The next important HR Tech acronym: CALO

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.

More (if you can stand it), on HR and the future robotic workplace

I feel at this point I simply have to beep banging on the robot drum, if for no other reason that everyone else seems to have jumped on the bandwagon too, and I want to make sure folks recognize I was driving said bandwagon ages ago!

I'm over at Fistful of Talent today with a piece called, Will You Be Replaced by a Robot? Let's Break it Down - here is a little bit of what I am riffing about there:

Ok, so let’s assume you were either on board with the seriousness of the robotic threats before, or had been skeptical but have read over the Oxford paper and have come around. How do you actually know, or at least take an educated guess at the actual threat to what you do, i.e., how can you determine if or when the robots are coming for you?

Well let’s break it down using the three primary criteria cited in the paper - perception and manipulation task requirements, the need for creative intelligence, and last, the need for social interaction and intelligence on the job. Your task, as you read through these parameters, is to think really honestly about how what you do fits on along the continuum of ‘Easy for a machine to learn and perform ←→ No way a robot could EVER do this’ in the three categories...

Check out the rest over at Fistful of Talent and be sure to let me know what you think.

Or let the robot that is actually writing all these posts know what you think. He's cool with that.

Happy Wednesday!

Your new favorite robot: One that fills your gas tank

I was born and raised in the great state of New Jersey and lived there until I was about 25 or so. Upon finally moving from the Garden State to warmer climes, there were two unsettling realizations I had to come to terms with about what life outside of ChrisChristieLand had in store.

One, at least at that time, it was just about impossible to get my hands on Taylor Ham, (also sometimes known as Pork Roll). If you are from NJ, and also the greater Philly area, you know what I am talking about.

And two, that I suddenly, regularly, had to pump my own fuel at the gas station.

You see New Jersey back then, as it still is now, is one of only two states in the US (Oregon is the other one), that do not allow for self-service dispensing of Class 1 Flammable Liquids at Retail. In other words, when you roll up to the gas pumps in NJ, an actual living, breathing person has to find out what type of gas you want, how much of it you would like, how you are going to pay for said gas, and then actually operate the gas pump, refuel the car, and finally process your payment.

While at times it is a pain in the neck for a motorist to have to be 'served' in this manner, by a person, (if the station is really busy or if the attendant is not terribly motivated, it can take a longer than desired time to get in and out of the station), there are other times, (in the rain ,the freezing cold, if you want to make a quick call or send a text, or if you just don't like smelling like gas for the next hour or two), that being able to wait in the car while someone else fills up the tank is actually pretty cool.

Well for all those folks in the other 48 states that have to suffer the indignity of pumping your own gas, soon help may be on the way in the form of Husky Corporation's new breakthrough - the Automatic Refueling System. 

Check the embedded video below, (Email and RSS subscribers will need to click through):

That is every kind of awesome, right? 

Reduces your refueling time by 30%, is cleaner, safer, and lets you stay snuggly warm and dry in your car no matter what is going on outside.

And, in a surprising turn of events in these kinds of 'robots are coming for all our jobs' stories, these refueling robots would not actually disrupt very many jobs, except some in New Jersey and Oregon.

What these robots 'replace' is the hassle of you having to pump your own gas, and activity which, after the 12,498th repetition has mostly lost whatever allure and glamour it once held.

But these automatic refueling robots do make we worried about the long-term fate of my home state, New Jersey. People are already leaving the Garden State in droves. Full-service gas stations are still one of the few reasons to stay. If those vanish by way of the robot, then what other reasons are there to remain in NJ?

And you can now buy Taylor Ham no matter where you live - shipped straight to your door.

Have a great weekend!

I don't see him like a robot. I see him like a person.

A couple of years ago when I know I was one of the few folks in the space regularly writing about robots at work and the potential impacts that were going to be realized from these developments, I used to get a boatload of Google search traffic simply from keyword searches on the word 'robot'. These days, I see much less of that kind of search directed traffic, even though I am probably writing even more frequently about the topic. 

But lately it seems like everyone in the HR/work/workplace blogosphere is talking, writing, and speculating about robots and the increasing automation of all kinds of work. While I do think that this increase and almost mainstreaming of attention on the topic is really quite needed, I also think that at some level we might be already getting a little tired of the topic, and are even beginning to tune out these messages.

