IBM and the HR Massacre
As predicted here, AI will destroy the HR departments
Barely a week ago, we predicted that AI would bring an end to the anti-productive nonsense of the social justice factories known as Human Resources departments creating corporate cancer from the inside. It turns out that the process has already begun and the charge is being led by the once-mighty computer giant, IBM.
IBM has used artificial intelligence to automate several human resources functions, replacing “a couple hundred” HR roles, said chief executive officer Arvind Krishna, according to a Wall Street Journal (WSJ) report. Krishna said the move allowed the company to hire more programmers and sales staff, as it reallocates resources toward areas driving growth.
The remarks come amid growing corporate adoption of AI agents (autonomous tools that can analyse spreadsheets, conduct research and draft emails), as companies explore the impact of generative AI on workforce dynamics.
“While we have done a huge amount of work inside IBM on leveraging AI and automation on certain enterprise workflows, our total employment has actually gone up, because what it does is it gives you more investment to put into other areas,” Krishna told WSJ.
The primary objective of AI integration, he said, is to improve operational efficiency by automating repetitive HR tasks such as employment verification and internal transfers.
What was that about a couple hundred HR employees? Make that a couple thousand, eight thousand, to be specific. And that level of change is coming to every other large company very soon, because IBM has productized the very efficiency whose benefits it is currently enjoying and making it available to other corporations.
IBM laid off 8,000 HR employees!!
Not for budget.
Not for performance.
They got replaced...by a chatbot.
That bot? It’s called AskHR, and it runs on IBM’s own Al engine: Watsonx Orchestrate.
- 94% of HR work, automated
- Pay, vacation, paperwork, even terminations
- $3.5B in “productivity gains”
- 40% drop in HR costs
IBM built the system that made these types of layoffs possible. Now they’re selling it to everyone else- packaged, no-code, enterprise-ready.
IBM calls it innovation.
Let’s call it what it is though ya'll... One of the first at-scale white-collar replacement experiment.
And it worked.
This is much better than simple outsourcing, because HR is, and has been for decades, not only inefficient at performing its core responsibilities, but has proven to be massively destructive by preventing corporations from performing their core functions, as explicated in the 2019 business book, Corporate Cancer, which specifically recommending eliminating HR departments as the primary root of social justice convergence in corporations.
It is very easy to demonstrate, social justice is bad for business. It is very bad for business. In fact, it is so bad for business that the more completely devoted the corporation is to social justice, the less able it is able to perform its primary function.
Convergence describes the degree to which an organization prioritizes social justice. There are five stages of convergence:
Infiltrated. The corporation has been entered by people devoted to social justice, but they do not have any significant influence or authority within the company. Employees are hired, fired, and promoted on the basis of either merit or connections. The marketing tends to reflect the company’s products and services.
Lightly Converged. The social justice infiltrators have begun to move into their preferred areas, such as Human Resources and Marketing, but they don’t have any real influence over the corporation’s policies or corporate strategies. The company starts to make occasional noises about “outreach” and “diversity”, but doesn’t actually change its employment practices. The marketing is still mostly about the company’s products, but increasingly features improbably diverse scenarios.
Moderately Converged. Social justice advocates now control Human Resources, which is used as a corporate high ground to exert influence over other departments as well as the executive team. The corporate marketing begins to devote more attention to signaling corporate virtue than selling its products. Managers are encouraged to hire diverse candidates and pressured to stop holding low-performance employees accountable. HR begins holding mandatory awareness sessions and hiring diversity consultants. The corporation’s customer service begins to go downhill.
Heavily Converged. Social justice advocates now control the corporate high ground and the strategic centers. Significant elements of the executive team and the board are devoted to social justice, often in a very public manner. Implicit hiring quotas are imposed and it becomes almost impossible to fire anyone for anything short of murder in the workplace. HR openly dictates corporate policy to employees, often without consulting the executives. The marketing materials not only signal corporate virtue, but openly advocate various social justice issues. The corporation shows indifference to its core customer base and begins to focus obsessively on new markets that mostly exist in its imagination.
Fully Converged. The corporation devotes significant resources to social causes that have absolutely nothing to do with its core business activities. Human Resources is transformed into a full Inquisition, imposing its policies without restraint and striking fear into everyone from the Chairman of the Board on down. The CEO regularly mouths social justice platitudes in the place of corporate strategies, and the marketing materials are so full of virtue-signaling and social justice advocacy that it becomes difficult to tell from them what the company actually does or sells. The corporation now shows open contempt for its customers.
It’s not the 40 percent reduction in HR costs that we’re seeing with IBM’s new implementation of AI control of traditional HR functions that is going to make the biggest difference going forward, but rather, the way in which AI prevents the possibility of bad human actors with their own agenda interfering with the objectives of the enterprise.
I'm glad I lived to see programmers finally get revenge on the misery that HR departments have been inflicting on us for decades.
The hilarious thing is that Google can’t do this, while IBM is now nimble and small enough to know not only that they need to automate their HR dept to survive, but to also realize they can sell their HR bots to other companies. On the other hand, Google has become as ossified as IBM was at their peak, but in a fraction of the time. Google delenda est.