This HR tech founder predicts lean HR teams in our AI-enabled future

According to Job van der Voort, co-founder and CEO of the global payroll-platform-turned-HRIS Remote, HR teams “really need” their HRIS—or system of record—to work intuitively, calibrate for international hiring and business operations, and navigate emerging compliance minefields.

It’s the kind of platform needed for lean HR teams of the future.

Companies are quickly building out borderless workforces and are relying on transformative AI technology to upend work and optimize productivity, according to a new report published by Remote. Remote—which primarily works with clients that employ international teams—found that 86% of HR leaders surveyed reported international talent as a part of their organization’s workforce. Many HR teams—equipped with AI tools—are delivering outsized impacts, according to the findings.

Remote surveyed more than 3,500 director-level-and-above HR and business leaders at companies in fields like finance, IT and telecommunications, and professional services in 10 countries.

Van der Voort told HR Brew that Remote employs roughly 2,000 employees across the globe, but he doesn’t “want to increase the size of our HR team,” so he’s building tools into Remote’s platform that can enable its own lean HR team to grow and scale without added headcount.

“HR teams have all this bureaucracy. They have all this administrative work, we can just make it disappear,” he said. “We’re just really fortunate and lucky to build that while we have all these cool AI tools now.”

How can HR handle this? With automation and AI inside their tech stacks, of course. HR pros expect more and more of their function’s processes to be automated or reimagined by new AI-optimized workflows that can help smaller, more agile teams deliver an outsized impact.

“We want talented people to spend less time doing rote or other administrative work, which is not really fun to do,” van der Voort said.

While HR leaders said they see AI and automation as the future, the tools themselves are currently a challenge, especially with UX and integration. Nearly one-third reported that their top tech-stack challenge is “too many disconnected tools.”

Well-integrated, AI-enabled platforms can help address this gap in the future, allowing HR to rely more on AI-optimized workflows and amplify their workforce management and productivity contributions. Three-fourths of HR leaders expect AI will handle more than half of their admin tasks by the end of next year, according to the survey.

HR prose see a “unified, flexible stack, stronger analytics, and smart automation” as ingredients to high-performing HR functions, according to the report.

“You need automation to cut manual work, analytics to spot issues early, and one source of truth for all your people data,” he said.

What’s possible? The patchwork of solutions currently utilized by many organizations addresses HR needs, but with fewer tools, better integration between them, and automated workflows, lean HR teams can deliver outsized impacts.

Roberta Terranova, CPO at Wildix, oversees a globally distributed workforce with a team of seven HR pros. She said AI helps them deliver data-driven insights that can help inform business decisions about hiring, comp, and L&D programs.

Wildix is also working on bringing employees along on the journey, prioritizing upskilling and training as the tools evolve and improve.

“My main focus is really to work together with managers and understand what responsibilities from the existing roles that we have in the workplace [that] can be automised,” she said. “AI is going to make that more efficient, but support managers again in that transition of identify[ing] early upskilling so that we really invest in our talent.”

But even optimists will tell you that, at present, “expectations are higher than we currently have.”

“In terms of expectations, I’m very positive, and yes, I think we will see an improvement,” she said, referring to the tools’ integration capabilities and potential for improved natural language potential.