Curious how AI will change HR? These Big Tech HR leaders have some thoughts about what to expect.

HR teams across the globe are under pressure to leverage AI to transform services and processes with the help of this transformational technology. It’s early days, and in an AI-enabled world of work, the only thing that’s currently abundantly clear is that the future ways of working are changing, and HR can help drive the transformation.

At CES, one of the largest tech conferences in the US, three HR pros from high tech companies discussed AI’s impact on human capital. Their conversation revealed how AI is changing work for them and their teams, and how they’re eyeing the technology’s strengths while digging their heels on the importance of human-centered policies.

Salesforce’s chief equity and engagement officer, Alexandra Siegel, started with the obvious.

“We can all agree that AI is changing every single part of our roles: changing the way we think about our companies, changing the way we think about org design and our talent practices,” she said. “A big way that my role has changed is that now it’s not just, ‘how do we make sure we’re creating fair, inclusive, equitable and objective practices in the workplace,’ but ‘how do we make sure that the AI technology is helping to drive those right behaviors?’”

Siegel said that Salesforce also worked hard on AI fluency for all employees as part of the company’s “equality and inclusion” work, claiming that 99% of Salesforce employees use the technology daily.

“The way that we work, it’s fundamentally changed. We use AI; 99% of our employees use AI every single day,” she said. “I use AI every single day…You can use it as a tool, as an assistant, as a catalyst, and so really reimagining those HR and talent processes with an AI-first mindset is a whole new terrain.”

All Samsung employees are mandated to understand AI, according to Michelle Manglal-Lan, senior manager of culture and engagement.

“We’ve already educated our employees globally on AI technology, just so that we can reskill ourselves,” she said. “But for my role specifically, I think my role has become a little bit more fluid, and it’s not so siloed anymore. Because I have the ability to actually utilize AI to assist HR, not to replace HR, but to assist it. So you need it to be a little bit more integrated: ‘Where can I actually utilize the technology to be a little bit more effective, more productive, quicker and support HR [professionals] in their roles so that they can do their jobs more better?’”

GitLab’s Sherida McMullan, who works as the VP of diversity, inclusion and belonging for the software development platform, echoed an emphasis on multidisciplinary stakes when it comes to injecting AI into processes, adding that HR leaders and their teams need to work closely with engineering and product teams to ensure the human element stays a top priority as AI processes are developed throughout the company.

“I think opportunity is what I see. We have a better and greater opportunity to work across all of our other functions. So working in collaboration with engineering, with our product teams,” she said. “It’s not AI versus the human. It’s amplification. It’s making sure that we’re utilizing the human element for the judgments that are being made.”

And for HR pros like me? “In a practical sense, the AI is really good at repeatable tasks. So all those tasks that we hate, like, who likes doing expense reports? Nobody. Okay, so one day it’ll be able to do that for us,” Seigel said.

HR pros on the panel echoed Seigel’s assessment of repeatable tasking with AI tools. In addition to automatic expense reporting, the pros pointed to writing job descriptions, scheduling meetings or interviews, and summarizing comments thematically from survey responses.

“It’s quicker to market if you’re utilizing it for repetitive skills, utilizing the technology to make it a little bit faster for you to do your job,” Manglal-Lan said, pointing to AI summary tools that can surface up feedback from thousands of comments from employees and surface insights that would have taken human HR pros days or weeks to sift through.

Stressed during the panel discussion was human oversight and AI’s ability to amplify human skills and intelligence, rather than replacing what people are uniquely good at. AI is a tool that requires a good set of data, good inputs and prompting, and a healthy dose of skepticism and due diligence.

“It’s also only as good as the data that you input and the processes that you built. You cannot have AI fix your processes. It will not fix broken processes,” Seigel warned. “So now we’re starting to hire and think about new roles like ‘AI content readiness roles.’ As HR professionals, we have so much content, so much information out there on benefits, on programs, on leadership development courses, and we design that content for humans to digest it…Well, [now] I need to make sure that the content that is feeding the AI is ready for the AI, and so that’s a whole new role that never even existed.”