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HR Brew

Generative AI

Mikaela Cohen

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AI skills are in demand, and HR will need to fork over higher salaries to recruit this talent.

Adding AI skills to job descriptions could cost employers 28% more in annual compensation, a 

 from research firm Lightcast found. AI-related skills can include expertise with large language models (LLMs), like ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot, as well as prompt engineering, text summarization, and more.

A Lightcast analysis of over 1.3 billion job postings in 2024 found roles advertising at least one AI or generative AI skill offered $18,000 more in annual compensation on average than those that did not. Some 51% of these AI roles were not in tech-related industries, up from 44% in 2022.

“AI is becoming more and more pervasive throughout all of the job descriptions that we’re seeing for virtually any different career area,” Cole Napper, VP of research at Lightcast, told HR Brew.

No longer are AI skills only associated with tech or IT roles, Napper said, and the roles that are seeing the biggest rise in AI skill demand are recruiters and HR pros.

Companies that don’t keep up with this trend, he said, could miss out on talent.

“There is a divergence that’s going on between employers who are saying, ‘We’re not leaning into this space. We’re not really seeing the need to do that,” Napper said. “It’s better to recruit sooner than later, because if you try to play catch up later, this is going to cost you even more.”

It’s a supply and demand issue, Napper added. More employers are demanding AI skills, but the supply of employees with these skills has stayed consistent, he said. He suspects the workforce will adjust through upskilling and reskilling, but this will take time.

“There is always a lagging effect, because it takes time for people to build skills,” he said.

AI robot arms reaching towards the sky with lots of money falling around them.

AI talent costs nearly 30% more in annual compensation

The majority (64%) of US adults plan to avoid using AI for “as long as possible,” according to a 

. AI experts think 79% of US adults already use AI “constantly or several times a day,” the 

 found in April, but only 27% of respondents said they use AI to that extent.

There could be an educational or “misunderstanding gap,” said Todd Blaskowitz, senior client partner on the AI strategy and transformation team at consulting firm Korn Ferry.

“You’re probably using an AI or a generative AI solution, day in and day out, that you may not even be aware of,” Blaskowitz told HR Brew. “[It’s] a misunderstanding gap with individuals around these tools, and how they are starting to present themselves in your daily lives, and how you accomplish a daily task, or even your work within your job.”

Many people don’t realize they’re already using AI, said Lydia Saad, director of US social research at Gallup. For instance, she said, Netflix uses AI to recommend users content based on their viewing history. And Google uses it to aggregate information for search results.

“There’s a lot of people who don’t know what all the different variations of AI are,” Saad told HR Brew. This could cause resistance.

Saad highlighted another piece of Gallup data, which found the more people use AI tools, the more likely they are to see it as a tech advancement, rather than a threat. Some 71% of US adults who use genAI daily see it as innovative, compared to 35% of those who’ve never used it.

“As people get more familiar with using it, they’ll get more comfortable with understanding how they can use it without it doing harm to them or their livelihood,” she said.

Before introducing AI tools in the workplace, Blaskowitz recommended providing education, as well as clarity and transparency around how it fits in their company’s strategy.

“If people just hear, ‘Oh, we’re doing all this AI stuff at work. Oh, we just got Copilot or ChatGPT, but if they don’t have clarity on how that fits into the overall, bigger picture, that’s going to cause resistance in the organization,” he said. “If you don’t hear that narrative or understand it, you’re going to create your own.”

Then, people leaders, Blaskowitz said, can start encouraging employees to embrace an AI mindset.

“Help your people rethink their work, rethink the outcomes that they’re trying to do with a mindset of, ‘How might AI improve this?’” he said. “How might AI enhance the overall experience, the overall quality, my overall productivity?”

In offering encouragement, however, Blaskowitz said he advises leaders not to ignore workers’ fears. “[Be] a human, showing empathy, and addressing the fears that people bring into the workplace,” he said.

Employees are avoiding AI—HR can help them embrace it

“As people get more familiar with using it, they’ll get more comfortable with understanding how they can use it without it doing harm to them or their livelihood,” Lydia Saad, director of US social research at Gallup, told HR Brew.

Adam DeRose

ChatGPT might be a new stakeholder in your salary discussions, according to 

 from compensation software company Payscale, which surveyed 1,000 employees and 500 leaders working in compensation.

Payscale found a growing gap between employer and employee salary expectations, and generative AI tools are contributing to the new norm.

