GEISHA KOW­LESSAR-ALON­ZO

geisha.kow­lessar@guardian.co.tt

A proud mile­stone for the ANSA McAL Group as the com­pa­ny has be­come the first of its size in the Eng­lish-speak­ing Caribbean to in­te­grate AI in­to its hu­man re­sources op­er­a­tions.

The step marks a trans­for­ma­tive mo­ment not on­ly for ANSA McAL but for the re­gion’s cor­po­rate land­scape.

Fa­heem Mo­hammed, chief shared ser­vices of­fi­cer, and Sean Bowlah, Group HRIS an­a­lyt­ics and da­ta in­te­gra­tion man­ag­er at ANSA McAL Ltd, joined CNC3’s Morn­ing Brew yes­ter­day to share in­sights in­to this ini­tia­tive and its im­pact.

“We have part­nered with glob­al­ly ac­cred­it­ed ogan­i­sa­tion SAP and Hori­zons who are deal­ing with USA and LATAM and for us it’s a core part of our HR trans­for­ma­tion agen­da where we are mod­ernising sys­tems and re­al­ly en­hanc­ing the em­ploy­ee ex­pe­ri­ence,” Mo­hammed ex­plained. Recog­nis­ing the evolv­ing work­force, he not­ed the im­por­tance of adapt­ing to the ex­pec­ta­tions of Gen Zs, who now make up a grow­ing por­tion of the work­place.

“...We are al­so very fo­cused on dri­ving the tal­ent agen­da that we have be­cause the Gen Zs are tak­ing over the work­place now and the Gen Z’s are re­quir­ing or­gan­i­sa­tions to be dig­i­tal first and be dig­i­tal ready. This is al­so part of our two times and be­yond growth am­bi­tion as a group where we are dou­bling ANSA McAL’s scale and im­pact.”

Not­ing that a lot of head­way has al­ready been made with the im­ple­men­ta­tion, Mo­hammed shared, “I mean just to give a very in-fo­cus da­ta point, we are 80 per cent more ef­fi­cient as an HR cen­tre in this de­ploy­ment. So from the at­tract-to-hire-to-the-re­tire stage, we are mak­ing our HR cen­tre more peo­ple fo­cused.” He al­so re­as­sured that ro­bust safe­guards are in place to en­sure re­spon­si­ble use of AI.

“ANSA McAL, as a group, we have very strin­gent risk and com­pli­ance frame­works. The fact that we have part­nered with a glob­al­ly ac­cred­it­ed or­gan­i­sa­tion that does im­ple­men­ta­tion for For­tune 500 com­pa­nies could with­stand that lev­el of scruti­ny. Let me al­so touch on what the tech­nol­o­gy brings so we have a ba­sic un­der­stand­ing of the tech­nol­o­gy it­self and us us­ing our da­ta as an or­gan­i­sa­tion as op­posed to the world-wide web of what a chat GPT us­es.

“So what the em­ploy­ee is go­ing to see is a dig­i­tal as­sis­tant to a chat bot. So this is the di­rect in­ter­face or the tool or the friend­ly tool with­in HR. So just imag­ine an em­ploy­ee wants to un­der­stand their de­vel­op­ment plan. They can ask the dig­i­tal as­sis­tant a very sim­ple ques­tion of what are the skill sets that they need in or­der to get in­to a lead­er­ship role...This is the en­gine that works in the back­ground in or­der to you know al­low the learn­ing pat­terns to hap­pen and for the in­sights to be de­liv­ered to the em­ploy­ee,” Mo­hammed fur­ther ex­plained.

Ad­dress­ing con­cerns that AI might cause un­ease among em­ploy­ees, Bowlah em­pha­sised that the tech­nol­o­gy is de­signed to sim­pli­fy work and en­hance ca­reer de­vel­op­ment with­in the ANSA McAL group. “It’s noth­ing to be fear­ful about. It’s some­thing em­brace and see it as a tool that is go­ing help you take your ca­reer to an­oth­er lev­el help you take your ex­pe­ri­ence to an­oth­er lev­el,” he re­it­er­at­ed.

Mo­hammed who echoed sim­i­lar sen­ti­ments said AI is not re­plac­ing the hu­man touch but would am­pli­fy­ing it.

"It's go­ing make HR more hu­man so that we could fo­cus on a strate­gic agen­da a bit more than we would have in the ad­min­is­tra­tive process of do­ing HR so it's go­ing to make us very fo­cused on that pur­pose dri­ven state­ment and agen­da," he added.