Empowering Your Workforce with AI

The problem here is that the next generation down – Gen X, aged 35-50 – isn't big enough to pick up the slack. There are fewer people in this age bracket to fill these jobs as they become available.

Millennials (aged 18-34) are as numerous as boomers, which should provide employers with some hope, but this group follows a different behavioral profile. Those at the younger end of the spectrum do not have the decades of experience that boomers have accrued over a lifetime of service.

Millennial workers are also more nomadic in their careers than their older counterparts, switching jobs more frequently.

Gallup notes that:

Job-hopping employees can make it difficult and expensive for employers to find and retain talent in this age group.

It will come as no surprise that this trend is hitting those companies relying on worker knowledge the hardest. Companies in professional services, finance and engineering are all facing similar issues.

As a knowledge-heavy sector, financial services faces brain-drain issues similar to law. Bankers are leaving in droves, although the hemorrhage is more due to people leaving voluntarily than due to retiring boomers.

One thing we know about millennials is that they crave meaningful, fulfilling careers. Traditional banking, with its long hours and delayed reward, simply isn't cutting it. As regulators curb bonuses and the industry's reputation remains bruised by the financial crisis, people are looking elsewhere for employment. Headcounts dropped by almost an eighth in four years, and it is costing banks up to $1bn per annum.

Banks are finding it difficult to bridge this talent gap with new recruits:

Business school grads are naturally more inclined to these sectors, but even there, interest is waning. MIT Sloan School grads eyeing banking careers halved from 31% to 15% in the decade to 2016, while just 37% of Columbia's grads targeted finance in 2016, compared to 55% ten years prior.

As banks court more customers, the need to personalize and serve clients through expert knowledge grows. By using IBM Watson, banks can offset this declining influx of new talent by using automation to empower its human talent. It can assist employees with critical functions including elements of research, prospecting and customer service.

Drawing from deep industry-and company-specific knowledge, Training Watson to answer thousands of questions on dozens of products complements human agents' performance and improve customer service.

By understanding customers in context, it can use this knowledge to recommend products and services with confidence, improving customer relationships and boosting retention.

The public sector is an aging industry. In the U.S., one in four employees is now older than 55. A storm is coming as these workers prepare for retirement in the next decade. Who will replace them?

Certainly not millennials. Just 17% of federal workers are in this age bracket, and just 1.2% are under 24. The stream of younger people interested in a government career is drying up as they turn their back on longer-term pensions and other benefits that traditionally attracted government workers.

IBM Watson offers an opportunity to bottle existing government institutional knowledge and use it to get new employees up to speed quickly.

Some industries facing an aging workforce kick the can down the road. In oil and gas, which like many other sectors is seeing boomers leave, companies are doing their best to delay retirement as they scrabble to retain hard-won technical knowledge.

Hydrocarbon companies also face challenges in passing on knowledge from older to younger. Whereas boomers learned from manuals, millennials tend to like hands-on learning. Delays in extraction projects during the oil price crash have exacerbated that problem by making it more difficult for younger employees to learn from older ones on the job.

Encapsulating detailed knowledge and making it easily digestible is a use case made for AI systems like Watson. The technology has been proven to reduce the time spent searching for expert knowledge by 75%, leading to millions of dollars in annual savings as it makes more efficient use of highly-paid employees' time. It accelerates research and discovery in an industry that relies heavily on innovation in the race to find and use natural resources efficiently.

Skills shortages are also affecting the electronics and IT industries, reports indicate.

The problem here is not with a shortage of young professionals, many of whom are eager to work in this exciting industry. According to 28% of IT employers, the issue is the speed of technology development. It is moving so quickly that professionals find it difficult to keep up.

Although more than half of IT employers expect to increase headcount in 2018, new technology is outpacing training. Two thirds of IT employers face a moderate to extreme skill shortage and nine in 10 say this is negatively affecting business in areas such as productivity, employee satisfaction and staff turnover.

The other issue facing this dynamic sector is that workforces are often distributed and project-based. IT tops the list of industries for which telecommuting jobs are available, and temporary contractors make it difficult to retain a permanent base of knowledge.

Businesses don't need massive consumer- generated data sets at their disposal to benefit from Watson's capabilities. Watson can apply its AI algorithms to smaller sets of proprietary enterprise information and can find new insights to help employees think about their work in new ways.

By starting small, companies can learn quickly about how to unlock the value in subsets of their business data. From there, they can apply their experience with Watson to more data in other parts of the company, transforming business as they go.

Companies will continue to invest in people as they seek to improve performance in their chosen markets. For the first time, AI can empower and enhance those people by distilling and sharing knowledge between them all.

Watson is not only a viable way to bridge the talent gap, but a valuable tool for your existing workforce. By unlocking the hidden knowledge in your company, it empowers your newer recruits to learn more, faster.