Eighteen percent of employees are sourcing salary information from AI assistants like ChatGPT. Of those nearly one in five employees turning to a chatbot for insights, 27% say it’s “inflated their expectations” and 38% of employers agree that these tools yield higher salary demands, 

“I think the fundamental issue is that they’re [employers and employees] looking at the same object through two different lenses,” said Ron Seifert, senior client partner at Korn Ferry. “Employees get anecdotal information, and employers have real data, both internal practices and references as well as external market data.”

Employers are also armed with insights on how the company approaches pay with other people performing the same job, employee performance data and an employer view of an employee’s potential, and compensation survey data.

But employees may consult ChatGPT, social media, and websites like Glassdoor or others. Younger employees are also more open with their salary information than older colleagues, and word-of-mouth insights may also impact their impression of comp.

This dissonance has become a recipe for a growing confidence gap, the study found. While 93% of employers “believe their employees trust their pay decisions,” only 69% of employees say they trust their employer’s thinking.

 “Acknowledge it and be sufficiently empathetic is probably the most important thing,” Seifert said. “You want to not be defensive and then share the perspective of how we reach our answers as employers on pay decision making, and then just present that in a fairly dispassionate way.”

Seifert told HR Brew it’s safe to assume employees are coming to a comp discussion armed with information, and some of that is probably misinformation. Be ready to receive bloated asks and prepared to explain the work that went into the company’s offer, he suggested.

“An employee discussion isn’t going to change an employer’s mind about their practices,” he said.

Seifert added that, in these conversations, it’s also useful to assess an employee’s motivation for the discussion: Is there another job offer, or is there a personal financial issue? These types of motivations can affect which action might make the most sense for the company and employee.

“Employees generally don’t leave for pay unless…[they] get an offer that’s so substantially above where they are, but if it’s 10 or 15%, it’s entertaining and charming up until the moment I need to make a decision about leaving,” he said, suggesting HR leaders or managers work with employees on identifying goals and a plan to achieve them.

AI-powered tools think your employees should be making more money

Employees are using AI to help prepare for salary discussions, but it’s possibly inflating their expectations of what’s fair.

ChatGPT's public launch left many companies scrambling to understand how the technology will impact work. Some companies took a

: let early-adopter firms experiment, adopt early, and make costly mistakes. Others opted for 

 with certain business units or executives.

 from business seemed like a logical choice. The tech posed too many unknowns, like concerns about the data security of personal and proprietary information and, frankly, leaders were still worried that using the tool was akin to cheating.

Colgate-Palmolive took a different approach. Rather than restrict AI access, the company created a safe, internal environment for employees to explore using AI.

“The tools are broad based and extremely useful for everybody, for virtually everything that they do. Task number one is to make sure that the entire workforce feels comfortable with AI [and] understands that we want them to be using AI,” said Kli Pappas, global head of AI at Colgate-Palmolive. “Then all the other pieces can fall into place, and the world can shift around us.”

Early in 2023, the company built AI Hub, a central platform for its employees to learn about, use, and interact with AI.

“I own enterprise risk related to AI, and part of this was just a pure risk-based calculation,” Pappas said. “There's so much data [showing] that if you don't give employees access to tooling, then 

 of your network. When we looked at what was available for free publicly to people, we had to at least replicate what they could do outside.”

Additionally, Pappas’s team set up a tool inside the AI Hub where employees can build their own AI assistant, a custom GPT. Employees can give instructions and relevant data to the assistant, and then can use it at work.

The AI Hub enables employees to build any AI assistant they need. There are built-in governance processes for sharing. Assistants can be used by their creators, shared across teams, departments, or geographical regions through a governance framework. With more than 3,000 employee-developed assistants, some even rise up to be useful org-wide.

“This, at the time, was a revolutionary idea, because we were saying, ‘AI is not the domain of IT people or AI engineers and we’re in control of what gets built and [what] use cases are,” Pappas said. “There are thousands of…valuable things that people can do.”

 Colgate-Palmolive’s objective-setting assistant is homegrown. A member of the HR team built the tool that helps employees zero in on their goals. Trained on company values, priorities and strategies, as well as institutional knowledge about SMART goal-setting. The assistant coaches employees to develop better objectives.

The assistant began at the hands of one "very intrepid" employee, was tested by a group of roughly 20 colleagues, notified management, and now the tool is used across the globe.

