HR Can Lead the Charge Against AI-Fueled Competency Decline

HR professionals should work to counteract the declines in competency that can accompany increased AI usage, SHRM Chief Knowledge Officer Alex Alonso, Ph.D., SHRM-SCP, said at SHRM26 in Orlando. 

This skill decline affects recruiting, as AI helps job candidates convincingly inflate their own skill sets to get hired, a phenomenon known as skillfishing. AI usage can also affect employees’ quality of work unless strategic actions are taken, Alonso said. 

Erosion of Competency

Nearly 3 in 5 U.S. workers surveyed by SHRM in April 2026 said they have worked with a colleague who was hired for certain skills they later did not appear to have. Roughly the same percentage (57%) said they are at least moderately concerned that overuse of AI is leading to lower quality work products that have not been thoughtfully reviewed or vetted by the workers themselves. 

When AI-generated work is continually summarized and built upon without meaningful human contribution, “atrophy of original thought is a real workforce risk,” Alonso said. 

That atrophy is not something to be taken lightly. “Original thinking is not a soft skill. It’s a business control: it helps people challenge assumptions, detect errors, adapt to ambiguity, and make better decisions,” Alonso said. 

So how do you know if this is starting to affect your organization? “When someone can show you the answer faster than ever but cannot tell you why it is the right answer, capability is at risk,” Alonso said. 

In SHRM’s April survey, 80% of HR pros polled said they believe it is moderately or highly likely that repeatedly drafting, editing, or refining work with AI reduces original thinking. Workers are sensing the shift too. Nearly three-quarters (71%) of workers said critical thinking is more important now because of AI, according to SHRM’s Navigating AI in the Workplace: 2026 research report. 

AI Governance’s Role

Innovation is outpacing the safeguards around AI use at many organizations, said Ashley Miller, SHRM-SCP, director of operations and partnerships at SHRM. More than two-fifths (42%) of organizations do not have AI use policies in place for employees, according to SHRM’s State of AI in HR 2026 research report. 

Template: Comprehensive AI Governance Template

A governance structure for AI use is one safeguard against erosion of capabilities; others include AI literacy training, guardrails around when employees should and should not use AI, and checkpoints for human review of work product drafted with AI.

Another checkpoint should happen during hiring. Hiring managers should move from assessing someone’s declared skills to requiring a demonstration of those skills, Miller said. This can happen through on-site simulations, structured assessments, or verbal portfolio defense.  

Though employers are trying to gauge a candidate’s competencies, including critical thinking skills, that doesn’t mean interviewers should gloss over discussing AI usage with candidates. It helps to ask candidates where they incorporated AI into their most common workflows, how they verify its output, to show their prompt history, or to list all the different AI tools they use, Alonso said. 

“If you see great depth in terms of the tools that they're using, you are actually getting yourself a talented utility knife as opposed to someone who is just using one tool,” Alonso said. 

Preserving the human decision in hiring is also essential to prevent a skillfishing hire, Miller said. “If we allow AI to become the only judge of AI-enhanced candidates, we are compounding the problem,” she said. 

Credential: AI+HI

How HR Can Preserve Workforce Capability

There are concrete steps HR leaders and professionals can take to foster and grow their workforce’s competency in the AI era. 

• Define AI literacy: At a minimum, all employees should understand the principles of responsible use, data sensitivity, and how to verify AI outputs. Evaluate employees not on whether they can use a tool, but whether they “can use the tool with judgment,” Alonso said. 

• Develop employees through practice: HR should create employee development systems in which they define skills, employees practice those skills in workflows, managers provide feedback on that practice, employees try again, and HR measures employee performance to see if it improves. 

• Acknowledge AI assistants in the organizational chart: Naming the role of AI assistants and the tasks they are responsible for makes them visible to leaders, but also to employees. It also leads to accountability, since employees know exactly what output they are responsible for, Alonso said. 

• Protect developmental tasks: Increased AI usage means redefining many of an organization’s workflows. HR’s role is to ensure core skill sets are not eliminated. "What is the key set of tasks, the key occupations, and, more importantly, those that are most likely to be impacted by enhanced AI literacy?” Alonso said. “If we remove the practice but still expect the capability, we are setting the workforce up to weaken over time.” 

• Measure more than productivity: Alonso and Miller recommended measuring more than simple productivity, which AI is known to improve. Measuring work quality (error rates, rework, customer satisfaction), efficiency (cycle time), capability (skills demonstrated), and risk (compliance, escalation rate). 

Viewing AI as more than a tool to increase productivity can ensure your workforce is using AI in the most responsible and impactful way. 

“Make sure that you are balancing the skills or competencies that you've lost with the ones you're gaining,” Alonso said. “If there is an imbalance, you have a real problem.”