AI in HR goes mainstream: Could AI help you get your next job?
On today's episode of the 5 Things podcast: 2023 is quickly becoming a watershed moment for artificial intelligence. The rise of high-powered chatbots and deep fake videos has many wondering about the myriad of economic and social implications, as tech leaders called for a 'pause' in AI development.
Executive Coach Jim Frawley joined the podcast to offer a peek at the future and his tips on how people can prepare for these transformations.
podcasts: True crime, in-depth interviews and more USA TODAY podcasts right here.
Hit play on the player above to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript below. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.
James Brown:
2023 is quickly becoming something of a watershed moment for artificial intelligence. With the rise of high-powered chatbots, deep fake videos and weirdly believable photos conjured from a few sentences, and even full on songs in the style of whatever you wish, pundits and people are pondering the implications of it all. Will these hyper-intelligent machines take inspiration from The Terminator or The Matrix? Maybe, but not yet. Frankly, I like many people, are more concerned about more plausible scenarios.
For instance, if a chatbot can get a B on a paper written for the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School as was claimed in January, what does that say about the future for millions of people like me who write for a living? Are our days numbered? And this is just the beginning. The bots are being used by at least 100 million people a month, and are expected to get better and better as people use them. What other career paths could change? Today's guest will help me get a peek into the future, or at least his perspective. He'll also have some suggestions about how employees can prepare for this new world. His name is Jim Frawley. He's an executive coach who works on talent development. Frawley sees ups and downs coming across the work world. Jim Frawley, welcome to the show.
Jim Frawley:
Thank you so much for having me. Great to be here.
James Brown:
Before we get to detailing that AI tsunami coming, I want to step back. We know that AI is already affecting employment decisions, and has for years. I took a resume writing course a few years ago, and one of the pieces of a device was, we had to be aware of keywords, because our resume in a lot of cases will not even get to the hiring manager for review. Are you aware of this? And what other ways are you aware that AI is already affecting our work?
Jim Frawley:
I like to think of how AI is affecting our work in two different ways. One is on the corporate side, which is AI is now the hiring manager. So it's not even just a challenge of keywords, it's you're going to use AI to write the resume so another AI can read it to determine if you're the right fit, where we're even able to tie certain behaviors that are identified within a resume with cultural norms that you wish to have within your organization. From an individual perspective is how do you utilize this to then elevate yourself and raise your visibility, your skillset, your inputs, and know how to use it to match whatever corporate AI system is going to be there, and find that meshing and merging of the two?
James Brown:
That's horrifying in many ways, just to be honest, the idea of a software identifying how I'm a cultural fit before I'm actually spoken to by a potential employer.
Jim Frawley:
It is, you're right. It's incredibly unsettling with what it means for the workplace. What does it mean as a human being within that workplace? We're adaptable people, and we're going to be okay. And a lot of the unsettling aspects of AI is the fact that we're not quite sure of what's possible yet, so it's a lot of fear of the unknown. We don't have an anchor to which we can really jump and change and say, "Oh, this is exactly my next move," because we're unsure of what that next move is going to be. So it changes the way that we actually have to prepare.
James Brown:
From what we've heard, some of the results have shown bias.
Jim Frawley:
Yes.
James Brown:
How can employers and employees navigate that?
Jim Frawley:
When we are naturally biased, which we're learning a lot now, especially in the workplace, a lot of the decisions we've made going back to when business started like 50, 100 years ago, biases have been built into the decisions, and the formats, and why we use cubicles, and all of these different types of things. We have these assumptions, we just take them for granted. And when AI works, it incorporates all of these natural biases that we have already put into it. We're aware of this bias. And some of the work now, it's still new, it's still in an early stage, will be how do you balance that bias into something that's actually valid information? It's going to have to be taught. It's not coming with all the right answers, we're going to have to teach it what those right answers are going to be.
James Brown:
On the right answers and on bias, are you aware of specific instances where AI has approached their work with bias?
Jim Frawley:
Yeah. Oh, and you see stories about that quite a bit, where you make certain requests and they come back with these ridiculously racist kind of answer on one of the requests, and people looked and they gasped, and they said, "I can't believe this actually came out." And so they went back and they said, "Where did this information come from?" And that's part of the ethical part of who's responsible for the AI and developing the AI within your corporation. Each organization's going to have their own AI. We see them as these separate entities right now, but we're going to be developing AI so that it's going to be individual to corporate, it's going to be individual to people, and each person's going to be responsible for developing, yes, that's an appropriate answer, no, that is fundamentally wrong as an answer, and it's part of that ongoing development that we're going to have to do.
