Harnessing the Power of Artificial Intelligence in Human Resources

AI in HR examples, benefits, and best practices

Artificial intelligence (AI) has experienced explosive growth in the past few years. It’s been embraced by just about every organization, department, and team — and HR is no exception. In fact, 81% of HR leaders say they’ve explored or implemented AI technology to improve process efficiency within their organization.

Aside from automating and streamlining processes, using artificial intelligence in human resources empowers managers, delivers personalized experiences, and makes better, data-driven decisions. Most importantly, AI empowers HR departments to refocus their attention towards delivering the essential human touch that businesses and employees need.

That said, AI is still an evolving technology. HR teams have only begun to scratch the surface on how to use and benefit from AI. To help you understand how this technology can help your business, we’ve pulled together a list of the top benefits of AI, most popular use cases, and real-world examples. We've also shared some words of caution to bear in mind as your business scales its utilization of AI.

Benefits of using artificial intelligence in human resources

At a time when many HR teams are facing budget constraints, reduced headcount, and fewer resources, AI has become a valuable asset. There are quite a few benefits of AI in HR, including that it can help businesses:

Improve efficiency: AI can automate manual tasks and streamline HR processes, helping reduce administrative tasks and giving HR teams time back in their day.
Make better decisions: Businesses generate tons of people data, but often lack the time and manpower to analyze it. Using AI, HR teams can quickly make sense of even the most complex data sets to identify workplace trends, predict employee behavior, and track employee sentiment. This can then empower them to make better, data-driven decisions.
Reduce costs: By eliminating manual errors, automating mundane tasks, and helping teams make stronger decisions, AI can save HR teams money and improve team productivity. In fact, one survey found that 83% of HR managers believe AI tools can contribute to cost savings.
Deliver personalized content at scale: AI makes it easy to cater content to unique audiences, enabling businesses to quickly create targeted onboarding experiences, training programs, newsletters, and more.

Of course, AI is still evolving, meaning HR teams may continue to discover new uses for this innovative technology and even more benefits.

8 ways to use AI in the workplace

While the applications of predictive and generative AI are always expanding, there are a few common AI use cases that human resources teams are using throughout the entire employee lifecycle. From recruiting top talent to enhancing the employee experience, here are a few ways to use artificial intelligence in human resources:

1. AI-driven resume screening

Ever had an intimidatingly large stack of resumes to sort through? Now, time-consuming manual resume screening can be a thing of the past.

Using AI in recruiting can help your business quickly sort through applicants, evaluate their skills and experience against your job description and target keywords, and highlight top candidates who meet or exceed your criteria. This can help your talent managers sort through a high volume of resumes in just minutes. Not only does AI save recruiters time, but it also helps them more easily discover promising applicants and spend more time building relationships with and interviewing job candidates.

2. Automated documentation processes

On an employee's first day, HR teams typically spend time reviewing piles of paperwork and identification documents and manually entering employee information into their HR, benefits, and payroll systems. Enter AI.

AI can swiftly scan and verify employee documents, extract relevant data, and seamlessly integrate it into your company's HR systems. This not only streamlines the onboarding process and saves your HR team valuable time, but it also significantly minimizes the risk of data entry errors making their way into your systems.

3. Personalized onboarding

Employee onboarding is often generic, teaching a general audience about your company, its mission, vision, and values, benefits packages, workplace policies, and more. While an organizational overview offers valuable context, it often falls short in capturing the operating intricacies of individual departments and teams. Luckily, by using AI, your business can build personalized employee experiences at scale, starting on a new hire’s first day at your company.

Your HR team can have AI analyze departmental processes, documents, tools, and programs to build more targeted onboarding experiences based on factors like a new hire’s team, role, or even work location (remote, hybrid, or in-person). This information is often more helpful to new joiners than generic company information, as it plays a larger role in shaping their day-to-day experience at your company.

4. Employee self-service chatbots

Offering HR chatbots can help your employees and your business. Using AI chat agents, employees can self-serve and get answers to common questions immediately, like “How can I book PTO?”, “I recently moved, how can I update my address?,” or “What’s the wifi password in the office?” Of course, giving employees this resource can also help divert questions from your team, freeing up more of your time to focus on strategic initiatives.

5. Learning and development programs

Everyone has a learning style, so it’s hard to use a one-size-fits-all approach to employee training. Luckily, generative AI can help your business build targeted training programs that cater to each individual learner. By sharing an individual’s goals, current skills and experience, and preferred learning style, AI can create a personalized course based on your internal documents and training programs. It can even help translate these documents and trainings as your company expands to new countries.

6. Sentiment analysis

Using natural language processing and AI, HR teams can analyze qualitative employee responses to understand how your employees feel about different topics. For example, say you run a survey following the opening of a new office, asking employees what they think of the space. You might receive a bunch of responses along the lines of, “The office space itself is great, but the office chairs are so uncomfortable!” or “Please get more standing desks so I don’t have to use the office chairs.” Sentiment analysis can help summarize these comments and let your business know that your employees feel negatively about one aspect of the new office: the chairs.

