Testimony of Silvano Sansoni, General Manager of IBM France and responsible for IBM sales worldwide.
What is artificial intelligence?
Artificial intelligence is a wonderful promise for our generation and those to come. The most appropriate way to talk about artificial intelligence would be to talk about "augmented intelligence". We call it that at IBM. Let's take the example of a dermatologist: today, he identifies about 80% of the cases of melanoma, cancer, in a patient. By using augmented intelligence, we can reach 85%. By combining human knowledge and augmented intelligence, we finally reach 95%. It is the complementarity between machine and man that makes the integrated value of artificial intelligence.
How to use artificial intelligence?
In the world of artificial intelligence, the characteristics and skills that you need to have are above all a general culture, an ability to be curious, adaptable, work with agility and be collaborative. This is what we call soft skills. As far as technical skills are concerned, I think that the "digital natives" will have a boulevard in front of them, since they already have these abilities almost innately.
How can I learn about artificial intelligence?
In today's world of artificial intelligence, we see that the employee is becoming more and more augmented. This means that he will focus on critical missions, and everything that concerns automatic and repetitive tasks will be done by artificial intelligence. With clients where we deploy augmented intelligence, we are actually seeing the creation of new value-added jobs. This is where the optimistic promise of artificial intelligence lies. For people who want to retrain in digital/digital, we have a collaboration with non-governmental organizations, to offer courses on digital, in collaboration with Open classrooms. These courses build a kind of skeleton that allows the individual concerned to approach the new position in digital with confidence.
How to avoid bias in recruitment, career management, and compensation?
To avoid bias in recruitment in a process of implementing cognitive or augmented intelligence, it is already important to have a mass of historical data, to organize and process it well to avoid cognitive bias as much as possible. For a Human Resources Director, there are two areas where artificial intelligence can bring real added value. The first is talent management: it is about retaining talent and giving them fulfilling external opportunities. On the other hand, concerning the management of skills throughout the employee's life, for example, at IBM, we are setting up a virtual coach that allows people to learn with very interactive tools, but also to experiment and play with the technologies.
So what will be the place of artificial intelligence in 5 years?
In IBM's Research department, we have the "Five in Five", i.e. the 5 innovations that will generate technological upheavals over the next 5 years. These upheavals will become more widespread for two reasons. On the one hand, a better understanding of natural language, and on the other, a correction of cognitive biases, which will be deployed thanks to the Cloud - essential for universal access to data, and Quantum - a new form of computing that enables millions of data to be exploited, while remaining extremely vigilant as regards the computing power used.
