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Who do you trust? HR's conflicted role in the AI disruption
The SHRM conference highlighted HR's balancing act: calming AI job-loss fears and upskilling workers while carrying out CEO plans to cut labor costs and boost the bottom line.
I would not want to be an HR person trying to navigate the AI revolution. On one hand, HR departments are likely to be tasked with implementing C-suite mandates for AI use, providing training in AI and figuring out where to move people whose jobs have been transformed or eliminated. They will also be asked to promulgate and enforce AI policies -- ideally after having a say in those policies.
On the other hand, HR will also field complaints and bear the brunt of responsibility for managing the impact on people and cultures, which inevitably means sometimes disagreeing with their bosses -- or at least making them aware of AI's negative effects on employees.
Meanwhile, AI is disrupting HR departments themselves with the promise of automating everyday processes, especially recruiting, benefits administration and training. HR leaders are downsizing staff at the very moment AI is making existing tasks so much harder by enabling resume fraud and skillfishing, in which applicants use AI to fake the skills required for a job.
And they'll do all of this while both bosses and workers continue to express strong dislike or fear of HR and question its value. It's a classic case of being between a rock and a hard place.
In an oft-cited 2024 survey of 981 workers by MyPerfectResume, a vendor of resume-writing software, 86% of respondents said they fear HR, while 85% expressed reluctance to bring work issues to HR. A perceived lack of confidentiality, fear of repercussions and a belief that HR is ineffective were among the reasons cited. Feedback from CEOs indicates that most only tolerate HR and don't appreciate the stressful nature of the job.
Who's the boss?
The conflicting roles of HR in AI adoption and the forces pressing in on it from all sides were on full display at the annual conference of the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) last week in Orlando.
"We've got a foot in two different and often opposing worlds," said SHRM CEO Johnny C. Taylor, Jr. in his conference keynote. "We're jammed right in the middle, trying to protect the people and trying to protect the business. Some days it feels like a no-win proposition."
HR has long been perceived as siding with management over employees, especially in legally sensitive areas like sexual harassment. So, it stands to reason that workers aren't likely to trust HR to protect their jobs if the C-suite decides to automate them.
In his keynote, Taylor left no doubt where HR's loyalties lie after explaining why CEOs' bitter experience with the COVID-19 pandemic makes many of them reluctant to assuage workers’ fears about AI job loss.
"The CEO, the general manager, the president, whatever you call the leader of the organization, is HR's critical customer. And as we know, the customer is almost always right," he said. "While most of us do a great job of listening to our employees -- we survey them constantly -- we must do a better job of listening to our internal customers, our CEOs and other business colleagues."
HR can still advocate for workers
Yet Taylor also reminded attendees of the human-centric side of the AI coin, advising them to understand work processes so well that they can use that knowledge to quantify the ROI of each employee. "That's how we're going to protect employees," he said.
In fact, HR professionals might be in the best position of anyone to find a happy medium between upper management's AI needs and those of employees. That kind of balancing act was part of HR's job long before AI arrived on the scene.
Furthermore, AI's transformation of the daily work of HR practitioners makes HR departments almost ideal teachers and advisors on the technology's proper role in the workplace.
For example, at the conference, a panel of HR leaders shared how offloading their most tedious tasks to AI enabled them to show other employees how the technology can be more of a help than a threat.
In a panel on strategic AI adoption, Kimberly Southern, assistant city manager of internal services for Greeley, Colo., a role that encompasses the city's HR and IT functions, described why having a team of early adopters who can talk about AI and specific applications they have built can help alleviate fears.
"I have employees who are freeing up their time because they're taking admin work, giving it to AI and figuring out better ways to do the work," Southern said. As a result, the city council went from fear-based prohibition of AI two years ago to enthusiasm about AI chatbots. She said fear dissipates once people learn what AI really is, that it will never replace certain jobs and that automating tedium frees staff to spend more time interacting with people. Southern recommended getting comfortable with incremental change and encouraging curiosity among employees instead of stifling it. "That starts with us as leaders. We have to be curious and listen."
In the end, it's not realistic to expect HR professionals to resist their bosses' AI fever dreams and stand with workers in opposition to AI. But it is realistic for HR to do what it has always done and help workers adapt to the new realities of the workplace.
One hopeful sign from the conference was the palpable idealism of HR practitioners on panels and in the audience about how the profession can help people. Whenever cheers broke out for one of Taylor's statements, it was usually about fighting for people -- something that could fit just as well at a Bernie Sanders rally.
David Essex is an industry editor who creates in-depth content on enterprise applications, emerging technology and market trends for several Informa TechTarget websites.
