HR in 2035 – how will AI transform HR?

Robert Shore: Hello, and welcome to the Brightmine podcast, formerly known as the XpertHR podcast. Brightmine is a leading provider of people data, analytics and insight, offering employment law expertise, comprehensive HR resources and reward data to meet every HR and organisational challenge and opportunity. You can find us any time of the day or night at www.brightmine.com.

My name is Robert Shore, and today I am joined by Tessa HilsonGreener, a prominent thought leader in AI for HR, workforce development, leadership and business innovation, and the CEO of AI Capability.

Given Tessa’s particular expertise, you may not be surprised to learn that we’re going to be discussing AI and its impact on HR across the coming decade.

So Tess, hello.

Tessa Hilson-Greener: Hello. It’s nice to be here.

Robert Shore: Great to have you with us. You’re about to publish the first in a series of books entitled HR 2035, I think. And the first volume is subtitled An AI-driven Blueprint for the Future of Work. So let’s begin at the beginning then with what inspired you to begin this project, HR 2035?

Tessa Hilson-Greener: It’s a good question. I found that, having worked in HR for the past 30 years, I’ve seen many different HR models come and go, and I think what tends to happen with them is that they follow the same sort of areas that they’ve covered without the technology input that we’ve got now with AI.

So really, what inspired me was understanding what happens with HR over the next 10 years, looking 10 years forward, and then really working back from there in terms of what do we need to do, what is our roadmap that we need to follow to make sure HR is successful, sustainable and really starts to utilise AI as more of a HR-centric model rather than it being on the periphery as a tool.

Robert Shore: So this is really looking at AI being central to actors in the future, and that may be what was heralded with the whole Gen-AI, ChatGPT sort of headline-grabbing moment.

So what do you think HR are going to look like in 2035. You know, how does it differ from today’s landscape?

Tessa Hilson-Greener: I think what’s interesting is that HR have always been driven a lot by policies and processes, and have been quite bogged down in the administrative side of their work. I know for myself how frustrating it is for people working within HR to really be able to keep up with the volume of requests and information that come from our employees asking questions about various parts of their employee work.

So I think with AI, it will help to alleviate a lot of that burden that HR have had with administration but also help them to become a lot more effective in terms of responding to requests 24/7.

And I think from what I’ve seen and the research we’ve done, the new worker will expect answers quicker. I think we’re all much more thirsty now for information in a much faster way. I know myself if I want a solution I’ll go onto YouTube and look for a solution very fast if I’m doing anything that I don’t quite understand. We used to in the past refer to reference books, then now AI is taking over that gap and actually is responding much quicker.

Just to give you an example, ChatGPT is used a lot now in business. A lot of managers are using it to actually performance manage their teams. They’re using it as a coach. A lot of people are using it to put
CVs together. They’re using it to get quick answers to difficult conversations they may be having. So AI has really taken on the role of being the sort of internal HR support/training person quite quickly. And I think it’s important that we acknowledge that and actually bring that into HR so that we keep our human touch with that but also link that into our values, our training culture that we have, and also put some boundaries around that in terms of how we use it in-house.

Robert Shore: I suppose one little spin-off question from that, so part of what you said there, you suggested that AI would liberate HR professionals. Also that it would increase the burden because everybody expects everything to happen faster. Do you think it will make HR a more exciting space to work in and one where people will want to work
there?

Tessa Hilson-Greener: I think so because I think that a lot of the responses that people have when they’ve talked to HR, or a lot of the image, is that HR are the sort of personnel police, if you like, that they are the people that, if you’re sent to HR it’s almost like being sent to the headmaster. And I don’t think that’s a very nice image to have.

And I think with AI being able to take away a lot of the policy side of it in terms of, you know, ‘This is how we do things, this is how we do our employment interviews or our employment law legislation,’ and things like that, will become much more intrinsic in how people work within the organisation. It’s a little bit clunky at the moment. I don’t think, you know, managers completely understand some of the legislation around how they manage teams. And I think that will become much more integral in terms of…from sort of onboarding right through to retirement, the whole process will become a lot more seamless.

So I think HR’s role will evolve going forward, and I think they’ll become much closer to the business side and more strategic in how they work, more than they have done in the past.

Robert Shore: How do you see AI transforming HR practices over the next decade?

Tessa Hilson-Greener: One of the areas that I see this is really on how personalised the employee experience will be. It’ll be much more data-driven insights for decision-making and continuous learning and development. For example, we’ve recently developed an overview of a person joining the organisation and what it would look like with AI as a central sort of support function going all the way through. So an employee, before they join they go through a recruitment process, then that’s driven by AI. Once they’ve gone through the recruitment process, then they’re onboarded. And within that onboarding process they would also have a test, which would help them to see where their skills and development areas are. This is when they’re buddied up to an AI buddy, who would then help them through the whole process of integrating throughout the whole organisation, set up meetings for them, develop their training. Pull-up training would be done either through virtual reality or through other sources. So everything would actually be enabling that person to sort of hit the ground running much quicker. Through all the areas that they would be interacting with AI and help them to get on board much quicker.

