Leveraging AI to Transform Industries and Empower Employees

HR Policy’s latest AI Webinar, AI at Work: Effective Use Cases and Their Impact on the Job & Talent Landscapes, featured AI experts and member CHROs, and shared practical insights on how companies are leveraging AI tools across their organizations, emphasizing that employee collaboration and trust are critical factors in driving successful business transformation.

Tim Bartl opened the panel emphasizing that despite public perceptions associating AI with the potential for job loss, HRPA member companies such as Intel and Allstate are instead looking at integrating AI to enhance existing roles and create new ones.

Key Insights from Panelists

Christy Pambianchi: Intel believes that the synergy of human and computer outperforms the computer alone. Intel has a program that consolidates its AI work across all company business lines. The CEO chairs monthly engagements with this program, aiming to achieve two key objectives: 

• Identify the highest impact use cases and execute them with dedicated project teams. 
  
  
• Create a central repository where employees can provide feedback and share ideas on how AI can increase efficiency and productivity in their respective business areas, resulting in a ‘crowd sourcing’ of ideas which helps prevent redundancy across team projects. 

Lama Nachman: Nachman’s research lab team at Intel focuses on how the end user employees AI and how that use can train the specific AI system to better support user needs. This approach allows all types of employees to understand where AI can fit into their workflows and enables companies to integrate AI into existing systems and scale success across operations, rather than having it sit as a separate technology. It also maximizes the use of AI at the tasks it is best at, and the use of humans at the skills and competencies at which they excel.

Bob Toohey: When employees started asking about use of AI tools, Allstate applied its business knowledge of risk management by first creating an internally contained ChatGPT to keep its sensitive data in house. To help dispel fears of AI taking jobs, Toohey recommended sharing positive stories with employees showing how the company uses AI in their current systems and being transparent. Allstate has implemented multiple AI enhancements to their HR processes, including a skills and training program with personalized learnings for employees and a recruiting system that has cut time from candidate application to interview by 50% while enabling the recruiting team to focus on other value-added work.

Huggy Rao: Ensuring a level of transparency in the design and use of AI systems is crucial to help build trust and psychological safety, elements that are necessary for companies to move beyond using AI solely for individual productivity enhancements and progress to business-wide workflow efficiency gains. Professor Rao commented so many roles involving adding tasks, AI has the potential to simplify and focus. He shared a quote from an executive, “I do so much mindless work in my company, I get exhausted when I go back home and all I've got left for my family are scraps of myself.” This, Rao emphasized, is what AI has the opportunity to change.