Deepa Subbaiah: Human skills that matter most in the digital enterprise

Every organization investing in artificial intelligence should never lose sight of one constraint: Capturing value from the technology ultimately comes down to the skills of people tasked with using it.

With two decades of experience as a human resources leader, Deepa Subbaiah, a senior director for HR at Freshworks, has deep expertise in exploring how enterprise teams can get the most out of workplace tech, from first-generation SaaS applications in the early 2000s to today’s AI-powered chatbots.

Every day, knowledge workers are teaming up in new ways with intelligent machines. Subbaiah believes those who excel in four core abilities will thrive in the digitally driven enterprise.

Organizations will benefit from these skills in other ways, too, she adds. “Create passion and enthusiasm in-house [for AI], and in that way you will be able to identify future leaders.” 

A human understanding of the technology

For companies to maximize the business value of AI, employees must be able to communicate effectively about the technology. That doesn’t mean getting certifications in deep learning or mastering natural language processing. It means communicating clearly to colleagues about the strategic value that AI offers to the business.

“People need to take the enigma out of AI and make it human,” Subbaiah says. “We should speak a language [for AI] that creates understanding and excitement in all kinds of people without making it seem complicated and difficult to understand,” she adds. “Make it appealing and relevant to me.”

One job with that kind of focus is an analytics translator—an enterprise role that emerged several years ago for data experts adept at decoding insights from AI and data science teams into relevant and relatable insights for business and product teams. 

Business acumen

In-depth knowledge of market dynamics, product-market fit, and understanding your customer have always been essential business skills, but they’re especially critical in the AI era, says Subbaiah. 

Employees need to “understand the customer’s need, how to develop respect and understanding of the business, and tailor-make a product that the customer wants,” she says. 

A developer creating an AI app can’t assume their company has unlimited access to the datasets of commercial large language models. The product has to be designed in ways that are affordable to the customer and profitable for the company. 

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“If your AI capability in the product is going to cost the customer additional money but won’t bring them that much more profitability,” that’s not going to work, says Subbaiah. Their response will likely be: “It's a brilliant solution, but it's too expensive.”

Individual and organizational agility 

AI will change how organizations work, and different functions will evolve accordingly. Companies must foster cultures where workers embrace, not resist, new processes and organizational change. Roles and teams will change, in most cases for the better. 

Leaders need to be nimble, Subbaiah says, and ask an important question of themselves: “How are you willing to change the way your organization works, thinks, and operates to create a great environment for AI and its applications to thrive?”

The urgency to adopt AI is forcing rapid change. “We are in a transition from incorporating AI here and there to where it is essential for success.” 

Deep appreciation of data 

The people driving innovation in any organization have to be passionate about data and its possibilities. 

Workers with “a keen interest in the beauty of numbers,” Subbaiah says, will more readily grasp the underlying pattern recognition at the core of AI and be able to exploit it more effectively. 

“We need people with a natural affinity for statistics, data patterns, and forecasting,” she says. “If you start with that deep understanding, then you can use AI to do much more at a larger scale.” 

Along these lines, predictive analytics is one field destined for AI-powered growth. User-friendly implementations have expanded the popularity of these tools—whether that be leveraging historical data and AI to maximize sales or conducting predictive maintenance on capital-intensive manufacturing equipment. 

While an ongoing labor and skills shortage will challenge many HR departments in the coming years, business leaders needn’t obsess over winning the war for talent. “Companies are running this [talent] race like it’s a sprint,” says Subbaiah. “I consider it more of a marathon. It’s not about being the fastest—it’s who can stay the longest.”

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