What AI Is Doing For, and To, the Humans in the People Function

HR functions will play a key role in overseeing AI usage throughout the organization. This responsibility has huge ramifications for HR professionals and nearly all of the functional pillars within HR.

The challenge: HR leaders need a firm grasp of how AI can transform HR processes and positions, an understanding of their team’s AI concerns, and a strategy for upskilling HR professionals to thrive in AI-empowered roles.

The potential: The AI-driven innovations that an organization produces may generate transformations whose magnitude rivals that of the Industrial Revolution. For that to occur, HR also will need to be AI savvy.

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The “source for any real advantage in AI will come from the expertise of . . . employees, which is needed to unlock the expertise latent in AI,” asserts Wharton Associate Professor Ethan Mollick in his widely read artificial intelligence (AI) email newsletter. I couldn’t agree more, which is why I also believe that HR functions will play a key role in overseeing AI usage throughout the organization. While HR’s AI ownership will vary by company, this responsibility has huge ramifications for HR professionals and nearly all of the functional pillars within HR.

We already see companies not only moving forward with AI centers of excellence (COEs) overseen by the HR function, but also considering assigning responsibility to the CHRO (direct or dotted-line) for leading the use of AI throughout the organization.

While that may surprise some, it makes perfect sense given the HR function’s ownership of sensitive employee data and AI’s potentially transformative impacts on HR operations. AI will help HR perform its traditional blocking and tackling more effectively and efficiently, freeing HR professionals to delve deeper into strategic activities.

For this to occur, HR leaders need a firm grasp of how AI can transform HR processes and positions, an understanding of their team’s AI concerns, and a strategy for upskilling HR professionals to thrive in AI-empowered roles. AI skills – which involve more cognitive and social competencies than one might expect – need to become second nature very quickly. This will be a challenge in HR groups with high numbers of tactical roles and HR professionals who are resistant to change.

Virtual agents, resume parsing and (more) self-service

When assessing how AI is driving HR transformation, it’s easier to identify processes that the technology will not affect, like investigations of employee wrongdoing and – well, that’s about it. To be sure, the HR-employee relationship is not going away, but it will change – dramatically so inside many companies.

We already see heavy AI use in most phases of talent acquisition (e.g., parsing resumes, scheduling interviews, connecting candidates to job requisitions) and onboarding new employees. From a knowledge-management perspective, AI can quickly equip employees with the policies, procedures, articles and other content they need to thrive in their roles.

Robotic process automation (RPA) solutions drive self-service applications that support workforce administrations activities. Rather than creating a job requisition from scratch, a hiring manager can ask a virtual agent to create a requisition based on a similar position. These types of advancements diminish the long hours HR groups previously spent researching market data and drafting job descriptions. AI can even strip biased language from job descriptions.

Virtual AI agents answer employees’ benefits questions while ensuring that the responses are accurate and consistent. AI applications also are increasing the effectiveness and efficiency of training and development, performance management, and succession-planning activities.

The ramifications of these HR-specific AI advancements raise a big question: What’s the impact on the HR professional?

Four AI-adoption considerations

The impacts, plural, are profound. Facilitating these changes marks a crucial component of an HR leader’s approach to using AI – a plan that should cover the following actions:

• Develop a strategy and game plan: HR leaders should craft a clear plan for hiring AI-proficient HR professionals and upskilling their current teams. Since AI skills are in high demand, an effective strategy emphasizes upskilling. In addition to AI knowledge and experience, upskilling should focus on critical-thinking competencies, consultative skills and (this may sound a bit meta) the ability to help HR colleagues figure out which skills they will need in the future. These types of proficiencies currently reside in relatively few HR groups.
• Recognize the importance of critical thinking: Many HR professionals need help thinking about their jobs in different ways. As AI takes on a larger share of transactional work, what adjacent skills are needed to work with employees in a more consultative manner? Surprisingly, “heavy users and creators of gen AI overwhelmingly feel they need higher-level cognitive and social-emotional skills to do their jobs, more than they need to build technological skills,” according to a McKinsey report based on a survey of more than 12,000 employees and employers. “As workers increasingly use generative AI to tackle more repetitive tasks, the human-centric skills of critical thinking and decision making will become ever more important.”
• Avoid AI overreliance: An overreliance on AI – and AI work that lacks human oversight –produces unintended consequences. HR groups must monitor these risks and swiftly mitigate them when they materialize. AI recruiting applications can degrade the candidate experience through impersonal rejection letters that arrive months after a job application has been submitted. The employee brand impacts of inward-facing HR tools also require consideration. AI should supplement and improve HR processes designed and actively overseen by HR professionals rather than replacing those processes.
• Consider a COE: As protectors of employees’ personally identifiable information (PII), HR functions have earned a reputation for ensuring confidentiality as well as data privacy and security. These capabilities, along with HR’s focus on ethical decision making, serve it well as an organizational leader of AI usage. Although the nature and structure of this ownership responsibility will vary by organization, HR leaders should recognize their function’s advantages as AI stewards and consider whether creating an AI COE within the function makes sense.

To drive home his point that AI’s ultimate value to companies will extend far beyond efficiency gains, Mollick asserts that “HR is R&D.” In other words, a company’s human assets produce the innovations that create competitive advantage. The AI-driven innovations that an organization produces may, as Mollick and other AI thought leaders suggest, generate transformations whose magnitude rivals that of the Industrial Revolution. For that to occur, HR also will need to be AI savvy.