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)
Employee Experience
Holistic approaches to enhancing workforce engagement, productivity, and satisfaction.
AI tools can answer simple employee questions about pay, leave, benefits, and policies at any hour and pass harder cases to a human.
- Prevalence: Used by 6% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Low/Average — The AI tools’ answers draw on approved content, but an automated process creates the possibility that a confidently phrased wrong answer could reach an employee with no one to correct it in the moment.
- Perceived cost rating: Average — This use case requires a maintained knowledge base, system integrations, and ongoing tuning.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM's article Human Skills Still Matter as Agentic AI Transforms HR to better understand when a human must tap in within the AI-enabled system.
Strategic Bets
AI tools can allow organizations to create updated, personalized onboarding materials for new hires at scale.
- Prevalence: Used by 6% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Low — If the custom onboarding documents are based on existing policies and templates, the AI is likely to create functional content.
- Perceived cost rating: Low/Average — The cost may vary depending on whether you’re using AI to modify, update, and personalize existing content or to develop each onboarding journey from scratch.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM’s Employee Onboarding Guide to better inform the structure of your onboarding content.
Low-Hanging Fruit
AI tools can flag patterns linked to burnout risk, such as sustained overtime and dropping engagement scores, so leaders can check in before a worker reaches a crisis.
- Prevalence: Used by 1% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Low — This use case prompts a supportive conversation with a human, and the model takes no action on its own.
- Perceived cost rating: Average — This use case requires integrated time, calendar, and survey data, which takes effort to set up.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM's Creating a Mental-Health-Friendly Workplace toolkit to learn how to respond once an AI tool (or a manager) spots a burnout risk.
Low-Hanging Fruit
AI tools can analyze anonymized work-pattern data — such as communication networks, after-hours activity, and tone in open feedback — to estimate team sentiment and collaboration health.
- Prevalence: Used by 2% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Average — Assessments inferred from behavior can be wrong, and employees who feel watched may lose trust in HR.
- Perceived cost rating: Average — This use case requires specialized analytics and careful privacy safeguards.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM's How to Develop and Sustain Employee Engagement toolkit to explore direct ways to measure engagement patterns.
Strategic Bets
AI tools can combine data from employee surveys, HR, and employee services usage to map the employee journey and build personas that show how different groups experience work.
- Prevalence: Used by 2% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Low — The output informs program design, but it makes no decisions about individuals.
- Perceived cost rating: Average — This use case requires data from several systems, plus analysts’ time to keep the personas honest.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM's How to Develop and Sustain Employee Engagement toolkit to learn how to connect experience data with engagement strategy.
Strategic Bets
A virtual assistant can walk new hires through paperwork, training tasks, and first-week questions, sending reminders until each step is done.
- Prevalence: Used by 5% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Low — The assistant follows a defined checklist, and onboarding mistakes will surface quickly through parallel HR contact with new hires.
- Perceived cost rating: Average — This use case requires role-specific content and integrations with onboarding systems.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM's Employee Onboarding Guide to understand the steps that a virtual assistant should cover.
Strategic Bets
AI tools can suggest well-being programs and benefits options that fit each employee's situation, based on data the employee chooses to share.
- Prevalence: Used by 4% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Low — The tools’ recommendations are always optional, and they stay within the plans the organization already offers.
- Perceived cost rating: Average — This use case requires a benefits platform with recommendation features and careful data-privacy setup.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM's Designing and Managing Effective Wellness Programs toolkit to better understand wellness benefits strategy and the privacy rules around wellness data.
Strategic Bets
AI tools can read aggregate signals from collaboration platforms — including response times, meeting loads, and activity rhythms — to give leaders a running read on how teams are doing.
- Prevalence: Used by 2% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Low/Average — Employees may see this as monitoring. Also, the conclusions that the AI draws from weak signals in the data can misjudge a team.
- Perceived cost rating: Average — This use case requires platform integrations and privacy engineering.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM's 6 HR Technology Tools That Can Help Boost Employee Retention article to better understand continuous-listening platforms.
Strategic Bets
A well-being chatbot can offer initial responses such as stress-management content and self-help exercises and then connect employees to the employee assistance program (EAP) when a human should handle the case.
- Prevalence: Used by 3% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Low — The tool will be set to hand over sensitive situations to trained EAP professionals rather than handling them alone.
- Perceived cost rating: Low/Average — Many EAP vendors bundle a chatbot, and costs can rise when an organization integrates its own version.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM's Creating a Mental-Health-Friendly Workplace toolkit to better understand connecting employees to mental health support.
