He is HR Director at T-Systems, Telekom’s IT provider, and says: “The further development of chatbots will change our work to a large extent, it will be disruptive.”
Dusseldorf Whether it’s ChatGPT, Google Bard or Bing Chat: It’s been a long time since any technical innovation has sparked as many discussions as the new capabilities of chatbots. In the Handelsblatt interview, US investor Peter Thiel even spoke of perhaps the most important moment “since the market launch of the iPhone”.
There are already indications that the new technology will make some jobs obsolete. But what does it mean in concrete terms for a unit that is actually very close to people in most companies, the human resources department?
Georg Pepping has been labor director at the IT service provider T-Systems for more than ten years. In the current episode of Handelsblatt Rethink Work, he says in an interview with host Charlotte Haunhorst: “At the end of the day, it’s a shift in the interface between man and machine.” does not mean that human contact is no longer desired. “We don’t just hire employees, we hire people,” says Pepping.
Whether interviews take place in person or via video is of secondary importance as long as it is about communication between people. On the other hand, he sees a major change in recruiting. “In the past few years we have introduced things such as online tests to test technical skills, or psychological tests. If these are now more or less replaced by large-language models, the question is of course: Can I still trust them?” HR departments urgently need to develop new methods here – also to avoid falling for fakes.
In the current episode of Handelsblatt Rethink Work, he explains which technological developments people are still overoptimistic about from Georg Pepping’s point of view, which activities he personally would like to have more time for thanks to chatbots and why AI in particular will change further training massively.
More: You can hear the previous episode of Handelsblatt Rethink Work here