When new employees start at content recommendations tech company Taboola, many often ask to speak to Sasha, a personality with whom they grew familiar during the hiring process.
But Sasha doesn’t exist — at least not in human form.
Sasha is a chatbot the company uses to handle candidate interview scheduling.
“It is actually quite funny that it was so smooth that the new hires will join Taboola and say, ‘Can I meet Sasha?’” Kristy Sundjaja, chief people officer at Taboola, said. “There is no Sasha, because Sasha is actually a bot.”
From automating tasks like scheduling to analyzing data and answering internal questions, artificial intelligence is being used for human resources functions running the gamut, experts told HR Dive. And that’s just the beginning.
“We’re scratching the surface,” Sundjaja said.
Already, Taboola uses AI for people analytics, filtering through data on start dates, promotions, engagement, learning and development, performance and management to provide basic information on employees.
And that frees up Sundjaja’s team to dive deeper into trend analysis to predict attrition and success rates of the company’s workers.
“There’s just work that I think AI can take over from HR,” Sundjaja said.
But it’s not as simple as just handing certain tasks over to AI, Sundjaja explained. For large language modeling — the “FAQ type of AI solutions” or chatbots — companies need to make sure their data is clean and unbiased. Without doing so, “garbage in, garbage out,” Sundjaja said about the quality of the models.
While there’s work “AI can take over from HR,” some things can’t be automated and some require a human touch, she said.
“How do we use AI to better our job but not make it so robotic?” Sundjaja said. “There’s a lot for us to learn.”
One challenge is that AI is a very general term, said Angela Hood, founder and CEO of ThisWay Global, an HR tech AI company.
“It’s important just to be aware that artificial intelligence is an umbrella word,” she said.
Hood likened the term “AI” to the word “apparel.”
“Apparel can apply to lots of things: shirts and shoes and children’s clothing and men’s ties. All of that is apparel,” Hood said. “When people use the words ‘artificial intelligence,’ it’s a category. I think that it gets blurred because people lack the understanding of how to differentiate those things.”