A significant portion of Providence health system’s annual hiring comes from internal transfers, but a burdensome process made career moves difficult for employees. Working with IBM, the health system deployed an AI-powered digital worker to streamline transfers, cutting down hiring managers’ administrative work and helping employees start new roles sooner.
Across the 16 HRX practices from recruitment and compliance to talent management and leadership development — AI is increasingly augmenting the HR function. To demonstrate how HR professionals are putting AI into practice, SHRM reached out to HR leaders to share their experiences. This installment of our AI Use Case series explores how one HR executive is using AI and automation to streamline the internal transfers process and improve talent mobility.
This article is an example of an AI-Powered Internal Talent Mobility use case. Discover 137 other AI use cases by visiting SHRM’s AI Field Manual for Employers: 138 Use Cases for AI at Work.
For Providence, one of the largest health systems in the United States, a cumbersome hiring process was creating unnecessary barriers to employee mobility. Hiring managers navigated multiple systems, approvals required manual effort, and employees — referred to as caregivers — seeking new opportunities within the organization faced frustrating delays. Some employees found it easier to leave the organization and reapply for a job, said Carol McDaniel, vice president of talent acquisition at Providence, based in Atlanta.
McDaniel and her team saw an opportunity to improve that experience using artificial intelligence and automation. Working with IBM Consulting, the health system redesigned its internal hiring processes around an AI-powered digital worker called RITA, short for Requisition and Internal Transfer Assistant.
The results have been significant. Providence has reduced administrative work for hiring managers by 90%, lowered internal transfer costs by 60%, and improved requisition accuracy by more than 70%. Internal transfers also have become faster, with caregivers starting new roles an average of 12 days sooner.
The initiative demonstrates how AI can do more than accelerate recruiting tasks. By rethinking how work moves across systems and departments, organizations can improve internal mobility, boost retention, and free managers to focus on their teams.
“At Providence, we took a step back and asked how we could make it easier for our caregivers to grow their careers within our organization,” McDaniel said. “We saw an opportunity to use AI in a way that could remove barriers, simplify work, and better support our caregivers and our mission.”
AI Use Case Study
Providence employs approximately 119,000 caregivers across a complex health system. A significant part of its hiring activity involves internal transfers, making employee mobility an important component of workforce planning and retention.
Yet processes designed to manage hiring, approvals, and compliance requirements created friction for employees moving between hospitals, departments, or even between shifts.
“In partnering with IBM, we had an opportunity to review all of our talent acquisition and mobility processes in general,” McDaniel said. “When we were looking at our caregiver journeys, we discovered through focus groups and employee feedback that internal transfers were very frustrating for them.”
Providence partnered with IBM to redesign the experience with human-centered design in mind, an approach that prioritizes how people interact with a process rather than simply automating existing procedures.
The resulting solution, RITA, is built on IBM watsonx Orchestrate and operates across Providence’s existing Oracle human capital management and recruiting environments, as well as other systems and data sources. Rather than replacing core HR technology or adding another stand-alone application, it coordinates information and tasks across existing platforms.
RITA helps automate requisition creation, approvals, internal transfers, job opportunity notifications, and hiring status updates. It also guides hiring managers through the offer stage, gathering the appropriate state-specific information needed to prepare offers.
The system addresses several specific pain points. Qualified internal candidates can be notified about relevant opportunities rather than having to search for openings themselves. They also can avoid an additional interview process and redundant preboarding steps, including certain checks of credentials and certifications already verified through their employment at Providence, as appropriate.
“We now use an AI agentic tool to pull the various pieces of information and orchestrate the process much faster for our hiring leaders to review,” McDaniel said.
Providence deployed RITA in August 2025, initially focusing on internal mobility as a way to test the technology in a defined use case before expanding its application.
What Worked
One of the initiative’s most important successes was its focus on eliminating friction rather than simply speeding up individual tasks.
Within the first three to six months, Providence found that RITA was removing 90% of the administrative burden associated with the internal hiring process. Instead of moving among multiple portals to gather information, managers receive the relevant details through a more connected workflow.
The system also improved requisition accuracy. Incorrectly created requisitions had required talent acquisition teams to make corrections, adding delays and unnecessary work, McDaniel said. Providence has seen requisition accuracy improve by more than 70%.
The financial results have been equally notable. Although Providence’s overall cost per hire was already competitive, the organization achieved a 60% reduction in cost per hire for internal transfers. McDaniel said those savings created opportunities to reinvest resources in talent acquisition and HR functions.
Internal mobility has also gained momentum. According to McDaniel, internal transfers increased from approximately 15% to 23% of overall hiring activity to more than 35% within a year.
The improvements matter beyond recruiting efficiency. In healthcare, moving qualified employees into needed roles more quickly can help organizations deploy existing talent while reducing the disruption associated with vacancies and lengthy staffing processes.
For Providence, a simpler transfer experience also helps restore employees’ confidence in the organization’s internal career opportunities.
Lessons Learned
Providence’s experience highlights several considerations for HR leaders evaluating AI-powered workflows.
First, organizations should involve technology teams early. McDaniel said Providence initially began designing what it believed would be an effective solution before bringing its IT team into the process. The organization subsequently had to adjust its plans to accommodate its existing technology environment.
“We needed to get our technology team to the table much faster,” she said, emphasizing the importance of aligning process design with the organization’s technology architecture from the outset.
The experience underscores the importance of cross-functional collaboration among HR, talent acquisition, IT, and other stakeholders. AI agents must work within existing systems, data structures, security requirements, and governance practices to deliver practical results.
Second, leaders should identify the underlying process problems before introducing automation. Simply automating a complicated workflow risks making an inefficient process faster without making it better, McDaniel said. Providence first examined where approvals, policies, and system interactions created unnecessary obstacles.
Finally, McDaniel emphasized the importance of maintaining a human-centered approach.
“Automation by itself can be cold,” she said. “You don’t want to lose your people along the way to automation.”
That means assessing how employees and managers experience a process, not just measuring time saved or tasks completed. In a highly regulated environment such as healthcare, organizations also must ensure that streamlining does not compromise necessary credentialing, compliance, or other safeguards.
Advice for HR Teams
McDaniel recommended HR leaders approach AI as a way to remove administrative burdens and improve employees’ work experiences, rather than primarily as a workforce-reduction strategy.
“We used AI to remove burden, not see how many employees to potentially replace,” she said.
That distinction can influence how employees perceive an initiative and whether they embrace the resulting changes. When the objective is to make work easier, managers can spend less time navigating systems and more time supporting employees, while HR teams can redirect resources toward higher-value activities.
HR leaders also should identify use cases with clear operational pain points and measurable outcomes. Providence began with internal transfers because employee feedback had exposed a problem and the organization could track improvements in administrative effort, accuracy, costs, and time to start a new role.
The approach also offered a way to test AI in a limited setting before expanding it across the broader talent acquisition function.
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