Transformation doesn’t stop with technology. Workplace culture is changing as businesses move into the digital era, and many people will admit to uncertainty about having the skill set required for future work.

“I think the boots on the ground, they’re very hungry … because they understand what’s coming on,” said Beth Rudden (pictured), distinguished engineer and principal data scientist at IBM. “They’ve listened to the messages; they’re ready.”

Rudden spoke with Dave Vellante, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the IBM Chief Data Officer Summit in San Francisco. They discussed how IBM is using digital era intelligence to “upskill” its workforce (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

Workforce transformation through cognitive AI

IBM is using digital-era intelligence to help solve the skills gap.

“My role is to infuse workforce transformation with cognitive artificial intelligence,” Rudden said. “Apply[ing] artificial intelligence and natural language processing … is instrumental in being able to see human beings in a lot more dimensions.”

Those dimensions enable Rudden and her team to identify internal candidates who best match the skill set required to solve a problem or who have the aptitude and passion to develop the required skills. These employees are then sent through very specific training classes to make their skills a perfect match for job needs. In this way IBM can “upscale and rescale the entire workforce,” Rudden said.

Diversity is important for AI

Alongside internal “repurposing” of employees, IBM hires with a focus on diversity. Rudden’s team includes two high-school age interns, and she runs women’s and LGBTQ+ groups. IBM has a long history of inclusivity in the workforce, and the aim is more mathematical than political correctness. Searching for accurate information requires a wide variance of thought, Rudden explained.

“The wider your variance, the more standard your mean. It’s actually a mathematical theorem, so this is something that is part of our truth,” she said.

Coming up with unbiased, ethical and explainable AI is possible. It’s just hard. “I think that a lot of people want to reach for machine learning … without really understanding the context of the data,” Rudden said.

Viewing data as “an artifact of a human behavior” is critical for understanding the process of artificial intelligence, according to Rudden. “Human behaviors put data in places, or human behaviors create machines to put data in places. All of this can be understood if we look at it in a little bit of a different way,” she said.

Success is “being able to get [accurate] information to the right people at the right time, and give people a path so that they know that they’re all in the boat together, all rowing together, in order to make our client successful,” Rudden said.

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the IBM Chief Data Officer Summit. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the IBM Chief Data Officer Summit. Neither IBM, the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE