Identified your key resources for AI deployment yet?- Your Dragon Warrior

Blog: NASSCOM Official Blog

You’re working from home and the children are flipping through OTT platforms. They decide they’ll watch Kung Fu Panda today and you’re stuck in the same room as them.

But hey, you have an Aha! Moment and you’re suddenly drawing parallels between the film and how you’d deal with your warriors aka employees as you begin your Kung Fu Journey of deploying AI within your organization.

Identifying and engaging the right talent while experimenting and deploying AI strategies within your organization is important.

The Plan- Team Leaders must have a clear understanding of skill composition within roles like that of a data scientist for example and also be sure of their career paths.

The Push- Employees must be pushed to work on long term value projects with a significant cross organizational impact rather than forcing them to work on smaller low potential PoCs.

The Team- There is significant outside-in engagement and talent acquisition through collaboration with accelerators and incubators.

The Key Resource- Try to identify key resources who can act as evangelists for AI for faster adoption.

Centralized AI CoE with embedded staff structure serving enterprise-wide business functions

Training your Warriors to be Kung Fu (AI) Ready

Change isn’t easy to accept and employees may be confused at first. Leadership needs to ensure that employees are introduced with AI concepts at regular intervals.

Training will play a key role in diffusing the knowledge about opportunities and risks of emerging technologies like AI. However, AI shouldn’t be treated like traditional IT training since the learning curve is steep and requires specialization.

This training should focus on:

Contextualizing the concepts of AI to employee needs- One size doesn’t fit all

Clearing myths about AI- And laying out a structured manual covering questions like What AI is and What it isn’t.

Pushing them harder and explaining how AI will augment the way employees approach work. The motivation must get stronger as you move along.

Highlighting the need for employees to re-skill as all organizations are moving towards a data driven era and trusting their ability to perform.

Asserting the need for awareness about AI to understand broader aspects such as Ethics and Risks associated with it.

So, here are a few questions that must be answered while you welcome AI into your organization:

Are certain demographic characteristics, behaviours or interests associated with negativity?
Is the application inappropriately denying access to opportunities having lasting consequences in a user’s personal life?
Is the algorithm giving skewed outcomes for certain users?
Is the data set complete and the labelling accurate?
Are there any representational biases, wherein the algorithm is amplifying stereotypes over race, nationality, groups – etc?

The Balancing Act

While loyalty to existing employees and a desire to retain employees with organization-specific knowledge often leads organizations to focus on reskilling those impacted by automation to take on new roles. Research suggests that less than 40 percent of them enjoy even a modest degree of success in doing so. In part, this lack of success may reflect overly optimistic assumptions about the degree to which staff most heavily impacted by automation can be reskilled.

It is therefore important to ensure that leadership has a strong change management plan. Especially in collaboration with HR teams for existing employees who are affected negatively by AI. This could help organizations develop and deploy proactive plans to manage downsizing and attrition.

Yes, it could be challenging to bring in technology and disrupt the flow of things especially with respect to your warriors.

You’ve tried.

You’ve failed.

However, Master Shifu says…