Low-Hanging Fruit
Inclusion & Diversity
Fostering a fair and inclusive environment that leverages diverse perspectives to enhance organizational success.
AI tools can track demographic and outcome gaps across hiring, promotion, pay, and turnover, showing where in the talent life cycle that disparities appear.
- Prevalence: Used by 0.7% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Average — Demographic analysis touches protected characteristics; a flawed cut of the data can support unfair conclusions or create legal exposure if humans make decisions based on those conclusions.
- Perceived cost rating: Average — This use case requires clean demographic data joined across several systems.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM's Using AI for Employment Purposes toolkit to better understand responsible analysis of employment data.
Monitor
AI tools can analyze survey comments and team feedback to estimate whether people feel safe speaking up and track how that changes by team and over time.
- Prevalence: Used by 0.3% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Average — Comments come from people who expect confidentiality; analyses of small teams can expose who said what, which damages the very safety being measured.
- Perceived cost rating: Average — This use case requires text analytics tools and careful anonymization thresholds.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM's Creating a Mental-Health-Friendly Workplace toolkit to learn how to build the trust that this analysis measures.
Experimental
AI tools can scan documents to look for terms that might be considered biased or noninclusive.
- Prevalence: Used by 0.9% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Average — AI models inherit the biases of their training data. Unmonitored AI could ignore biases that align with its training.
- Perceived cost rating: Average — This use case may require a specialized tool designed to better identify bias.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM’s Foundations of Legally Compliant Inclusion and Diversity toolkit to inform your AI analysis.
Monitor
AI tools can observe meeting patterns — such as who speaks, who gets interrupted, and whose items get time — and nudge organizers toward practices that include everyone.
- Prevalence: Used by 0.6% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Average — Analyzing individual speaking behavior can feel like surveillance, and mislabeling someone's participation can create the very friction that the suggestions were meant to prevent.
- Perceived cost rating: Average — This use case requires recording integrations and consent processes.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM's How to Develop and Sustain Employee Engagement toolkit to learn how to build meeting norms that include every voice.
Experimental
Before an employer changes a sourcing channel or selection step, they can use AI tools to model whether and how the change may shift the demographics of the candidate pool.
- Prevalence: Used by 0.4% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Average — Models trained on past hiring data can carry that history's biases forward, and acting on a wrong projection changes real hiring outcomes.
- Perceived cost rating: Average — This use case requires analytics expertise and detailed funnel data.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM's Skills-First Hiring toolkit to better understand selection design choices that widen candidate pools.
Monitor
AI tools can map who works with whom across the organization and show whether some groups sit at the edges of information and opportunity networks.
- Prevalence: Used by 0.4% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Average — Network maps reveal individual relationships, so publishing or misreading them can single people out.
- Perceived cost rating: Average — This use case requires specialized tools and communication metadata handled under clear privacy rules.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM's Organizational Structure Explained toolkit to get the structural context for reading network maps.
Monitor
AI tools can run statistical comparisons of pay across demographic groups — controlling for role, tenure, and performance — to find gaps that need explanation or correction.
- Prevalence: Used by 0.7% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Average/High — Findings can create legal obligations, once known, and a flawed model can either hide a real gap or announce a false one, so counsel should be involved.
- Perceived cost rating: Average — This use case requires specialized statistical tools and complete compensation data.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM's Managing Pay Equity toolkit to learn audit methods, including AI-supported ones.
Monitor
AI tools can test hiring, promotion, and termination patterns for adverse impact, flagging decision points where outcomes differ for those with certain protected characteristics.
- Prevalence: Used by 0.4% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Average/High — The analysis sits close to legal claims because errors in either direction carry consequences. The results of adverse impact testing usually belong under privilege with counsel.
- Perceived cost rating: Average — This use case requires statistical tools, defensible methods, and complete decision data.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM's Using AI for Employment Purposes toolkit to better understand adverse impact in AI-assisted decisions.
Experimental
AI tools can help manage accommodation requests by logging them and facilitate the interactive process by suggesting accommodation options. It can also power accessibility features such as captions and screen-reader-friendly documents.
- Prevalence: Used by 0.5% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Average — Accommodation decisions carry Americans with Disabilities Act obligations, which means a human should be involved in the interactive process and final accommodation decision. The process also handles medical information that demands strict confidentiality.
- Perceived cost rating: Average — This use case requires case-management tools and accessibility testing.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM's Managing Disability Accommodations toolkit to understand the interactive process that the workflow must follow.
