AI: The ‘Devil’ HR Teams Should Embrace
The question of whether AI is a force for good or evil often features in conversations with HR peers, causing much debate and for some can feel like embracing the devil in disguise.
This was brought into sharp focus last week. A respected and senior Chief People Officer looking for her next role posted much justified indignance of having to sign a declaration that her application for a role was completed without AI intervention. The irony of a declaration that AI wasn’t used to a complete an application within an AI driven ATS (Applicant Tracking System) made me chuckle out loud!
Personally, I’ve experienced a long-standing friend and portfolio Chair telling me I’ll be OK as my career is diverse, but AI will make HR teams redundant in the next decade. A commonplace view often combined with concerns about how to manage oversight of AI decision making.
Freeing HR to Focus on People
All reasonable and valid concerns but forward-looking HR teams are embracing AI as an opportunity. AI enables HR teams to truly evolve into providing strategic business support through automating the heavy administrative HR burden releasing time to increase the value add role brought to their organisations and focus on the ‘human’ element of the role.
Rather than replacing and displacing HR jobs, AI can provide job enrichment and enhancement, delivering rich data and analysis to identify trends that inform proactive decision making with much reduced opportunity for bias and inequity across all areas of the people agenda.
Of course, like any work system, AI can only ever be as good as the data it’s trained on. Rules and algorithms need to be representative and complete to avoid inbuilt bias or perpetuating historical biases with HR retaining control over key decisions.
AI is integrated into many HR operations: recruitment processes; chatbots to answer queries about benefits and policies; performance appraisal processes; engagement surveys: supporting a HR revolution of efficiency and data-driven decision making, creating measurable improvement in the value added by HR.
Far from being a devil to be feared AI offers HR teams an empowering angel enabling focus on the reason for our job: our people!
At Uptrend Labs , we specialize in guiding businesses through the complexities of implementing AI solutions tailored to their unique needs. From identifying optimal use cases to deploying advanced AI tools, our team ensures seamless integration that delivers measurable results. Let us help you unlock the full power of your human resources management with AI.