When it comes to AI competence, HR pros don’t have a great reputation. And they know it.
Only 30% of HR practitioners surveyed by General Assembly say they’ve received any comprehensive, job-specific training for AI, despite 82% using the technology daily.
HR Brew spoke with two experts about the technical and human skills HR practitioners need to stay on top of AI transformation.
Role rebirth. Experts have speculated that AI will drastically change jobs. That goes for HR roles, too. AI agents, for example, could handle much of an HR generalist’s workload, allowing them to focus on more complicated projects.
“Fundamentally, we believe that a lot of the operational, tactical tasks that we spend time on today are going to be solved by AI agents,” Brandon Roberts, ServiceNow’s group VP of people product, analytics and AI, told HR Brew. As a result, “you’re going to have less folks who are supporting that type of work, less of the operational world, and more of building the technology to support the HR business partners on these really complex topics that they’re going to be spending their time on.”
That means that the skills required of HR pros will change, as well. Experts say HR’s new must-have skills fall into two categories: AI-specific skills, and soft skills.
The former includes technical skills like understanding how generative and agentic AI tools work, an intimate knowledge of data literacy and analytics, and an understanding of how algorithms work and ability to identify their biases.
“I think if you think about everybody who’s in HR today, imagine you had to train them on becoming an expert on people analytics. Those are the types of skills that I think we have to build,” Roberts said.
Having a proper grasp on prompt engineering will also be critical: “I like to say that AI is your assistant. So if you’ve got a HR assistant in the workplace, are you just going to tell it to write an email for you? You’re obviously going to be giving it more information, more depth. That’s where prompt engineering comes in,” said Lucy Schott, General Assembly’s subject matter expert on HR and AI.
Quick-to-read HR news & insights
From recruiting and retention to company culture and the latest in HR tech, HR Brew delivers up-to-date industry news and tips to help HR pros stay nimble in today’s fast-changing business environment.
Soft skills, like critical thinking, will also be “really crucial,” Schott said, because agents don’t currently have the ability to account for nuance, or fact check, when analyzing data.
Adaptability will be similarly important amid rapid organizational transformation. HR leaders will want direct reports who are actively re-imagining their roles with AI in mind, Schott said.
Making it stick. To start, HR leaders should focus on job-specific training. According to General Assembly’s survey, 85% of HR practitioners with formal AI training feel “very or completely confident” using AI, compared to 63% of self-trained HR pros.
“AI training is really crucial from that specific job skill level, because it’s one thing to just learn about ChatGPT or Gemini, but it’s another to actually unpack it within your daily workplace and understand what does a prompt engineering look like for talent acquisition, or for performance management, and how to apply that,” said Schott.
That said, it’s one thing to know your team needs to reskill, and another to address it. HR teams tend to prioritize their workforce’s needs while ignoring their own, Roberts said.
“If HR isn’t involved in this transformation, we’re going to get much worse outcomes, and it’s going to be less of a transformation and more of a technology implementation,” he said. “There is both the enterprise role we need to play…but we can’t forget that HR needs to transform our internal operations and how we support the organization in order to be successful.”