Monitor
Credential
SHRM Inclusive Workforce Strategy Specialty Credential
Turn inclusion from a values statement into a measurable business driver with the SHRM Inclusive Workforce Strategy Specialty Credential, where AI-enabled tools, SHRM's Belonging Enhanced by Access through Merit (BEAM) Framework, and workforce analytics help you build inclusion strategies that are legally compliant, workplace-unifying, and business-accretive. Pair AI with human intelligence to reduce bias, strengthen compliance, and translate workforce data into real ROI.
Labor & Employee Relations
Managing workplace dynamics and ensuring compliance with labor laws to foster a harmonious and legally sound work environment
AI tools can turn a folder of emails, notes, and documents from an employee relations case into a clean timeline of who did what and when.
- Prevalence: Used by 2% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Average — Case summaries can end up in legal proceedings; a timeline that drops or misorders an event can distort the record.
- Perceived cost rating: Low/Average — Common tools are adept at summarization, but case material must stay inside a secure environment.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM's Strategic AI Prompts to Transform HR Summarization Tasks how-to guide to learn how to structure case timelines.
Experimental
AI tools can sort incoming complaints or other employee relations matters by type and severity so urgent allegations reach senior specialists immediately.
- Prevalence: Used by 1% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Average/High — A serious complaint that the model labels routine can sit in a queue while the organization's legal duty to respond is already running.
- Perceived cost rating: Low/Average — Triage can start with lightweight tools layered on the existing intake channel.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM's Workplace Conduct Investigations Policy to understand the response standards that triage must protect.
Experimental
AI tools can route grievances to the right handler, start the clock on the required response times set by service-level agreements (SLAs), and alert managers of an upcoming deadline.
- Prevalence: Used by 0.6% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Average — Grievance timelines often carry contractual weight under collective bargaining agreements, so a routing failure can become a procedural violation.
- Perceived cost rating: Average — This use case requires case-management tools and workflow configuration.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM's How to Conduct a Workplace Investigation guide to better understand the next steps needed after grievance routing.
Monitor
AI tools can read incident reports in bulk and pull out themes such as locations, behaviors, and repeat issues — that single-case reviews miss.
- Prevalence: Used by 2% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Low/Average — The analysis reads existing reports and surfaces patterns for humans to investigate; conclusions still get verified for each case.
- Perceived cost rating: Low/Average — Text analysis is inexpensive to pilot, though secure handling of sensitive reports adds requirements.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM's How to Conduct a Workplace Investigation guide to learn how to follow up on flagged patterns.
Experimental
AI tools can be used to streamline the development of workforce policies, especially when the tools can base their output on a template.
- Prevalence: Used by 5% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Average — Policy documents are foundational to HR functions, and they require thoughtful development.
- Perceived cost rating: Low — Providing templates and clear guidance make it easier for general-purpose HR tools to develop informed policies.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM’s Guide to Building AI Prompts for Smart HR Policy Creation to get started.
Experimental
AI tools can track the policy library as a system — flagging documents due for review, finding conflicts between policies, and logging version history.
- Prevalence: Used by 2% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Average — Policies define the employment relationship; automation that publishes an unreviewed change or misses a required update creates compliance gaps.
- Perceived cost rating: Average — This use case requires a policy-management platform and workflow setup, which carry ongoing costs.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM's Guide to Building AI Prompts for Smart HR Policy Creation to support the drafting side of the workflow.
Experimental
Before a policy change, AI tools can check the proposal against collective bargaining agreements and past grievances to flag terms that may require negotiation.
- Prevalence: Used by 0.3% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Average — Missing a mandatory bargaining subject can trigger an unfair labor practice charge, so labor counsel must confirm the AI's analysis.
- Perceived cost rating: Average — This use case requires contract documents in an analyzable form and specialist review time.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM's Managing Organizational Change toolkit to plan changes that affect represented workforces.
Strategic Bets
Leadership & Manager Development
Enhancing skills for guiding teams and managing organizations effectively.
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AI tools can combine feedback from peers, direct reports, and managers into one clear summary of a person's strengths and growth areas.
- Prevalence: Used by 3% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Low/Average — Summaries shape development conversations and careers. A summary that buries an important comment or hints at who said what can cause real harm, so a human must review before these are shared with the employee.
- Perceived cost rating: Average — This use case requires a 360-degree feedback platform that collects the input and connects to the AI.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM's How to Turn the 360-Degree Review into a Tool for Success guide to learn how to use multisource feedback well.
Strategic Bets
AI tools can help people managers practice challenging discussions and test a variety of scenarios and responses.
