HR embracing AI: opportunity to impact the entire organization

Monday past, May 20, was International HR Day.  I wish to acknowledge the many HR leaders with whom I have worked and from whom I have learned.  HR has a great impact on organizations, especially now when the nature of work is in flux.  Given the ever-growing power of AI (generative or otherwise), HR can take a leading role in leveraging AI in transforming how people work and create value for their organizations.

There are many articles on how AI can benefit the HR function.  Examples of value-add have been cited in screening applicants, employee self-service, talent analytics, targeted learning & development, detection of useful patterns, etc.  The benefits include improvements in efficiency, employee experience, L&D results, accuracy, decision-making, and others.

However, many of the conferences and panels to discuss AI at the enterprise level involve business leaders and technology heads.  Leaving aside HR-oriented events, I have not seen many HR leaders included in such gatherings.

There are HR leaders who acknowledged they are behind and are investing time to catch up on this topic.  I know some who had not heard of “white fonting”, which is not just used to ensure keywords are “found” by search engines or filters.  It can be used to trick or surreptitiously instruct GenAI tools to generate positive summaries of resumes unjustified by the visible text.  And there are now multimodal GenAI tools that can read prompts, respond to voice, and even recognize visual inputs.  Chat-only bots will soon be outdated.

On the other hand, I am encouraged to have met those who have fought to be at the forefront and getting resources to launch AI projects.

Someone told me about inheriting a repetitive task that another colleague took a few hours to complete every morning in a manual manner.  Using some knowledge of Excel and investing time to learn automation scripts, the person got the same results in minutes.  Just as important was the willingness to not accept status quo and to put in effort to improve things.

But not every employee will be motivated or feel empowered to change the way work is currently done.  Or they might lack the skills and tools to do so.  The provision of tools by the IT function alone is not enough.

This is where HR comes in.  HR can shape culture.  HR can work with leaders to help encourage employees throughout the company to question current tasks, repetitive or otherwise, and to be empowered to acquire capabilities to improve time-consuming or error-prone activities.

While many tech solutions are function-specific, GenAI – like Excel – can and should be used throughout the organization. 

GenAI tools will proliferate and become better.  But already today more of us can make use of existing GenAI tools to create transcripts of discussions and summaries from transcripts.  Images and videos for communications can now be generated easily.  New laptops will enable AI work to be done without sending any company data outside the corporate network.

Pro-active HR leaders can work with business and technology peers to help decide who will get what new capabilities when, and how to measure the returns.  If need be, HR can help push senior leaders and middle managers to learn GenAI and to be role models in using it.

Of course, there are well-known risks that need to be addressed and managed when applying AI in areas that impinge on diversity, bias, privacy, etc.  Here again, HR should be well-versed in dealing with these issues.

This is therefore a tremendous opportunity for HR to push for the effective use of AI throughout the organization across all functions; and to shape the workforce and the nature of work in the years to come.  I look forward to more HR leaders embracing and taking a bigger lead in AI!