AI and Automation in HR: Impact, Adoption and Future Outlook
“Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.” This idea is central to how HR should approach AI and automation: not as a race to adopt tools, but as a chance to rethink what’s worth automating – and what’s better left human.
AI and automation in HR—and across the workplace—are quickly becoming the norm. Various well-known companies, such as Shopify and Duolingo, have already (proudly) declared they are now ‘AI-first’. This means they aim to prioritize AI for suitable tasks and will consider human involvement when AI tools are not effective or appropriate.
In this article, we will examine how AI and automation are shaping HR practices and operations. We discuss the current state of AI and automation in HR, its benefits and challenges, real-life examples, and what to watch out for regarding the future of AI in HR. Let’s take a look.
Contents
AI and automation in HR: Impact and current state
Real-world examples of AI automation in Human Resources
Benefits and challenges of AI and automation in HR
What’s next? A look ahead for HR leaders
AI and automation in HR: Impact and current state
AI is everywhere today, both in people’s personal and professional lives. Here’s a sample of what AI and automation in HR look like right now:
- HR automation is a baseline expectation: Automation is one of the key drivers behind process optimization, especially in large organizations managing complex, global workforces.
- AI-powered tools are embedded in core HR processes: For virtually every HR process, from recruitment and onboarding to employee development and internal mobility, there are dedicated AI-powered and HR automation software tools helping HR practitioners become more effective and efficient.
- HR teams increasingly combine automation with people analytics: HR teams are shifting from simply tracking data to acting on it in real time through automated dashboards and reports.
- Generative AI is used for content creation: GenAI is increasingly used for creating content in HR, such as drafting job descriptions, email templates, and training guides.
- AI becomes more integrated: AI is increasingly built into core HR platforms like ATS, HRIS, and learning systems. This reduces the need to juggle multiple tools and helps unify data across workflows, making processes like recruiting or reporting faster and less fragmented.
- Compliance and governance are priorities: New frameworks are being established to guide the ethical and legally compliant use of AI in HR.
- Managing hybrid teams of humans and agents: Some organizations are starting to bring AI agents into their teams, asking HR managers to ‘onboard’ them.
- Upskilling initiatives are underway: As HR teams learn to apply AI in their day-to-day and strategic work, it becomes increasingly clear where skill gaps lie. HR leaders need to find ways to address them.
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Real-world examples of AI automation in Human Resources
Let’s have a closer look at some of the tools and what they actually (can) do. We’ll categorize them according to the various stages of the employee life cycle:
Attraction and recruitment
Sample tools:
- HireVue: HireVue’s AI-driven platform helps companies identify and validate the skills that lead to job success and enables them to automate and simplify their hiring process.
- Eightfold AI: Eightfold AI is a talent intelligence platform that uses AI to support organizations with talent acquisition, retention, and overall workforce management.
- Fetcher: Fetcher is an AI tool that automates candidate sourcing (i.e., finding and reaching out to relevant candidates).
Onboarding
Sample tools:
- Leena AI: Leena AI provides many AI-driven solutions, one of which focuses on employee preboarding and onboarding. The company states that most dropouts happen during or before the onboarding process, so it developed a virtual assistant (or buddy) powered by GenAI that provides new hires with a seamless experience.
- Coursebox: Coursebox allows you to easily generate and streamline training courses with videos and assessments, such as those for onboarding new hires.
- Appical: Appical is an AI-powered pre- and onboarding platform that helps companies structure those critical first days, weeks, and months of their new hires and give them a warm welcome to the team.
Employee retention
Sample tools:
- Opre: Opre is an AI tool that tracks and contextualizes teams’ performance, context, and communication so that managers can actually provide relevant recommendations that improve their team members’ performance (and engagement).
- Kinfolk: Kin is Kinfolk’s AI HR coordinator. It handles 70% of employee requests and questions (in Slack or Teams, for example), providing instant and continuous employee support. It also updates your HRIS so you can focus on non-admin things.
- Incompass Labs: Incompass takes a different, AI-native, and data-driven approach to 360-degree feedback. It lets employees choose peers they know well enough to review and comment on, and then helps them write and deliver relevant, thoughtful feedback.
Learning and development
Sample tools:
- Lingio: Lingio provides employee training software that enables companies to quickly create engaging, custom, and gamified courses for their frontline workers.
- SC Training: SC Training is an AI tool you can use to transform your ideas and documents into training courses. They use Google’s Machine Learning Cloud Translation Engine to enable users to convert their content into more than 100 languages easily.
