In recent years, the HR world has felt the strong influence of AI, forcing leaders to rethink how technology can enhance their roles and team strategies. Starting in late 2022, with the unveiling of ChatGPT and the explosion of the AI hype cycle, HR leaders have been scrambling to integrate this technology into their operations. In doing so, they’ve been faced with fundamental questions about the field. What, in the end, is HR for? And how exactly can advanced technology help practitioners accomplish their aims more effectively?
It has always been clear that AI was never going to replace the core functions of the job: connecting with employees on a personal level and ensuring they’re granted the tools and support they need to do their best work. The heart of HR is, fundamentally, unautomatable: no machine can build genuine trust with employees, or successfully mediate between two colleagues.
What AI can do, though, is grant HR personnel the time and insight they need to carry out precisely those functions. This is the big lesson from 2024, and it will undoubtedly shape HR operations globally in the year to come: the true potential of AI lies in its ability to enhance, rather than replace, human interaction.
Better Understanding Your Employees Through AI
Even the most skilled HR professional has had to run up against a simple fact of life: you cannot know something is wrong if your employee doesn’t tell you. Employee disillusionment is often a gradual process, with the signs only visible in retrospect. Historically, this fact has accounted for the vague, inescapable tension felt by many HR professionals as they go about their jobs. Yes, things might seem fine—but what if we’re missing something?
The odds are, of course, that you are missing something. HR professionals have traditionally deployed surveys to try to correct their blind spots, but these have several drawbacks, like low response rates, generic feedback, and delayed insights. One-on-one conversations allow for more substantive feedback, but day-to-day time constraints make consistent personal outreach a challenge—particularly in larger organizations.
The result is that pre-AI insight into employee morale was invariably inadequate and partial: there were only so many surveys that HR professionals could send, and only so many appointments they could make with employees. The analogy here would be between a surveillance camera that takes a picture once every hour and a surveillance camera that provides a continuous, 24/7 live feed. Yes, the former camera might pick up on broader trends—but would lose a lot in granularity.
The consequences here have often been dire. Though there was hope that, four years out from the pandemic, turnover rates might finally begin to stabilize, this has not happened: employees are less likely than ever to try to work through their on-the-job issues, and more likely than ever to simply jump ship at the first signs of distress. Fundamentally, this is an HR problem, which is to say, a communication issue: managers are currently reporting unprecedented levels of stress and burnout from the office to the frontline, but HR is too often blind to these issues, hampered by impartial information.
Where AI Can Help
What we are discussing here are relationships between people. What AI can do is deepen those relationships—and allow HR personnel to make more impactful interventions. It accomplishes this, in part, by handling the administrative workload. Think of all those hours HR professionals spend responding to routine employee inquiries—questions about company policies, leave balances, about benefits. These are precisely the kinds of questions that AI chatbots are built to handle. AI also has tremendous benefits in the hiring stage: instead of individually vetting every resume, AI can identify top matches (and even schedule interviews with them). The benefits go on and on: flagging gaps in documentation, for instance, or ensuring payroll and tax calculations meet local regulations. With these repetitive, energy-draining tasks out of the way, HR professionals can settle down to the work that really matters: building connections and driving initiatives that meaningfully improve workplace culture and employee satisfaction.
As importantly, though, it gives HR teams much more detailed insight into how their employees are actually feeling (and the right AI solutions will still maintain their privacy while doing so).
As discussed, distress signals in a workforce can be hard for HR personnel to pick up on. This is especially true in the remote era, when HR teams and employees may not even live in the same state. Gathering employee feedback—from pulse surveys, chat interactions, performance reviews, etc.—can help, but with such a surplus of data, it can be hard to see the forest for the trees. This is precisely where AI excels: it can identify patterns of dissatisfaction or disengagement, allowing HR professionals to make targeted interventions before they escalate. Through predictive analytics, meanwhile, HR teams can flag troubling trends—like rising attrition risks in specific teams or roles—and adjust strategy accordingly.
Of course, quality HR is not just about identifying and fixing problems—it’s also about proactively finding ways to help employees grow into their best selves. Here, too, AI is poised to play a significant role. HR teams know a lot about their employees—what they’re good at, what they’re interested in, and how they’ve performed in various roles. Through AI, they can use this information to generate personalized recommendations for training or career development—ensuring tailored support while respecting employee privacy.
The skills possessed by a quality HR professional—quick thinking, empathy, innovative problem-solving—are still very much in demand, and will not be obviated by the rise of AI. What the rise of AI will allow—in 2025 and beyond—is for HR professionals to actually use those skills, instead of wasting productive hours mired in repetitive digital processes or tending to other administrative tasks. We’re not all the way there yet: 2025 is poised to be another year of experimentation, as HR professionals work to figure out precisely how to make these tools work for their purposes. There will inevitably be bumps along the way, not to mention concerns surrounding ethics, as HR professionals work to navigate new regulations and implement their AI processes as transparently and responsibly as possible. But this is the year we might just start to see the true shape of HR’s future.
Louise Willoughby is the Chief People Officer at Beekeeper.