AI and AI agents are still finding their place in the workforce – and HR leaders are tasked with shaping how these technologies integrate into day-to-day business, people, and organizational strategy.
Although there are countless different approached HR leaders can take, UNLEASH was particularly interested to hear from technology giant IBM – a company of 270,300 employees that’s not only building AI, but actively redefining how it should be used inside a global workforce.
Speaking exclusively to UNLEASH, Jon Lester, Vice President, HR Technology, Data & AI at IBM, explains how the tech giant is bridging the gap between IT and HR, as well as how the business is ensuring AI is used ethically in the hiring process.
Creating a common language between HR and IT
Since joining HR in 2016, Lester has been passionate about using technology to enable real transformation – exploring Gen AI and AI agents is just one facet of this.
For Lester, these tools becoming more integrated to HR systems is more of a “big jump” rather than an evolution. To accommodate this, he believes that HR needs to position itself as the custodian partner of the workforce.
“At IBM, we always talk about buying, building, and borrowing skills,” Lester says.
“But do we hire skills, develop them internally, or do we bring in contractors?
“Agents now provide the opportunity to ‘bot’ a skill. This concept changes everything about a workforce: the way it’s developed, the way it emerges, and the way it interacts.
“This hybrid model between humans and agents and large language models is a shift.
Therefore, every single HR function within every single company has to figure out how to change the workforce dynamics to bring agents and Gen AI into it.
“The concepts are relevant for every company.”
Although some HR leaders may encourage the merger of HR and IT, many will need a “significantly better set of insights”, according to Lester.
This will include HR having a much more open and transparent partnership with IT, to understand how the emergence of agents and Gen AI can change the workforce, the way people work, and, in effect, redesign work around agents.
“That’s why HR is so key to this,” he explains.
“Whether you go the full nine yards is up to you. But there’s got to be a significantly closer relationship between HR and IT.”
Lester admits that he and his team have become known as “translators” within the company as they operate between both departments, articulating HR’s vision and strategy into something IBM can put technology behind.
This translation comes as HR and IT often speak “different languages”; HR focuses on workforce perspectives, whereas IT requires specification on what they should build.
The translation capability is needed to ensure IT has the correct blueprints, rather than going from an interpretation.
Figuring out a common language and a common way of engaging that is very open and transparent and trusted is really key,” Lester comments.
“That comes back to things like success metrics, clear business cases, and understanding that tech-enabled transformation is just one of the levers for bringing the two together.
“It’s how we deliver great experiences for our employees through HR and IT.”
But how does this change the skills of most employees?
In Lester’s view, as it’s IBM’s aim to redesign work, the skills of the workforce have to shift to be in line with the new way that leaders are asking them to work.
Employees will therefore need to become prompt engineers and learn how to get the most out of the Gen AI capability.
“It is going to replace the old model,” he says. “You’re going to see this hybrid workforce of humans and agents together.”
Embedding AI into hiring – ethically
As IBM is a pioneering tech company, it’s no surprise that the business has been at the forefront of AI advancements.
Lester says that one key lesson IBM learnt around AI is just because something can be done with AI, doesn’t mean it should be done.
To monitor this, he explains that around 2015, IBM started publishing papers on ethical AI, looking into what it means, and how to mitigate bias, for example.
That has evolved, and in 2018, the company created an AI ethics board, that Lester is now on as the HR representative.
“Whether it be internal software we use with our employees or external software we give to our customers, if it’s got AI in it, it has to be approved or reviewed by the board,” Lester shares.
Within the board, there are three key principles: the purpose of AI is to augment – not replace – human intelligence; data and insight own their creator; and new technology must be transparent and explainable.
These have now evolved into what are called five pillars of trust: explainability, fairness, robustness, transparency, and privacy.
IBM has been deploying AI from an HR perspective since 2016, but it’s only been recently that the business has used it for recruiting.
We see many other companies getting a lot of benefits from bringing AI into recruiting,” Lester notes. “We’ve always said we certainly would never use AI for ranking because humans should decide who gets ranked.
“But things like identification and matching of skills in a CV to a particular defined role with listed skills. AI can tell us if these people have the skills or if they match the job description that you’re giving.”
IBM is therefore utilizing AI to match candidates with no inference around recruiting. However, Lester assures that the business has “no intention whatsoever” to use it for ranking candidates, because it hasn’t discovered a way to do it fairly that mitigates bias.
This being said, IBM realizes that AI and automation are reshaping roles fast. The company is therefore focused on gaining a better understanding of predicting where skills need to go in the future.
“That skill scarcity concept tells us what we need,” Lester adds.
“We do a lot of analysis externally and internally to say, if IBM wants to be the most successful hybrid cloud and AI company in the world, what skills do we need across our consulting, product development, sales, and back office?
“We now see that in the short term, people should be using Gen AI in their daily work.”
To support this idea, Lester explains that IBM’s HR team ran a two-hour mandatory training course to teach people how to be prompt engineers. It has also brought large language models within the company’s firewalls so employees can use them safely.
“We’re training everybody, whether they’re a subject matter expert or an operations person, in the art of the possible,” he says.
As a result he reiterates that the first step is education. The second step is understanding which employees should be defining how we use the tools within certain functions.
Although there’s a great deal of uncertainty around the impacts of these new technologies, Lester expresses that this is what makes the future of work so exciting.
Yet he warns that HR leaders much be “extremely careful” in how we deploy it, especially as ethics and governance are becoming increasingly important factors due to AI’s power to be misused.
This technology has the power to do things we probably don’t want it to do. So, bringing those ethical cases, principles and pillars into every single use case is hugely important,” he concludes.
“As long as we do that in the right way, the ability to change the way people work is a greater opportunity and possibility than we’ve ever seen before.”