James Brown:
Have you heard of success stories?
Jim Frawley:
From AI in terms of eliminating bias? I would say yes. It compiles information that we may not have been aware of as an individual. So every human we know has bias of some sort. And a lot of really good organizational work is being done in terms of, how do we eliminate these bias in these types of decisions into buying decisions and hiring decisions and everything else? When we use AI for this on why this person may be better versus not, it's very heavily weighted on logic versus emotion.
And so when we find that this logically makes a lot more sense rather than what our emotional thing is, it allows us to question our uniquely human aspect to this. It's a tool right now, it's not a replacement. So it's informing our decision in a good way, where we can say, "Oh, okay, so now do I have a bias in this hiring decision? Do I have a bias in this buying decision? The chatbot and AI is telling me I should naturally go this way, what's preventing me from doing this?" And again, it's not truth, it's not belief, it's just another data point that can inform our decision, and we should accommodate that in the right kind of way.
James Brown:
It's very early days with this technology, but are there specific industries that you see reshaped by AI in the coming few years?
Jim Frawley:
I hate to be hyperbolic, but this is going to be fundamentally different for everyone. I'm going to see AI majorly in the financial industry. We see it already with blockchain and cryptocurrency and everything else. I could see it incredibly disrupting the real estate industry, I could see it incredibly disrupting the legal industry, simply because it's doing thinking for you. I would say it's almost industry agnostic, I would almost look in departments. It's going to fundamentally change marketing departments. It's going to fundamentally change accounting and finance departments.
And the organizations are looking at AI to supplement their employees right now, but what they're realizing, especially with three years of COVID, and people have been working virtually, and we know how productive they've been or lack thereof, is they're realizing they could probably get along with maybe 50% of their workforce. These people have to know how to use AI to augment the 50% that we lost. And so now as an individual, you have to position yourself as, "I'm aware of what a AI can do, I need to be in that top 50% so that I could be retained within the organization." Every individual listening to this should start becoming familiar with it, so that you can be in that top 50%, because it's going to be table stakes for anyone getting hired or retaining their job in the next decade.
James Brown:
I want to talk about a phrase that you used, and I think it's really interesting. Doing thinking for you. What do you mean by that?
Jim Frawley:
Oftentimes, we really like the mundane work, because it takes the pressure off. And we could just kind of do the push and papers and doing this little tiny thought process of an Excel doc or whatever, that's going away. AI can do that thinking for you. What we're going to have to do is find a new way to think. When we think about what's uniquely human, and thinking about journalism and how AI can disrupt journalism, and yeah, AI can write an article, no problem. It's not as good as when a human writes it, but the human still has to say, "This is an article that needs to be written, and this is a story that needs to be told." AI's not at the point to be creative and generative and bring all of these new ideas of what's possible and what we should be doing at this point. If a company's paying me 100, 200, $300,000 a year, how can I create work utilizing AI that's going to bring that kind of value to the organization? That's how you're going to remain relevant in the new economy.
James Brown:
Any sense of when we'll get there, where AI can make those decisions?
Jim Frawley:
I don't. I wouldn't be surprised if it's very soon. When you hear futurists talk and technologists talk, generally, technology lives at like a half-life. So if it takes you 100 years to get somewhere, it's going to take you 50 years to go doubled. Effectively, we've made the equivalent of three centuries of advancement in technology in just the first 20 years of this century. So we've done the 20th century, from horse and buggy up to iPhone, we've done that three times in these first 23 years of the new century. So when we sit and think about how quickly AI is developed, it's like chaos theory. One thing will develop, another thing will develop another thing, and it's going to become so quick. The change is going to be so fast that we're not going to be able to keep up. The world in the next five to 10 years, I would argue, is going to be fundamentally different than anything we're doing today.
James Brown:
Jim Frawley, any famous last words?
Jim Frawley:
My favorite quote that I give to everybody when I speak, is Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote in the confession to, "How can anyone be satisfied in life if they're not satisfied with the one person they can never be separated from?" And that's fundamental to responding to AIs. Macro change requires a focus on the micro individual. And everybody, we're adaptable, we have value, we just got to remind ourselves that we have it.
James Brown:
Jim, thanks for joining me.
Jim Frawley:
Thank you so much.
James Brown:
Thanks to Mary Louise Kelly for joining me, and to Shannon Rae Green and Alexis Gustin for their production assistance. You can email podcast@usatoday.com with your thoughts on the show. For all of us at USA Today, thanks for listening. I'm James Brown, and as always, be well.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: AI in HR goes mainstream: Could AI help you get your next job?
