Unlocking the power of AI in HCM: Yvette Cameron, SVP, Oracle

Artificial Intelligence is transforming the way organizations manage human capital, from hiring and workforce planning to payroll and employee engagement. Oracle is at the forefront of this evolution, integrating AI-driven solutions into its Cloud HCM suite to help businesses optimize talent management and HR processes. In this interview, Yvette Cameron, Senior Vice President of Oracle’s Cloud HCM Product Strategy, discusses how AI is reshaping HR, eliminating bias in recruitment, and improving workforce efficiency. She also shares insights into Oracle’s latest advancements in payroll, benefits management, and the future of AI-driven automation in human capital management.

Excerpts:

DQ: We are seeing a major shift towards skills-based hiring, moving away from traditional metrics like degrees and past experience. How does AI assist organizations in identifying and mapping skill gaps within their workforce?

Yvette Cameron: I am so excited by this shift in the industry. Hiring people based on a particular degree that they hold or a school they went to or companies they worked for is actually fraught with bias. So, hiring based on skills is a stupendous focus. How does AI help? It helps in every way possible. From uncovering hidden skills, AI's capability is to look at the skills that are in a job description or the skills that a candidate presents when applying for a job and can extrapolate from those skills, can infer other skills that are probably held but not declared. They can be leveraged to match those candidates to jobs, to mentors, to projects, and capabilities. So, AI is there to identify, to infer skills, to support in planning for the workforce, and to really help ensure that we are hiring and retaining the best people.

A big challenge for organizations that want to do skill-based hiring is they don't understand the proper language around the skills that they should be using. Where should we start? Are we starting with a skills library? We've got skills in our job descriptions, but when were those job descriptions written? An industry like healthcare is a little easier because the skills and the certifications you need are well understood and they have to be managed every year. But in other areas, skills are changing quickly. They're oftentimes turning over every four or five years. AI can build an ontology, a dynamic ontology of skills and adjacent skills so that as you both write job descriptions and match candidates and hire for skills, it's constantly updated with the latest and greatest language. Suddenly, HR doesn't have to be an expert in skills language. The AI takes that on for them. So, it's fundamental to hiring for skills and AI approach and it's everything from the ontology to matching to predicting what's needed in the future.

DQ: How can an organization ensure that they are doing fair hiring and they are practicing fair hiring processes and also eliminating biases in the recruitment process? Also, how does Oracle at HCM leverage AI-driven insights to help businesses predict employee turnover and implement proactive retention?

Yvette Cameron: At Oracle, we use AI to not only deliver a skills library, a seeded skills library, but we use AI to constantly enrich it and we enrich it based on new skills data that's coming into the organization. It might come in through the resumes of candidates. It might come in through new skills language that people are putting into their job descriptions. It also naturally comes in through transactions. As I'm writing a performance review and I'm saying that this particular employee has demonstrated XYZ skills, that skills data is captured automatically in Oracle's approach to AI. And so, this ontology, this understanding of skills, where they're used in the organization, the prevalence of skills, the importance of skills is constantly understood because it's all in one uniform, single database and leveraged at every part of the organization. So, the skills-related transaction in learning, what are people taking, what are the skills they're developing, can automatically feed into the skills gaps and understanding we use when we are recruiting people. We understand what we have, we understand what we're building, we understand still what we need.

This idea that training your skills on one database isn't the way that skills should be managed and our approach at Oracle is to keep it very dynamic, constantly refreshed, and not just trained on some library, but constantly learning from the skills wherever they're being leveraged and identified across all of your workforce processes, not just in hiring and in writing a job description.

DQ: AI chatbots and virtual assistants are being rapidly integrated into the HR processes or HR systems. Oracle have also come up with an AI HCM agent. Can you explain how these AI tools provide a human-centric experience, a personal employee experience?

Yvette Cameron: As an industry, we've been using chatbots in our applications for years. When you think about chatbots, they have to be programmed so that it will give an answer based on multiple ways that question could be asked.  Agents, AI, generative AI agents are trained on a large corpus of information  and they don't need to be pre-programmed on the way questions are going to be asked or answered.  That's the intelligence and the excitement  that we can now, through agents, interact with that technology a question and response format,  and yet in a very conversational way.

Additionally, at Oracle,  not only do we deliver these AI agents,  but they deliver the context that's necessary. So, the ability to ingest corporate policies, the ability to understand the HCM data,  the people, the salaries, the job, the hierarchy,  the job structures, organization, the benefit elections, the pay people have, etc, so that when I am interacting and asking questions, the guidance, the response that I'm receiving from the agent  is highly personalized.

That comes because it understands the policies for that job of what that person's eligible for, it understands all that corporate data. And oftentimes, getting that kind of support, highly personalized, based on the particular offer I'm making and on my company's data, would have required calls to HR, and a service ticket.

It's a very different experience that only comes when you move beyond just traditional gen-AI of authoring and summarizing text, and you move beyond the digital assistant, pre-programmed question and response to having the context of all the data to be very personalized.

DQ: Can we discuss the latest advancements that Oracle has made in the HR functions, like payroll, benefit management, and workforce analytics?

Yvette Cameron: We deliver four releases a year at Oracle, and that's across HCM and all of our other Fusion applications, hundreds of new innovations. Specifically in those areas of payroll and benefits and workforce management, of course, agents feature prominently. Today we have announced 12  HCM AI agents in HR at Oracle CloudWorld Tour.  We first introduced about nine or so last September, and now in HCM, we are identifying another 12 agents. It's just a subset of the almost two dozen agents that we have in our application, and you'll see in that press release things like a benefits assistant, a payroll explainer.

Innovation that helps the employee just ask and answer what's different in their paycheck. Why is their paycheck less or more? Why are their taxes higher? Guidance for the manager on scheduling. We have an agent for workforce scheduling, part of workforce management, so that if there are gaps or overtime that they're trying to resolve, the agent will guide them through their options legally according to union contracts, according to company policy very quickly. Here's how you can overcome this overtime balance, for example. AI, of course, features prominently, but also from the other perspective of innovation. We've introduced in the last year India payroll, an entirely new payroll for India that, while it's new for the region, is based on our global payroll platform that has 10 years of experience, delivers pay for 60 million people, so a very robust proven capability, but the localization is new here.

DQ: What is Oracle's long-term vision for the intersection of AI automation and human capital management?

Yvette Cameron: AI, as it continues to evolve, and we are already working on what I call the third generation of AI, generative AI. The first generation was AI assistant. The second generation is AI agents. The third generation is autonomous workflows managed by multiple agents working together. And that's a huge vision in itself, that you can have autonomous workflows that check in with employees, with managers, with users as appropriate, but basically a digital expert managing different parts of the process, checking in with individuals as necessary, but managing it end-to-end. That's huge. I think, ultimately, if you're interacting with agents more, you will probably interact with the actual user experience of the software less. If an agent is going to find candidates so that you can hire a new employee, do you even need to go into the software anymore and post the job or do different things? The agent can do that for you. Fundamentally, AI is going to change the way we interact with software.