How HR Leaders Can Get Ready for the AI Revolution

As artificial intelligence advances, HR professionals have unprecedented opportunities to enhance efficiency, improve employee engagement, and refine recruitment processes. George Rivera III, senior vice president of Enterprise Solutions at SHRM, discussed this technology’s promise and challenge in his session “Transforming Human Resources: The Future of HR in the Age of AI” at the SHRM Annual Conference & Expo 2024.

Winning Hearts and Minds

Rivera opened the session by asking the attendees how they personally felt about AI. Their answers revealed mixed emotions—including excitement, anxiety, and confusion—elicited by personal AI experiences. Rivera emphasized that understanding these diverse perspectives is crucial for shaping future conversations about the role of AI in the workplace.

HR professionals will have to help workers shift their mindset regarding AI, he explained. To make the most of AI, organizations will need to move away from the fear that automation will render jobs obsolete, because that discourages experimentation. Instead, Rivera proposed viewing AI as a tool for augmentation, enhancing human capabilities rather than replacing them. “There’s this whole other tier of work that we haven’t even imagined yet. There are jobs that we haven’t even thought of,” he said.

By embracing this perspective, employees and leaders can start to recognize AI’s potential to create new organizational capacity by fostering innovation and efficiency. Rivera’s message underscored the importance of cultivating excitement around AI, as it can help organizations evolve and adapt to the ever-changing workplace landscape.

Learning from the Last Revolution

The world of work has changed multiple times over human history, but historically, those shifts were very far apart. By the time the assembly line became common, no one working remembered the introduction of steam power. That meant that every generation had to face its revolution alone, relearning the change management lessons that were gained by their predecessors, only to be later forgotten.

However, many modern workers have dealt with several technological revolutions in recent years, including the rise of the internet, the introduction of mobile devices, and the launch of social media. Rivera said that because today’s HR leaders have those experiences under their belts, they’re better positioned to navigate the shifts required by AI. For starters, HR can look ahead and prioritize the skills that new technology will require, rather than the skills currently needed.

Preparing for the Skills of Tomorrow

The skills workers will need to thrive in an AI-driven world are the ones that make the most of our humanity, Rivera noted. The World Economic Forum has identified cognitive skills, such as analytical, critical, and creative thinking, as being particularly vital. “The more important AI becomes, the more critical thinking comes out as a key skill. That’s the thing we’re going to need the most,” Rivera said.

The challenge for employers is that these are some of the hardest skills to train and instill in workers. The stability of future talent pipelines will rest on having workers with these core intellectual and emotional capabilities. Talent leaders need to start working now to figure out how they’ll address those skill shortages in the years to come, Rivera said.

Improving HR Accessibility and Actionability

Finally, Rivera emphasized the importance of integrating HR functions into the company’s decision-making process. To do this, HR information must be easily accessible and actionable so that AI tools can conduct analysis and forecasting based on company data and benchmarking research from organizations such as SHRM. In a world where human skills are going to be at the center of an organization’s competitiveness, talent strategy and business strategy need to be in lockstep, and new AI technologies will help make that possible, he said.

The Story Isn’t Over

As exciting as generative AI has been, it is only the start of a longer transformation. Rivera noted that larger firms often adopt AI at a higher rate than small and medium-sized businesses, suggesting smaller organizations may need additional help managing the transformation. AI’s progression from narrow intelligence to more advanced forms capable of human-like learning will require ever-more sophisticated understandings of change management. HR has a crucial role to play, with SHRM standing by as a ready partner. “It’s our job to make sure that these things come to fruition for you,” Rivera concluded.

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