This type of analysis is particularly helpful, as it can help your business track changes in employee perceptions and attitudes over time. Plus, it can provide insight into what’s currently working within your organization and where employees would like to see change.

7. Data-driven decision making

AI can process vast data sets significantly faster than a human, empowering your HR team to make data-driven decisions more quickly. Not only does this save your organization time, it also gives your teams more bandwidth to act on these findings and create lasting change within your workplace.

AI can also help your business predict employee behaviors. For example, AI can quickly scan your employee database for individuals who meet specific criteria, like those who haven’t received a significant raise in the last two years or a title change in the last three. You can then use this information to look out for employees who are at risk of leaving your organization. Armed with this knowledge, your company can take action to mitigate the impact of their departures or retain these individuals with retention bonuses or increased equity.

8. Performance management

One common issue with performance reviews is recency bias, or a form of bias that favors recent events over past ones. While managers should evaluate a direct report’s performance throughout an entire review period, they often place more emphasis on what’s freshest in their memory, like the last few weeks or months.

Luckily, AI can help managers more easily recall an employee’s achievements and contributions throughout a given period. AI can combine and consolidate data from one-on-one meetings, goal tracking software, and employee recognition software to give managers a holistic view of employee performance for the entire performance period. This helps managers quickly and easily access the information they need to create unbiased, fair, and equitable performance evaluations.

Real-world applications: AI in HR examples

Wondering how your organization can leverage AI in your own HR department? Check out these AI in HR examples as inspiration.

Analyzing employee surveys and user sentiment

Let’s say a 20,000-employee company just concluded its annual engagement survey. Manually sifting through survey responses and employee comments would demand hours of labor, but with AI, the HR team can complete this task in a fraction of the time.

AI can generate concise summaries of the most common ideas and employee suggestions, allowing the HR team to quickly and efficiently pull valuable insights from employee comments without having to read tens of thousands of responses. It can also help analyze sentiment, giving the team a clear understanding of how their employees are feeling and what they’re passionate about. Using AI, the HR team can drastically improve time-to-insight after a survey closes, freeing up more time for them to act on employee feedback and build high-impact initiatives that drive engagement.

Engaging job applicants with recruitment chatbots

Job applications and interviews can be anxiety-inducing for some individuals, pushing many to seek reassurance and answers to their questions in order to calm their nerves. Unfortunately, responding to every applicant question, addressing their questions and concerns, and outlining next steps can be extremely time-consuming for recruiters, and potentially take their attention away from top candidates.

Using natural language processing, machine learning, and AI, your company can build a 24/7 recruitment chatbot to answer common questions, evaluate candidates, and schedule interviews. This ensures that candidates receive prompt answers to their inquiries, helping your business build a positive candidate experience for all applicants.

How HR teams can maximize the value of AI, while minimizing risk

Before your company dives head-first into AI, there are a few things to keep in mind. While AI is an incredibly powerful technology, it can also be inadvertently misused. Here are a few key points to help ensure your business uses AI responsibly:

1. Identify and remediate bias

One of the biggest critiques of AI is its tendency to perpetuate bias. Depending on how your AI models are trained, they can end up favoring certain groups over others. This is particularly concerning if your company uses AI to screen job candidates, as diverse candidates could be unintentionally penalized. In order to ensure your AI algorithms are fair and in line with your company values, your HR team should collaborate closely with IT, data, and legal teams to understand how your AI tools are trained and if they could be perpetuating bias.

2. Prioritize data security

You’ll also want to consider implementing measures to safeguard your company and employee data when using AI. Tools like ChatGPT can be vulnerable to security breaches, so sharing sensitive or confidential information with them can put your business at risk.

To get the most out of AI, while also prioritizing data security, be sure to:

Adopt company policy on acceptable use and outline AI transparency rules
Only approve and use AI tools that meet your data privacy standards
Be explicit about what types of information employees should never share with AI tools
Create internal procedures for reporting and addressing AI-related security issues

Together, these steps can keep your company and employee data safe while also allowing your workforce to benefit from AI technology.

3. Evaluate third-party vendors

While your organization maintains control over internal tools, it's also essential to assess how your current external HR vendors leverage AI and, more importantly, whether their tools align with your company's security and ethical use policies. If you’re sharing important information with them, you’ll need to ensure there’s no risk of their systems being breached and your data compromised. Understanding how these external tools work ensures your business can safeguard intellectual property while also using AI responsibly and fairly.

How HR teams can get the most out of AI

Artificial intelligence in human resources is revolutionizing the way HR teams operate for good. From automating time-consuming manual tasks to providing insights into employee data, AI can free up more time for HR professionals to focus on strategy and engagement.

To fully leverage the benefits of AI in HR, partnering with the right Human Capital Management (HCM) vendor, like UKG Ready^®, is crucial. Incorporating over 2,500 AI models, the UKG Ready platform helps HR professionals simplify day-to-day tasks for leaner teams, allowing HR professionals to focus on the priorities that lead to more meaningful, people-centered decisions.