Empowering Employees to Unlock AI’s Potential

In the evolving landscape of HR, generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is becoming increasingly central to daily operations. GenAI tools hold the potential to make HR both more efficient and more strategic in functions such as talent acquisition, employee engagement, and performance management. However, knowing these tools exist and getting your team to use them effectively are two entirely different challenges.

For HR managers, successful long-term AI integration requires clear objectives and well-defined use case. The process begins by engaging with your organization’s leaders, who should have a vision of the business functions they most want to enhance with AI.

For example, say your company wants to boost its service quality to improve customer experience and satisfaction. Your leaders are likely asking these key questions:

• What business problem(s) are we addressing?

• What’s our strategic goal?

• How can we improve the customer experience?

None of these questions mentions AI—yet. At this point, your organization is defining its business strategy to align with AI technology adoption, so the focus is not yet on the tools themselves. During this process, ask yourself: How can my HR team help the organization achieve its goal of better customer satisfaction by using AI? It’s key that the company has the right employees working with customers, and it’s your team’s job to recruit those employees. AI can help them succeed in that task.

Rally the HR Team

For managers—particularly those just beginning to implement AI tools—the first challenge is getting your team on board and ensuring they use the resources to their full potential. How can you best encourage this? It all comes down to how you position these tools to the staff, starting with how GenAI can benefit them personally by empowering the development of new capabilities and efficiencies.

SHRM has developed a four-pillar framework to help HR leaders guide the change management necessary for the thoughtful adoption of AI:

• Empower.

• Steward.

• Explore.

• Activate.

These pillars reflect key components that align organizations’ business needs with AI opportunities and focus on the most critical part of implementation: your people. HR has the capability to lead people-centric change across the organization, but you must first and foremost execute each pillar in a way that helps secure buy-in from HR employees.

Empower: Craft a Clear Business Vision. Your organization’s vision for its business depends heavily on the quality of its workforce to execute that vision. When it comes to recruiting staff, AI can be an invaluable tool for performing rote tasks such as creating job descriptions, screening candidates, managing talent pipelines, and assisting with initial outreach.

Before introducing the technology to the HR team, craft an employee-centered story that connects the organization’s vision to the recruiters’ daily tasks. Rather than presenting AI as just another thing to learn, encourage recruiters to envision how it can address their pain points. For example, explain how the technology decreases the time devoted to the tedious sorting of resumes and allows for more focus on high-value tasks, such as building relationships with candidates. This frames AI as a solution that enables them to focus on the tasks they’ve wanted—but haven’t been able—to prioritize.

Once you’ve conveyed that message, shift to problem-solving. Ask recruiters to identify areas in which they feel overwhelmed or that need improvement and then encourage them to explore how AI can tackle those specific challenges. This approach moves the conversation from “Here’s a new tool” to “Here’s how a new tool can help you achieve what truly matters.” 

Steward: Establish Ethical Guidelines. Incorporating AI into the workplace as a whole requires HR to serve as a steward, working closely with other departments to develop a strong ethical framework that ensures responsible AI use aligns with the organization’s values. HR’s unique vantage point on employee experience makes it well suited to craft policies that govern AI’s impact across the entire employee life cycle, from recruitment and development to performance management and beyond.

Begin by creating policies that center around fairness, transparency, and accuracy, ensuring these principles become the foundation for AI’s role in the organization. For employees, this means helping them understand exactly how AI affects their work experience and knowing that it operates with respect for their privacy and fairness in mind.

For example, HR can outline how AI tools will handle sensitive data, clearly communicating how privacy is protected and how decisions are made without bias. Once these policies are established, let employees know that HR will continually revisit and refine them as AI use evolves internally, ensuring they remain relevant and aligned with ethical advancements and employee feedback.

Explore: Encourage Experimentation. When evaluating the capabilities of AI tools, organizations often test use cases to assess their viability. A testing environment that fosters cross-functional collaboration and encourages employee experimentation is essential to the ultimate success of new AI tools.

HR teams should be encouraged to explore AI-driven engagement tools in a creative, low-pressure environment in which they can experiment freely without feeling that they have to “get it right” the first time. HR managers can take an active role in collecting staff feedback through pulse surveys and engagement metrics. However, start by allowing for open experimentation. This approach lowers the barrier to entry and builds familiarity with AI tools.

After initial exploration, move into a phase of directed experimentation in which employees share their experiences, insights, and results. A collaborative environment supports workers as they integrate AI into their workflows, developing a sense of ownership as they increase their comfort with these technologies.

Activate: Build Workforce Readiness. If you plan to use AI as a tool for continual learning and the enhancement of workplace efficiencies, it’s essential to establish trust with your team. For example, AI can be used to identify skills gaps, recommend personalized development plans, and assist in curating learning content for your employees—but none of this matters if your team doesn’t trust the internal use of AI.

When managers use AI as a means for employee development, it’s important to explain to the team how it analyzes data to suggest personalized learning or upskilling opportunities. Clarify that AI is an augmenter, not a replacer, that is designed to support employees’ growth rather than supplant their decision-making agency. One approach is to encourage your team to see AI feedback as a “personal coach” that can help them grow and evolve as professionals. The more they trust AI as a partner in their growth, the more open they will be to its potential.

The Impact of Hero Cases

When implementing AI tools, it’s crucial to offer “hero cases” to drive organizational adoption. These are fully documented examples that demonstrate measurable success and transformative potential in real business contexts. A strong hero case showcases quantifiable improvements in business metrics, funda- mental shifts in operating models, and the ability to scale across large operations or teams.

The most compelling cases highlight how AI empowers employees with innovative tools and capabilities while delivering significant efficiency gains, such as Microsoft’s documented reduction in manual tasks that freed up employees for higher-value work. These examples go beyond theoretical benefits to demonstrate tangible value through before-and-after metrics, specific workflow improvements, and clear return on investment.

HR leaders develop hero cases by collaborating with key stakeholders and creating powerful narratives to promote further AI adoption within an organization.

By demonstrating a tangible, positive impact on employee growth and business outcomes, these success stories can be key to driving wider AI adoption.

The Human Element

HR managers can play a critical role in their organizations’ successful adoption of AI tools by ensuring that the human element remains at the forefront of AI experimentation and integration and that the adoption process reflects the concerns and experiences of the workforce, fostering trust and engagement.

According to a research report from RAND, 80% of AI projects fail—often not due to technical issues but because of human-centered challenges, such as leadership misalignment and poor collaboration. By focusing on executing the four-pillar framework, implementing human-centered strategies, and showcasing tried-and-true hero cases, HR managers can ensure that AI integration within their team—and their organizations—leads to measurable improvements and long-term success. 

Nichol Bradford is executive in residence for AI+HI at SHRM.