- We need to reinvent what people do to add value and shift to more strategic work as AI takes over administrative tasks.
- Being a good student of AI, regardless of role or level, is a must to stay ahead of trends.
- Leadership modeling is key to making the cultural shifts that AI demands.
There’s no argument that AI will drastically change how we work over the next decade.
Right now, there’s a lot of chatter about AI replacing people in the workforce, but if you dig deeper into the conversation, you’ll start to understand the possibilities and see that replacement isn’t the goal — it’s better career paths.
As an HR professional, figuring out where to get started with AI can be tough in a crowded field.
I recently joined Chris Rainey, CEO and Co-Founder at HR Leaders, along with a panel of fellow HR professionals to discuss how to build an HR strategy with AI. We shared our thoughts on the potential for AI to shape career futures, the business cases for its use, how to gain leadership and employee buy-in, and best practices for implementation.
Related content: Watch the webinar “How to Build an HR Strategy with AI,” on demand now.
How AI’s potential shapes the future
Think about where we were with the internet 20 years ago. Everyone was aware of its existence, but no one quite knew yet how we were going to harness its power to improve our work.
It changed everything, yet absolutely nothing — we all still hold jobs, we just adapted and integrated the internet into our lives.
“The core of what we do in terms of thinking about people and operations — that’s going to stand the test of time, we’re just going to do it radically different,” said Christopher Lind, Chief Learning Officer at ChenMed.
It’s a learning opportunity — a chance to upskill yourself, as those of us focused on talent-centered design say. It’s a challenge, but one with a rewarding payoff.
“We’re going to be challenged on many different fronts. Being uncomfortable with AI in HR is going to make us better in the future. It’s going to bring us to the level where we need to be,” said Beatriz Rodriguez, Group Senior Vice President of Talent and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at Bayer.
Those challenges start with how we interact with systems. Inside and outside of HR, departments are burdens with systems that digitize a lot of administrative tasks. People have built entire careers on their abilities to manage these systems, so proselytizing that AI will replace them all is scary.
But we’re looking at it the wrong way. Think about what your work desk looked like in the mid-2000s, pre-smartphone. Cluttered, lots of paper, lots of files to review, things to keep track of. Post-smartphone, we’ve moved to a place where everything is digitized.
AI is kind of like the smartphone but for systems. It will help bring all those systems together and simplify the tasks they address, leaving you more time to do the strategic tasks that drive business outcomes. As AI removes transactions and administrative work, what remains is the critical thinking, relational, and motivational work that can often cause an initiative to sink or succeed — in essence the human elements of work are amplified.
“Ultimately, while we want AI to take over some of these tasks, we need to reinvent what humans do to add value which is going to be a learning process all on its own,” said Tim Young, Senior Vice President of HR Operations at Pearson.
The compelling business case for AI
Executives who are plugged into the conversation around AI are doing everything they can to figure out how to best use it to make a difference in their businesses. It’s a crowded field that can be overwhelming to dive into with little or no context.
So here are three strategic starting places the panel recommends for HR professionals wanting to start the AI conversation with leadership:
- Identify a home-run case that shows why AI matters for your company.
- Bring in champions outside of HR to be a voice for why AI matters.
- Lead with showing how AI saves money, then follow with the employee experience.
Looking at things like the impact to the customer experience or how AI improves efficiencies can be compelling business cases, too.
Another compelling case: AI helps move talent front and center in the organization. With so many businesses moving to the skills-based approach mindset, it’s no longer reasonable to think individuals can hold all the necessary knowledge to make decisions about hiring or internal mobility. But AI platforms can.
“When you start looking at the business case, talking about efficiency and technology — we’ve already been talking about this in many different ways,” Rodriguez said. “It’s about putting talent at the front of AI, breaking some of the myths regarding what AI does for talent, and helping people understand what a talent ecosystem could look like for you as an organization and as a business. To be able to deliver your business results at the end of the day, you need people at the center.”
Gaining AI acceptance from employees
Once you have your business case, it’s time to get buy-in. Leadership is essential, of course, but so are your employees.
It’s as simple as this: AI enables the business, not just HR. Looking outside your own needs is critical.
Bayer adopted this mindset, then analyzed the parts of their business that were “pulling” versus “pushing” before rolling out AI. Employees identified as MVPs because they were pulling the business ahead were asked to become early adopters of AI.
By being strategic about who they approached to test drive AI rather than rolling it out to everyone, Bayer created an opportunity where their MVPs could work alongside HR as teachers and advocates of the platform. Those MVPs helped their peers onboard and understand the value of AI to their role as well as to the business, not just HR.
“We [HR] were there enabling, but the business was in the driver’s seat,” Rodriguez said. “We let our business and our leaders bring everyone else on the journey, which gave us better adoption and buy-in that was much greater than what we’ve done in the past.”
Young shared that Pearson has taken another highly successful approach. Their CEO has made it clear to employees that it is their responsibility to understand AI — to be students of it, pay attention to trends, and follow technologists in the space, regardless of their role or level.
Young said from the CEO’s perspective, encouraging his entire company to be well-versed in AI are the stepping stones to giving Pearson a strategic advantage.
“I think the other advantage is it puts people in the driver’s seat of their own career in unfamiliar territory,” Young said. “We don’t know what we’ll be doing in five or 10 years, and we won’t know until we get there, but if you’re just an observer from the side, it’s going to be a lot harder to adapt than if you are understanding the technology, what it’s good for, how it’s built, how to apply it, and that can be a big game changer for any organization.”
Best practices for adopting AI
With understanding of its potential, the business cases, and buy-in, your attention turns to successful adoption. Communication and understanding of business outcomes are essential.
Another key is leadership modeling adoption. It sets the tone at the top of the company and helps make the cultural shift that needs to happen to successfully adopt AI.
“AI is just as disruptive at the senior level as it is to any other level in the organization,” said Lind. “As a senior leader, your ability to analyze all the different situations and read the reports and figure out what’s going on—AI can do that better than you can, so you need to be evolving with this as well.”
Rodrigez also recommends being practical about using AI. Level-setting was key at the beginning of their process. Use of relevant and simple language ensured understanding of new processes and that everyone was working from the same knowledge base. Clarity on what AI should and shouldn’t be used for was also critical.
Most importantly, she advised, you can’t let it be a shiny new toy that loses its sparkle when people don’t understand or use its power.
“I think there is ground level work that has to be done prior to bring the entire story together,” she said. “You [must] bring people on the journey, or you run the risk of losing a compelling story just because it’s something new.”
My final piece of advice: as you move through your first year with AI, reevaluate your metrics and don’t be afraid to adjust them. Not all tools are built the same, and not all AI works the same. Often, AI changes how you look at your metrics because it’s designed to achieve things in a very different way.
Watch the entire webinar “How to Build an HR Strategy with AI” on demand now.
Jason Cerrato is Vice President, Talent-centered Transformation at Eightfold AI. Before joining Eightfold, he was an HCM industry analyst with Gartner and held talent leadership positions at United Technologies for over a decade. Cerrato is the co-host of The New Talent Code podcast — new episodes streaming now.