Sterlite Technologies. (STL), a global fiber optics provider, has been increasingly using artificial intelligence (AI) to automate the company’s employee recruitment and hiring, conduct staff pulse checks, and gamify worker rewards.
The India-based company employs about 8,000 people across the US, China, Europe, India, and the Middle East. Since rolling out its first AI-based applications three or so years ago, Chief Human Resources Officer Anjali Byce has continued to experiment with new uses for the technology, and is currently eyeing how generative AI tools such as ChatGPT could create chatbots to converse with employees for a variety of purposes.
One of the newer uses of AI has been to automate CV stacking and to match skills inventories with specific use cases inside and outside the company.
Along with gamifying rewards, and recognizing employee accomplishments that might otherwise be overlooked, STL is now looking at AI apps that can recognize skills deficiencies and recommend training for staff. The automation tools are also being deployed to help workers who are laid off find jobs in other companies — even competitors — through an external network where skill sets are highlighted for would-be employers.
The following are excerpts from a Computerworld interview with Byce:
Anjali Byce
Anjali Byce, STL’s CHRO
When did you begin using AI for various HR purposes and why? “Maybe three years or three-and-a-half years ago. We used it in much smaller ways at that point…, like every employee has a virtual assistant of sorts. You want to apply for leave, you just go into the system and ask it: can you please apply for leave for me for the 29th of June. It will apply for leave for you, send a note to your manager and add it to your calendar, block out time, cancel meetings, or whatever. So we used it in ways to make employee work easier.”
Did you initially build your own AI functionality? “Yes. We used simple [bots] and algorithms in the backend. That was a simple, fun, and easy-to-work kind of AI application at the time. We then moved onto gamification applications.”
How did you use gamification and how did AI enable that? “We had a high amount of onboarding that needed to be done virtually. When lockdown happened in COVID, we needed to onboard like 800 people…in multiple batches of 200 people each, things like that. So, we gamified it. We made it a spaceship. You’re going to take a tour like astronauts and earn gold coins.
“The serious journey in AI started just after that. I would say it’s now part of the entire employee lifecycle — hire to retire. We had a resume-stack ranking process. What basically happens in that is the world is moving from purely role-based jobs to skills-based jobs. Most progressive organizations are already moving to that. So, when we do large-scale hiring, or even if you need to do very sharp, targeted hiring, it would become impossible to scale with speed…
2023-07-11 10:48:02
Article from www.computerworld.com rnrn