In today’s fast-paced business world, employers are increasingly relying on artificial intelligence (AI) to perform tasks usually undertaken by human workers. However, as advanced as AI technologies may be, there remains a wide swath of skills that they still can’t sufficiently emulate – the very skills human resources (HR) should now focus on cultivating in today’s workforce.
Among these skills are creativity, complex problem-solving, negotiation, empathy, leadership, critical thinking and emotional intelligence. These same skills were identified in the World Economic Forum’s 2018 “The Future of Jobs Report” as critical skills for the 2022 workforce, coincidentally highlighting that the arena untouched by AI will be the most lucrative for humans.
AI has fundamentally changed the HR landscape in numerous ways, including recruitment, performance analysis, and learning & development. It saves time, cuts costs, and reduces biases, but the human touch, characterized by intuition and emotional connection, remains irreplaceable and increasingly valuable.
Recently, Gartner’s 2020 “Reimagining HR for the Post-Pandemic World” report shed light on the need for developing “future-fit” skills arising from changing work dynamics due to Covid-19. It highlighted that bolstering skills that AI can’t touch is more critical now than ever.
Investing in these attributes doesn’t only future-proof the workforce but also optimizes the human-AI collaboration. Humans and AI have different strengths, and a synergy can create the most value. As humans take care of the complex, creative, empathic tasks, AI can handle repetitive, large-scale tasks, creating a harmonious working machine.
Mahesh Makhija, Emerging Technologies Leader at EY, underlines this point. “We need to change how we see the contribution of humans in a digital world,” he said. “It’s not about replacing people with machines; it’s about creating a unique collaboration where both use their strengths to improve and optimize processes.”
But fear and misunderstanding remain common. Many workers worry that AI could replace their jobs, but experts like Makhija indicate that AI is more about augmenting human capacity. Key to this transition will be HR’s role in communication and training.
Importantly, HR must clearly direct their resources toward acquiring these skills and nurturing a work environment that fosters them. Google’s “Project Aristotle” demonstrated that the best-performing teams were characterized not by individual expertise but by soft skills like equality, generosity, curiosity towards others’ ideas, and emotional safety.
Suki Sandhu OBE, Founder and CEO of Audeliss and INvolve, adds more weight to the need for these skills. “In a digital world, we’re seeing the value of people skills and emotional intelligence. Inclusion, collaboration, adaptability – all of these are challenging for AI to emulate,” Sandhu says.
To perform these roles, HR departments will need to adapt, equipping themselves with the resources necessary to cultivate these skills among the workforce. Continued learning platforms can play a crucial role in this, providing employees with opportunities to learn and grow.
Critically, HR must shift from a role focused solely on recruitment and retention to one concerned with workforce development. They will need to balance the analytical strength of AI with the equally important “soft” strengths of their human employees. And in this lies the industry’s challenge: linking AI capabilities with human potential to create a workforce tailored for the future.
There is no denying that AI’s integration has brought seismic changes to the workforce landscape. But as the pendulum of progress swings, it appears that the HR’s imperative should be to mine the richest vein of all, the wealth of human skills that remain firmly and advantageously out of reach for AI.
Original Source: https://hrexecutive.com/hrs-imperative-invest-in-the-skills-ai-cant-touch/
