With the immense promise of artificial intelligence and machine-learning technology, HR departments are working on strategies for the workforce as a whole and also looking internally at how their own department can benefit from the latest software and tech services. The most common examples seem to be in recruiting, HR administration and employee support.
“The most mature, sophisticated uses of AI are in recruiting,” Josh Bersin, founder and CEO of The Josh Bersin Company, an HR industry analyst and consulting firm, told Newsweek.
Bersin’s company recently released a review of the most successful use cases of AI in HR with benchmarking data and case studies from Delta and other companies, identifying a few trends and key themes.
The Josh Bersin Company
The Best Uses of AI in HR
In a way, the proliferation of AI is a continuation of digital transformation strategies as legacy brands and employers advanced with the internet and cloud-based services era.
Today, the capabilities and availability of emerging AI-powered tools offer time savings and the potential for faster iteration across activities such as writing job descriptions, encouraging job candidates to complete their applications, picking which candidates to interview or scheduling interviews with candidates.
“Getting summaries of résumés, not necessarily automatic filtering because there are issues with that in terms of AI safety, but people are using résumé summaries,” Apratim Purakayastha, GM of talent development solutions at Skillsoft, a training technology provider, told Newsweek. “Rather than going through 50 résumés at a time, 50 résumé summaries are useful and faster.”
The use of AI in HR can include automation of the recruiting process all the way through screening interviews and up to the job offer in some cases, according to Bersin, where employers are hiring in high volumes. “Not everyone does it in this way yet,” he added.
Before the offer, new technology is helping HR source candidates, A/B test job descriptions and get a salary range for candidates selected to receive a job offer. Chipotle has reported immense time savings from the use of an AI chatbot to drastically speed up application completion and applicant flow. A conglomerate profiled in the Bersin report reduced time to fill from “three to four months to three to four weeks.”
“Generative AI is being used for tasks that are repetitive,” Purakayastha said.
This represents an opportunity for HR to be increasingly strategic and provide better and more support for employees in the interest of engagement and retention.
“Everything from performance assessment, development planning, coaching, ‘How do I evaluate you for a raise relative to your peers?’ ‘What’s your development plan and what are the next roles that should be on your personal career roadmap?’ That’s all getting automated by AI too,” Bersin said. “HR people have been very skeptical about using algorithms for performance evaluation, but the AI does it in such a transparent way that you can do skills assessments using AI.”
Within HR, this could alleviate many of the operational tasks within the function.
“There are a lot of administrative jobs in HR,” Bersin, a former Deloitte partner, said. “There are schedulers. There are people that manage documentation. There are people that analyze data and look at surveys.”
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Better HR Functional Support
The other place where HR is saving time is in employee queries on workplace policy or procedures. By uploading company policies like the employee handbook and benefits plans into AI tools, they can launch agents to answer questions for employees on demand. They can also keep these policies updated and current across all platforms where they appear.
“You can take your company documents, your company policies, and you can put it into the AI and everybody can automatically ask questions about it,” Bersin said. “That’s a huge ROI, because they’ve got these big call centers answering people’s questions all day, and HR managers are answering questions all day. It’s also a way to centralize policies and keep them up to date.”
This alone could free up at least half of a larger company’s HR business partner or manager’s time, Purakayastha and Bersin both estimated.
Of course, AI is also helping customer-facing employees, programmers, software engineers and business analysts move faster in a lot of different ways. It’s helping employees in all departments work together in hybrid and remote environments.
“People who are directly interacting with customers on the phone, in some service role, they will be enhanced by AI tremendously,” Purakayastha said. “Over time, some of the jobs will be less important. There’s an opportunity for these people to retrain and retool, [but] new jobs should be created as well.”
He added that programmers are asked to be nearly four or five times as productive as they were a few years ago, thanks to code-generation tools and software that helps identify errors. HR can help functional leaders with the change management element of adopting these new technologies. This requires them to gain some foundational understanding of these emerging technologies and also to train leaders on their capabilities.
“AI is much more about change management than just technology,” Purakayastha said. “Business leaders cannot actually lead a change management if they don’t know much about it themselves. So they need to get trained too. One of the first things we hear working with clients is, ‘How about my leadership’s AI curriculum?'”
While some may be fearful of AI and the potential threats it brings to job stability and the economy writ large, Purakayastha noted that some business leaders, particularly those in manufacturing, are finding digital transformation to be an easier label for these initiatives. Ultimately, it remains about partnering with technology offices and existing offerings to improve or make easier the employee lifecycle.
“You don’t need to tell people that it’s an AI initiative. You can just say, ‘Hey, we have a new system for this and it’s a lot easier to use,'” Bersin said. “My guess is, a year from now, we’re not going to use the phrase ‘AI’ very much. Do you say ‘web-based mobile application’? No, it’s just an app…all software is built on AI now.”
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