IBM artificial intelligence can predict with 95% accuracy if you plan to quit your job

• Updated on: 2019-04-25
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6 Hours Ago | 02:22
IBM receives more than 8,000 resumes a day, making it No. 1 on job-search site Glassdoor for Gen Z applicants, claimed IBM CEO Ginni Rometty at CNBC's @ Work Talent + HR Summit on Tuesday in New York City.
But that's not the only way the technology giant, which employs roughly 350,000 workers, knows who in the U.S. workforce is currently searching for a new position. IBM artificial intelligence technology is now 95 percent accurate in predicting workers who are planning to leave their jobs, said Rometty.
During Rometty's seven-year tenure as CEO, IBM has been improving its AI work devoted to the retention of its employees.
"The best time to get to an employee is before they go," she said.
IBM HR has a patent for its "predictive attrition program" which was developed with Watson to predict employee flight risk and prescribe actions for managers to engage employees. Rometty would not explain "the secret sauce" that allowed the AI to work so effectively in identifying workers about to jump (officially, IBM said the predictions are now in the 95 percent accuracy "range"). Rometty would only say that its success comes through analyzing many data points.
"It took time to convince company management it was accurate," Rometty said, but the AI has so far saved IBM nearly $300 million in retention costs, she claimed.
The AI analysis of employees likely to leave a company is part of IBM's plan to sell a suite of AI-based products that will upend the traditional approach to human resources management. Rometty described the classic human resources model as broken and said it is one of the professions where humans are being replaced by AI that can do much of the work better.
Rometty said that since IBM implemented technology more widely, the tech giant has reduced the size of its global human resources department by 30 percent. But she added that the remaining positions are higher pay and able to perform higher-value work.
"You have to put AI through everything you do," she said.
A clearer career path is needed for many
Among the tasks that HR departments and corporate managers have not always proved effective at, and where AI will play a bigger role in the future, is keeping employees on a clear career path and identifying their skills.
Rometty said being transparent with individual employees about their career path is an issue in which many companies still fail. And it is going to become more critical. "I expect AI will change 100 percent of jobs in the next five to 10 years ," the IBM CEO said.
Being transparent with employees means being honest about the skills that are needed, especially when the workers don't possess them. IBM managers talk to employees about where they place in an assessment of market skills that are scarce or abundant.
"If you have a skill that is not needed for the future and is abundant in the market and does not fit a strategy my company needs, you are not in a good square to stay inside of," Rometty said. "I really believe in being transparent about where skills are."
By better understanding data patterns, AI can zero in on an individual's skills. In turn, this can enable a manager to direct an employee to future opportunities they may not have seen using traditional methods. "We found manager surveys were not accurate," Rometty said. "Managers are subjective in ratings. We can infer and be more accurate from data."
On a network, IBM's HR managers can view the tasks employees are completing, who they associate with, the educational courses they have taken and any rankings they have earned. Through these data points, the HR managers can gain a greater understanding of an employee's skill set than they would by assessing the feedback from manager surveys.
IBM also abandoned another staple of classic HR: the annual performance review, a move Rometty said she resisted at first, but persistent HR leaders proved to her was necessary. The company assesses employees on their skills growth as part of their quarterly feedback check-ins with management.
"You have to know the individual. Skills are your renewable asset, and you need to treat them like that." -Ginni Rometty, IBM CEO
AI is getting better at providing feedback to employees. IBM's MYCA (My Career Advisor) AI virtual assistant uses Watson to help employees identify where they need to increase their skills. Its companion, Blue Match technology, serves up job openings to employees based on their AI-inferred skills data. Rometty said some of the 27 percent of IBM workers who received a new job or promotion in 2018 were assisted by Blue Match.
"AI will change all jobs once it is in the workflow, and that is the most meaningful kind of AI. Yes, some jobs will be replaced, but that is a red herring," Rometty contends. "It is about getting people to work at the intersection of this."
She added: "This is all a game about skill and having people with the right skills, and everyone's job is changing."
Getting rid of the current HR system
Traditional human resource departments, where Rometty said companies typically "underinvest," has been divided between a self-service system, where employees are forced to be their own career managers, and a defensive system to deal with poor performers.
"We need to bring AI everywhere and get rid of the self-service system," Rometty said. IBM employees no longer need to decipher which programs will help them upskill; its AI suggests to each employee what they should be learning in order to get ahead in their career.
Poor performers, meanwhile, will not be a "problem" that is dealt with by managers, HR, legal and finance, but by solutions groups that engage poor performers — IBM is using "pop-up" solutions centers for its poor performers. She said many companies have relied on centers of excellence — specialized groups or collaborative entities created to focus on areas where there is a knowledge or skills gap within an organization or community. "We have to move away from centers of excellence to solutions centers."
IBM's bet is that the future of work is one in which a machine understands the individual better than the HR individual can alone. The new era of AI-centered human resources will improve upon something many human-led HR teams have not proved they can handle effectively without the assistance of machine learning: recognizing the true resource potential of individuals and serving as growth engines for companies.
"It is at the individual level. You have to know the individual. Skills are your renewable asset, and you need to treat them like that," Rometty said.