- ElevenLabs: ElevenLabs is a voice AI platform that can be particularly interesting to use for L&D teams as it can (among other things):
- Translate audio and video language at speed and with quality
- Dub someone’s voice (including your own) in 29 languages
- Provide high-quality voiceovers for videos
- Convert text-based resources into audio.
Offboarding and happy leavers
Sample tools:
- HappyFox: HappyFox helps automate and streamline workflows for customer service reps, as well as for HR teams and, for instance, their offboarding process by:
- Removing IT access
- Automatically notifying stakeholders
- Following up on approvals
- And more.
- Hivebrite: Hivebrite leverages AI features to boost community engagement. It can be an interesting tool to use for building and maintaining your alum network and talent pools since it can:
- Suggest people recommendations
- Provide personalized experiences
- Generate AI-powered content
- Automate connections within communities.
General productivity tools
Sample tools:
- Generative AI tools: Large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, and Perplexity AI are becoming everyday tools for many HR professionals. While they aren’t HR-specific platforms, they’re widely used to support tasks such as:
- Drafting job descriptions, policies, or internal communications
- Summarizing interviews, training materials, or meeting notes
- Researching HR trends, legal considerations, or best practices
- Brainstorming ideas for engagement initiatives or learning content
- Automating responses to common employee questions when integrated into workflows.
Benefits and challenges of AI and automation in HR
To get a clearer picture of its implications, it’s important to understand the key benefits and challenges of AI and automation in HR.
Benefits
- Improved efficiency: As we’ve seen earlier, a good example of this is using GenAI to create job descriptions or templates, or to generate work anniversary ideas in a short time frame. Another example is using some of the tools mentioned above to answer common employee queries and get information to update across your systems automatically.
- More time for high-value, human-centered work: By handling repetitive tasks like answering routine questions, processing requests, or scheduling interviews, AI and automation free up HR professionals to focus on what really requires judgment, empathy, and context. This includes managing sensitive employee issues, supporting managers through change, resolving conflicts, coaching leaders, or driving cultural and organizational development efforts.
- Smarter, faster data-driven decision-making: AI and automation don’t just collect more data – they turn it into something usable. From identifying hiring patterns to spotting early signs of disengagement or flight risk, these tools surface trends HR teams might otherwise miss. That gives leaders a more objective base for strategic decisions on hiring, retention, workforce planning, and more.
- Personalized employee experience: Artificial intelligence and HR process automation can help create a more seamless, flexible, and user-driven employee experience. It can, for example, provide custom coaching and mentoring, assist people in finding relevant training (or new jobs), keep track of performance conversations, give recommendations, and much more.
Challenges
- Ethical concerns and data privacy: Recently, a U.S. court decided that OpenAI (the company behind ChatGPT) needs to preserve ChatGPT data (including deleted conversations) indefinitely following a case brought by the New York Times. This is just one example of why companies and HR need to carefully consider and develop a policy on using AI in HR and the rest of the company, addressing ethical and data privacy concerns.
- Technology overwhelm and fatigue: As new tools pop up daily, it can be hard to know where and how to start. AIHR data about AI adoption in HR shows that while 49% of HR professionals use AI in recruitment and selection, there’s a limited integration into broader HR practices. This suggests many teams are experimenting with point solutions but haven’t yet built a cohesive strategy or gained the confidence to scale AI across the employee life cycle.
- Skills gaps: To effectively use AI, HR professionals need to understand new tools and know how to interpret AI outputs. According to our AIHR data, only 35% of HR practitioners feel equipped to use AI technologies.
- Change management: Implementing new systems should be accompanied by carefully thought-out change management, which often doesn’t get the attention it deserves.
What’s next? A look ahead for HR leaders
With developments in AI technology going faster than ever before, here are some (potential) topics to watch out for and reflect on (in no particular order):
1. The rise of human-AI collaboration
We briefly mentioned an example of this in the first section of this article, when discussing the HR manager having to ‘onboard’ and train her first AI agent.
When building ‘hybrid’ teams like this, HR leaders need to ask themselves some critical questions about, for instance, what tasks they want agents to do and what they do not want them to do, and how they can best contribute to making the team more productive.
HR tip
As this is just starting to happen, seek out peers who are already doing this and follow their journey (if they openly share about it) or simply reach out to them.
2. Reskilling and upskilling as a continuous process
As more companies become AI-first, meaning that AI becomes their default starting point, and employees are required to first try an AI tool for every task, the need for HR professionals to stay on top of their AI skills and keep experimenting with new tools grows, too.
