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This article is part of "Workforce Innovation," a series exploring the forces shaping enterprise transformation.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion programs have become the subject of a heated, politicized debate over the past few years.

Several major corporations, including John Deere, Microsoft, and Molson Coors, have made headlines recently for rolling back their DEI initiatives.

Meanwhile, Walmart, the world's largest retailer, announced it would no longer use the acronym in its communications and would not extend its Center for Racial Equity, a nonprofit established in 2020 with a five-year, $100 million commitment to address racial disparities.

Even so, as we've reported in this series, many companies remain committed to the values of DEI — but are shifting their strategies for a new era. Whatever the motivation of the companies, it's clear that DEI is undergoing a period of change.

Business Insider asked its Workforce Innovation board to participate in a roundtable to discuss how DEI programs are evolving. We wanted to find out what structural changes are happening, how companies can continue to build trust with employees, and what role artificial intelligence is poised to play.

The consensus around the virtual table was that the focus of the DEI story is shifting to business outcomes and the skills needed to achieve them. "We can't do it the old way," Purvi Tailor, the vice president of human resources at Ferring Pharmaceuticals, said. "We have to have the conversation in a new way. It becomes much more about inclusion and changing mindsets and creating awareness about your own biases."

Skills-based hiring is one way companies are working to identify diverse candidates organically. "Let's focus on the skills that are required for the future of work and what we are looking for from leaders in our company," Maggie Hulce, the chief revenue officer at Indeed, said. "And then be more consistent in the application of holding that bar."

By homing in on the skills organizations need to succeed and how to use AI tools to help surface in-house talent, companies could move the DEI story away from conflicts and focus on its benefits.

"It dismisses this notion that you have to lower the bar if you want diversity in your organization," said Spring Lacy, the global head of talent acquisition and DEI at Verizon. "We've got lots of super smart, super skilled people of color, women, people with disabilities, LGBTQI community, who just aren't seen for all of the biases that you talked about. You don't have to lower the bar."

Roundtable participants included:

• Anant Adya, executive vice president, service offering head, and head of Americas Delivery, Infosys
• Lucrecia Borgonovo, chief talent and organizational effectiveness officer, Mastercard
• Chris Deri, president, Weber Shandwick Collective
• Maggie Hulce, chief revenue officer, Indeed
• Spring Lacy, vice president, chief talent acquisition and diversity officer, Verizon
• Purvi Tailor, vice president of human resources, Ferring Pharmaceuticals USA

Here are six key takeaways from the discussion.

Skills-based hiring, supercharged with AI tools, helps companies find 'hidden figures'

Skills-based hiring is a strategy that some companies are using to identify candidates and reduce bias in the hiring process. The approach focuses on the skills needed to fulfill the role, minimizing qualifications like college degrees or previous job titles.

With artificial intelligence, talent leaders can accelerate the hiring process and uncover strong candidates within their companies that they might have missed before.

Lacy, who was previously an HR leader at Prudential, said AI is empowering existing employees to showcase their abilities more effectively.

"When went to recruit internally, and we pulled people based on the skills profile and not based on proximity bias or any other bias, our slates were inherently more diverse," Lacy said.

The critical piece for companies is to figure out the best way to capture an accurate and comprehensive view of employees' skills.

Verizon uses the Workday HR platform and is piloting a program with its partner company, Censia, that uses an AI tool to help employees craft their profiles.

Lacy has seen how difficult it can be for employees to isolate their skills in ways that might help them be identified for new opportunities. "When we said to employees, 'Go build a skills profile,' the page was blank," she said. "It was really hard for people to get started." AI tools can pull information from a range of sources and serve up a framework that guides employees through the process.

Mastercard has launched an employee-skills initiative with the software company Gloat. "It has been a really great way to democratize access to opportunities for employees," said Lucrecia Borgonova, Mastercard's chief talent and organizational effectiveness officer.

The outcome for companies can be a more diverse talent pool from inside the house.

Lacy said Verizon is conscious of the potential for bias in the AI programs, but early indicators suggest that more individuals are being considered for roles than in the past.

"We are uncovering hidden figures in this organization because there are people who we don't know, because they are not well networked, they don't have sponsors," Lacy said. "If not for this technology, we wouldn't have known that they were there, to be able to lift them and perhaps provide them with other opportunities."

Leaning into the 'I' of DEI — inclusion

DEI programs have many aspects, including employer branding and attracting a diverse talent pool, screening and hiring, and compensation.

Inclusion relates to a person's workplace experience and their sense of belonging at an organization, which research suggests makes people want to join and stay at a company. Benefits are an essential part of that employee experience, and companies may want to think about how these packages reflect their values to staffers and prospects alike.

