HR is the future of AI: What we've done in Microsoft HR

AI as a tool, not intelligence in the human sense?

In my last LinkedIn article I concluded by focusing on the importance of organizations embracing artificial intelligence (AI) with the understanding that AI is a tool to be shaped and informed by human judgment. We decide our future with AI, and human intelligence will determine how AI will impact our lives.?

“Artificial intelligence” which in and of itself is a misnomer, is a truly powerful tool with massive data sets, sophisticated modeling and incredible and powerful computational scale. Nevertheless, intelligence, in the true cognitive sense of humans, is not the purview of tools. As such, HR leaders specifically, along with other leaders of organizations, need a practical usage plan which guides people to adopt such a tool. In doing so, people in organizations can realize the real and material benefits of AI in the workplace.??

HR can make such a transformation amazing if there is a commitment to an AI adoption plan with people at the center.?

AI for everyone?

Over the past 18 months in HR at Microsoft, I’ve had the responsibility of leading our AI transformation across the HR function in addition to driving operational service delivery work across all aspects of HR. Along the way, I’ve had the opportunity to partner with an outstanding team of HR leaders, technologists, engineers, and business leaders, both inside and outside of my company. I’ve met with my HR Service Center Teams in various locations around the world to obtain a meaningful sensibility about what their practical work looks like and how AI can enable a vastly different experience both for them and for the teams they partner with across hundreds of thousands of employee interactions each year.?

?It is important to note I have led our early HR AI adoption journey at Microsoft from the standpoint of spending nearly 30 years in the HR profession, not as a technology expert. My previous roles spanned across various HR disciplines within the HR profession and across multiple industries and geographies and not in technology, at least not in a traditional sense.??

Why is my professional background key here? Because the adoption and transformation journey I and my team have been on proves you need not be a technologist to drive material digital transformation and AI adoption in your organization. You need an adoption plan, and correspondingly, clear business architecture where technology will be applied. You must understand what the advent of AI means to your organization in practical terms, both in changing how work gets done, and the critical role HR will play in such change.?

HR organization harnesses powerful technology?

When we began our AI adoption journey 18 months ago, I quoted, in my global townhall forum, Peter Drucker, "The best way to predict the future is to create it”, and with human judgment, we began our journey of creating the future of our HR profession and corresponding employee experiences.?

?In Microsoft HR, we are creating the future with AI and applying our human judgment to how work gets done in HR and in service to the enterprise. We are not only ensuring there is a human in the AI loop, but even more, that human judgement is the meta loop and AI is a tool for refining the loop.?

To make this concept real to our teams, we grounded our efforts in Microsoft’s Responsible AI Standard. The six key principles for responsible AI of Accountability, Inclusiveness, Reliability and Safety, Fairness, Transparency, and Privacy and Security were essential in creating a responsible and trustworthy AI framework from which to operate across HR. The principles have guided every decision our HR team has made related to the implementation of first- and third-party AI solutions.?

The first of these decisions was to create a virtuous cycle between how employees engaged with HR via intelligent digital agents and how HR service professionals could leverage AI in their work to create better experiences both for themselves and for the employees.?

The next key decision was to?empower HR professionals with the practical application of technology.?

Herein was the value of low-code application development.??

In various parts of HR, we created space for HR professionals to become “citizen” developers. Such citizen developers have no software development education or experience, rather, they know their domain deeply and understand practically the workflows within their jobs. Their ability to develop is driven by their knowledge and low code created applications. We started with the use of Microsoft Power Apps, which is a very intuitive low-code application development platform. Power Apps combines visual development environment, services and connectors as well as data platform, all part of Power Platform, to enable rapid development of custom apps, like ones for the HR workflows. Using Power Apps, our HR team built custom business apps that connected data stored in our HR System of Record along with other data sources from across our ecosystem such as SharePoint, Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, and SQL Server.?

The key to this work was the HR professional – not the technology - was at the center of the application creation. In doing so, the focus on enhancing employee experiences with technology remained central to our efforts.?

Their expertise, knowledge, and experience enabled intelligent automation of previously manual work. Apps built using Power Apps provide rich business logic and workflow capabilities to transform manual HR operations into digital, automated processes. They also have a responsive design and run seamlessly in browsers and on mobile devices. Power Apps democratized HR-app-building by enabling HR professionals, with no software development education or experience writing code, to create feature-rich, custom HR apps.?

When the HR professionals in my organization saw the outcome, a spark of realization occurred. The technology was in service to them and their continuous pursuit of improving the employee experience.??

Technology enabled them to focus on high value work and increase human interactions with employees when and where it mattered most. Core to how the apps were developed was the HR professional’s human judgment. They knew what to ask and they knew how to frame the workflows. They embraced the “Socratic Doctrine” I noted in my last LinkedIn article and used the metaphorical “paint brush” to create imaginative, useful and practically applied outcomes – results that enhanced their work and created better experiences for the employees they were partnering with to find solutions.?

HR technology innovation redefines how employees engage?