- Prevalence: Used by 4% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Low — AI prompts can be customized to handle specialized scenarios, enabling people managers to perform their duties with greater confidence.
- Perceived cost rating: Low — Many general-purpose AI tools excel at role-playing exercises.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM’s How to Handle Difficult Conversations article to study how to respond to any curveballs that the AI throws your way.
Low-Hanging Fruit
Managers can ask an AI assistant how to apply HR policy on tasks — such as approving leave, handling overtime, and documenting issues — and get plain-language answers that cite the policy.
- Prevalence: Used by 3% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Average — Managers act on the answers; a wrong answer about pay or leave becomes a real decision that HR has to unwind.
- Perceived cost rating: Low — The assistant builds on policy documents that the organization already has.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM's Guide to Building AI Prompts for Smart HR Policy Creation to keep the underlying policies clear enough to answer from.
Experimental
AI tools can play the candidate so managers can practice interviews, then grade their questions for clarity, fairness, and legal safety.
- Prevalence: Used by 3% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Average — A coach that teaches poor habits or lets an unlawful question pass means the error can make its way into real interviews with real candidates.
- Perceived cost rating: Low/Average — General chat tools handle the role-play; structured scoring and tracking add cost.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM's Screening and Evaluating Job Candidates toolkit to understand the interviewing standards that the coach should teach.
Low-Hanging Fruit
With a leader's consent, AI tools can review their communications and feedback to describe their leadership style, habits, and blind spots.
- Prevalence: Used by 2% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Low — The output informs private coaching, and the leader controls who sees it.
- Perceived cost rating: Low/Average — General tools can produce a basic version; validated assessments cost more.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM's Developing Organizational Leaders toolkit to pair leadership style insights with development action.
Low-Hanging Fruit
AI tools can maintain the resource hub that managers rely on — selecting guides, tagging forms, retiring outdated pages, and answering questions about where to find specific information.
- Prevalence: Used by 3% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Average — The hub speaks with HR's authority; an outdated guide left up can steer many managers wrong at once.
- Perceived cost rating: Average — This use case requires a content platform and editorial review time.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM's Empowering Managers With Strategies and Tools for Growth toolkit to better understand what managers need from HR support content.
Monitor
Before each one-on-one meeting, AI tools can suggest talking points drawn from goals, recent work, and past notes, then prompt follow-ups afterward.
- Prevalence: Used by 2% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Low — Suggestions go privately to the manager, who decides what to raise.
- Perceived cost rating: Average — This use case requires connections to calendars, goals, and notes on work products.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM's Empower Managers toolkit to better understand the conversations that the AI coach supports.
Strategic Bets
AI tools can pair mentors and mentees across the organization by skills, goals, and availability, helping manage a difficult matrix, especially once the group grows to more than a few dozen people.
- Prevalence: Used by 1% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Average — A weak match wastes goodwill and mentors’ time. Hidden matching criteria can feel unfair, though participants can request a new match.
- Perceived cost rating: Average — This use case requires a matching platform and current profile data.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM's Building Dynamic Employee Career Paths toolkit to place mentoring inside a growth strategy.
Monitor
AI tools can build a development path for each leader based on role, assessment results, and goals, then adjust the path as the leader progresses.
- Prevalence: Used by 3% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Low — The journey is a sequence of suggestions; the leader and their coach stay in control.
- Perceived cost rating: Low/Average — This use case requires content libraries and specific features within a learning platform.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM's Developing Organizational Leaders toolkit to understand what strong leadership development covers.
Low-Hanging Fruit
Learning & Development
Training and resources to foster worker growth and development.
Seminar
Building an AI-Enabled Workforce
Learn to integrate AI into workforce strategies for smarter decision-making, productivity, and competitive advantage in talent management.
AI-customized courses adjust difficulty and pacing to each learner — moving fast through topics for which they answer well and slowing down on subject areas where they struggle.
- Prevalence: Used by 8% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Low — A learner placed at the wrong level shows up quickly in assessment results and self-corrects.
- Perceived cost rating: Average — This use case requires a specialized adaptive-learning platform.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM's Comprehensive Guide to Development and Training toolkit to match learning methods to needs.
Strategic Bets
AI tools can turn job- or capability-specific source material into quizzes, practice scenarios, and short lessons in minutes instead of days.
- Prevalence: Used by 9% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Low — Instructional designers review the material before learners see it, catching errors in the normal workflow.
- Perceived cost rating: Average — This use case requires authoring tools or learning-platform AI features, which carry licensing costs.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM's Comprehensive Guide to Development and Training toolkit to learn how to build effective training content.
