Virtual HR, or, 'Did you ask the HR chatbot?'

While I and many, many others have blogged, talked, and pontificated about how the ongoing advances in technology, automation, robotics, and artificial intelligence continue to 'hollow-out' or eliminate wide ranges of jobs formerly and traditionally that are done by humans, I also often think that many folks don't see these trends as all that interesting or potentially threatening. Most of the people who read this blog, I imagine, see themselves as knowledge workers that bring imagination, creativity, and perhaps most essentially, an understanding of subtle things like culture and attitude to their jobs and careers. Most of us, (admittedly me too), say of think things like 'My job is just too complex and ever-changing for it to even be outsourced to a less-expensive human (much less a robot).'

Possibly. But it also seems likely that given enough time, access to ever-improving technologies, and the right economic incentives, there are enterprising people and organizations that even if they couldn't completely automate or robot-icize everything you do, chances are a fair amount of even what we creative types do is already routine enough that the robots could do a passable, if not better (and cheaper and will less of a bad attitude), than we do.

But again, I know you don't really believe me, as you are (probably) and HR person that is reading this, and automation in HR has only meant changing how the transactional work of HR, (forms, time-tracking, payroll, etc), from paper-driven processes to computer-driven ones, (and often, initiated by employees and completed by managers with little direct involvement from HR). The important work in HR and in many other organizational functions still, and perhaps for a long time yet, remains the exclusive domain of humans - which humans (see the self-service HR example above), matters less today than it used to. 

But automation is coming - not just to manufacturing lines or driverless cars or better algorithms and assessments that can screen candidates much faster and more efficiently than you can. Perhaps in HR automation will have to look a little different than what we expect, since so much of the profession is about people - talking to them, understanding them, evaluating them, and motivating them - and ultimately helping, (or concluding that we can't), help them.

Those kind of interactions, even at a basic level, can't be automated yet. Right?

Well, maybe not yet, but that doesn't mean they won't be one day soon.

Don't believe me? Then ask Ivy her opinion.

Who is Ivy? The latest in automation - this time form one of the country's largest employers, and right in your area of interest - the delivery of HR services.  Check the details from the Jobs at Intel blog.

Okay, the newest thing we’ve launched is a “virtual HR agent”. What’s that, you ask? You know when you shop online, whether it’s for new gadgets or it’s for a plane ticket to go somewhere or maybe it’s just for odds and ends, some websites have a virtual agent that will answer FAQs for you and guide you through the process. Our new virtual HR agent, we named her Ivy, is set up to do the same thing, but for our employees at Intel (so this is an internal tool.) If employees have questions about their pay, stock, benefits, or other HR programs, they simply bring Ivy up on the intranet and type in a question. Ivy uses a combination of natural language processing, artificial intelligence and optimized search to find the answer to the question. Also, magic. Okay, well, it’s like magic to me, so…  As of today, Ivy has 4,331 possible responses. How do I know that number so exactly? I led the team that wrote all the responses. You can bet we’re excited for the launch after all that work!

 Catch all that?

Ivy, or the virtual HR chat agent, has over 4,000 possible responses to any employee question about pay or benefits or other HR programs, and using the same kind of intelligence we've seen in a consumer or retail environment, provides HR services to Intel employees. As it is an internal-only tool, I'm not able to test it out, but it stands to reason that with over 4K responses, and the ability to 'learn' and adapt, that over time a tool like Ivy would be able to do more that respond to simple questions, and provide more complex answers to more difficult questions.

Yes, Intel's HR team has to provide the 'intelligence' for Ivy to work, and that, as yet, is still a human job, but what if employees at Intel begin to prefer dealing with virtual HR over real HR? 

I'll leave you with more from the Jobs at Intel blog about Ivy:

Ivy’s no chatbot and she’s not backed by a human “behind the curtain”. She’s all software. We’ve got lots of metrics in place to monitor her performance and our employees can give a star rating to each interaction. Using the performance data and star ratings, we can tune Ivy to make her even better. Beyond that, what’s weird is that she learns. Seriously. Her artificial intelligence gets better as employees ask her questions. Amazing.

