Will AI replace my job?
This is a question that’s weighed heavily on the minds of HR professionals in recent years, as the field is considered ripe for disruption due to technologies like ChatGPT. Already, HR teams in some companies are getting insight into how their roles can be at least partially replaced by AI, particularly when it comes to areas like total rewards.
How Moderna and IBM are using AI in total rewards. IBM has seen a number of promising use cases for incorporating AI into the HR function and is now using those stories to help attract new customers, according to Steve Moss, director with watsonx Americas, the company’s AI portfolio.
The company deploys an AI agent called “AskHR” that fields questions from 270,000 individuals on a daily basis about everything from IBM’s maternity leave policy to employment verification letter requests, Moss said during a May 20 presentation at WorldatWork’s Total Rewards conference in Orlando, Florida. Among the total rewards functions the agent can perform is compensation guidance, as the tool can suggest how managers should spend their salary budgets across a certain number of people, and troubleshooting expense reports.
Assigning expense-related tasks to the AI agent has freed up IBM’s expense team to work on other things, like policy-setting or vendor selection. Moss said, “They’re spending their time differently as a result of this, and feeling like they’re covering a lot more bases.”
IBM also uses AI for employee recognition. When an employee wants to leave positive feedback for a colleague, they can answer a series of questions about what they did, which will then prompt IBM’s watsonx software to generate “a meaningful recognition message,” said Beth Sundberg, VP of technology solutions at BI Worldwide, which partnered with IBM on the tool. Employees earn points for the recognition they receive and can redeem them for goods in a rewards marketplace, a process that is all integrated with IBM’s AI agent.
The biotech company Moderna has built thousands of GPTs to perform tasks specific to the company, HR Brew previously reported. For total rewards, the HR team leans on AI-powered tools that aid with benefits selection, navigating equity compensation, and job leveling, according to Hem Patel, Moderna’s VP, HR business partner for research and executive compensation.
While Patel’s team isn’t yet using agents akin to what IBM described, he said that’s the vision for the near future. The GPTs have helped Moderna’s HR team cut down on email traffic and service tickets, but what his team would really like to start doing is focusing on, “some of the repetitive things that we already do, that don't need a human….that's what an agent is perfect for,” he said. “That’s kind of the next piece for us, is can we get agents actually doing work as opposed to just answering as an interface?” Patel added.
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AI outlook. Though both Moss and Patel were optimistic that their firms’ investments in AI will be a net positive for HR leaders, it also seems likely these investments will result in at least some roles going away.
Moderna confirmed to Fierce Pharma in February that it was laying off 10% of workers employed in digital roles. Tracey Franklin, who now leads both the HR and tech functions at Moderna, said the decision to merge these departments will result in certain positions being nixed, and others being reimagined, the Wall Street Journal reported in May. She declined to share exactly which roles would be eliminated.
Meanwhile, IBM CEO Arvind Krishna told the Journal that the work of a couple hundred HR workers had been replaced with AI agents, resulting in increased hiring of programmers and salespeople.
IBM’s Moss admitted asking himself, “is this going to replace me?” when the company first rolled out AskHR in 2017. “We really had to do a lot of thinking and discussion inside the organization of being able to elevate the HR professional,” he told conference-goers. Moss also said he’d seen examples of HR roles with IBM being “elevated,” such as a Philippines-based employee who previously fielded HR questions via phone, and now works as a “conversational AI specialist,” doing prompt engineering for AskHR.
To stay relevant in an AI-focused future, it seems HR pros will have to focus on developing skills that may not have been on their radar just a few years ago, a recent survey commissioned by IBM suggests. Over one-half of CEOs reported they were hiring for AI-related roles that didn’t exist a year ago, and those surveyed estimated one-third of the workforce will require “retraining and/or reskilling” over the next three years.