Christopher Lomas

Global HR consulting firm Mercer has a wealth of documented expertise and thought leadership at its disposal for consultants and clients alike, but it hasn’t always been easy to create, find, or manage this content. The organization’s natural growth and numerous acquisitions over the past decade and siloed product strategies led to a range of disparate tools and repositories that left a lot of colleagues frustrated—especially with the organization’s search capabilities. Mercer has overcome… Show more

Global HR consulting firm Mercer has a wealth of documented expertise and thought leadership at its disposal for consultants and clients alike, but it hasn’t always been easy to create, find, or manage this content. The organization’s natural growth and numerous acquisitions over the past decade and siloed product strategies led to a range of disparate tools and repositories that left a lot of colleagues frustrated—especially with the organization’s search capabilities. Mercer has overcome these challenges with the creation of the Mercer Brain—a federated index that makes searches faster, content easier to manage, and KM more cost effective. APQC interviewed Christopher Lomas, Artificial Intelligence Products Leader, and Lisa Weber, Knowledge Management Leader for the business units, about the evolution of the Mercer Brain and the benefits it has delivered to end users and the organization. Show less

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE has been defined as “a constellation of technologies that extend human capabilities by sensing, comprehending, acting and learning—allowing people to do much more”, but I find it helps if you break the actual words down a bit further: "Artificial": made or produced by human beings rather than occurring naturally, especially as a copy of something natural. "Intelligence": the ability to learn, understand, and make judgements or have opinions that are based on reason, data… Show more

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE has been defined as “a constellation of technologies that extend human capabilities by sensing, comprehending, acting and learning—allowing people to do much more”, but I find it helps if you break the actual words down a bit further: "Artificial": made or produced by human beings rather than occurring naturally, especially as a copy of something natural. "Intelligence": the ability to learn, understand, and make judgements or have opinions that are based on reason, data or experience. Now you can quickly see that every AI-enabled machine, robot, or computer system has a de-facto human parent and that it must be trained by data or experience... Show less

According to Lomas: “The biggest wins in artificial intelligence today are often discussed as those ‘narrow’ tasks in which humans would perform very poorly. A good example of this is evaluating large data sets. In the pensions industry there is a vast amount of data that is rarely activated. Artificial intelligence has the potential to highlight populations in employers’ schemes that will not be able to retire (due to insufficient savings), or those that will face other decisions, like what to… Show more

According to Lomas: “The biggest wins in artificial intelligence today are often discussed as those ‘narrow’ tasks in which humans would perform very poorly. A good example of this is evaluating large data sets. In the pensions industry there is a vast amount of data that is rarely activated. Artificial intelligence has the potential to highlight populations in employers’ schemes that will not be able to retire (due to insufficient savings), or those that will face other decisions, like what to do when saving in to a pension is no longer efficient. The loop then goes back to personalisation and education, to drive
new actions.” Show less