By Abhishek Agarwal, President , Judge India – Global Delivery, The Judge Group.

The transformation of workplaces has been a hot topic of discussion over the last two years, propelled by the Coronavirus impact. Companies have tried to incorporate varied technologies and best practices available to create a flexible and uninterrupted work environment in a measured manner. Those who onboarded the technology at work did fairly well in comparison to organizations that had second thoughts on digital or technology adoption.

Crisis management, adaptability, and the new normalare currently terms that have been engraved within all of us in the last 2 years. While the senior management were all hands on deck to maintain normalcy in business operations and to keep the coffers running, they were simultaneously handling the much-needed business transformational changes that were happening within,in order to adapt to the external evolving business ecosystem.

Work from home or famously termed as #WFH, a working flexibility phenomenon that was restricted to the IT industry alone was introduced to different sectors. The unprecedented situation culminated in many businesses shifting a large part of their workto a WFH model and some took the hybrid-working model after the relaxation of Covid-19 restrictions. From a business process perspective, the need for the physicalityof some existing systems and processes became redundant overnight and one such key area that took the brunt was the hiring and recruitment process of the workforce. However, this disruption did lead to newer ways of handling therecruitment and internal training process too.

Since people always are the center focus of all activities, the pandemic did teach us the value of business agility, the importance of technology, and the true nature of harnessing productivity. The role of technology, particularly the implementation of AI and ML(Machine Learning) enabled companies to effectively use these tools for assessing recruits, hiring, training, and performance evaluation. Implementation of AI helped businesses to make better and quicker hiring decisions by responding faster, scheduling meetings/interviews, or by responding to candidate queries via Chatbots. Companies with digital agility and AI implemented modules use the power of AI to match candidates for open positions or screen prospective candidates to match job descriptions. With the use of AI, human resources and recruiters are working more efficiently by deploying the latest technology made available to them.

Some of the customized learning solutions developed by staffing companies with the help of AI tools deliver instructor-led training. These solutions provide a wide variety of courses, which are professionally designed, customized, easily accessible at different locations, and engaging enough to deliversimilaror better results in comparison to the physical process deployed earlier.

The global AI market size is projected to grow from USD 47.47 billion in 2021 to USD 360.36 billion in 2028 at a CAGR of 33.6% in the 2021-2028 period.* Even before the pandemic hit, companies often found it challenging to recruit the right talent and train them on specific skills needed, to help them succeed in an automated, AI-driven environment. Companies need to upskill their executives at the global or senior management level on using data, analytics, and AI as enablers to better understand their customers and improvise the services they offer. The opportunity in these evolved times for the senior and mid-level executive is the availability of curriculums that use data to assist in exploring and aligning business opportunities and overcoming challenges with the help of data.

When a health crisis swiftly converted into a global economic crisis, business leaders had to make quick decisions and this situation gave stimulus to the adoption of advanced analytics and AI-based techniques to augment decision-making. But all has not been hunky-dory since viable AI model creation and the execution itself takes a stipulated amount of time. But rest assured IoT, Cloud, and AI integration has enabled and opened up new vistas of collaboration and communication amongst external and internal stakeholders and made life slightly better for human resource managers.