AI is a phrase you hear thrown out a lot. But most of what you hear isn’t really about artificial intelligence. It’s really not AI.

The promise of Talent Intelligence requires deep-learning AI. It can also be described as distributed neural networks.

This deep-learning AI requires a massive amount of data. It can involve more than a billion profiles of people, a large proportion of the working world. On top of that, really advanced machine learning is used to discover patterns in those profiles.

Let’s talk about four things AI can do.

First, AI helps us move beyond the long-standing over-reliance on resumes. AI can have a sense of our skills, even if we didn’t list them on our resumes, bios, or LinkedIn profiles.

Let’s say a company is looking to hire someone. The company wants someone who has a certain skill. But not everyone says in their resumes that they have that skill, even if they do. AI can determine that it’s highly likely that a certain person, based on where they’ve worked, when, and in what role, has that skill, even if it’s unsaid.

Second, AI can help us understand the differences between candidates, even if they had the same title.

Let’s say three people have all worked as product managers. One of them worked at Google, another Honeywell, and the third, Delta Airlines. The AI has examined the careers of so many people, and the skills people have, that it can actually know how one product manager job is different from another. It knows with a high degree of certainty that the person from Honeywell had certain types of skills that the Delta and Google people did not, or vice versa.

Third, AI can help companies hire for potential.

The most advanced AI can understand both a person’s skills and the skills needed to do each job. In the past, a company would write a job description and look for candidates who had done similar jobs. Now, companies can hire, as well as move people internally, based on the skills needed for a job, even if those people haven’t done that specific job before.

Fourth, AI can be very valuable in understanding adjacent skills. It can see that if someone knows Python, they are a great candidate to learn another computer language.

It’s the same with soft skills. Maybe a company is looking for someone who’s good at operating in a fast-paced environment. The AI may notice that someone’s resume doesn’t explicitly say that they thrive in fast-paced environments. There could be an adjacent skill, such as multitasking, that the person does have, that the AI recognizes as an indicator that someone excels in fast-paced environments.

The AI knows that people who were in a specific role, such as the head of a military unit, are very likely to have certain soft skills.

Only with a huge amount of data and advanced artificial intelligence can this be done. (NOTE: this sentence moved down)

This intelligence is embedded into every part of a Talent Intelligence Platform. It can be used on a career site to match people with a job that matches them, even if they haven’t done a job with that title. It can be used to build a pipeline of candidates for a recruiter or hiring manager, reducing bias and assumptions. It can be used by human resources to see who would fit in a new role that’s different from their current one, as well as to reduce layoffs by finding new work for people internally. And it can be used by employees to plan out their future career moves.

Artificial Intelligence can help unlock a person’s potential and ultimately transform how companies hire, manage, and develop their people.