With AI, HR professionals see an opportunity to provide their workforce with more personalized, more responsive service.



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Artificial intelligence (AI) is playing an increasingly significant role in HR workflows, alleviating the burden caused by the growing list of tasks that HR professionals face. In fact, according to a recent survey of 1,000 HR professionals conducted by isolved in partnership with Talker Research, 77% of HR professionals believe AI training is critical to enhancing their roles, and 81% of those whose companies have adopted AI report using it in their daily tasks. On average, AI handles 34% of HR-related tasks in these organizations.

In AI, HR professionals see an opportunity to provide their workforce with more personized, more responsive service. The technology’s ability to sort through data and speed a variety of technical tasks can free up a significant amount of time – time that can be applied to providing more high-touch service to the workforce. In short, when HR professionals look at AI, they see opportunities to improve their ability to develop and maintain a stellar employee experience.

“I know the fear is it'll eliminate our jobs, but I completely disagree with that,” said Kimberly Crawford, director of HR at the Southeast Mississippi Rural Health Initiative. “If I can free up 50% of not just my day but the rest of my team's day, I'm not thinking, ‘well I don't need you.’ I'm thinking, ‘what else can we do to enhance our employee experience or increase training opportunities?’”

Kimberly spoke as part of a panel discussion on AI that was sponsored by isolved. Joining her were Mary Beth Quirk, HR and finance administrator for Pennsylvania-based Friends Life Care Partners, and Nancy Whitacre, HR manager of Connecticut’s Supported Living Group.

All of them are thinking about how they can leverage AI in both their day-to-day and strategic work. But before they begin fully implementing AI, they want to determine where it can provide the most value. Among other things, that means developing plans and drafting policies that will govern advanced solutions anytime they touch the workforce. One thing is certain, the panel said: AI will change HR’s traditional functions.

That begins with self-service. AI-driven solutions allow workers to directly update personal details, submit time-off requests or answer questions about their individual concerns. “We think that AI is going to really help our employees with some of those basic questions like how much PTO do I get,” said Mary Beth. “So that's going to just save time.”

HR professionals believe implementing more intelligent self-service is important for laying the groundwork for HR’s transition to a function that’s even more people-oriented than it is today. “We want to make sure that our employees feel empowered to do things on their own, but they always have that support from us, as well,” said Mary Beth.

The benefits of AI are clear: 81% of HR professionals surveyed say that using AI helps them automate routine tasks allowing them to focus more on building meaningful connections with employees.

In addition to all this, managing a workforce today is complicated. For one thing, multiple generations are at work today, and each approaches their concerns in a different way. HR professionals believe AI solutions give them more time and more flexibility to understand and meet the demands of all of their workers. “How do we keep up with a changing workforce and different generations, as well?” Kimberly said. “That’s a factor in the mix.”

Already, many in HR see AI as an engagement tool as much as anything else. “We have isolved’s AI integrated with SurveyMonkey, so every time we do our engagement surveys, isolved Predictive People Analytics pulls in that data directly from SurveyMonkey and we're able to … pretty much determine, okay, we identified a weak area over here,” said Kimberly. “Then with the next survey, we can dive deeper into possible areas of improvement and look at them more closely.”

Of course, how AI is applied varies from organization to organization, and HR needs to think carefully about how it can best leverage the technology before solutions are designed and implemented solutions. “One of the very first things we did was get our heads around a policy for it here,” said Mary Beth. “How do we want to utilize it? What's going to work best for our strengths to grow as a company – again with employee engagement – and what are the things we want to avoid?”

You can watch the complete conversation here.

Brought to you by isolved: isolved People Cloud is a comprehensive HCM solution that helps you employ, enable and empower your workforce throughout the entire employment lifecycle. For more information go to isolvedhcm.com.