The money line in that?

We can tune Ivy to make her even better. Beyond that, what’s weird is that she learns.

Can you say the same about the people in your HR organization?

Happy Tuesday.

Technology, Service, and Dehumanization

My pal the great Paul Hebert had a fantastic piece over on Fistful of Talent titled 'What HR Should be Thinking About in 2013', an examination of some of the most important and interesting business and product/service challenges facing organizations, and how HR departments can or should be responding to these challenges. The entire piece is excellent, and I encourage you to read it all, but I wanted to call out two (related), trends Paul highlighted and compare them to another, different example where business, policy, and pragmatism seems to be at odds with what we 'know' to be sound business advice. Retro Robot

First - the two bits from Paul's piece at FOT:

CUSTOMER-FACING EMPLOYEES ARE YOUR BRAIN AND YOUR BACKBONE.

The crucial element in any customer experience is still people, no matter how much technology has transformed the landscape. The larger an organization, the more it relies on the thousand tiny decisions its frontline employees make on a daily basis. And listening to their collective wisdom is more important than ever.

NOTE TO HR:  Nothing really to add here – just go read that paragraph 100,001 times before starting your next initiative.

HUMAN INTERACTION HAS NEVER BEEN MORE PRECIOUS.

There’s almost no transaction that can’t be automated today, from buying groceries to learning about health issues. And customers are starting to resist. Look for places to act more human. 2013 reverses the trend toward automated everything, as humanity becomes the crucial differentiator between a beloved brand and a commodity.

NOTE TO HR:  This is my mantra for 2013 and on. Just change the word customer to employee in the previous paragraph.  It truly is about BEING HUMAN.  And you all SHOULD be the experts at it!

Both of these trends or areas of focus boil down to essentially the same thing - the return of the importance of real and human interaction at the most important customer touchpoints -, which for many kinds of industries are often the responsibility of the most junior and lowest-paid employees. Think call center reps, cashiers, customer service agents, food service folks, the guy who parks your car at the valet - you get the idea. So the advice from both Fast Company and Paul makes perfect sense - listen to your front-line staff, make your organization more 'human', don't jump to automation just for its own sake, etc.  

Hard to disagree with that line of reasoning. Or maybe not so hard. Take a look at an excerpt from another piece from the Wall St. Journal online titled, 'Can the Tablet Please Take Your Order Now?':

Carla Hesseltine is considering buying a few tablet devices for her bakery so customers can place orders for her signature M&M cupcakes on their own, straight from the counter.

The reason: She fears the $7.25 an hour that she currently pays her 10 customer-service employees, mostly college students, could rise, perhaps to $9 an hour under a pledge by President Barack Obama earlier this month.

In order for her Just Cupcakes LLC to remain profitable in the face of higher expected labor costs, Ms. Hesseltine believes the customer-ordering process "would have to be more automated" at the Virginia Beach, Va., chain, which has two strip-mall locations as well as a food van. Thus, she could eliminate the 10 workers who currently ask customers what they would like to eat.

Did you get all of that? A local cupcake shop thinks it smart, cost-effective, and beneficial to replace their front-line, low-paid workers, the ones that make up the vast majority of customer touchpoints, with a couple of iPads and a custom menu app that will allow customers to place orders without having to actually talk to any of the staff.

And Ms. Hesseltine's cupcake shop isn't the only one thinking about how technology and automation can reduce or even eliminate or at least reduce the human interaction between customers and front-line staff. More from the WSJ piece:

Tarang Gosalia, of Cambridge, Mass., hopes he can get away with having fewer employees waiting on customers at the three hair-salon franchises and one frozen-yogurt outlet he owns by using Square, a three-year-old technology brand designed to streamline credit-card transactions. He is planning to test it out starting in June to see if it will make accepting payments easier and faster for his staffers—and therefore allow him to downsize. About 70% of the 35 employees who work for his combined businesses currently earn $8 an hour, the minimum pay required in his state. Raising prices to offset the higher payroll costs strikes him as too risky, because he worries his sales may suffer.

