You can’t go a day without hearing about the rise of artificial intelligence in HR and business. AI is here – that’s for sure – and there are tons of ways you can ethically harness it to save yourself time, improve productivity, and potentially increase the quality of your work.
Let’s look at five ways you can make AI work for HR.
Five Ways To Streamline Your Workflow With AI for HR
1. Draft Documentation Without Re-inventing the Wheel
Nowhere is artificial intelligence more easily adopted in HR than in drafting documentation. You've probably heard the buzz already -- chatGPT is streamlining the creation of job descriptions, job postings, handbooks, and other documentation.
Using generative AI tools to assist with penning documentation is a great place to start with adopting AI in the workplace. Just remember, these tools are helpers, not authors, and anything they produce and any changes they make to existing text should be reviewed by a person before use.
2. Fine Tune the Language in Emails, Job Listings, and Other Documents
Generative AI tools can tweak the tone of emails to make them more professional, suggest more inclusive language for job descriptions, and improve the feedback you and your management team are giving to employees.
Textio is one such AI tool for HR specifically, able to identify and help you to eliminate biases in processes and documentation and optimize language for recruiting and performance management.
3. Transcribe and Summarize Meetings
How often do you sit for a meeting, take extensive notes, and still feel a little left behind at the end of things? If you struggle to split your attention between taking notes and actively listening to speakers, or with remembering all the most important points once the meeting is over, AI note-taking tools like Fireflies and Zapier’s OpenAI integration tools can help.
The most common features of AI note-takers, real-time transcription of audio and video recordings, will improve overall accessibility. Many AI note-takers can also tease out key points from meeting notes and succinctly summarize a meeting for you, giving you something more easily shareable.
4. Automate Many of Your Most Time-Consuming Tasks
Have a tedious task that takes up too much space in your brain? Chances are, there’s an AI tool that can help keep that plate spinning for you.
Workflow automation is a very broad category, covering everything from simple data entry to live on-demand communication with employees. Here are a few specific examples of where AI can automate your workload:
Virtual assistants like Leena AI can communicate policy, processes, and other information (like vacation time and pay stubs) to employees via live chat.
SAP SuccessFactors is a suite of software that utilizes AI to automate various tasks in performance management, recruiting, and onboarding. Software like the SuccessFactors suite can analyze and select resumes, issue surveys and training materials, and assemble the results, identifying patterns within.
AI can make managing leave time and travel/expense reimbursement easy by reducing and simplifying the amount of data entry you need to do and tracking everything for you.
Generative AI can streamline smaller administrative tasks, like calendar updates and reminders.
5. Predictive Analytics Can Give You a Head Start On Addressing Issues Like Turnover
There is amazing value in all that data you collect on your business and its employees, and data analytics tools can help you to harness that information. In short, data analytics takes a data set, identifies patterns, and then predicts outcomes from those patterns.
For example, predictive tools like Humantic AI and Visier can be used to identify the specific risks for employee turnover at your organization, point you toward those employees most likely to leave, and provide actionable solutions to improve retention.
What to Consider When Using AI
Make sure you’re using AI to solve specific problems, not just to follow the trends. Just like any tool, there is a learning curve you’ll need to overcome to get the most out of AI software. Before you bring AI into the toolbox, identify the specific pain points it will address for your organization. Adopting AI tools for tasks or processes that are already efficient may wind up costing you and your business time and extra money in the long run.
Be honest about AI use in the workplace. It’s about integrity, mainly, but disclosing AI use will allow those viewing or utilizing the results to judge them better – making them more aware of the potential presence of (confidently stated) mistakes, for instance.
Some AI tools come with copyright concerns, and ownership of results may be murky. Many AI tools have been trained on data sets pulled straight from the web without licensing that information first. Not only can these tools reproduce potentially copyrighted data without the owner’s permission as part of their output, but the U.S. copyright office is still deciding whether or not any AI results can be copyrighted.
Be sure to research the security of an AI tool before you use it. AI tools like chatGPT learn from, store, and reuse the information they receive from their users, meaning confidential information shared with a generative AI could potentially become public. If you aren’t sure, don’t share anything with an AI tool you wouldn’t be comfortable sharing publicly.
AI tools have a history of bias, and the problem hasn’t yet been completely solved. AI receives the biases inherent in the human-made data sets used to train them. You’ll want to keep this in mind as you utilize any AI tools. Do not assume that your tool is free of bias – even if it advertises itself as such.
AI output is not always error-free, and work produced by an AI should always be reviewed by human eyes. Whether you’re using AI tools to generate text or assist in hiring decisions, you’ll want a human to review the results before you utilize them. This can help catch bias and errors caused by AI hallucination before they reach the rest of the organization, potential new hires, clients, or the public.
