It’s pretty safe to say that corporate execs are bullish on AI, and if you’re reading this sentence, it means even the detail-oriented copy desk at Morning Brew sees the ones and zeros on the wall.
This summer, MIT’s Media Lab’s Project NANDA found that enterprise organizations have invested between $30–40 billion in AI—though it would be irresponsible not to mention that the analysis also concluded that 95% of those investments, so far, have not yielded the expected ROI…so yeah.
While AI is top of mind for many in the C-suite, HR pros are more hesitant to welcome the burgeoning technology, according to survey research from employee experience platform Culture Amp.
Culture Amp’s North American people science director, Robert Melloy, told HR Brew that the platform’s found HR pros are more leery of the promise of AI for their function and for employee
“The primary benefits of AI are to increase your scale, your scope, and your learning,” said Melloy, who also teaches business and organizational psychology. “Increase the amount of things that you’re able to do…increase the types of things that you’re able to do, and then…being able to get feedback faster, to become better over time.”
Execs are frothing at the mouth at the thought of AI because they see the tool as a cash multiplier, he said.
“The whole promise of AI in increasing scale, scope, and learning is that it affords us efficiency gains that allow us to be more productive and therefore potentially more profitable, because we’re doing more with less,” he said. “If we can spend less but do more, profits should increase, so AI is like a beacon of hope in a path toward a higher profit.”
But Melloy said that Culture Amp researchers found that HR pros don’t feel like AI is going to prop up the HR function in organizations.
“They actually feel like AI is going to benefit the company and the company’s bottom line more than, specifically, it will benefit people,” he said. “That’s not to say that, if it benefits people, [thus] it benefits the company; they chose ‘the company’ instead of choosing any individual person-related option.”
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.
Perhaps AI is helping them tackle tasks and duties in ways that save them minutes, instead of being the boon to productivity they were promised and keep hearing about. Melloy told HR Brew that the top AI use cases were mostly administrative: drafting emails or communications, brainstorming ideas, or taking and summarizing meeting notes.
“What you’re seeing is like a lot of administrative use, which is not surprising, because maybe that’s the first thought of how to use AI,” Melloy said. “It’s low hanging fruit.”
People work, he argues, would be more impactful and better deliver on AI’s promise, but those AI use cases are ones that HR leaders haven’t yet waded into with gusto, like automating HR operations, upskilling, and analysing people data and HR metrics.
“All of the kinds of things that I would try to argue are the reasons HR should use AI in order to get the benefits of AI for HR,” Melloy said. “Then it’s not surprising why HR folks don’t think that AI has this promise to elevate the value of HR in organizations, because they’re not using AI in the ways that I’m trying to argue they should use it in order to increase the value of HR.”
That tide should change as more people become proficient with AI, Melloy said, but right now many HR pros are missing the potential dramatic gains available to them.
“Most people in HR were not interested to be owning this—the AI strategy—within their own organization,” Melloy said, but added that HR pros “are best positioned to be shepherds of this technology in your organization and creating the strategy for how it’s used among your people, because you’re the people people.”