Some entrepreneurs see a promising market in selling technologies to small businesses that might help them to streamline operations and do away with low-wage workers, or retrain them for higher-skilled jobs. An automatic hamburger flipper currently in development could replace low-wage line cooks at a beachside burger joint, for example.

FastCompany could very well be correct, that '2013 reverses the trend toward automated everything, as humanity becomes the crucial differentiator between a beloved brand and a commodity', but as the examples from the WSJ piece tell us, at least for small businesses, (and I bet many large ones as well), cost, compliance, and even the lack of available talent are still conspiring to drive organizations to at least consider further automation and technology-driven substitutions for human interaction.

Technology can be liberating, it can free up time and resources for people and organizations to actually provide better customer experiences, but it also can be really dehumanizing at the same time. When tablets replace counter help, when robots are the new short-order cooks, when the check-in, check-out and everything in between becomes just a series of user interfaces, touch screens, and customer-machine interactions, we are moving in the opposite direction from humanity as a differentiator.

I think the real challenge for HR and business in 2013 (and beyond) isn't deciding whether or not to automate, but rather making the critical decisions about where and how the organization can afford to automate and where it can't.

Have a great weekend!

Robots Selling Cookies

According to a recent article in Business Week, the next wave of robot technology is aimed directly at the office market - robots that can file papers, deliver mail, and fetch a coffee for their human bosses.

These robots, according to Noriyuki Kanehira, a systems manager at robot manufacturer Kawada, will soon be able to take on a 'secretarial role' in offices. Joe Bosworth, the CEO of a firm called Smart Robots envisions these office robots as being able to 'take mail down to the mailroom and then travel across the street to pick up a latte.'

The price for this robot convenience for mail delivery and latte fetching is not cheap - prices on the current wave of office assistant type robots can run as high as $400,000 for a model called the PR2. Thankfully the PR2 comes with an associated web app called 'Beer Me' that allows the robot to be programmed to fetch and deliver beer from the fridge.

As with any new workplace automation or productivity technology, there will be some that will sound the alarm that the coming of these 'smart' robots will be the doom of more actual human workers.  Despite the high price, and (for now) somewhat limited application in the office environment the robots have many advantages over the humans they might replace.  Again from the Business Week article the robots 'doesn't goof around on Facebook, spend hours tweaking its fantasy football roster, or require a lunch break.'

When presented with that kind of a cost-benefit analysis, I imagine some executives might see the value in replacing some clerical and administrative employees with robot counterparts.  'Let me see, $300K for an employee that is never late, never gets sick, never complains about Judy's music in the next cube, and won't be hassling me to buy Girl Scout cookies every year?'.  Sounds like a good deal.

But for these leaders that might eventually make those kinds of decisions, there is another, more intriguing element to the 'robots in the office' angle. At Georgia Tech, researchers claim to be making progress on robot intelligence that will allow them one day 'to build robots that can not only interact with humans but are also capable of representing, reasoning, and developing relationships with others." They developed an algorithm that, they claim, allows robots, just like CEOs, "to look at a situation and determine whether [it] requires deception, providing false information, to benefit itself.'

Nice, not only will future robots be able to sort the mail, they will be able to be programmed to have Enron-style ethics and behaviors. Sweet.

Will we see the day in the foreseeable future where robots are as common around the office as pot-luck lunches, pedometer giveaways, and fluorescent lighting?  Perhaps.  But one thing seems likely to be discovered from the development of robot intelligence designed to replace and automate common workplace functions - that the line of irreplaceable human skills and intelligence is probably much higher up the managerial food chain than we like to think.

If what you are spending your time on today can be replicated by a robot, you are already in trouble. And if you think your contribution is on a high enough level where it can't be truly automated, think about it this way - if all the people that you support and direct were actually replaced by robots, then what would you do?

For laughs on a Monday - another take on the distant future of robot domination (email and RSS subscribers will need to click through)