Low-Hanging Fruit
AI tools can tag every course by skill, topic, and level so the search function and recommendations work across the whole library.
- Prevalence: Used by 5% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Low — A mistagged course is harder to find; the fix is a corrected tag.
- Perceived cost rating: Average — This use case requires cataloging tools and learning platform integration.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM's Learning & Development resource hub to better understand how to manage learning libraries.
Strategic Bets
AI tools can group learners into cohorts by goals, level, and time zone so people move through programs together.
- Prevalence: Used by 2% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Low — The worst case is an awkward group, and regrouping is easy.
- Perceived cost rating: Average — This use case requires cohort features in learning management software and coordination effort.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM's How to Develop and Sustain Employee Engagement toolkit to better understand peer connection as an engagement driver.
Low-Hanging Fruit
AI tools can translate training into other languages and adapt examples, measurements, and legal references for each region.
- Prevalence: Used by 5% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Low — Local reviewers check adapted content before release to catch translation slips.
- Perceived cost rating: Average — Translation workflows cost real money at volume.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM's Learning & Development resource hub to better understand how to train global workforces.
Low-Hanging Fruit
AI tools can compare performance data, skills data, and business goals to identify what training the workforce actually needs.
- Prevalence: Used by 5% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Average — A misread allocates training budget to the wrong problem, and data about individual gaps deserves careful handling.
- Perceived cost rating: Average — This use case joins data from several systems and requires analysts’ time.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM's How to Conduct a Skills Gap Analysis guide to better understand the fundamentals of a needs analysis.
Low-Hanging Fruit
AI tools can recommend courses to each employee based on role, skills, and goals the same way streaming services suggest movies and TV shows.
- Prevalence: Used by 9% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Low — Recommendations are optional; the worst case is an unhelpful suggestion.
- Perceived cost rating: Average — This use case requires a tagged content catalog and platform support.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM's Learning & Development resource hub to keep up with personalization tools and practices.
Low-Hanging Fruit
AI tools can distill lengthy training materials into their essential points for easy review. It can also transpose resources across media, such as turning a meeting recording into a step-by-step written guide, to accommodate different learning styles.
- Prevalence: Used by 9% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Low — Summaries should be reviewed for accuracy, but are easy to update as new information becomes available.
- Perceived cost rating: Low — This use case can be accomplished with many common AI tools and scales easily.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM’s Strategic AI Prompts to Transform HR Summarization Tasks how-to guide to achieve the proper summary structure.
Low-Hanging Fruit
AI tools can connect training completion to performance, retention, and business results to estimate the ROI that a program delivers.
- Prevalence: Used by 3% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Low — The analysis informs budget conversations, and stakeholders can question the method openly.
- Perceived cost rating: Average — This use case requires linking learning data to outcome data, which takes integration work.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM's Comprehensive Guide to Development and Training toolkit to learn how to measure development impact.
Strategic Bets
Performance Management
Process of aligning individual objectives with organizational goals to optimize worker and organizational success.
AI tools can combine ratings, goals, and feedback across teams and cycles to reveal trends such as rating inflation or growing skills gaps.
- Prevalence: Used by 6% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Average — Leaders make workforce decisions from these patterns, so misleading errors in the underlying data can have broad implications.
- Perceived cost rating: Average — This use case requires multisystem data and analytics tools.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM's Performance Management resource hub to learn how to use performance data well.
Monitor
AI tools can help people managers find tactful, targeted ways to give employees feedback that improves performance.
- Prevalence: Used by 9% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Low/Average — AI tools can draft or edit feedback, but they can’t replace the judgment of an engaged people manager.
- Perceived cost rating: Low — Many mainstream AI tools are great at drafting copy; do not give the tool access to any sensitive data outside of a secure environment.
SHRM Member Resource:
Test your knowledge of giving quality feedback with SHRM’s Performance Feedback Best Practices quiz.
Low-Hanging Fruit
AI tools can prepare calibration sessions with rating distributions, outlier flags, and evidence summaries for each person under discussion.
- Prevalence: Used by 4% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Average — Calibration sets ratings and pay, and an AI summary can anchor the room before discussion starts.
- Perceived cost rating: Average — This use case requires specific performance management system features and facilitation time.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM's Q&A How to Know Which Performance Scale Rating Is Best to better understand fair calibration.
Strategic Bets
Before feedback reaches an employee, AI tools can check the draft for common pitfalls — such as vagueness, bias, and missing examples — and suggest stronger wording.
