Is AI in the ‘trough of disillusionment’ for HR teams?

Has early optimism about the potential of artificial intelligence to transform business outcomes across the Australian marketplace started to dissipate for human resources professionals?

Organisations throughout Australia have been in a constant pursuit to increase efficiencies, drive higher levels of productivity, and boost wellness programs through the implementation of AI. This pursuit for organisations has resulted in this current stage of betting on discovering an AI application that can achieve that improvement.

HR Leader recently spoke to Aaron McEwan, vice president of research and advisory at Gartner, about how the journey of AI hype has progressed throughout the Australian workforce and how that path may be at a stage of disillusionment.

McEwan first spoke about the fears that some employees have in terms of AI replacing their job roles within their organisations.

“There’s always fears about job displacements when it comes to emerging technologies. Those concerns are particularly high for something like generative AI or AI more broadly. When it first hit the scene, the expectations for job losses, particularly amongst HR leaders, were pretty high, but it’s kind of reduced now a little bit,” McEwan said.

“It’s only now sitting at about 52 per cent of HR leaders saying that their organisation, that’s more than half, saying that their organisation is not planning to decrease their workforce due to advancements in things like generative AI.”

“The majority, 67 per cent, actually anticipate that it’s more likely that they’ll reallocate employees whose roles might be impacted, as opposed to decreasing the workforce overall.”

McEwan explained that this is a typical change that happens after those initial stages of a new emerging technology.

“[It’s a] hype cycle. It starts with an innovation trigger. In the case of generative AI, [when] OpenAI announced that they’d created this thing, it got heaps of media attention. It tends to spark a little bit of excitement. And so, very quickly, what happens is that the hype around it builds up to a point that we call the peak of inflated expectations. That’s when we think it’s the best thing since sliced bread, it’s going to make everyone lots of money, and touch our lives in all sorts of ways,” he said.

“And we’ve kind of been through that. Then what happens is that the hype starts to dissipate a little bit when we realise that maybe it’s not as disruptive as we first thought it was. Maybe it’s more expensive to roll out. Maybe it doesn’t quite do all the things that it was promised. And it turns out to be a lot harder than we thought it was going to be.”

“[Therefore], we believe that generative AI is just over the top of that curve. So, it’s coming out of the peak of inflated expectations and then moving down to what we call the trough of disillusionment. That’s a point where we go, ‘Yeah, maybe this thing isn’t that great.’”

This has been a common cause for a number of organisations somewhat pausing their AI implementation plan, and really being cautious with their approach, to ensure that they select the correct platform that suits their business practices.

Although this won’t halt AI integration as a whole, it’s an interesting mindset shift that organisations have had where they are approaching this once-heralded opportunity, with much more caution and patience. It will be interesting to see, however, if that wait for the perfect AI implementation leaves organisations behind the eight ball of capitalising on its potential.