In reality, though, AIHR data shows that more than half of HR practitioners (61.6%) indicate little to no AI involvement in their HR processes. Moreover, many feel they don’t have the right skills to use AI tools effectively, which makes them hesitant to embrace this technology fully.
Consider this: Enroll your team in the AI for HR Boot Camp provided by AIHR. In just six months, this bootcamp trains you (and your HR team(s)) on how to:
- Confidently navigate a quickly changing AI tech landscape
- Identify where and when to use AI in the context of HR
- Streamline your HR workflow to make a meaningful business impact
- Leverage various GenAI systems (such as ChatGPT) for day-to-day HR applications
- Go about AI governance and risk management
- And much more.
3. The evolving role of HR as tech interpreters and human advocates
As automation expands and organizations lean more heavily on AI, HR’s role is shifting. The function often becomes the bridge between technical innovation and real-world impact. That means helping teams understand what the technology can (and can’t) do, translating vendor claims into practical applications, and raising questions about ethics, transparency, and fairness. HR is uniquely positioned to ensure that AI supports – not undermines – employee experience, inclusion, and organizational values.
HR professionals need certain skills to embrace this evolving role.
At AIHR, we believe that HR professionals need to be T-shaped. This means that there are certain HR competencies that every HR practitioner needs to master, regardless of their role or context.
Specifically, two competencies are important regarding AI automation in Human Resources: Digital Literacy and People Advocacy.
- Digital Literacy is about knowing how to effectively apply technology across the employee journey to improve efficiency, shape culture, and support business goals.
- People Advocacy refers to acting as a trusted people champion and communication expert while creating a strong internal culture that encourages people to give their best.
Together, these competencies enable HR professionals to bridge the gap between emerging technology and people-focused outcomes: translating AI into practical use, guiding ethical adoption, and ensuring tech enhances rather than detracts from the employee experience and workplace culture.
HR tip
Conduct the T-Shaped HR Assessment with your team members and identify where the biggest skills gaps are.
Check out how Moderna recently merged its HR and IT departments to move toward ‘work planning’ rather than ‘workforce planning (historically HR’s focus) and ‘technology planning’ (historically IT’s focus) to get inspired and rethink ‘how to get work done at the highest quality and at scale,’ as Moderna’s Chief People and Digital Technology Officer Tracey Franklin puts it.
4. AI maturity models: where organizations go after early adoption
If you don’t have an AI and automation strategy (or something similar on that front) yet, this should be your starting point, and now is an excellent time to develop one. You can take the following three-stage framework as the base:
- Automate (short term): The first step is using AI to eliminate repetitive tasks and improve operational efficiency. This includes things like cost savings, faster processing, and more accurate outputs—think automated workflows, chatbots, or resume screening.
- Augment (medium term): Next, organizations begin using AI to support and enhance human decision-making. Tools in this stage help with things like predictive analytics, smarter recommendations, or adaptive learning, enabling better outcomes without replacing the human element.
- Amplify (long term): At this stage, AI becomes part of the organization’s core strategy. It supports more autonomous operations, powers high-level decision-making, and strengthens overall capability, such as using AI-driven insights to shape workforce planning or personalized development at scale.
Begin by asking the following questions:
- Automate: What are the key activities within this role that could be automated to provide greater efficiency and effectiveness in accomplishing routine tasks?
- Augment: How could we create more value by applying people analytics to identify new business insights that improve strategic planning and action?
- Amplify: Which work processes and workflows could be re-designed by AI technologies to boost human activities and decision-making?
It’s clear that developing an effective AI strategy for HR goes beyond implementing the right tools. It requires the right conditions – strategic alignment, strong leadership, clear governance, and a culture that supports innovation and change.
The diagram below highlights two key categories: the fundamentals that create a solid foundation, and the essential factors that drive adoption, scale, and long-term impact. When these are in place, HR can adopt AI in ways that support both business goals and employee needs, now and in the future.
HR tip
Once you have your AI and HR automation strategy ready, you may want to assess your HR team’s AI readiness to get an idea of where you stand. Feel free to check out our AI Readiness Assessment to get instant clarity on your team’s AI capabilities.
A final word
AI-driven HR workflow automation can have undeniable benefits on how HR performs its core roles: It can reduce tedious admin tasks, boost productivity, and even enhance employee experience.
With countless AI tools, platforms, and applications available, it’s wise to start with a strategy. What are you trying to accomplish, and how? Also, start building your and your team’s (digital and AI) skills where necessary. Perhaps most importantly, keep in mind that while automation has its place, the human touch will always be central to effective HR.
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