The Transformative Impact Of “Digital Twin Organizations”

If you haven’t heard of “digital twins”, it won’t be long before you do. More and more people, cities, and organizations, will be digitally “replicated” to help us make better decisions, answer difficult questions, and make more confident predictions. 

At SAP HR Connect in Riyadh (one of the first cities in the world to be turned into a “digital twin city”) our co-founder and president Sultan Saidov spoke about how digital twins can take on numerous forms… and the huge potential they have for people, business, and society.  

The power of a digital twin 👭

New research has shown that generative-AI powered “behavioral digital twins” can predict how someone would respond to an attitudinal survey with 85% accuracy, using just a 2-hour interview with those people as an input. 

As Sultan (and his “twin Sultans”) demonstrated, digital twins can be trained on previous speeches and publications in order to expertly answer on certain topics (in the way that person would). Reid Hoffman talks about training his digital twin on “books, speeches, articles, and podcasts that I’ve produced over the last 20 years” in order to “help me think differently, express myself in new ways, or connect ideas that I might not have otherwise”. 

They can also be trained on other inputs, to know things you don’t; they can understand and respond in multiple languages that you don’t actually speak; they can even take on synthetic data to become really intelligent, spotting patterns and making inferences a human wouldn’t. 

Going beyond a “personal digital twin”, you can create digital twins for cities, trained on data around traffic, buildings, and even the interiors of venues, to allow planners, businesses and governments to get answers to questions like “How much traffic will this road closure cause?” – before the closure happens.

“By constructing scenarios of real-world situations and outcomes, [digital twins] can provide insights that serve as an early-warning system, predicting events and the likelihood they will occur. They also provide a risk-free digital laboratory for testing designs and options, improving efficiency and time to market, for example, by optimizing scheduling, sequencing, and maintenance.” – McKinsey

Combined with the latest in generative AI, digital twins help businesses reduce costs and accelerate deployments, because they offer a really efficient way to test and learn. 

Digital Twin Organizations 🏢🏢

And we can now start using this same technology to make better workforce decisions. Just like the speeches used to build an individual’s digital twin, or the 3D models used for a city’s digital twin, all of our organizations and people – our work and our skills – can now be simulated, as a route to clearer insights and smarter predictions. 

You can now ask your “Digital Twin Organization” questions before committing to business plans or signing on new clients. You could ask “If we win this client project, could there be gaps in our team that we need to hire for?” and “If we need to launch this product next year, is there anyone in the company that we should train or redeploy based on their adjacent skills?”

The data that goes into training your Digital Twin Organization is similar to twin Riyadh and twin Sultans – it’s an analysis of the work and tasks that your people do, and how that compares to the work done across billions of other people and jobs. This is what enables the AI to create a ‘skills-based’ based simulation of your work environment – one that can give suggestions for how to optimize your People strategies to meet your business needs. 

Embracing change 💕

“Innovation can only lead to positive outcomes if human beings know how and when to adopt it. And adopting new technology takes time – to learn new tools, to change working habits, and to upskill yourself.” – Sultan Saidov

The past few years have been a great example of how the potential of new technologies is not unlocked overnight. Digital twins have already been around for a while, but very few people have started using them.

Most of our employees and teams are already ‘digitally assisted’ – increasingly, the ‘HR teams’ that work with our managers are part-digital: Talent Acquisition teams are using ‘sourcing agents’ to help populate candidates in their pipelines while they sleep; recruitment coordination is now being done by digital twins who can manage scheduling without human involvement; HR business partners are using co-pilots to write better job descriptions – and not just to save time, but to improve hiring outcomes.

But the Digital Twin Organization is not yet another new technology to learn and grapple with; it’s a tool that can help us unlock the power of other innovations; to accelerate their adoption and realize more value from them. 

The key is skills data 🔑

In order to get excellent results from a Digital Twin Organization, you need excellent data around the capabilities of your workforce and wider talent pool, and around the tasks involved in the work that needs to be done. 

This requires a shared language – skills. A way to describe people and tasks that can be gathered, normalized, validated and used at scale. 

If you want to use Digital Twins in HR to make everyone more productive and successful, you need data about people and work that you can trust. You also need AI, but AI alone is not enough: certainly, the “generative AI” we’ve seen over the past few years hasn’t been able to solve the problem of the incomplete and disconnected skills data we need, in order to model our ‘Digital Twin Organizations’. 

You require deep talent intelligence and a dynamic Job Architecture, based around skills. A connected HR data and AI ecosystem that allows you to continuously model the skills you have and need in your unique organizations.

What powers this is a “skills data flywheel”, in which AI skills inferences and labor market insights are continuously validated and refreshed in the context of your company’s daily talent and business decisions. AI can continuously learn and improve based on the reality of your specific business needs, and your own talent data – how you hire, which of your employees are successful, and so on. 

It’s worth noting that this data isn’t just useful for powering a Digital Twin Organization – skills intelligence is fast becoming the currency for any application of AI within HR. So it’s important to set up the skills data ecosystem properly, ensuring you have an integrated, single system of record for skills, which enables the AI models built on this data to be consistent.

Better AI in HR requires better skills data, and maintaining better skills data requires a new approach: where AI inferences are validated against a ‘total view’ of talent and job data: your employees, candidates and the labor market.

Transform how you work, and manage work 🚀

Without the skills data to support a “Digital Twin Organization”, to simulate plans and respond to new inputs in real time, supporting your leaders with an agile and effective workforce plan is impossible. Until now, we have had to juggle and reconcile different skills inventories and sources of truth for candidate, employee and market data. 

And that’s no longer the case. Connected AI and skills models will give you a continuously fresh, reliable and connected picture of the skills you need as your business transforms, as well as the skills you have access to across your organization and talent pipelines. 

HR teams can finally have the insights needed to run continuous planning, and be strategic advisors to their business. 

The outcome of connected skills intelligence (and the Digital Twin Organization this creates) will be transformational to every organization, enabling them to manage business risk, by managing talent risk, and to better govern the AI experiences they use within HR. 

“In the years ahead, this kind of forward looking help on making people decisions will likely evolve from the competitive advantage for early adopting HR teams that it is today, to an ethical necessity to help mitigate avoidable job losses and help guide both employees and managers across all businesses.” – Sultan Saidov

The promise of skills data and the Digital Twin Organization is no longer just on the horizon – it’s something you can get started with today. Will you embrace “a tool that can help companies to more ethically explore and make people decisions – to enable us, humans, to be the beneficiaries of the coming wave of innovation.”? 

Read more of Sultan’s thoughts on the year of the “Digital Twin Organization”.