During a panel discussion at the CES tech conference earlier this month, three HR pros were asked by moderator Tiffany Moore, the Consumer Technology Association’s VP of political and industry affairs, to discuss where people strategy and human capital fits into the ongoing AI transformation.

Agreed early in the session was the irreplaceable value the human workforce brings to any successes as AI changes how work gets done.

“We think about artificial intelligence, it should really be accelerating intelligence, or amplifying intelligence, because it’s a helper, but the human instinct is critical,” Moore said.

Salesforce’s chief equality and engagement officer, Alexandra Siegel, suggested that the ongoing technological transformation we've experienced for the last few years across companies and industries worldwide is, in fact, actually, a people transformation. 💅

“Fundamentally, this is a people transformation,” she said. “The technology is important, but this is a people transformation because AI is going to be as ubiquitous as email, as the internet, as the mobile phone, and no one taught us. We didn’t go to class to learn how to use your iPhone. We didn’t go to class to learn how to use the internet or email. It became an extension of how we work. However, the how we work changed, and so there’s a lot of great research that shows it’s not actually those technical skills that are the most important.”

Siegel said, of course, most employees are going to need to be “AI fluent” in this new era of work, but she said it will be those explicit human skills like “agility and curiosity and storytelling and creativity” that will make the most impact as organizations reimagine workflows.

“It’s not AI versus the human, it’s an amplification,” said Sherida McMullan, Gitlab’s VP of diversity, inclusion, and belonging. “It’s making sure that we’re utilizing the human element for the judgments that are being made…you also have to make sure…that human element stays top of mind throughout the process.”

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