Ferring Pharmaceuticals introduced a program in 2022 that includes unlimited financial support for creating a family — through IVF, adoption, surrogacy, or birth — for all employees, regardless of gender or sexual orientation.

Ferring's Tailor said it is one way that the company emphasizes its approach to its entire workforce.

"We talk about more of the 'I' than we do about the 'D' and the 'E,'" Tailor said. "We do it to show the kind of culture and working environment that we want to have. It's all about inclusion and bringing your whole self to the workplace."

Linking AI tools with culture and leadership

As companies develop new hiring strategies, culture does not stand still.

"Inclusion and belonging are essential parts of the culture, the value proposition, and key to driving the outcomes of our business," said Mastercard's Borgonovo. "It's really important that we drive shared accountability across our 34,000 employees around the role that each of us has to collectively play in creating this culture of inclusion where everybody feels that they can belong."

Borgonovo said that Mastercard is exploring ways to leverage AI to help business leaders across the organization improve efficiency and be more intentional about DEI and other workforce goals.

"How do we enable people, leaders, from an automation or efficiency standpoint? How do we help them be more proactive?" she said. "How do we help them create more bandwidth by automating certain processes so then they have more time to coach and develop their teams."

She said the company is exploring how AI can be used to coach leaders to role-play and get feedback on how they engage with their teams. "AI can be your coach, your copilot, and help augment your leadership," she said.

Ditching the DEI silo

Indeed's Hulce said a lot of time goes into optimizing the company's structure. "How do you make it the norm that equity needs to be built into processes, period," she said.

It's not just about interviewing and hiring diverse candidates, but about leading teams through every opportunity and decision, including promotions, performance bonuses, and assignments.

"How do you measure that? How do have regular conversations with managers at different levels in the organization about the expectation that we will be looking at equity in all of these steps," Hulce said.

Indeed once had a DEI team that worked parallel to the HR function. But when the previous HR leader left the company, they decided to reorganize and embed the DEI discipline across the business, elevating the previous head of DEI to chief people officer.

Hulce said realigning DEI was essential to scaling goals, standards, and accountability across the company. "It's almost an impossible task to ask a separate group to influence everybody else unless it's built into core processes somehow," she said.

Infosys is also considering its optimal DEI structure. "We are slightly decentralized," Anant Adya, an executive vice president, said. The global company has a centralized corporate DEI team, with DEI councils at the individual industry units. Adya said the company will leverage AI tools to help measure effectiveness.

Hulce emphasized the need to regularly and consistently review management decisions. "It can't be just once a year," she said. "You evaluate, you check, and if there's a correction to be made, you say, 'OK, guys, something looks amiss.' The expectation is we will be following equitable processes."

Using AI to scrutinize hiring, while retaining the human touch

Adya said Infosys is using AI to analyze patterns in its hiring data.

"It is very important to look at and analyze the data based on how hiring patterns are being used and if there is any bias in the hiring process itself," he said.

AI will grow increasingly important in analyzing the efficacy of various recruitment sources. "A lot of times we see that employee referrals actually work the best," he said. "But that might not be true when it comes to specific DEI initiatives."

By enlisting AI tools to analyze online sources, university partnerships, and other talent alliances and platforms the company is using, Adya said it should be able to optimize its approach around specific goals.

But all the AI analysis in the world does not negate the need for the human touch. Adya said that sometimes there's a perception at the company that hiring is being done only to hit certain DEI benchmarks and that the process is too onerous.

Adya said that hosting a "clear dialogue" about the company's decision-making process around recruitment methodology has helped employees understand the company's rationale.

"It's always better to sit down and explain why this is critical for the unit and why it is important," he said. "Sometimes open dialogues, going back to the old school, not using AI or gen AI, but just sitting and talking and removing that uncertainty and lack of transparency helps a lot."

Leveraging AI-powered insights to change the DEI story

Proponents of DEI maintain that a diverse, inclusive workplace yields better business results, and there are studies that also support that view.

Opponents of DEI, said Chris Deri, the president of Weber Shandwick's corporate advisory business, tend to focus on the methodology of achieving workplace diversity, such as companies actively seeking women for leadership positions, seemingly at the expense of male candidates.

"That's what DEI opponents are focused on," Deri said. "Like, how do you pull together a candidate pool, like having women candidates somehow be seen to be at the front of the line."

Deri said that companies should work to shift the perspective to DEI outcomes and tangible business benefits — and should leverage artificial intelligence to surface insights that might not be obvious.

"AI can do that in a way that human knowledge management and analysis is not going to be able to do," Deri said. "We can use the power of AI to look across our enterprises' data and knowledge and start to collect the outputs and outcomes of the principles of applying DEI. "

Deri said that if a large language model can be trained on the outcomes, such as attracting new customers, creating new products, and building community trust, "that might be something that uses technology to help the storytelling about DEI. We really need to change the entire story now."