Explore AI use cases within the HR practice areas listed below. In addition to a basic description, each entry includes how commonly a use case is among HR professionals, how costly and risky HR professionals perceive the use to be, and whether it falls into one of four categories based on those factors, according to SHRM research:
Low-Hanging Fruit
(Low Risk/Low Cost)
Experimental
(High Risk/Low Cost)
Strategic Bets
(Low Risk/High Cost)
Monitor
(High Risk/High Cost)
HR Practice Areas:
Recruiting
Attracting and selecting talent to meet organizational needs.
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AI tools can find and prioritize people who never applied, then draft outreach messages that start a conversation.
- Prevalence: Used by 12% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Average — Sourcing tools scan public profiles, which creates privacy questions around outreach. Biased search patterns can also quietly narrow the pool.
- Perceived cost rating: Average — This use case requires sourcing platforms and licensing fees.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM's Optimize Your Hiring Strategy with Business-Driven Recruiting toolkit to place sourcing inside a full strategy.
Experimental
A recruiting chatbot can answer candidate questions, share application status, and collect basic screening information at any hour.
- Prevalence: Used by 7% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Average — The chatbot speaks to candidates in the employer's voice, and if it screens people, it becomes part of the selection process that must adhere to equal employment opportunity standards.
- Perceived cost rating: Average — This use case requires a recruiting-chatbot platform and content upkeep.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM's article AI in HR: Where to Lean In — and Where to Hold Back to better understand candidate-facing bot practices.
Monitor
AI tools can read incoming applications, extract qualifications, and rank candidates against the job requirements.
- Prevalence: Used by 16% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Average — A flawed ranking excludes real people, and applicant screening is a decision point that can face discrimination claims. In addition, several jurisdictions now require bias audits of automated screening tools.
- Perceived cost rating: Average — This use case requires applicant-tracking features or dedicated screening tools, which carry license costs, as well as validation work.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM's Screening and Evaluating Job Candidates toolkit to better understand responsible screening design.
Experimental
AI tools can analyze where past strong hires came from and steer campus visits and regional sourcing toward the highest-yield places.
- Prevalence: Used by 2% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Average — Shifting recruiting channels or locations changes who ends up in the applicant pool, so the relevant talent pool demographics require monitoring.
- Perceived cost rating: Average — This use case requires yield data plus program and travel budgets.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM's Optimize Your Hiring Strategy with Business-Driven Recruiting toolkit to better understand strategies for recruiting channels.
Strategic Bets
Matching engines score the fit between candidates and open roles in both directions, suggesting jobs to candidates and candidates to recruiters.
- Prevalence: Used by 11% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Average — Matching influences who gets considered for a role, which pulls these engines under automated-employment-decision rules in some places.
- Perceived cost rating: Average — This use case requires platform licensing and validation work.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM's Using AI for Employment Purposes toolkit to better understand the legal landscape for job-matching tools.
Monitor
AI tools can spot duplicate candidate records, merge them, and clear stale entries so the pipeline reflects reality.
- Prevalence: Used by 8% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Low — This type of candidate record cleanup is necessary data hygiene and can be set to require human review to ensure no data is lost.
- Perceived cost rating: Low — Most applicant tracking systems support this cheaply.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM's How to Select HR Technology guide to learn about how the applicant tracking tools you choose can affect your candidate data.
Low-Hanging Fruit
AI tools can coordinate calendars across interviewers and candidates, propose times, and handle rescheduling on their own.
- Prevalence: Used by 9% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Low — The worst outcome is a scheduling mix-up, fixed with an apology and a new slot.
- Perceived cost rating: Average — This use case requires scheduling tools and calendar integration.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM's article AI in HR: Where to Lean In — and Where to Hold Back to better understand scheduling assistants in recruiting.
Low-Hanging Fruit
With consent, AI tools can transcribe interviews and summarize each candidate's answers against the evaluation criteria.
- Prevalence: Used by 7% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Low — The notes support human evaluation, and candidates are told about the recording.
- Perceived cost rating: Low — Transcription is now a commodity feature.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM's Strategic AI Prompts to Transform HR Summarization Tasks how-to guide to learn how to structure interview summaries.
Low-Hanging Fruit
AI tools can write copy to accelerate the development of up-to-date job descriptions that accurately reflect organizational needs and capture the attention of qualified applicants.
- Prevalence: Used by 20% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Low — Job descriptions are highly adaptable and easy to modify if the initial version isn’t attracting the right candidates.
