AI will not replace workers, says Workday’s tech chief
AI will aid workers, not replace them, Workday’s chief technology officer for Asia Pacific and Japan, Damian Leach stressed in an interview with The Nation during a recent trip to Bangkok.
Machine learning is great for surfacing insight and helping with complex decision-making. But it shouldn't be making decisions on behalf of us,” he added.
Leach, who is currently based in Singapore and has lived in Southeast Asia for 19 years, talked in depth about how companies can use AI and machine learning (ML) in the workplace in the most effective ways.
“We believe that by adopting machine learning and moving to a skills-based economy, organisations can really harness their existing talent,” the CTO said.
Workday has implemented AI technologies for a variety of workplace solutions including people analytics, workforce analysis, labour optimisation, learning recommendations, scheduling, and candidate matches.
“We've got something called a career hub, which allows the organisation to advertise jobs and the skills they demand internally. Applicants understand that if they don't have the necessary skills for those jobs, the system can trigger a learning plan using machine learning to guide them through the next step of their career journey,” he explained.
This is made possible by the company’s single data model, which it uses for all customers and which is trained with federated machine learning.
“This puts Workday in a unique position when it comes to providing solutions using AI and ML. We have 60 million employees that we manage under our platform. As a result of that, we’re extremely focused on our data. The single data model allows us to create trust in the data we have in our platform,” he said.
“We process around 3.1 billion transactions daily, which means that our AI and ML are extremely powerful and accurate,” he added.
As for potential ethical and privacy concerns, Leach said that service users can choose what data they want to share since the global ML model uses data that users are willing to share. This is solved through federated machine learning which supports ML based on the customer’s data and also benefits from the global models.
Workday is committed to the ethical use of AI, avoiding the development of intrusive productive monitoring and opting instead for job-relevant skill solutions that enable personalised experiences, he stressed.
“Machine learning models are built to elevate human performance, not to displace it, which is why we talk about the human in the middle of those decisions,” he reiterated.
Many Thai customers have already benefited from their AI services. Bangchak, a Thai energy conglomerate, was able to simplify and optimise their processes with Workday’s help.
A study conducted by the company, the Digital Agility Index, found that 91% of surveyed Thai organisations are still lagging in digital agility despite opportunities to accelerate their digital transformation during the Covid-19 pandemic.
“We’re excited to support Thai customers on their journey of moving to the cloud, simplifying their data strategy, and adopting ML capabilities,” he said.
“In Thailand, human capital management is the software capability we have available right now. We do have finance, but that's in the roadmap for release into Thailand.”
Workday is a leading provider of enterprise cloud applications for finance and human resources. It currently serves about 10,000 customers globally, covering a wide range of demands from the banking, finance, healthcare, government, education, and tech industries. Among these are 70% of Fortune 50 and 50% of Fortune 500 customers. In the Asia Pacific region including such well-known firms as AirAsia, Agoda, Gojek, SCB, and Accenture.