So I think that really makes quite a difference to how we’ve done it in the past where people have sort of joined and then been put at a desk and left there with an iPad – if they’re got an iPad – and left to get on with it. I think the thing is it will become much more personalised and much more seamless, and people will be developed in training in the areas that are really specific to them, and not on more of a generic basis.

Robert Shore: We’ve used the word ‘seamless’ but I want to ask you then about the opposite of seamless, which is ‘challenges’, the biggest challenges HR professionals are going to face in adapting to this future of work that we are describing. In what ways might it not be seamless in order to achieve the seamless future that we’re foreseeing?

Tessa Hilson-Greener: Well, I think that it would be less seamless if people don’t adopt AI and bring it into the organisation. I recently wrote an article about people having AI fatigue, basically, or becoming AI-phobic. I think AI fatigue is the fact that it’s like standing under a waterfall with a water bottle trying to absorb all the information about AI that’s flying at people from left, right and centre. I mean, there’s a lot of information about AI.

So I think the main thing is, as a HR team, is to be able to utilise AI within the organisation in the areas like recruitment, in the areas of data management, in the areas of personalised development quickly, and then link those areas up so they start to be more effective.

Robert Shore: Now, the subtitle of this first volume is An AI-driven Blueprint for the Future of Work. So in HR 2035, what is the blueprint?

Tessa Hilson-Greener: So the blueprint, as I mentioned earlier, is really looking at HR 2035 as a much more integrated model. So whereas we look at models that have been used in the past, they normally have some areas within them that are quite standard. So you normally have a focus on administrative efficiency, compliance and transactional HR functions like payroll, recruitment and performance management. They normally have a structure which tend to be siloed with departments such as talent acquisition, compensation and benefits, learning and development, employee relations, and these operate independently.

So as we know with the old model it was much more about COEs, Centres of Excellence. And technology in traditional HR models is traditionally supportive – HR has systems to record record-keeping – and not a core driver of strategy. So it’s all been a little bit unlinked, more sort spread out than it has been in the past.

The model that I’m proposing, that we’ve actually researched and developed, will incorporate technology and AI as a central driver of HR processes, allowing predictive analytics, automation and personalisation that drastically improve HR’s ability to be both strategic and responsive.

And the way we propose this is through interconnective pillars. So unlike other models where HR functions may operate independently, our models are interconnected. They actually create a holistic and agile HR ecosystem.

So how that looks is the pillars work in a sort of matrix fashion, which is quite interesting. And these are interconnected. This is a future-forward vision, so where HR needs to be in 2035. This roadmap is a long-term vision which really sets it apart from other models because it’s short to medium to long term. So it’s reiterated as we start to go through those phases, as technology develops as well. The model expands and contracts with that.

And a key strength of it is it’s balanced between AI-driven efficiency and enhancement of the human experience. So it really looks at, at the moment, where people are saying, ‘We don’t want to lose the human touch,’ this helps to keep that well and truly central to the whole process. And while many models focus on efficiency and strategic alignment, we focus on the employees and make sure that the personalised and meaningful experiences are there throughout their whole journey.

So really, the model is superior to other models because it’s designed with future needs in mind, it fully integrates AI, and enhances both business outcomes and the employee experience. And it goes beyond improving efficiency to truly transform HR into a strategic force for an AI-driven world.

Robert Shore: What key trends in workforce management should HR leaders be paying attention to right now?

Tessa Hilson-Greener: I think the trends are in workforce around ethnics and compliance, if we’re talking about AI, and safeguarding and AI-driven environments. So making sure the culture is digitally ready and able to support people’s development and learning and understanding of AI moving forward.

There is a lot of workforce trends around ages and different levels of people working within organisations, but everything at the moment is very technically focused because people are using AI so much. So I do think understanding how to set up a digital culture or expand your culture to make it more digitally acceptable is really key, and then starting to focus on those key elements and bringing that together.

My main concern is that a lot of companies are employing an AI officer to come in and really be the focus for AI, and I really think everyone needs to embrace it and not be on one person to be responsible for AI change compliance. We’ll all agree that that poor person will be pulled between IT, HR, legal on different occasions, and they’d have to be quite supersonic to be able to deal with all the different demands on them. So I think it needs to be a cultural shift towards embracing AI, rather than an add-on tool, as people may be looking at, to an organisation’s culture.

Robert Shore: AI is really becoming the whole environment.

Tessa Hilson-Greener: Absolutely.

