AI Is Already Transforming HR: 6 People Leaders Weigh In

AI has profoundly transformed the workforce by automating routine tasks, enhancing decision-making, and reshaping job roles across various industries. In sectors like manufacturing, AI-powered robots have taken over repetitive tasks, improving efficiency and reducing errors. In knowledge-based industries, AI tools analyze vast amounts of data, providing insights that guide business strategies and decisions. 

AI-driven automation has led to the creation of new roles, such as data scientists and AI specialists while making others obsolete. This shift has required workers to develop new skills, emphasizing the importance of continuous learning and adaptability.

Recent research shows that 38% of HR leaders have explored or implemented AI solutions to improve process efficiency, and 76% of HR leaders believe that if their organization does not adopt and implement AI solutions, such as generative AI, in the next 12 to 24 months, they will be lagging in organizational success compared with those that do. In addition, 61% believe AI will positively impact HR practices over the next five years, including HR analytics (46%), employment law (37%), and learning and development (35%).

Looking ahead, AI will continue to drive workforce transformation by enabling more personalized and flexible work experiences. AI-powered tools will increasingly support remote work, allowing for seamless collaboration across geographies. In healthcare, AI will assist with diagnostics and treatment planning, while in finance, it will enhance risk management and fraud detection. 

As AI systems become more sophisticated, they will take on more complex tasks, freeing humans to focus on creative, strategic, and empathetic work. However, this evolution will also raise challenges, such as the need for robust ethical frameworks and the potential for increased economic inequality, requiring proactive measures to ensure that the benefits of AI are broadly shared.

HR leaders are already putting AI to effective use on their teams

I spoke to six innovative HR executives from national brands to hear how AI is being used to enhance processes and decision-making at their companies. These leaders include Donna Morris (chief people officer, Walmart); Michael Fraccaro (chief people officer, Mastercard); Cornelius Boone (chief people officer, eBay); Kirsten Marriner (chief people and corporate affairs officer, The Clorox Company); Maria Zangardi (senior vice president of HR and corporate officer, Universal Health Services); and Karen Dunning (senior vice president of human resources, Motorola Solutions).

How is your organization currently using AI to enhance HR processes and decision-making, and what has been the impact on efficiency and effectiveness?

Donna Morris (Walmart): At Walmart, we use our in-house generative AI tool called My Assistant. We launched it approximately a year ago to our 50,000 campus-based associates in the U.S. and have been expanding to our international markets and our frontline managers in Sam’s Club since. 

My Assistant helps associates save time on administrative tasks so they can focus on the most important work. It has broad applicability, such as drafting emails and product specs, summarizing content, or searching for Walmart policies. It also has role-specific uses — for example, there’s a feature for managers that allows them to seamlessly perform 25 different actions, such as updating job details, viewing information about team members, and more. 

All of those things would have once required logging into our core HR systems. Now, managers can do all those things in a matter of seconds. We’re continuing to take feedback from our associates and build experiences that are the most impactful for them.

Michael Fraccaro (Mastercard): We’ve been using AI for decades to fight fraud for our customers and partners. More recently, we’ve been expanding our AI use internally to help deliver improved employee experience. 

In the HR space, we are exploring AI and automation to reduce friction in workflows and provide additional capacity to our teams — especially those that have a high volume of data-entry and manual processes. For example, we’re using AI with our talent acquisition teams. We have an automated scheduler that puts interviews directly on calendars of our hiring managers in their available space, eliminating multiple communications back and forth over meeting time slots. It has increased our speed to schedule by 90%. 

We’re also using AI for our internal talent to help match employees to short-term projects and mentoring connections that align to their experiences and desired areas of growth. It’s become a strong tool for talent mobility, as we’ve found a third of employees who take part in a short-term opportunity have made an internal career move of some sort.

Cornelius Boone (eBay): To give one example, in eBay’s people team functions, we are using generative AI tools to improve the way we create and improve job requisition descriptions for new hires, ensuring they’re as inclusive as eBay’s culture. 

We’ve deployed AI support to help people managers create and refine annual/quarterly goals in our performance success systems and to provide career guidance for job growth with development opportunities. We also use AI to automate interview scheduling, which is having a positive impact on efficiency and the effectiveness of the candidate experience. 

Our people analytics team is using gen AI to synthesize employee feedback and related insights based on our latest employee engagement survey comments (roughly 23K comments). Previously, comments were mapped to predefined topics that imposed rigid limitations. For this cycle, we used AI to better understand our employee sentiment by allowing the content to create the structure. Said another way, the data/feedback was mapped without preconceived notions of what we’d find, allowing better insights.

Kirsten Marriner (The Clorox Company): AI has the potential to transform our work by dramatically increasing our speed and ability to analyze, act, and create information. We’re optimistic about the ways we can leverage AI across the HR organization to accelerate our path to being more consumer-obsessed, faster, and leaner. 

For instance, in learning and development, AI helps us by analyzing data from external sources, surveys, employee feedback, and performance data to help get insights on best practices and industry trends, identify key competency areas, and design effective training programs for our marketing function. 

This approach has improved our collaboration with stakeholders and allowed us to scale the method to other functions like sales and R&D. We’re also using AI to ensure that our communications like job descriptions are inclusive to help attract a broad spectrum of talent to Clorox.

Maria Zangardi (Universal Health Services): Currently, AI comes with a lot of unknowns and it’s important to first determine appropriate use cases that could be effective and appropriate in HR. However, our healthcare industry is one in which quality care is at the forefront, so it is critical for us in our interviewing and hiring processes to have HR and hiring managers personally and actively involved with candidates from selection through successful onboarding.

Karen Dunning (Motorola Solutions): At Motorola Solutions, we take great pride in our rich history and deep culture of innovation. As practitioners of responsible AI, we continuously educate ourselves about the opportunities and risks, and approach the adoption of this technology with curiosity, discipline, and thoughtfulness. 

At a high level, Motorola Solutions uses AI to enhance efficiency with a number of HR processes, including optimizing job descriptions, streamlining employee onboarding, identifying employee engagement trends, and using analytics to inform future workforce needs and training initiatives. Automating some of the more mundane tasks allows our HR team to focus on the more strategic or complex projects that drive the business.

This post was originally published in the Workplace Intelligence Newsletter.

Dan Schawbel is a New York Times best-selling author and managing partner of Workplace Intelligence. Dan has spent his career researching and advising on workplace and career success. He's the author of three career books: Back to Human, Promote Yourself, and Me 2.0. Dan has conducted dozens of research studies and worked with major brands including Oracle, WeWork, American Express, Amazon, Facebook, and Coca-Cola. In addition, Dan has written for publications such as TIME, Forbes, the Harvard Business Review, The Economist, and the World Economic Forum. He currently publishes the LinkedIn Workplace Intelligence Newsletter and hosts the 5 Questions podcast with guests that have included Richard Branson, Natalie Portman, Stacey Abrams, and Marcus Lemonis.