DE
True to the motto “leading instead of oversleeping”, at our latest event we discussed with the experienced AI expert Prof. Dr. Patrick Glauner, HR specialists from 30 companies, and TWIST colleagues about the tasks for which AI can be usefully integrated into HR work and where caution is still advised at present.
In his captivating presentation, Patrick Glauner managed to make it clear that AI is a technological quantum leap that has the potential to ignite profound changes in business, administration, healthcare, and many other areas soon. Of course, HR work will not remain unaffected by this. According to Glauner, the European AI Act, which he helped to draft in an advisory capacity, addresses sensible topics such as data protection and labeling requirements, but its approximately 400 pages threaten to become a bureaucratic drag on the race to catch up with Asia and the USA.
And then it was the turn of our 50 guests:
They certainly did not get bored for a second in three very different workshops!
The joint exploration of ChatGPT for typical HR tasks awakened our guests' desire to try out AI immediately in their everyday work. A week after the event, an HR manager wrote to us: “On Monday, I had my first workshop with the new team and implemented a large part of the agenda that we developed with the help of AI in our group work at Twist. It worked very well!” Conclusion: AI takes a lot of tedious work off, such as creating a functioning agenda for the planned workshop, but you cannot do it without revision with brains, experience and creativity. AI is just a tool, not the solution!
Here, our guests from various industries shared use cases that their companies have already implemented. The workshop brought to light a variety of examples of use, such as the use of AI in selecting applicants, developing job profiles, drafting certificates, writing meeting minutes, or translating contracts. Furthermore, even the time-consuming evaluation of open survey questions will probably no longer be outsourced to external providers (e.g., TWIST) in the future: AI accomplishes in seconds what used to take us days. In the end, one question was central: How can we reduce fears of contact and prepare our workforce for the diverse possibilities of AI with a critical eye for its limitations? From now on, a new competence in the AC may be “AI readiness”!
This was about taking a broader view by addressing the opportunities and risks that will arise for our society in the medium term from the booming AI technology. At the beginning, the majority of our participants came out as “critical visionaries” who, despite all the AI euphoria, are concerned about deep fakes, data protection, the environment, and temporary upheavals on the labor market, with corresponding political consequences. Naturally, the broader view opened up a (very!) wide range of topics and unresolved questions that cannot be answered satisfactorily in one hour. Wherever a topic was dealt with at length (e.g., the enormous energy requirements of AI), it became clear that each of us needs to do our homework and delve deeper, inform ourselves as well as keep an eye on the secondary effects of AI in order to be able to have a say as a “responsible citizen” in the future.
In the late afternoon, the results of the individual workshops were compiled and final questions were directed to Prof. Glauner. The noise level in the break that followed, before the final act of our expert forum, indicated that many exciting thought-provoking ideas and new acquaintances had emerged among the company representatives over the course of the afternoon.
While AI uses the lightning-fast evaluation of huge amounts of data according to frequent and therefore probable patterns, real art is exactly the opposite: pure individuality! It's not about speed and efficiency and averages, but about an intensive, deeply subjective confrontation between the artist, his world view, and the viewer. This antipole to AI has always been important to TWIST in its almost 35-year history! We were all the more pleased that many guests followed our invitation to engage intensively with the exhibited paintings, to mark their favorite with a dot, and to share their evoked associations with the artist.
We will continue to take a curious and critical look at AI and its useful applications for everyday HR work within TWIST and with our customers. Our format of a one-day impulse workshop on the topic of “AI & Change” in collaboration with our cooperation partners and AI experts from digital.fwd will certainly offer us further exciting insights and discussions with different target groups when it comes to AI readiness, specific use cases, and the development of a common target image. If you are interested, we will be happy to tell you more about this format!