Robert Shore: So where you’ve raised that, obviously people talk a lot about the ethical challenges posed by emerging technologies. What can HR teams do to prepare themselves?

Tessa Hilson-Greener: I think there’s a couple of things, really. One is about buying AI. So I think how people buy AI is really key, to make sure how it’s designed and developed. And looking at the ethical side of how it’s been developed and who designed it, because there’s a lot of information in there about biases, and that’s an interesting sort of area to
develop. And especially look at stakeholders.

The second thing is to make sure that within an organisation the gender side and all the areas that you’re using data from doesn’t have biases within it. So if there are any processes or any data that’s being used at the moment that could be open to bias, then that’s something that needs to be looked at and assessed. And an AI team can look at that, and they can go through that and make sure the data’s clear of any potential biases.

Because it could be inherently historic, that you have information like that already. There’s lots of examples in case studies where people have used data for recruitment that, you know, 10 years ago it was acceptable to say certain things in recruitment advertisements then that it’s not now. So I think really looking at the DEI side of it well is really important.

Robert Shore: Yeah. So you said at the point where you buy. What actually would you look at, at that point?

Tessa Hilson-Greener: Well, if you’re going to use AI for recruitment, I would definitely start to look at any examples of how AI’s been used by other customers or pilot the recruitment tool using your own data, and see the results from that. Look at where they’ve used this data before in organisations. Really looking in a lot more detail about how the AI tool that you’re using is actually being utilised effectively.

For example, there’s a couple of AI tools at the moment in recruitment. You can actually download 10,000 of your LinkedIn contacts into your profile and then you can actually start to contact those people directly. Now, it depends on your organisation’s rules or what parameters you have within your recruitment area, but that might be something that you don’t want to open up to people. And so that’s an area that you’d have to make a decision on. ‘Are we going to do this? How many people are we going to recruit? Where are they going to come from?’ So you need to set your parameters up, basically, so that everything that you’re doing is fully compliant and ethical.

Robert Shore: How is the relationship between technology and people going to evolve with recruitment and employee development? What do you foresee there?

Tessa Hilson-Greener: That’s a good question. I think that there’s a lot of legislation coming up in the future around how AI is used. There’s been a lot of articles around education, using AI tools to assess whether people have used AI, and they’ve actually turned out to be not very good. And in fact, people have actually downloaded some of Shakespeare’s work, and it’s actually come back that it was AI-generated by Shakespeare! So it just shows you how bad that is.

So I think that there’s a lot of assumptions made that people are using AI for everything at the moment in education. The tools that detect AI are turning out not to be very good. So I think in the future it’s going to be a lot of case of, you know, oversee, check, doublecheck. And if you’re using AI, make sure you’re monitoring it and how you’re using it, and keep an eye on everything.

And I do think the big thing that everyone needs to remember is that, you know, if you ask a question of AI, it doesn’t guarantee that your answer is going to be 100% correct. So use it as research but make sure you source everything and make sure that it’s factually correct.

Robert Shore: How is AI driving change in HR?

Tessa Hilson-Greener: I think it’s driving change because, as I said, it’s actually enabling HR to get a better handle on how strategically they’re doing through data, through being able to assess the temperature of their employees, through linking up performance reviews and seeing how engagement is. It’s enabling people to have more time to focus on strategic areas like change and cultural development. It’s enabling people to start to look at wellness more closely and to start to spend more time in that area.

But the biggest thing that it’s doing is it’s speeding up recruitment time in most areas. So whereas people have trolled through 1,000 CVs and spent a lot of time on that side of it, AI is doing that within seconds, giving them a really good overview of the questions to ask, and enabling people that may not be as skilled in recruitment to become more skilled by doing best practice using AI to help them to work faster and quite smartly, smarter.

Robert Shore: HR 2035, when is it published, by the way?

Tessa Hilson-Greener: January.

Robert Shore: January. And we will put a link in the show notes where you can read more about it and preorder a copy. How can it help readers shape the future of their organisations? Why should they be reading this book right now?

Tessa Hilson-Greener: So, within the book there is a roadmap. There’s also associated training with it. So people can have training if they want to on HR 2035, so they can start to use it strategically. There’s detailed charts and information about how HR 2035, the AI-centric model, would work in organisations. So there’s loads of helpful tools, loads of information. And also it’s going to be on Audible, so people will be able to listen to it when they’re travelling, rather than have to read it on a train.

Robert Shore: So we’re looking forward to seeing that. Of course, for listeners Tess has been writing a series of articles for us on the Brightmine website as well, which you can see there. I’ll put links to those in the show notes. She’s done an excellent webinar for us, which you can also watch on our website.

So finally, just thank you very much to Tess for joining us today.

Tessa Hilson-Greener: Thank you. It’s a pleasure being here.

Robert Shore: And speak to you next time on the Brightmine podcast.