2024 HR Technology Predictions

by Steve Elcock, Founder and CEO at elementsuite

January 17 2024 - CHROs must embrace AI and become more data-driven or they will fail to optimise their talent value.

As organisations have established their business models with more disparate global teams, knowing the skills required, their existing talent and how to harness and engage this talent will be critical for 2024. Understanding some of the key HR trends and practices to keep up with, particularly in workforce management (WFM), will give tech and data-led businesses the edge over their competitors and make them leaders in the race for new talent and business partnerships, boosting their reputation and bottom line.

From a worker engagement and training perspective, organisations that adopt AI to identify and optimise skills development will have the biggest impact on the future of work and employee experience.

As we expect to see a greater focus on ED&I in 2024, this increased data focus means there can be no excuses for organisations not to benchmark themselves. Organisations must have policies on ethical hiring, the gender pay gap, diversity and fairness in age representation to become an attractive place to work and do business with.

Approaches to workforce management (WFM) are fast evolving

Workforce management (WFM) is becoming extensively optimised via access to a wider range of causal factors and metrics that can affect business performance. Business leaders can add more data from more sources externally, so that staff schedules are optimised for the right employees to be working in the right place at the right time. It's also becoming essential to build employee preferences into schedules.

With AI advancement, instead of taking several clicks to book their absence, determine which team members they are working with on a particular shift, or request a shift swap, an employee can ask the AI assistant to manage these actions on their behalf, in a more frictionless way. From a manager perspective, the introduction of an AI assistant will significantly reduce time spent on mundane admin tasks, thereby increasing productivity.

AI will be table stakes for automation and decision-making

For business leaders, just talking about exploring AI will no longer be enough - taking action to implement it will be critical in 2024. Key areas include AI for content generation, AI for chatbots for internal employee support, predictive analytics for demand forecasting, natural language processing for data analysis, and running virtual reports makes it far less hassle for HR leaders to interact with systems.

Using AI as a replacement to UI offers endless possibilities for better employee engagement. It empowers workers to manage their work lives better, without the need for workers to click around on screens because they can interact in different ways using natural language. However, interactions must be fully authenticated before they happen.

The biggest HR & WFM technology challenges in 2024

To protect their biggest assets - their data and their people - it's essential that HR leaders are aware of some key challenges that AI presents. These include:

• Privacy - Large Language Models (LLMs) do not enable data subjects with a 'right to be forgotten'. Once embedded within a model weight, systems cannot simply 'forget' data that has been inputted, posing a potential risk for GDPR.
• Security - In looking at the opportunities for reducing friction with AI interactions, the UI needs to be counterbalanced with greater appreciation and awareness of security risk and possibilities of deepfakes in the future, especially if HR systems implement features like voice or facial recognition.
• Eliminating data bias - Since data bias has already emerged as a problem, this means that solutions for ground truth data collection are imperative by following a 3-stage solution:

1. Make sure you have big and proportional data sets,
2. Make sure you sample it in the right way that makes it de-biased and, if you can't,
3. Make sure you proportionalise the weights to try and de-bias it. CEOs will need to hire dedicated data skills, such as data scientists, prompt engineers, to focus on model training techniques.

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