Explore AI use cases within the HR practice areas listed below. In addition to a basic description, each entry includes how common 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:
HR Function Strategy & Management
Aligning HR practices with business goals to drive organizational success.
AI tools can produce first drafts of HR strategy documents, project proposals, and business cases, pulling their structure from templates and past examples.
- Prevalence: Used by 7% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Low/Average — Strategy documents shape budget and leadership decisions, so a weak draft that skips human review can spread flawed assumptions across the company.
- Perceived cost rating: Low — Drafting copy is a core strength of mainstream AI tools and needs little setup.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM's AI Prompts Guide for HR to find sample AI prompts for writing business-facing documents.
Low-Hanging Fruit
AI tools can act as an internal communications specialist, tailoring company messages to a specific audience by using the appropriate tone and voice for a given topic.
- Prevalence: Used by 8% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Low — Workers can easily review the text for accuracy and appropriate language. A minor mistake can be corrected with a second message.
- Perceived cost rating: Low — This use case can be achieved with many standard AI tools and integrates smoothly into existing workflows.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM’s AI Prompting Guide for Crafting Employee Communications to identify the information that AI tools need to draft quality messages.
Low-Hanging Fruit
AI tools can project HR spending across categories such as staffing, benefits, and technology, then test how the budget holds up under different growth or cost scenarios.
- Prevalence: Used by 2% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Low — Forecasts inform planning conversations; finance review catches errors before money moves.
- Perceived cost rating: Average — Simple forecasts run in spreadsheets with AI help, but multi-scenario models require more structured data and setup time.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM's Practicing Strategic HR to Drive Performance and Business Growth toolkit to connect HR spending to business outcomes.
Experimental
AI tools can review how HR’s work currently flows across intake channels, handoffs, and cycle times and point out bottlenecks or duplicated effort in the operating model.
- Prevalence: Used by 2% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Low — The output is a diagnostic report for internal discussion; people decide what to change.
- Perceived cost rating: Low — This use case can start with documents and workflow descriptions the team already has.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM's Organizational Structure Explained toolkit to understand the structural options that a diagnostic should test against.
Low-Hanging Fruit
AI tools can review internal messages before they go out, flagging language that strays from the organization's voice, style rules, or reading level.
- Prevalence: Used by 7% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Low — The tool only suggests edits and a human still decides what to send, so a poor suggestion is easy to ignore.
- Perceived cost rating: Low — General-purpose AI tools handle tone and style checks well with a short set of instructions.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM's AI Prompting Guide for Crafting Employee Communications to define the voice you want the tool to enforce
Low-Hanging Fruit
AI tools can model how different HR operating models — such as centralized, shared-services, or business-partner structures — would perform under changes to headcount, budget, or service demand.
- Prevalence: Used by 3% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Low/Average — Models rest on assumptions, so leaders who treat a model’s output as fact can end up committing to a structure that is only weakly supported by the data.
- Perceived cost rating: Low/Average — Basic scenarios run in general tools, but detailed modeling requires clean internal data and analysts’ time.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM's Workforce Planning toolkit to better understand the planning discipline behind sound operating scenarios.
Low-Hanging Fruit
AI tools can condense long legal or vendor contracts into plain-language summaries that highlight terms, dates, and obligations that HR needs to track.
- Prevalence: Used by 4% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Average — A summary that drops or misstates a contract term can lead HR to miss a real obligation, so counsel should confirm anything that drives action.
- Perceived cost rating: Low — Summarization works well in common AI tools without special configuration.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM's AI Prompts to Transform HR Summarization Tasks to structure contract summaries.
Experimental
Enterprise Solution
AI Enablement for HR
Nontechnical barriers may slow job displacement by AI, but they don't pause its adoption. This program gives your HR team readiness assessments, live expert training, and implementation guides to lead AI adoption thoughtfully across roles that face fewer barriers.
HR Technology
Strategic use of digital tools and platforms designed to enhance HR processes, streamline operations, and improve worker experience.
Copilots are AI assistants built into HR software. They answer questions, complete steps, and surface records without making the user leave the platform.
- Prevalence: Used by 10% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Low — Copilots work inside the vendor's user permissions model, so users only see data they could already access.
- Perceived cost rating: Average — This use case often arrives through vendor licensing tiers, and enabling it requires configuration and training.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM's AI in the Workplace resource hub to keep up with how these tools are evolving.
Strategic Bets
AI tools can draft replies to routine HR tickets — such as address changes, verification letters, or policy questions — for a staff member to review and send.
- Prevalence: Used by 6% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Low — A human reviews each draft before it goes out in order to catch incorrect or incomplete answers.
- Perceived cost rating: Average — This use case works best when the tool connects to the ticketing system and policy content, which requires integration.