- Prevalence: Used by 6% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Average — Feedback impacts ratings and pay; a coach that misses a biased piece of feedback or recommends over-softening critical messages will change real outcomes.
- Perceived cost rating: Average — This use case typically lives inside a performance management platform.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM's Constructive Feedback Checklist to learn how to raise feedback quality.
Experimental
AI tools can help employees draft goals that line up with team and company objectives and suggest wording that makes each goal measurable.
- Prevalence: Used by 8% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Low/Average — Goals steer a whole cycle of work; a plausible draft that skips manager scrutiny can point someone at the wrong target.
- Perceived cost rating: Low/Average — General tools draft well; goal-system integration adds cost.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM's Q&A on Goal Setting Made Easier with AI to better understand AI’s role in effective goal design.
Low-Hanging Fruit
AI tools can audit submitted goals across the organization, flagging ones that are vague, unmeasurable, or misaligned with strategy.
- Prevalence: Used by 5% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Low/Average — The output is advisory, though an AI-powered checker that rejects reasonable goals would frustrate managers fast.
- Perceived cost rating: Low/Average — This use case adds a light AI layer onto the existing goal system.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM's SMART Goals Made Simple: A Dynamic Goal-Setting Worksheet as a base to help your AI tool understand what strong goals look like.
Low-Hanging Fruit
Credential
SHRM People Analytics Specialty Credential
Talent is your organization's most significant and continuous investment, yet too many workforce decisions still rest on intuition rather than evidence. The SHRM People Analytics Specialty Credential equips you to turn people data into strategic business outcomes — so you can see what's coming, act with confidence, and lead as a partner your executives trust.
Talent Analytics
Data-driven insights to inform workforce planning and optimize performance.
AI tools can draft survey questions, flag leading or double-barreled wording, and suggest response scales that produce usable data.
- Prevalence: Used by 7% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Low — The survey team approves every question before anything goes out.
- Perceived cost rating: Low/Average — General tools help with drafting; survey platforms add design features.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM's How to Develop and Sustain Employee Engagement toolkit to better understand survey programs that people trust.
Low-Hanging Fruit
AI tools can monitor continuous feedback channels — such as virtual suggestion boxes, chat-based feedback, and comment streams — and surface emerging themes in real time.
- Prevalence: Used by 1% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Average — Continuous listening carries privacy implications, and a misread spike can trigger overreaction.
- Perceived cost rating: Average — This use case requires streaming text analytics and channel integrations.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM's How to Develop and Sustain Employee Engagement toolkit to learn how to act responsibly on continuous feedback.
Low-Hanging Fruit
AI tools can track market pay, talent supply, and review-site sentiment to show how the organization looks from the outside.
- Prevalence: Used by 3% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Low — The inputs are public data, and the output informs strategy discussions.
- Perceived cost rating: Low/Average — Data subscriptions range from cheap to substantial.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM's Optimize Your Hiring Strategy with Business-Driven Recruiting toolkit to tie market signals to recruiting strategy.
Low-Hanging Fruit
Dashboards can now write their own plain-language summaries — what changed this month, which teams moved, and what deserves attention.
- Prevalence: Used by 6% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Low/Average — Auto-written narratives can imply causation when the data only show correlation, and leaders may quote them as fact.
- Perceived cost rating: Average — This use case requires business-intelligence tools and data preparation.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM's Practicing Strategic HR to Drive Performance and Increase Value toolkit to learn how to report HR metrics to the business.
Strategic Bets
Employees’ skills profiles can update themselves based on completed projects, training, and work product instead of waiting for annual edits.
- Prevalence: Used by 2% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Average — Auto-updates can wrongly credit or miss skills, so employees need to see and correct their own profiles.
- Perceived cost rating: Average — This use case requires integrations with workflow management and learning systems.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM's Skills-First Hiring toolkit to learn how to keep skills data current.
Experimental
AI tools can measure whether mentoring actually moves promotion rates, retention, and engagement for participants compared with peers.
- Prevalence: Used by 1% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Average — Small samples invite overclaiming, and participation data identifies individuals.
- Perceived cost rating: Average — This use case requires joining program records to outcome data, which takes work.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM's How to Build a Successful Mentorship Program guide to frame mentoring outcomes worth measuring.
Monitor
AI tools can coordinate calendars across interviewers and candidates, propose times, and handle rescheduling on their own.
- Prevalence: Used by 9% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Low — The worst outcome is a scheduling mix-up, fixed with an apology and a new slot.
