How two HR executives are using AI tools with their people ops teams

Feel like you’ve been screaming, “AI, AI, AI!” into the void in your organization without much to show for it?

If so, you’re not alone. Many people leaders expressed a similar sentiment (though with less yelling) when discussing AI adoption within their companies and on their HR teams at the annual Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) conference in Orlando on June 18.

In one such conversation, Kate Noel, SVP and head of people ops at Morning Brew, Inc., and Stefani Steinway, SVP of HR at Equifax, shared how they’re using AI on their people ops teams with an audience of roughly 100 HR pros.

“[HR tends] to be the smallest group or department supporting the largest service area, which is basically everyone and their mom, and so I really have to figure out…how to have AI help me make my time more efficient,” Noel said.

Marrying AI + HR. Amid rapid tech transformation, people pros are now in “the driver’s seat,” Steinway said, designing and architecting how work gets done. AI tools can help HR decide what does and doesn’t get automated, she said.

“A lot of times things are thrown at us or they’re dictated toward us, but now we have an opportunity to actually design, and so, this is not the time to be sitting back,” she said. “This is really our opportunity, as HR professionals, to act swiftly and also start to get really decisive on the work that matters.”

Like many people leaders, Noel said she’s used AI as a time-saving tool. Gemini, for example, has helped her synthesize and prioritize emails, while Claude has helped her aggregate information and data into simplistic, aesthetic dashboards.

“It’s a great signal, because if I’m doing that, as the head of HR, for my team, I’m hoping, and they’ve told me, that it makes the people on my team also feel psychologically safe to do it as well,” Noel said. “There’s nothing more than showing you mean something than to act upon it.”

Steinway said she’s currently building AI agents to help answer frequently-asked HR questions, like those related to benefits and onboarding questions. She hopes her people ops team will be able to fully offload these administrative tasks to AI agents, thus improving their employee experience.

Learnings and lessons. Before implementing a new AI tool, Steinway recommended HR pros survey their team, managers, and employees about where they’re spending most of their time. Understanding where employees spend most of their time, she said, can help identify where AI can improve productivity.

“AI is giving us this opportunity to move from sometimes a reactive state in HR…to a more proactive conversation,” she said. “That, to me, is what’s really exciting about where we’re headed as an industry.”

HR pros should also recognize that AI use cases may differ from employee to employee, Noel said. Concerns may vary, too, so HR pros should address them with specificity and avoid sweeping AI mandates.

“We’ve done this before. It may not have been AI specifically, but I pink promise, whatever your job description was when you joined, you are not solely just doing that,” Noel said. “The topic may be different, but that muscle is still there…You roll with the punches, and so use that same mindset when it comes to implementing AI.”