How does it compare to AI, machine learning, and big data?

- There are many levels of technology and domains within people analytics. And so let me just quickly explain what some of these are so you understand these concepts. The fundamental sort of building block is usually surveys. So one of the most common places where you have data about your people is the annual survey, the poll survey, the exit survey, the new candidate survey, the onboarding survey, so all that survey data. So the first thing you're going to do in people analytics is you're going to look at that data and make sense of it and get enough of it that it's reliable. One of the potential mistakes you can make as people analytics is looking at one survey and drawing a very broad conclusion without making sure that it's actually statistically valid. Now, beyond that, as more and more data becomes available in your HR department and you feel comfortable with the quality of the data, you're going to be looking at more sophisticated analysis. Does this particular answer to this survey correlate to sales productivity or turnover? Or some other business measure. Or customer satisfaction in a hospital, for example. Hospitals now know that data about employee happiness has a direct correlation to actually patient outcomes, which is a pretty significant issue. So you're going to do correlations, and so some background in statistics and understanding what a correlation is is going to be part of your job. And as that progresses and you get better and better at it, there's more sophisticated mathematical techniques which fall into the domain of AI and machine learning. Machine learning is a term that really refers to algorithms that can predict the future based on data that you already have. AI is really a broader phrase that really encompasses statistics, machine learning, cognitive software, which actually can speak languages, and then it's now being used to talk about visual representation, understanding facial expressions, all these other ideas that are now reaching the consumer. At some point, I wouldn't be surprised if we have cameras at work that look at people's faces and can tell you at the end of a meeting if it was a happy meeting or not. I'm not saying that's happening yet, but I have a feeling companies are playing with that. So you'll probably going to have an opportunity as a people analytics specialist or engineer or manager to move into some of these advanced technologies over time. It's amazing to me as I meet with HR departments around the world how quickly they're trying to adapt some of these new technologies to the office. So all of that is going to be part of this domain. But you don't have to understand all of it to get started.