TechHR Pulse Indonesia: Brian Sommer talks ‘nemesis’ of transformation

JAKARTA – Out with the old, in with the new? In HR tech, new trends change faster than HR leaders realise.

Digital transformation can quickly render HR systems obsolete. So, are your HR tech investments strategic enough to survive this fast-paced change?

That’s the central thesis of the keynote address of Brian Sommer, the renowned HR leader and founder and president of consulting firm TechVentive, when he headlined People Matters’ TechHR Pulse Indonesia.

Sommer believes buying minor HR tech solutions to address problems only in the immediate present – not for the long haul – leaves organisations at the mercy of fast-changing trends, especially in the age of AI. He calls this method of purchasing fragmented and disjointed tech solutions “incrementalism”.

Read More: How HR can add value to ESG initiatives: Brian Sommer

Low-impact HR tech projects

“Incrementalism is the nemesis of transformation,” Sommer told his audience.

“If you are going to drive a big change in your company, you’re not going to do it by sprinkling a chatbot here, or adding smart analytics there,” he said. “That’s not going to create anything very transformative. That’s incrementalism.”

When leading new HR software selection projects, leaders often rely on methods from previous cycles, implementing only minor innovations along the way. This approach is flawed, according to Sommer’s principle.

“That is not what you should be shooting for,” he said. “You have to be thinking about now – believe it or not – is developing a post-artificial intelligence vision for HR and other parts of your firm. You need to be thinking that far ahead.”

Strategic thinking in HR has already opened up the profession to a variety of problems. For Sommer, however, knowing the problems of HR isn’t enough.

“You need to be thinking about the solutions and countermeasures for what you’re going to develop,” he said.

Read More: We need business leaders who are open and creative, says Brian Sommer

The dark side of AI adoption

With the rapid explosion of AI-powered software comes a host of problems that HR will now need to solve quickly.

Sommer provided real-world cases of AI supposedly being “misused” in the way people craft their resumés or perform their jobs.

One job applicant in the US, for example, reportedly used AI to apply to about 5,000 openings in one week. This is called resumé spamming by jobseekers who aren’t serious about the recruitment process.

Meanwhile, a remote worker who claimed to use AI to find engineering jobs quickly is now purportedly overemployed because of it. “This individual is currently working eight full-time engineering jobs, collecting salaries for eight full-time jobs, and he’s doing a terrible job on almost all of them, but he collects eight salaries from companies,” Sommer recounted.

While most organisations are concerned about small-scale HR tech projects that offer solutions in a piecemeal approach, the rise of AI requires a more strategic approach to tech adoption.

“What I’m pointing out is, there is a dark side to some of this technology, and your firm has to be prepared to deal with it and to create the appropriate countermeasures for it,” Sommer said.

“You’ve got problems that AI is creating right now, and that’s just the beginning. We’ve got problems on how to keep your perfectly good HR systems and processes efficient in light of what AI is doing to them today,” he said.

Apart from dealing with resumé spammers and jobseekers who game the system by abusing AI tools, employers today also have to contend with what Sommer calls “pures” or previously undetected recruiting errors.

“These are people who somehow slip through the cracks. Why do they get through? Because your systems didn’t do a good enough job of spotting that person,” he said.

New problems require new solutions

In the post-AI world, HR leaders have to be willing to uncover problems with AI, from the false positives to the false negatives – and all the ethical questions in between.

“You have to first start with some imagination – because the vendors are not going to spoon-feed you the answers,” Sommer said. “You need to reimagine how all these processes work, and don’t be surprised if you end up inventing many more processes than what you have today. You have to create processes that deal with some of the extra issues.”