Embracing AI for retail HR: Why you can’t afford to wait

I am or was a lateral CHRO — someone who ended up in the seat because I didn’t have a typical HR background. It was a bold move by my former boss, a CEO who hailed from Microsoft and believed that like any function, HR is measurable and should be measured.

My experience as a CHRO of a listed company was that people, whilst not on your balance sheet, are your most valuable asset but the experience of searching and selecting the right people was fraught with bias and inefficiency. Coming from a career of 10 years advising CEOs and Boards on business strategy, I learnt fast that the absence of data to measure HR impact or inform people decisions did not help in the cause of creating a more commercial HR function. It is no wonder that a recent global survey of CEO’s found inefficiencies in the hiring processes as one of the top 4 contributors to a US$10 trillion tax on productivity across organizations.

Fast forward 6 years and now the company I founded is helping some of the world’s most trusted retailers to leverage the power of ethical AI to achieve both people and business impact. AI in Retail is not just about delivering a faster status quo through automation. It touches bigger more strategic company challenges such as time to productivity of new hires, turnover, annualized cost of hiring and leadership pipelining. It can even increase revenue per store through better hiring.

Over the last 6 years we have had the privilege of working with many transformational retail HR leaders who adopted and optimised HR processes using AI. In this paper we share our learnings.
Many HR leaders are hesitant around the adoption of AI, as they are blinded by several myths. Myths about retail, myths about HR, and myths about AI. In the section “Myths that hold retail HR back”, we challenge 8 of
the biggest myths. We hope it will provoke your curiosity about the huge potential of AI, whether you’re a retail CEO, CHRO or HR business partner.

Dive in and feel free to get in touch with me if you want to know more about what AI can do for your people strategy.

Barb Hyman,

CEO, Sapia.ai