SHRM Member Resource:
Read SHRM's article AI in HR: Where to Lean In — and Where to Hold Back to better understand how teams pair automation with human review.
Low-Hanging Fruit
AI tools can turn policy documents and recurring ticket answers into knowledge base articles and refresh those articles when the employer changes the policy or implements new workflows.
- Prevalence: Used by 5% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Average — Published articles carry the organization’s authority, so an article that drifts from actual policy can mislead employees at scale.
- Perceived cost rating: Average — This use case requires an editorial review step and a system for syncing articles to their source policies.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM's AI Prompting Guide for Crafting Employee Communications to keep generated articles clear, on message, and in the correct tone.
Strategic Bets
AI tools can read incoming HR requests, label them by topic and urgency, and send each one to the right queue or specialist.
- Prevalence: Used by 5% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Low — A misrouted ticket costs some time, but routing rules are easy to correct.
- Perceived cost rating: Average — This use case requires help-desk integration and a training period to learn the organization’s categories.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM's article AI in HR: Where to Lean In — and Where to Hold Back to better understand conversational AI in HR service delivery.
Strategic Bets
AI tools can label incoming HR documents by type, candidate or employee, and retention category, keeping digital files organized without manual sorting.
- Prevalence: Used by 5% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Average — A document filed under the wrong person or category can violate record-keeping rules or expose private information.
- Perceived cost rating: Average — This use case usually requires a document-management tool and a defined taxonomy.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM's Complying with Employment Record Requirements toolkit to find the categories and retention rules that your tagging should follow.
Low-Hanging Fruit
AI tools can scan paper personnel files, read the contents, and index them so old records become searchable and properly categorized.
- Prevalence: Used by 4% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Average — Legacy files hold sensitive history, so a scanning error or misfile can lose a record the organization is required to keep.
- Perceived cost rating: Average — This use case involves scanning hardware or services plus quality checks on the output.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM's Complying with Employment Record Requirements toolkit to better understand retention rules for the records that you digitize.
Monitor
AI tools can be configured to generate automated alerts when a document isn’t completed within the required time frame, enhancing visibility and helping prevent documents from slipping through the cracks.
- Prevalence: Used by 11% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Low — AI shouldn’t be the only way documentation compliance is tracked, but it can save time spent on sending reminders.
- Perceived cost rating: Average — This use case may require specialized tools or integrations, particularly to create notifications across multiple platforms.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM’s HR Forms & Checklists to identify documentation processes for which completion reminders would be useful.
Low-Hanging Fruit
AI tools can extract data such as names, dates, and amounts from forms, pay records, and letters and enter them into HR systems, replacing manual data entry.
- Prevalence: Used by 5% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Average — Extraction errors write bad data directly into systems of record, and those errors ripple into pay and compliance.
- Perceived cost rating: Average — These tools are specialized, and accuracy depends on tuning them to your document formats.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM's Complying with Employment Record Requirements toolkit to understand which regulations the extracted records must comply with.
Monitor
AI tools can answer questions from employees and HR staff by searching the organization's own policies, handbooks, and guides, then citing the source document.
- Prevalence: Used by 9% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Average — An answer built on an outdated or misread policy can steer employees wrong on pay, leave, or benefits, so the document library needs regular upkeep.
- Perceived cost rating: Average — This use case requires a maintained knowledge base, a permissions setup, and ongoing monitoring.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM's article Human Skills Still Matter as Agentic AI Transforms HR to better understand oversight practices for this kind of tool.
Low-Hanging Fruit
Instead of building reports, HR staff can type questions such as “How many open roles did we have in the past 60 days?” and get an answer drawn from HR systems.
- Prevalence: Used by 6% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Low — Queries only read data — they do not change records. Results can be checked against standard reports.
- Perceived cost rating: Average — This use case depends on system integrations and clean data, both of which take work to establish.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM's AI Prompts Guide for HR to learn the question-writing skills that this use case depends on.
Low-Hanging Fruit
AI tools can translate HR chats, calls, and documents into other languages on the spot so employees can get HR support in the language they prefer.
- Prevalence: Used by 4% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Average — A mistranslated benefits or policy detail can mislead an employee, and errors are harder to spot across languages.
- Perceived cost rating: Average — Live translation across channels typically requires a dedicated tool and integration work.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM's AI in the Workplace hub to keep up with language translation tools alongside other workplace AI.
Monitor
Employees can complete transactions — such as updating a bank account, requesting leave, or enrolling a dependent — by chatting with an AI assistant instead of navigating through menus.
- Prevalence: Used by 6% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Average — These workflows change live records, so a misunderstood request can alter pay or benefits data before anyone notices.
- Perceived cost rating: Average — This use case requires secure integration with core HR systems and careful testing.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM's article Human Skills Still Matter as Agentic AI Transforms HR to understand audits and spot checks for transaction-capable agents.