AI employees are now a reality. Coworkers no longer solely comprise humans who you regularly engage with at work. They now encompass digital and agentic agents that will perform tasks at a rate of speed and accuracy not capable of their human counterparts.
HR professionals are already employing a type of digital worker. Consider that 25% of employers are leveraging AI to perform varied tasks in the human resources department and you can see that this is most likely your reality, whether you have realised it or not.
AI employees: Crucial considerations
Deploying AI in the HR department is a delicate waltz that must be taken at a steady and deliberate pace.
The first step is to programme and design your AI employees to be a safe superintelligence subservient to the humans that control it. Similarly, you must start programmatically inculcating ethics of what is good and bad at an early stage.
We teach our children what is ethical and what is not at an early age. Imagine a world where kids weren’t taught the difference between right and wrong. It could be chaotically catastrophic. How can you presume an AI employee will know what not to do if you do not start infusing ethical values in them at the early stages of superintelligence?
The second step is to organise an inclusive group of testers to review the technology before deployment. As one person you cannot think of all the potential pitfalls or unintended biases that can occur when programming new AI.
Build a testing team from front-line employees up to every level and department of your company. This will give you the best opportunity to ensure your use of AI aligns with the company’s mission, and that it is working for the benefit of all.
The next evolution of labour
Offshore hiring as a way to reduce overheads will soon be a vestige of the past. The use of AI employees, and a true commitment to this path, will be the separator between you and your competition. McKinsey predicts that by 2030 upwards of 30% of work hours could be automated thanks to AI – that is 12 hours a week.
Properly vetted and deployed digital employees will provide immediate benefits to your human team. Your subject matter experts, who get pulled in to fix any escalated issue, will be freed up to focus on complex issues that need a creative mind. Metrics like customer service wait times will be drastically shortened leading to better brand association and customer satisfaction.
From an HR standpoint, your employees will no longer feel bogged down by mindless tasks. This will increase job satisfaction and, eventually, lead to higher retention and lower turnover.
The agentic evolution
Agentic agents – AI employees – are not simply supercharged chatbots. They are the closest creation to the Turing Horizon, where machines are indistinguishable from human beings. This is what is at your hands as an HR professional.
You can now install in your workforce a digital employee that can work autonomously with close to no human input, create new workflows, and problem solve issues that jammed up a vast amount of your employees’ time in the past.
You are undoubtedly familiar with generative AI, or a GPT – but this goes further than that. Think of it like this. If you ask chatGPT the best way to build an application portal, it would give you a great set of instructions to do so. Agentic AI would build the portal for you.
AI employees offer more than automation
As an HR leader, understanding agentic AI and its capabilities for your department and company are crucial to your success.
Agentic AI brings cutting-edge digital employees to your company that are miles beyond the standard automations of the recent past. Agentic agents will give your company a path from fragmented systems to an end-to-end automation framework for an entire customer or applicant journey.
You are sitting at an inflection point of technology, whether you realise it or not. Agentic Agents, digital employees, are here to revolutionise the way your company and industry operates.
Your new AI employees will enhance the productivity of your overall business, and your current people. They will create more productive interactions between your subject matter experts and clients in need, and improve the overall health of your business. It is imperative to research, build, deploy, and leverage this new technology as soon as possible.
