Why This IBM Exec Says AI Adoption Should Be Led by HR

HR is the natural choice to lead company-wide adoption of AI, according to Nickle LaMoreaux, senior vice president and chief human resources officer at IBM, who took to LinkedIn to make her case. She sat down Monday with LinkedIn chief people officer Teuila Hanson in the social-media platform’s latest episode of Conversations with CHROs, and Inc. got an exclusive first look. The two discussed issues that are keeping HR up at night. LaMoreaux said she believes HR should take the reins on AI adoption because the department is an expert on both skills and culture change. “AI is about the technology, but it is about a lot more than that. It is about willingness to change how you lead people through the different roles of managers and leaders,” LaMoreaux said. Although many companies choose to give this responsibility to leaders who deal with new technologies—chief product officers, head of engineering, line of business owner, etc.—LaMoreaux says these professionals are good at adopting tech to complete job-related tasks, but they lack the skills to ensure company-wide adoption. Hanson points out that when HR is handling benefit enrollment or performance management, they’re always thinking about how these processes will affect employees at different stages of their careers: the applicant, new hire, employees who want to be promoted, managers, and leaders. They need to consider how team dynamics will be affected by these company-wide processes, she said. “We’re the employee experience function, and so it’s sort of natural for us to be in this space and really think through how the change is going to hold,” Hanson said. On the subject of change, LaMoreaux said AI created a major culture shift in how IBM measures employee performance. It started with using data to measure skills—ones employees had, new incoming skills, and skills that were becoming irrelevant. Pairing this data with employee business performance initially resulted in unusual results that frustrated some managers—for example, some top performers were rated as ineligible for promotions because their skills were out of date. LaMoreaux said it was a “really, really difficult” transition, but managers started “to see first-hand how quickly these jobs were changing,” and that someone “could go from being a top performer one year to an average performer or even a low performer the next year.” But IBM felt it still wasn’t addressing the full picture. “We started to realize, in this age of AI, even that wasn’t enough, that the world is just moving so quickly that we actually had to start evaluating on this idea of behaviors,” LaMoreaux said. IBM now measures employees’ capacity for entrepreneurial spirit, curiosity, and being OK with failure while trying new skills. IBM measures whether employees are “OK with failure” to determine their resiliency, LaMoreaux said. She added that IBM’s HR team was inspired by how the company’s product and development teams treat feedback as a problem solving tool, rather than a reflection of employee performance. “When you get negative feedback, it’s not a bad thing. It means you have this feedback and you can pivot. So we kind of really learned a lot from their culture and ways of working,” LaMoreaux said. While there’s a lot of public concern over AI’s potential to replace jobs, LaMoreaux says that using it to identify certain behaviors helps guide employees toward their professional goals. She says anyone who has “ambition” and can “pivot with the changes” will be part of creating new jobs that work with AI. BY KAYLA WEBSTER