Everyone’s talking about generative AI in HR—and there’s little doubt we’re on the cusp of massive change. But how can your organisation move beyond the hype towards practical application? Keep reading to discover six of the most common use cases of generative AI for HR teams.
Are UK teams using generative AI in HR?
Gartner finds that 81% of global HR leaders have explored or implemented AI in HR—and 76% believe they’ll need to implement generative AI solutions in the next 12 to 24 months or they’ll fall behind peers on organisational success.
Is the same story true for the UK?
On one hand, McKinsey believes the UK is well positioned to take advantage of AI, which could boost the economy by 22% by 2023. But other early signs suggest HR teams in the UK aren’t yet capitalising fully.
New nationally representative research from the Digital Futures at Work Research Centre found that only 36% of UK employers have invested in AI-enabled technologies over the past five years—and only 10% were planning to over the next two years. There’s a major opportunity gap here.
Generative AI for HR: 6 use cases
Let’s explore six ways HR leaders could embed generative AI, to transform your people processes.
1 – Recruitment
AI could change recruitment dramatically, particularly tasks that involve repetitive content generation. We conducted a survey recently to learn how some Indeed customers are using generative AI in recruitment, and heard several brilliant suggestions:
- Improving language on career sites, job boards, and social media
- Developing job descriptions and adverts
- Creating Boolean keyword recommendations
- Mapping recruitment strategy templates
- Conducting research on recruitment tactics
- Writing email templates for candidate communications
- Crafting messaging to attract jobseekers
Free tools like ChatGPT make these possible right now. It’s not about replacing the human element of recruitment but about giving you a sensible starting point, to accelerate the process.
As Indeed Head of AI Ethics, Trey Causey, explains: ‘AI is not replacing the work you're doing or the ideas you're having. It's like you're getting another set of eyes on it, like sending it to a colleague'.
At a higher maturity and cost level, there are also talent acquisition tools that leverage generative AI to provide skills intelligence. These tools help organisations understand their skills profile, understand capability gaps, and develop a skills-based hiring and internal mobility strategy.
2 – Employee development
Given the speed of AI uptake so far—ChatGPT was estimated to hit 100-million users within two months of launch—it seems likely that skills intelligence will be the future of HR. This generative AI-powered technology doesn’t only help with hiring or promotion—it also helps with employee development.
Tools with a skills intelligence foundation can ingest data about someone’s career trajectory and capabilities and generate career pathways that show all the options for future growth. Plus comprehensive employee development plans aligned with each pathway.
Given the importance of employee development to company culture and retention, this offers a major leg-up for future-ready HR teams.
3 – Compliance training
Organisations need new starters to be up to speed with, as a minimum, foundational training like cybersecurity and health and safety training. Getting this wrong risks major cybersecurity incidents, breaches, and workplace accidents.
But the compliance training burden can be huge, especially given content requirements change constantly as regulations and processes change. The continuing cybersecurity skills gap in the UK is a testament to that: Ipsos report that 51% of businesses have a cybersecurity basic skills gap.
Generative AI can help HR teams here. There are a plethora of tools available that harness generative AI to create on-demand training content, update content, and make content more engaging through the likes of gamification or improving interfaces.
4 – HR support
Josh Bersin talks about how generative AI can help HR teams navigate their central tension from an employee experience perspective:
‘HR teams are continuously dealing with this problem of expanding the number of services yet shrinking their footprint and making them easier to use. AI helps with this.’
ChatGPT is the perfect example of how a conversational text-based interface can engage and motivate interaction on a massive scale while providing useful information. Many HR teams and HR tech vendors have already developed or are developing HR chatbots which can offer 24/7 support in an intuitive way. Ultimately this can:
- Improve the employee experience
- Reduce HR admin and support tickets
- Resolve support tickets faster
- Increase HR efficiency and productivity
- Increase employee productivity
5 – Performance improvement
Generative AI excels at ingesting large, unwieldy datasets that humans struggle with, instantly, and then computing insights at scale. One such dataset relates to performance.
Managers cost organisations billions each year because they’re pivotal for employee engagement, productivity, and performance—but these are hard to get right. Managing performance isn’t an exact science. But AI could certainly make it more akin to a science, by providing far better data to inform decision-making.
Workforce intelligence tools harnessing generative AI can build a comprehensive understanding of company, department, function, team, and individual performance, and all the variables that might contribute. Then generate performance plans and suggestions to drive improvement.
Again, we’re certainly not saying AI could take over entirely—but AI can provide human decision-makers with far better, more robust data to fuel better decisions.
6 – Compensation and rewards management
Mercer believes the Total Rewards Leader is one of three key HR roles AI will transform completely. Their research shows that roughly six months a year in this position could be spent entirely differently, thanks to generative AI.
They suggest generative AI could take over benefits administration, including market analyses, salary surveys and compensation benchmarking.
At the same time, generative AI could empower personalised compensation plans, ‘taking what you know about different people and pulling reward and benefit levers’ accordingly, to maximise motivation and retention.
The future of HR is faster, better, and more strategic
The major benefit of AI in HR is reducing admin and manual work, accelerating processes, and crunching vast amounts of data at scale.
Irrespective of function, this ultimately frees space for HR professionals to add more value handling non-administrative tasks and enhances decision-making—so you can deliver better services and support to your people.
