In a recent Wall Street Journal short documentary, the media house reported about an artificially intelligent machine taking virtual interviews of candidates to hire the best employees for a company. The AI system read the candidate’s CV and noted his/her eye movements, body language, speech fluency and other emotional attributes. Based on these, it predicted the candidate’s proficiency and made decisions to hire. This is AI’s intrusion in human resource management. The rush to absorb the top talent has shifted hiring and interviewing from humans to machines.
And not only in HR, but artificial intelligence is also increasingly being used in all aspects of running a business and companies believe that possessing AI in their arsenal provides them with competitive edges. As a manager of the future, you can no longer view AI as a headache of the IT team who understand the code written to create it. AI has already become an integral part of business management and the best PGDM colleges in Delhi are teaching AI-infused courses for a reason. Knowing about AI from a managerial perspective will help your candidature and place you in front of the queue in a world where intelligent machines are about to dominate.
AI in management
The success of AI came to the limelight back in 2017 when Google’s AI called AlphaGo beat the human world champion in the game called Go. The intelligence at work involved refining decisions to solve a specific problem by looking at historical solutions to the same problem. Since then, AI has evolved to find applications in facial recognition and image processing, traffic and weather analysis and more. Increasingly, the predictive nature of AI found extensive use and this is what managers should concern themselves about.
Right now, corporations use artificial intelligence to predict the future by reading into massive chunks of data from the past. Be it investment banks, insurance companies, marketing institutions or SaaS businesses, AI now does the predicting job which determines market movements and customer tastes and tells humans what the future is going to be like. From here on, humans have the responsibility to judge whether the prediction that the machine made is viable or not. Judgement is still better performed by humans.
AI is as good as the data
A venture in Israel developed an intelligent facial recognition system that can read attributes of people’s faces and determine who among them are terrorists. The maker claims that all known terrorists have similar facial features that only a machine can detect by looking into years’ worth of data. Yet, when presented with pictures of actual recent terrorists, the AI could not term them as so. And, worryingly, it termed pictures of random civilians as terrorists by looking through the data that was fed to it.
The fallacy is obvious, keeping aside the social debates of such a project. Depending just on machines can often return erroneous results. Companies employing AI know that their systems are as good as the data they collect. This is why many giants are partnering together to share their data or acquire data-collection startups to minimise faults due to corrupt data. Beyond this, the companies are looking for managers who possess the skill to judge, keeping aside their human biases from seeing a machine-predicted result and having the intuition to infuse the human element into the decision. The best Mba PGDM college in Delhi NCR is teaching this side of managerial AI. The machines can predict but the onus will be on you to judge.
The battle of efficiencies
Intelligent machines are far more efficient than humans. And it is the machine’s job to simplify the work of humans. But this aspect can also diminish both the need for a human workforce or for personnel who get too used to the machines. As PGDM graduates working with AI, you must become capable of using the machine for what it is and not become too dependent on its solutions. Retaining your human skills will help you bypass the trend where AI is increasingly replacing white-collar jobs. If the machine is efficient in predicting, you must be efficient with intuition. If the machine can read the past better, your knowledge of the present must break expectations.
EMPI, one of the best B-schools in the best PGDM colleges in Delhi, maintains an AI-infused curriculum for all its courses. And the lessons are not only about the technical aspects of things but also involve soft skill development around AI. Moving forward, AI is bound to become better in solving strategic issues. All 11 bits of intelligence of AI should progress and find their way into corporations. EMPI readies its students on these lines. Its PGDM graduates are proficient AI literates.