6 use cases for agentic AI in HR

1. Answering employee questions

Technology prior to agentic AI could answer routine questions for employees, such as number of vacation days for a certain worker. However, the technology struggled with answering more complex questions.

Agentic AI can respond to more complicated questions and flag policies that are inconsistent or fix them directly. For example, a company may have two documents about employee vacation time, with one discussing vacation time for American employees and one discussing vacation time for employees in the UK. Agentic AI can add the needed context.

If a company decided to enable agentic AI to make changes to documents, CHROs will want to establish guardrails so agentic AI is unable to make policy changes that would affect system configuration or relate to labor laws.  

2. Identifying good candidates

Recruitment has been at the forefront of HR automation efforts for well over a decade, in part because many companies receive so many resumes and recruitment involves so many manual tasks. Agentic AI furthers these automation efforts.

Agentic AI can carry out tasks such as automatically scanning the candidate database to identify candidates for new positions and automatically flagging or moving the candidate to the pipeline. CHROs should ask their teams to confirm that AI is successful at identifying qualified candidates and potentially add more details to the candidate’s profile as well as job postings to improve AI results.

3. Onboarding

Properly onboarding new hires helps retain new employees and gives new workers confidence that they made the right decision joining the company.

Agentic AI can simplify onboarding tasks for HR and provide an improved user experience. For example, agentic AI can identify which documents a new hire needs to complete based on their resume and profile data, such as country, state and job title. Agentic AI can also send out new hire surveys, analyze the responses and flag any dissatisfaction.

4. Interviewing

Some companies have started using agentic AI for first-round interviews for jobs that prompted a high volume of responses. AI can change questions based on a candidate’s initial responses, adapt questions to a candidate’s resume, score a candidate’s suitability for the role and send the recruitment team the recorded session, transcript and summary.

While using agentic AI for interviews can help the hiring company, the candidate experience may not be as positive. Some otherwise well-qualified candidates may perform poorly if AI is conducting the interview, while others may drop out of the process entirely because they don’t like the use of AI. In addition, AI may not always follow up on a certain candidate answer the way that a human would.

5. Workforce planning

Workforce planning can be time-consuming to carry out using traditional tools. Incorporating business plans and current workforce demographics into a prediction model can be overwhelming.

Agentic AI can handle large volumes of data, incorporate detailed plans and produce predictions that are based on workforce planning goals. The HR team and CHRO can use additional data to make the model more precise.

6. Data audits

Data being clean, accurate and complete is crucial for data analytics and basic reporting, and agentic AI can carry out continuous audits on employee data.

The HR team could start off with AI identifying issues and recommending fixes, then allow AI to fix easy-to-solve problems. For example, AI could likely supply a missing zip or postal code.

Eric St-Jean is an independent consultant with a particular focus on HR technology, project management and Microsoft Excel training and automation. He writes about numerous business and technology areas.