So rather than run the latest piece about the newest advancement or application of robot or otherwise machine intelligence to a new form of work and issue off another warning about how you or your kids need to take this all very seriously as one day the robots will take all our jobs and leave us, well, trying to figure out what to do with ourselves, I decided to share a simple, short video about a specific application of new robot technology in the workplace, and let you decide what it might mean.

Embedded below, (email and RSS subscribers will need to click through), is a recent video from Rethink Robotics, the makers of the pretty amazing industrial robot known as Baxter. Baxter, you might have heard, represents an improvement to traditional stationary and bespoke, single-use manufacturing robots of the past. Baxter is flexible, can be easily programmed, and can work in very close proximity to people.

Check the video and pay particular attention to the comments of one of the plastics plant supervisors, a Ms. Martinez about what it is like working with (and supervising as it were) Baxter:

Really interesting, for a couple of reasons I think. Certainly the big, easy to remember line is when Ms. Martinez admits to 'seeing' Baxter like a person, like the person who would have previously had that job on the line that Baxter is now cheerfully, ceaselessly, performing. But we also hear some comments from the plastic factory leadership about how the cost savings and efficiency gains from automation are necessary to save jobs in the aggregate, even if the shift to Baxter(s) will cost at least some jobs in the process.

No matter if you take the 'robot threat' seriously, or think it all a bit silly, I think it does help to ground the conversation at least a little bit sometimes, and the experiences and observations of front line organizations, managers, and co-workers that are now, increasingly, co-existing with more and more advanced robotics are worth considering.

Note: I am down at the IBM Connections event in Orlando this week, maybe I can see if Watson has some comments on the subject. 

Long Robots, Short Human Beings

The below chart from a indeterminate Bank of America report seems to be making the rounds today, interesting not just for the data, (which has two problems, one, it is kind of obvious to anyone watching the American economy over the last 30 years or so that manufacturing has been on the decline; and two, that it attempts to compare US manufacturing employment to Global industrial robot production). 

 

But still it is kind of a fun chart, not the least of which for its title, Long Robots, Short Human Beings. Clever Bank of America!

Except it might not be all the funny, even for the highly educated, well-paid types of folks that are likely working at Bank of America and would have put together a chart like this.

The robots are not just going to be satisfied and content with the boring, industrial, just another machine in the machine type factory jobs that are the main subject of this chart.

No, Mr. and Ms. Bank of America hotshot. The robots are probably coming for you too. Just a couple of examples to consider.

From the Abnormal Returns blog - 'The rising challenge of robo-advisors'  

It has been my hypothesis for some time now that the rise of the exchange-traded fund, or to be more specific the ultra low-cost, indexed ETF has made possible the growing wave of online, algorithmic asset managers (or robo-advisors).* In short, this abundance of low-cost portfolio building blocks available from a host of fund sponsors makes low-fee online portfolios possible. A couple of years ago I noted that most investors’ portfolio needs are not all that unique. Therefore algorithms could handle the bulk, but not all of their needs.

Or perhaps the disruption to the Bank's models will come from IBM Watson. The below is taken from the 'Watson at Work' section of IBM's site:

Watson is being designed as the ultimate financial services assistant, capable of performing deep content analysis and evidence-based reasoning to accelerate and improve decisions, reduce operational costs, and optimize outcomes.

In a bank, an advisor can use Watson to make better recommendations for financial products to customers based on comprehensive analysis of market conditions, the client's past decisions, recent life events, and available offerings.

The ability to take context into account during the hypothesis generation and scoring phases of the processing pipeline allows Watson to address these complex financial services problems and assist financial services professionals in making better decisions.

The context in which this capability of Watson is one in which Watson is a resource to the financial services professional, simply a tool or resource they can use when advising clients. But it is not hard to envision a time when the clients could simply 'ask Watson' directly questions about their investing strategies and get information on anticipated outcomes. Why would we need, forever, an intermediary between us and the source of knowledge?

These are just a couple of quick examples I found in about 10 minutes of writing this piece this AM, but I bet there are plenty more out there (and more coming).

I guess my point is really that everyone, including bankers in expensive suits should be taking what is happening with robots and automation seriously. It's all fun and games until the algorithm can do your job better than you.

And who knows, maybe the next investment planning chart we will see in a few years will be titled 'Long Automated Advisors, Short Bankers'.

Have a great day!