HR to Play a Pivotal Role in AI + HI

HR leaders have arrived at a transformative moment — when the opportunity to integrate artificial intelligence with human intelligence (AI + HI) can move HR into an even more strategic function trusted by leadership.  

AI is just beginning to make its mark in the workplace as organizations experiment with new tools and workflows and grapple with change management. The excitement around increased efficiency and innovation is tempered by understandable trepidation — concerns about job security, ethical implications, and the challenge of adapting to rapidly evolving technologies. These early days of AI + HI integration are marked by uncertainty as much as potential, demanding patience, education, and thoughtful implementation. One thing is for sure: AI in the workplace can’t be ignored. 

There has been a dramatic increase in HR adoption of AI, SHRM Chief Transformation Officer Andy Biladeau said, citing recent SHRM research. About 66% of surveyed HR professionals are using AI on a daily basis at work, up from about 30% eight months ago, he said during an April 16 SHRM webinar.   

“But as adoption grows, the question emerges: How best to apply the technology?” he said. “Fear of the technology may also be growing as more folks start to use it.” 

One overarching concern is that AI tools could lead to massive displacement of workers.  

SHRM’s research showed that only 3% of recent workforce reductions are tied to AI. “Displacement has not taken place in the way that many thought that it would,” Biladeau said. “While headlines often warn of AI replacing jobs, we’re seeing more HR pros use the technology to increase productivity and be more efficient. More important, they are using AI to be better business partners to serve their organizations.”         

During the webinar, Nichol Bradford, executive in residence for AI + HI at SHRM, shared her main takeaways from SHRM’s The AI+HI Project 2025, held April 9-10 in San Francisco:  

• Responsible AI is going to fall under HR. 
• AI will unlock credibility for the HR function. 
• The HR profession will be transformed. 

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Responsible AI

Bradford described responsible AI as translating to “people wanting to know if the AI being used is fair, if it’s transparent, if they understand how it is being used, and if they understand when it is being used.” 

This duty will fall to HR, she said. “Even while the C-suite sets the agenda and the culture, HR owns the mechanisms of the social contract within an organization over the employee life cycle,” she said. “To the extent that the company is using AI internally, ensuring it is responsible becomes an HR function.”     

Biladeau said that creating transparency is essential. “When you hide what you’re doing, there is a question mark on the employee side about the impact of AI on people’s personal work experience,” he said. “That transparency to build trust is critical, whatever adoption approach you take.”  

He added that employers have to marry their implementation approach to their culture. In some organizations, a compliance approach drives behavior change, while in others, a more incentive-based approach works best, he explained. 

Gaining Credibility 

Bradford said that one of the great benefits of integrating AI into the organization will be the ability to find causality from messy, unstructured data.  

“HR owns lots of unstructured data,” she said. “Traditional data analytics tags and sorts the data in a certain way, but AI allows you to take very messy data and find causation that was hard to see historically.” 

She added that “it does not mean that what is an art should only be a science, but it’s good to know that results you thought were true were, in fact, correlation instead of causation. You will have data for storytelling. Credibility comes with that.” 

Biladeau said that inconsistent data from siloed HR systems does not readily allow for a composite view of the individual.  

“One of the unlocks of these large language models will be the ability to merge datasets and query on an individual level at scale,” he said. “It will allow HR to move away from velocity metrics to value metrics.” 

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The Evolution of HR

AI will enable HR as a function to be more strategic and forward-looking. To be able to provide those forward-looking trajectories is going to be valuable, Biladeau said. And on the individual level, people can “increase the time spent at work doing things they want to do and that excite them, spending more time around the original reasons that inspired someone to become an HR professional in the first place,” he said.  

Bradford predicted that HR specialties could start to disappear. Traditional functional breakdowns will become less relevant as HR becomes generalists supported by AI tools, she said.  

“The question then is where do we want to spend more time?” she asked. “More coaching, learning and development, business partnerships.”  

The main survival skills in the age of AI will be adaptation and ideation, Bradford said, and the top leadership skills will be creating an environment where people can learn and where people can change.”     

Many organizations are just getting started on their AI implementation journey. Some initial tasks for those at that stage include initiating a conversation about creating an AI usage policy; setting up lines of communication between HR, legal, and IT; and starting to experiment with the tools.    

“We have made a ton of progress rolling out AI at SHRM,” Biladeau said. “It’s important to get people using the tools, getting them used to it, getting reps on the tools, getting them to ask questions. We’ve seen a tremendous uptick in adoption and application.”