than all the HR tech acronyms that have come before.

Article originally appeared on Steve's HR Technology (http://steveboese.squarespace.com/).
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