- Perceived cost rating: Low — Most job descriptions are based on existing roles or documented business needs, and many AI tools excel at adapting or updating existing documents.
SHRM Member Resources
Read through a real-world example of this use case in the SHRM article How a Fire Department's HR Leader Used AI to Rebuild Recruiting. Then use the SHRM guide How to Write an Effective Job Description to inform your AI tools’ work.
Low-Hanging Fruit
AI tools can analyze which job ads bring in qualified applicants and use that analysis to adjust how job ads read, where they run, and how much is spent on them.
- Prevalence: Used by 12% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Low — Ad copy stays reviewable, and budget shifts can be reversed easily.
- Perceived cost rating: Average — This use case requires programmatic advertising platforms, which carry ongoing spend.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM's Master AI Prompts for Writing Effective Job Descriptions how-to guide to sharpen the ad copy that the system tests.
Low-Hanging Fruit
AI tools can build role-specific interview guides with consistent questions, scoring rubrics, and follow-up prompts for every opening.
- Prevalence: Used by 10% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Low — Recruiters review the guides, and structured interviews reduce bias compared with improvised ones.
- Perceived cost rating: Low — Mainstream AI tools produce guides from job descriptions.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM's AI Prompts Guide for HR to find interview-guide prompts.
Low-Hanging Fruit
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Before each pay run, AI tools can flag unusual patterns such as duplicate payments, odd overtime spikes, or terminated employees still on the payroll.
- Prevalence: Used by 2% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Average — A missed anomaly lands in someone's paycheck, and payroll is among the most sensitive data that HR holds.
- Perceived cost rating: Average — This use case requires payroll analytics and system integration.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use the SHRM article How to Comply with Payroll Record-Keeping Requirements to better understand the records that this analysis runs on.
Monitor
During enrollment, AI tools can suggest the plan mix that fits each employee's family, health usage, and finances.
- Prevalence: Used by 4% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Average — Recommendations edge toward advice on health and money, so accuracy and clear disclaimers matter.
- Perceived cost rating: Average — This use case requires enrollment platforms with decision-support features.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM's Essential Healthcare Cost-Management Strategies toolkit to learn how to help employees choose well.
Low-Hanging Fruit
AI tools can forecast benefits usage and costs so plan design and budgets rest on data-informed projections rather than last year’s numbers plus a guess.
- Prevalence: Used by 3% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Low/Average — The forecast is used for internal planning, and aggregated claims data protects individuals.
- Perceived cost rating: Average — This use case requires claims data and forecasting tools.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM's Essential Healthcare Cost-Management Strategies toolkit to support cost planning.
Strategic Bets
AI tools can match internal compensation data to market surveys and flag roles paid well above or below market.
- Prevalence: Used by 4% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Average — A bad job match produces incorrect benchmarks, and pay decisions built on them spread the error organizationwide.
- Perceived cost rating: Average — This use case requires survey subscriptions and compensation tools.
SHRM Member Resource:
SHRM's Benchmarking HR Metrics toolkit can help you better understand the fundamentals of benchmarking.
Monitor
AI tools can analyze how overtime and premium pay are distributed across teams and groups, checking for both compliance and fairness.
- Prevalence: Used by 1% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Average — Findings may indicate wage and hour exposure, so counsel should be included in the review.
- Perceived cost rating: Average — This use case requires time and payroll data joined for analysis.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM's Smart Strategies for Overtime Management toolkit to better understand overtime governance.
Monitor
AI tools can highlight contributions worth recognizing, such as a big save or a stretch delivery, from work signals and prompt the manager to act.
- Prevalence: Used by 0.4% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Average — A missed or uneven prompt stings, but managers approve every award before money moves.
- Perceived cost rating: Average/High — This use case requires recognition platforms plus the many system integrations that the signals require.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM's Clarifying Bonuses vs. Incentives: Benefits and Best Practices Q&A to learn to deliver recognition that lands.
Monitor
AI tools can save time and improve the effectiveness of an organization’s total rewards communications by creating drafts for benefits explainers, open enrollment reminders, and more.
- Prevalence: Used by 5% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Low — AI-drafted total rewards communications — when reviewed by a human expert — can provide more robust, personalized information at a higher cadence than humans working alone.
- Perceived cost rating: Low — Many standard AI tools excel at drafting communications within a templated framework.
SHRM Member Resource:
Review SHRM’s 12-Month Benefits Communications Calendar to ensure your AI-drafted copy aligns with best practices.