As AI technology becomes a bigger part of the hiring process and as more people deal with a challenging job market, AI vendor Phenom revealed on Wednesday that it acquired Included, an AI-native agentic people analytics platform.
Phenom plans to use Included’s technology to be able to provide HR professionals and business leaders with more people analytics tools and actionable workforce insights on workforce deployment. The integration comes amid a job market in which many vendors are cutting jobs and attributing the layoffs to AI. Despite a rise in layoffs, some observers say AI and automation will only affect a small number of U.S. jobs. For example, a Forrester report out this week said AI will take only 6 % of jobs between now and 2030. For Phenom’s cofounder and CEO Mahe Bayireddi, the role of AI technology is to augment jobs and create new ones, as AI automates the most routine tasks. In this Q&A, Bayireddi addresses some concerns about automation and emphasizes the need for collaboration between AI and the workforce.
Many vendors are blaming layoffs on AI. Does that mean that AI will make everything automated?
Mahe Bayireddi: We constantly think about what can be automated in the workflow, what can be augmented, and what can be agentic. Those are the three elements that we look at in a workflow. What we have seen is that the complete end-to-end automation is not feasible anywhere.
But in the frontline jobs, in recruiting and talent acquisition, especially, you can do 70 to 80% of automation. The end-to-end automation is not possible, but the middle parts of the workflow can be automated. That’s where we automate based on the type of the job, the location it belongs to, and also what industry it really falls into. That combination determines where in the flow you will do automation and augmentation effectively so that you can improve the productivity of the overall HR teams, so that the candidate experience is better, the employees’ experience is better, and the manager and leader experiences are better in the overall people ecosystem.
It’s interesting to hear you say that not everything can be automated. What about the current climate in which multiple companies are replacing workers because of AI?
Bayireddi: I’ll give you a couple of examples of how we think about this.
Ten years back, people used to predict that the radiology job would be gone. But the demand for radiologists today is high. The reason is that the price of CT scans, MRIs, and other imaging tests has actually dropped dramatically. On top of it, we have an aging population. So, because of that combination, what happened is the number of scans we’re doing actually quadrupled. Even though AI automated 30%, the other 70% has to be handled by a human. Because of that the radiologist’s job actually morphed into a new job,
If the cost of a particular service plummets and the volume of usage for that service increases, the job will change at a fundamental level. A new job is going to really open up, and that is the opportunity we are seeing for every job family that we work with. Some job families will be completely eliminated, and others that we never anticipated are popping up.
If that is true, what is then causing this elimination of jobs that is being attributed to AI technology?
Bayireddi: Our primary point of view is that we are in a reset of work.
We are resetting the overall system of how work is actually happening. AI is taking certain tasks, what a human can do. And there are tasks that a machine can do that a human has to take.
Because of that, you see certain job families that are really shrinking, but not everywhere.
So, if you take knowledge workers, we are seeing a lot of replacements, such as developers and programmers. We are also seeing this in call centers and customer support, where AI can help.
The third area, where it is also really helpful to such an extent, is assisting doctors and nurses. But it’s not eliminating them. Doctors and nurses cannot be eliminated, but AI can assist. If you really look at an average doctor, half the time they look at the patient, and the other half is, how should the patient get billed? But if you see the jobs in frontline use cases, people who work in retail or nursing or people who work in manufacturing, those jobs are not going anywhere, because robotics are not that advanced. Only the knowledge worker space is where we are seeing job replacement. But the rest is still wide open. The market is tight, and it depends on which job you are really looking for and what is the impact of the AI on that particular job. All jobs from our perspective are not equally impacted by AI.
You just acquired Included. Where do people analytics fit in this relationship between automation and the job reset?
Bayireddi: The primary point right now, in people analytics, we have to understand which pieces can be automated, which pieces have to be augmented, which pieces have to be manual. For that, you have to have a very clear understanding of the data.
Included AI is an agentic infrastructure for people analytics, which can convert into actionable workforce insights so that every HR professional, every business leader, every people leader can understand how their people are deployed. And what are actionable insights they should focus on with the people, so that they can grow in the company, or really bring new people into the company, or change their fundamental jobs, what they’re really doing.
Because people in HR can move into finance, finance people can go into tech, tech can really move into marketing, marketing can move into sales. All these kinds of transitions will happen. Analytics are the fundamental ecosystem to understand, to be able to create a diagnostic process where the bottlenecks are and how people can be really moved, and the velocity of optimizing productivity.
Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for clarity and conciseness.
