Smart machines will enable companies to become smart organisations

The win itself was remarkable but if you consider how IBM Watson won, it is even more amazing. IBM Watson is a computer built on a QA technology that takes a question expressed in natural language, seeks to understand it in much greater detail, and returns a precise answer to the question.
 It means that computers can now look for answers based on text and questions, just like humans.
 To put things in perspective, IBM Watson’s three-year development price tag was around US$900 million (Bt32.5 billion). It had access to 200 million pages of structured and unstructured content consuming four terabytes of disk storage, including the full text of Wikipedia, but was not connected to the Internet during the game.
 Are we about to witness man-versus-machine warfare, as pictured in popular sci-fi movies, such as Skynet in “Terminator”? This article is not about that. It is also not about how machines will replace humans and automate processes.
 Rather, this article is about how machines can augment humans to allow us to do things which were not humanly possible or, if possible, would take a tremendous amount of resources and time.
 Smart machines or cognitive systems will enable organisations to become smart organisations. This is going to change the workplace in all areas, be it sales, marketing, research and development – and of course my favourite, human resources.
 Facing rising high turnover and a shortage of talent in the pipeline, imagine having to sift through external sources, internal sources in various forms such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, e-mails, and current and ex-employee records to find the right candidate. Imagine instead that you have a smart recruiting machine that can short-list candidates who are most likely to succeed in your company for you in a matter of minutes.
The smart recruiter can learn the rules of selection.
 Imagine a smart engagement system that lets you know the level of employee engagement instantly based on the data collected from your intranet, absence records, overtime records and employee turnover.
 Imagine a smart HR adviser that tells you who is likely to leave your company, and why! It’s a world where we will have smart computers that help improve our wisdom and our knowledge.
 Recently, I had my own experience with IBM Watson. My question was: “What are the key factors that affect turnover of high performers in the company?”
 To answer the question, it would take me at least a month of data mining and analysis (with my current ability in statistics) before I could come to a conclusion. Instead, with IBM Watson, it was able to answer in a matter of minutes.
 By the way, for those of you who want to try a question out on IBM Watson, there is a free version available online with fairly extensive functionality.
 It’s coming! Every major player in human-capital management space is investing heavily in machine learning and big data in its effort to develop smart systems providing insights to human-resource professionals.
 Smart HR can be our trusted adviser, just as Watson was to Sherlock Holmes.
 
Suvit Chansrichawla is |next-generation HR consultant under the brand Serendipity&Co, partner of the Curve Group in Thailand.