- Perceived cost rating: Average — This use case requires scheduling tools and calendar integration.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM's article How HR Is Using Virtual Chat and Chatbots to better understand scheduling assistants in recruiting.
Low-Hanging Fruit
With consent, AI tools can transcribe interviews and summarize each candidate's answers against the evaluation criteria.
- Prevalence: Used by 7% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Low — The notes support human evaluation, and candidates are told about the recording.
- Perceived cost rating: Low — Transcription is now a commodity feature.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM's Strategic AI Prompts to Transform HR Summarization Tasks how-to guide to learn how to structure interview summaries.
Low-Hanging Fruit
AI tools can write copy to accelerate the development of up-to-date job descriptions that accurately reflect organizational needs and capture the attention of qualified applicants.
- Prevalence: Used by 20% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Low — Job descriptions are highly adaptable and easy to modify if the initial version isn’t attracting the right candidates.
- Perceived cost rating: Low — Most job descriptions are based on existing roles or documented business needs, and many AI tools excel at adapting or updating existing documents.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use the SHRM guide How to Write an Effective Job Description to inform your AI tools’ work.
Low-Hanging Fruit
AI tools can analyze which job ads bring in qualified applicants and use that analysis to adjust how job ads read, where they run, and how much is spent on them.
- Prevalence: Used by 12% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Low — Ad copy stays reviewable, and budget shifts can be reversed easily.
- Perceived cost rating: Average — This use case requires programmatic advertising platforms, which carry ongoing spend.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM's Master AI Prompts for Writing Effective Job Descriptions how-to guide to sharpen the ad copy that the system tests.
Low-Hanging Fruit
AI tools can build role-specific interview guides with consistent questions, scoring rubrics, and follow-up prompts for every opening.
- Prevalence: Used by 10% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Low — Recruiters review the guides, and structured interviews reduce bias compared with improvised ones.
- Perceived cost rating: Low — Mainstream AI tools produce guides from job descriptions.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM's AI Prompts Guide for HR to find interview-guide prompts.
Low-Hanging Fruit
Instead of planning by headcount, AI tools can plan by skills — which capabilities the strategy needs; where they sit today; and whether to build, buy, or borrow them.
- Prevalence: Used by 3% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Average — Big resource decisions ride on inferred skills data, which is only as good as its sources.
- Perceived cost rating: Average — This use case requires a skills inventory as a prerequisite, plus planning tools.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM's Rethinking Workforce Planning article to understand the shift to skills-based planning.
Monitor
AI tools can read resumes, profiles, and job data to build a consistent skills vocabulary so that synonymous skills can be grouped together.
- Prevalence: Used by 4% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Average — Incorrect skill inferences flow into downstream staffing and mobility decisions.
- Perceived cost rating: Average — This use case requires skills platforms and ongoing upkeep of skills taxonomies.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM's Skills-First Hiring toolkit to learn how to build a skills foundation.
Monitor
AI tools can compare the skills the organization has against the skills it needs — for one person, a team, or the whole company.
- Prevalence: Used by 3% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Average — Individual-level gap data is sensitive; framed as development input, it helps people rather than penalizes them.
- Perceived cost rating: Low/Average — This use case requires skills data and analysis tools.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM's How to Conduct a Skills Gap Analysis guide to learn how to turn skills gap findings into development plans.
Experimental
AI tools can read thousands of open-ended survey comments, group them into themes, and gauge how strongly people feel about each one.
- Prevalence: Used by 5% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Low — Analysis stays at the group level, and anonymity thresholds are standard on survey platforms.
- Perceived cost rating: Average — This use case requires text analytics tools and configuration.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM's Managing Employee Surveys toolkit to connect survey themes to action plans.
Low-Hanging Fruit
AI tools can estimate turnover risk by team, role, and location as well as identify the factors driving it.
- Prevalence: Used by 4% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Low — The model informs retention programs at the group level, where an incorrect estimate incurs little penalty.
- Perceived cost rating: Average — This use case requires analytics platforms and historical data.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM's 6 HR Technology Tools That Can Help Boost Employee Retention article to better understand predictive retention tools.
Low-Hanging Fruit
Talent Management
Comprehensive integration of HR processes for recruiting, developing, and retaining talent to support organizational goals.
AI tools can match current employees to open internal roles based on their skills and interests, surfacing candidates whom recruiters might miss.
- Prevalence: Used by 3% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Average — Hidden match logic can affect who gets opportunities for growth, so employers need visibility into the AI’s logic and employees need a way to apply anyway.
