HR at a Crossroads of Talent, Smart Tech and Learning

HR is at a crossroads of talent, smart technology and learning. It’s time for the industry to determine how to go forward, said Elliott Masie, learning and development innovator and Broadway producer, to attendees at the SHRM Talent Conference & Expo 2024 (Talent 2024), which is taking place now through April 17.

“Crossroads means you have to prepare for breaking the rules, changing the functions and being surprised,” Masie said. “The world of learning is going to change. It’s going to change whether you are wanting it to change or not.

“There are decisions that you and your company and your colleagues need to make [with artificial intelligence and smart tech] that ultimately will show it either as exciting or overwhelming as it comes right at you.

“I’m here to push you a little bit. As you are here representing HR, you need to be confident and ready to be at the crossroads to advocate for sanity and good design when it comes to smart tech at your company.”

Masie has been in the learning industry for 52 years. He is known as the person who, many years ago, coined the term “e-learning” for instruction delivered electronically over the internet.

The audience was challenged to think about what that “e” could stand for today. Among the answers offered were evolve, everywhere, everything, energize, entertain and evaluate. Understanding how the concept of “e” has changed, Masie said, will help HR professionals design and deliver e-learning today and tomorrow.

“AI is not a standalone solution,” he said. “It becomes truly powerful when paired with human intelligence.”

Masie urged HR professionals to have confidence and readiness at the crossroads to advocate for sanity and good design in using artificial intelligence.

Generative AI (GenAI) uses large language models that are fed prompts by information seekers. Not unlike the familiar search engines of the past generation, GenAI puts information at its users’ fingertips.

Masie said he got a call from two of the largest school districts in the U.S. the week after ChatGPT was introduced, telling him they were banning the use of ChatGPT.

Their fear, Masie said, was that students were going to cheat on their exercises and homework.

After he spoke at length with the school representatives about AI, they decided they weren’t going to be threatened by it.

Masie said the conference attendees, as HR leaders, “have to decide: How do you balance all of that? How do you end up figuring it out? What do you approach? What do you test? What do you wait on? What do you look at as an example? How do you make sure that it works with your people along the way?”

Masie offered some guidance to help with the AI journey, noting that AI’s four primary uses are optimization, automation, predictive analytics and personalization.

Optimization, he said, means getting a better result. You can optimize, for example, the way an employee goes on maternity leave. There is an entire series of transactional information, policy and support for that person.

Automation can create “radical changes” in how things are done by using data to make predictions. He spoke of an odd situation during onboarding with a new company he knew of, where new hires were given a stack of forms to complete, including one about what happens when they retire from the company.

“I will tell you: That company hasn’t had anybody retire yet, and by time they do, we’ll not be in an age where there are forms being filled out,” he said. “But how do we get data to really understand and predict when they will?”

Personalization, he said, is a key to learning. One common form is through on-the-job training.

“What if we could truly personalize it based on that person’s background?” he asked. “What if we knew what they already know and what skills they are needing? If we could start the learning based on what they know and what they need to know and if we could personalize it, we could [improve their learning] by 100 percent to 200 percent.”

Paul Bergeron is a freelance writer based in Virginia.