Curated Intel from the Talent Tech Industry
May 20-26, 2024:
• Challenging personal identity: The arrival of AI-crafted digital twins is now a feasible reality;
• Messing with an A Lister: Scarlett Johansson accuses OpenAI of stealing her voice for its system;
• Adding a verbal capability: Sense integrates conversational AI into talent engagement platform;
• Doubling down on skill-based recruiting: Cornerstone On Demand buys SkyHive Technologies;
• Pushing back on accepted truth: Peter Cappelli says GenAI may create more work than it saves.
PLUS
Don’t be conspicuous by your absence at TAtech North America & The World Job Board Forum. Avoid FOMO and register right now for the only conference in the North American market that is specifically designed both for job board and talent technology company CEOs, their direct reports and rising stars and to accelerate the bottom-line growth of their enterprises. Why the rush? Because the conference will be held June 4-6, 2024 at The International Spy Museum which has a limited seating capacity. So, register today and accelerate the success your company achieves, today, tomorrow and into the future!
The Rise of AI-Crafted Digital Twins: Opportunities and Ethical Quandaries
After a conversation with the always inquisitive Jacob Madsen and off the back of the amazing TIC Deep Dive with Antonia Manoochehri, from Lumenai and Bob Pulver, from Cognitive Path, on Human-Centred AI and its Impact on Talent Intelligence and a number of conversations with the brilliant mind of Remy Glaisner on the concept of Digital Twins I wanted to dive into a fascinating concept that I think we will need to grapple with in the future. As artificial intelligence continues its relentless march, a new frontier is emerging that could profoundly impact the future of work and the very notion of identity. Imagine a world where an AI system can ingest your entire professional portfolio – résumés, work samples, video interviews, performance reviews – and construct an uncannily accurate digital replica of you, with the ability to complete tasks and even interact autonomously. This AI-crafted "digital twin" could open up remarkable opportunities but also raises a Pandora's box of ethical, legal, and philosophical questions. The AI models underpinning these digital twins would go far beyond today's rudimentary chatbots or virtual assistants. Powered by vast troves of multimodal data and cutting-edge machine learning, they could capture the nuances of an individual's communication style, areas of expertise, personality quirks, and behavioral patterns. In effect, they would be virtual clones of a person's professional persona, potentially even exhibiting signs of self-awareness or sentience.
ScarJo Goes After OpenAI
Scarlett Johansson has accused OpenAI of stealing her voice for GPT-4o. Johansson claims that OpenAI’s “Sky” voice is “eerily similar” to her own and that she was approached by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to voice the system, but declined. Unsurprisingly, OpenAI has denied the allegations, stating that the “Sky” voice belongs to a different professional actress. However, the company has agreed to pause the use of the “Sky” voice while it addresses questions about how it selects its AI voices. Unsatisfied with OpenAI’s response, Johansson has hired legal counsel to investigate the matter and has written two letters to Altman and OpenAI requesting details on how the “Sky” voice was created. This case will be interesting to watch. In a traditional copyright case, if you can prove intent, you almost always win. This case may be different.
Sense Announces Conversational Voice AI for Recruiting
Sense, the forefront leader in revolutionizing talent engagement through AI technology, unveils its latest innovation: Sense Conversational Voice AI. This groundbreaking product transforms recruiting by seamlessly integrating Voice AI technology into the Sense platform to automate tasks including candidate outreach, screening, and scheduling. “We are empowering recruiting teams to conduct thousands of automated phone calls per day, saving them valuable time and helping them hire top talent faster than ever before.” Sense Conversational Voice AI integrates with Sense’s Recruiting Automation, Chatbot, and Messaging products. This seamless functionality enables recruiters to leverage voice capabilities alongside existing SMS, WhatsApp, and email communication channels to maximize outreach efforts and accelerate the hiring process. “Recruiters devote up to half of their day reaching out to candidates but continue to struggle to connect with them by phone for initial screenings,” said Sense CEO Anil Dharni. “With many jobs requiring a fast turnaround for candidate selection, finding the best talent often feels like a constant battle. Conversational Voice AI now automates outreach phone calls, freeing up recruiters' time for more strategic activities.”
Cornerstone Accelerates Jobs-to-Skills Transformation with SkyHive Acquisition
Cornerstone OnDemand Inc., a leader in Workforce Agility solutions, today announced the acquisition of workforce skills intelligence capabilities and a team of highly specialized domain experts from SkyHive Technologies Holdings Inc.. SkyHive’s AI-powered skills intelligence platform and services help customers build skills-based organizations, providing visibility into the capabilities of employees and enabling organizations in their transformation efforts. This acquisition accelerates Cornerstone’s reskilling capabilities with predictive labor market intelligence, automated job architecture management, rapid skill proficiency detection, and other services to help organizations build agile workforces. Additionally, SkyHive aligns with Cornerstone’s commitment to openness and extensibility by providing rich integration and normalization for other skills-centric talent applications, simplifying customer technology stacks and improving time-to-value. By parsing terabytes of global workforce, labor market and economic data daily, SkyHive provides real-time granular visibility into the global labor economy and forecasts emerging critical skills, helping organizations predict future needs. Complementary to Cornerstone’s existing solutions, including the recently announced Cornerstone Talent Intelligence, this powerful data-rich solution will streamline any organization’s journey towards a dynamic skills-oriented approach to close the workforce readiness gap.
Generative AI may be creating more work than it saves
There's common agreement that generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools can help people save time and boost productivity. Yet while these technologies make it easy to run code or produce reports quickly, the backend work to build and sustain large language models (LLMs) may need more human labor than the effort saved up front. Plus, many tasks may not necessarily require the firepower of AI when standard automation will do. That's the word from Peter Cappelli, a management professor at the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School, who spoke at a recent MIT event. On a cumulative basis, generative AI and LLMs may create more work for people than alleviate tasks. LLMs are complicated to implement, and "it turns out there are many things generative AI could do that we don't really need doing," said Cappelli. While AI is hyped as a game-changing technology, "projections from the tech side are often spectacularly wrong," he pointed out. "In fact, most of the technology forecasts about work have been wrong over time." He said the imminent wave of driverless trucks and cars, predicted in 2018, is an example of rosy projections that have yet to come true. Broad visions of technology-driven transformation often get tripped up in the gritty details. Proponents of autonomous vehicles promoted what "driverless trucks could do, rather than what needs to be done, and what is required for clearing regulations -- the insurance issues, the software issues, and all those issues." Plus, Cappelli added: "If you look at their actual work, truck drivers do lots of things other than just driving trucks, even on long-haul trucking."
TAtech North America is one conference you cannot afford to miss!
Don’t be conspicuous by your absence at TAtech North America & The World Job Board Forum. Avoid FOMO and register right now for the only conference in the North American market that is specifically designed both for job board and talent technology company CEOs, their direct reports and rising stars and to accelerate the bottom-line growth of their enterprises. Why the rush? Because the conference will be held June 4-6, 2024 at The International Spy Museum which has a limited seating capacity. Whether your company is a niche or general job board, aggregator, talent marketplace, online classifieds business, programmatic platform, chatbot, conversational AI solution, ATS, recruitment marketing solution, CRM platform, interviewing or assessment system or talent technology consultancy, this event will supercharge your sales and your profits. So, register today and accelerate the success your company achieves, today, tomorrow and into the future!