- Perceived cost rating: Average — This use case requires an internal marketplace platform and integration, as well as validation work to determine if the AI matches follow predictable outcomes.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM's Optimize Your Hiring Strategy with Business-Driven Recruiting toolkit to better understand internal mobility.
Monitor
AI tools can show each employee realistic next roles and the specific skills that would get them there.
- Prevalence: Used by 3% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Low — Suggestions go to the employee, who decides what to pursue.
- Perceived cost rating: Average — This use case requires updated role and skills data plus a delivery platform.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM's Building Dynamic Employee Career Paths and Ladders toolkit to better understand career path design.
Strategic Bets
AI tools can flag strong former employees worth re-recruiting when a fitting role opens up.
- Prevalence: Used by 2% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Average — Outreach based on stale records can misfire, and alumni data carries privacy duties.
- Perceived cost rating: Average/High — This use case uses records that the organization already holds, but the records may sit between multiple systems, and may require a specialized tool to evaluate.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM's Best Practices for Re-Engaging Former Employees article to support the sourcing of former workers to rehire.
Strategic Bets
AI tools can be used to compare quantitative and qualitative data about employees’ performance and spot team members who may be ready for advancement.
- Prevalence: Used by 3% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Average — AI tools inherit the biases of the data they’re trained on, so relying on AI assessments alone may lead to overlooking some qualified workers.
- Perceived cost rating: Average — This kind of assessment is best performed by specialized tools and requires a fair amount of training and human review to be effective.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM’s toolkit Retool Reviews and Empower Teams with Thoughtful Performance Management to ensure a strategic approach to identifying high-potential employees.
Monitor
AI tools can audit the internal marketplace itself: who gets opportunities, which managers hoard talent, and whether access is fair.
- Prevalence: Used by 2% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Average — Findings can implicate specific managers, and demographic cuts need careful handling.
- Perceived cost rating: Average — This use case requires marketplace data and analysis.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM’s Q&A How Dual-Career Ladders Help Retain and Develop Top Talent to learn how to maximize the benefit of internal talent flows.
Monitor
AI tools can match employees to internal projects that build new skills without requiring a role change.
- Prevalence: Used by 2% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Average — Gigs compete with day jobs and uneven access to plum assignments breeds resentment, so managers must stay involved and be guided by clear rules.
- Perceived cost rating: Average — This use case requires marketplace tools and governance.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM's Building Dynamic Employee Career Paths and Ladders toolkit to better understand gig-style development.
Monitor
Where turnover risk is high, AI tools can suggest specific responses such as a compensation review, a growth conversation, or a workload change.
- Prevalence: Used by 2% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Average — Managers pick from the suggestions, and the playbook stays human-approved.
- Perceived cost rating: Average — This use case requires analytics plus an action library tied to HR systems.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM's 6 HR Technology Tools That Can Help Boost Employee Retention to better understand retention-action platforms.
Monitor
During a restructuring, AI tools can suggest internal landing spots for affected employees before the employer cuts positions.
- Prevalence: Used by 1% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Average — The stakes for each person are high and errors carry human and legal costs, so HR must make the final calls.
- Perceived cost rating: Average — This use case requires skills and vacancy data assembled under time pressure.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM's Managing Organizational Change toolkit to better understand workforce transitions.
Monitor
AI tools can assign rotational-program participants to placements that balance learning goals, business needs, and cohort fairness.
- Prevalence: Used by 1% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Average — Placements provide employment opportunities that shape careers, so the criteria behind them need to be transparent and legally defensible.
- Perceived cost rating: Average — This use case requires program data and matching tools as well as validation work to check that the AI’s placements are unbiased.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM's How Dual-Career Ladders Help Retain and Develop Top Talent Q&A to better understand rotational development programs.
Monitor
When employers eliminate roles, AI tools can match displaced workers to new roles based on transferable skills and outline the reskilling required for each move.
- Prevalence: Used by 1% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Average — Errors related to employees’ perceived skills hit people at their most vulnerable moment, so humans must verify every match.
- Perceived cost rating: Average — This use case requires skills infrastructure, training budgets, and validation work.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM's Skills-First Hiring toolkit to learn how to match people to work by their skills.
Monitor
AI tools can assess bench strength for key roles — who is ready now, who is close, and where the organization has no bench at all.
- Prevalence: Used by 3% of HR professionals.
- Perceived risk rating: Low — The analysis informs talent review meetings, where people make the calls.
- Perceived cost rating: Average — This use case requires both succession modules and current talent data.
SHRM Member Resource:
Use SHRM's Modernize Succession Planning for Better Results toolkit to better understand analytics-supported succession planning.