As the Microsoft Power App is a tool which empowers the HR professional to move from manual work to intelligent automation, so was the Microsoft Power Virtual Agent to the employee. This enabled our HR team to create AI-powered bots that chat with users about specific topics. Our bot can answer routine questions, resolve common issues, or automate tasks that take up valuable employee time.?

With deep integration with Power Automate and the Microsoft Bot Framework, we drove our bots to integrate with API backends, which enabled the bots to handle additional topics, powered by the HR professional’s imagination. We deployed our HR bots to many channels, including Microsoft Teams, meeting employees where they do so much of their everyday work.?

We worked very closely with the engineering team and the patterns we developed have now influenced product direction. Since our early work with Power Virtual Agents, the product team has evolved these powerful tools into the Copilot Studio. The practice of using Copilots and the Power Platform (Power Apps and Power Automate) to drive business outcomes along with the Microsoft standard approach to AI-powered business transformation has become the foundation of AI-powered HR.??

This has resulted in two key outcomes for HR.??

First, HR professionals are more comfortable with the technology they created, and second, the results demonstrated have proven business value and significantly improved employee experiences.?

The next step was capturing the energy and momentum of the efforts noted above and channeling them in a way that would continue to stoke?the creative spark that was ignited across the HR organization. To do this, I focused on two complementary motions. The first was to create an innovation intake process for individual ideas and a concurrent AI community of practice across HR. In doing so, ideas from HR professionals across the company could be collected, organized, and prioritized within the documented business architecture. The second motion evaluated was where such “citizen developed” ideas would be best applied in service to broader solutions within our HR technology ecosystem. As a result, we harnessed ideas while driving for measurable results and encouraging cross-HR group collaboration in the adoption of technology.?

Generative AI in HR?

These iterative technological innovations set the stage for broad deployment and adoption of Microsoft Copilot across our HR organization.?

We began with adopting Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Service in our global HR Service Centers. The goal was to meet the needs of our HR Service Center agents with a Copilot solution that integrated generative AI capabilities into the tools and processes they depend on every day. This particular AI-powered tool has revolutionized the HR Service Center professional’s experience. The tool provides real-time assistance to resolve issues faster, handle cases more efficiently, and automate time-consuming tasks, delivering high-quality service to employees.?

The experience has changed how work gets done and focused more of our work on human creativity and human connection with employees.??

We still have work to do, and I have been clear with my teams they have an active say in how the future of their work will evolve.??

Bringing teams along the innovation journey, not just with words, but rather by enabling them practical agency over the tools, was a learning gained from our early days of the introduction of citizen development activities.?

Similarly, the power of Copilot for Microsoft 365 to boost the HR Service Professionals productivity within applications they already use every day was also a key focus, such as Outlook and Teams. The Copilot provided AI-guided answers and resources personalized for each employee issue and conversation creating more efficient and timely communication with employees.?

Deploying these Copilot offerings to our HR Service Center Professionals has provided the flexibility to integrate with our organization’s existing CRM?system.??

The results for our HR Service Center teams have been astounding. While there have been material productivity gains, there have also been job satisfaction gains in how people value and perceive and experience their work.?

In addition to deploying Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Copilot for Microsoft 365 in our HR Service Centers, we rolled out Copilot for Microsoft 365 across our entire HR organization using the learnings we gained in the service area. We leveraged our HR AI community of practice to generate a group of AI enthusiasts who spearheaded the practical application of Copilot and crowdsourced HR for Copilot guides, including prompts, best practices, and other learning resources.??

This is creating tested and proven use case scenarios and driving outcomes for our shared goal that every HR professional can define their work with AI without being technology experts.?

The path forward?

This article explains some of what we have achieved in HR at Microsoft in our journey to practically apply AI to transform both the HR profession and the employee experience.?

Remaining grounded in responsible AI principles and taking a human-centered approach to the practical application of AI to understand and optimize benefits to both the HR function and the employee experience has been key to adoption success.??

Jobs will change and evolve with AI, as has been the case with all technological advancements in history. We cannot predict what the future holds, but we can be the ones to shape our future with AI.?

The HR profession is in a unique position to lead the AI transformation in organizations as the human experience itself changes. The work of HR leaders will shape how the employee experience continues to benefit from this transformation. How we approach AI as HR professionals now will define the world of work over the next century and beyond.??

I will share in my next article how we are continuing to apply our learnings from what I wrote above into the realm of talent acquisition and talent management.?

Do you have a plan??

HR leaders, what is your AI adoption plan? Have you prepared your HR team to lead during this time of historic change and opportunity? Have you created a practical plan from which you and your senior leadership colleagues can drive the adoption of AI in a way that changes the human experience for the better while also driving business results???

Answering these questions will be part of defining how success will be realized with AI in your HR organization and across your enterprise.??

To quote the character Doc Brown from the movie Back to the Future, “where we’re going, we don’t need roads”, perhaps true, however we do need a human centered plan created by HR leaders to navigate the implementation of AI.