“The person who built it is not in IT, is not a coder, is not a programmer, has no experience,” Pappas said. “All he did was just have the idea that this is a pain point and something that a chatbot can solve.”

Not every pain point is shared by everyone; some are unique to a job function or location, and Colgate-Palmolive’s approach works for specific issues as well as broad ones.

A manufacturing plant in Greece, for instance, was outfitted with complex machinery and instruments from Germany, all equipped with manuals and documentation, in German. German is a fine language, but not exactly spoken much in Greece, and not by the employees who sometimes have to troubleshoot issues, and would be much more successful doing so in their native tongue.

The issue wasn’t big enough to get on the radar of IT or Pappas’s team. The plant manager didn’t need to file a support ticket or wait for an enterprise tool to roll out. Instead, he built a handful of assistants using the AI Hub and trained them on the German manuals and instructions. The assistants are available for his employees to use when an issue arises. He handled the problem locally. He never asked permission. He didn’t need to.

“It never made it out of that specific plant, because it was built for that plant,” Pappas said. “But this person literally had a dozen of these that he had set up just for his individual teams, and it was valuable for them.”

After a certain number of interactions with an assistant, Colgate-Palmolive requires employees to complete a survey about how the new assistant impacts their work. They cannot continue to use the assistant until they’ve complete it. Surveys assess benefits including time savings, quality of work, and creativity. Builders, managers and Pappa’s team collect qualitative and quantitative data about the impact of these AI assistants. Sometimes the data reveals such high usage that enterprise-level resources are poured into a particularly good idea.

“We’ve had literally thousands of these assistants get built in the past year and a half, somewhere in the range 3,000 to 5,000 that have been built across the company. It’s taken off in a way that we really didn't even imagine,” Pappas said.

This Fortune 500 enables its employees to create AI solutions to workplace problems

Colgate-Palmolive built a platform that lets employees create AI-powered solutions to address pain points at work.

The year is halfway over. The way time flies, we’ll be ringing in 2026 before you know it.

 and new compliance requirements to agentic AI and 

, this year has been a whirlwind, and many CHROs are trying to strategize a path forward amid the many changes affecting their workplaces. As a pulse check, HR Brew asked a few people leaders what they’re prioritizing for the rest of 2025.

 “As we move through 2025, one thing is clear. The role of the CHRO is changing. We are moving beyond traditional talent management and stepping fully into business enablement, aligning people strategy directly with growth…AI is also becoming a real partner in this shift, helping automate repetitive tasks so people can focus on higher-impact work. At the same time, we are making a deeper investment in our managers, giving them the tools, clarity, and support they need to lead with confidence and care. In a world where trust and culture matter more than ever, HR is not on the sidelines, we are driving results and shaping what’s next.”—Amy Cappellanti-Wolf, CPO at Dayforce

 “My focus for the rest of 2025 is leading the workplace through change. With 

, I want to ensure that we’re building a future-ready organization where people and technology work together, and that means reimagining how we work, how we support our teams, and how we help people grow…While the pace of change is fast, it won’t be sustainable without a foundation of well-being. That means designing work that fosters balance, connection, and purpose. Indeed’s research shows that well-being isn’t just about how people feel. It’s predictive of how they perform. If we want to build a resilient, future-ready workforce, we need to take care of the humans in it.”—LaFawn Davis, Indeed’s chief people and sustainability officer

 “We’re exploring how AI can lighten the load for our team. Not in a vague future-of-work way, but in real, tangible, day-to-day ways that make an impact. Right now, that means digging in and finding where things feel clunky or repetitive to see if tech can smooth those out…There’s a lot of fear out there about tech replacing people, but that’s not our lens. We see AI as a tool that can cut through some of the noise, so our team can spend more energy on work that feels worth doing.

One example, we just launched an AI forecasting model to help our sourcing team better predict what we’ll need for upcoming menus. It’s already making it easier for them to advocate with suppliers and cut down on food waste. That’s the kind of shift we’re aiming for: More clarity, more confidence, less guesswork.”—Kyla Hanaway-Quinlan, COO and head of people at Feast and Fettle

 “As my team and I prepare for the end of 2025, our top priority continues to be enhancing our workforce agility through strategic workforce planning and skills development. At Cornerstone, this means supporting our workforce with a seamless work environment that prioritizes employee experience and development.

Our focus on employee development is centered on ensuring skills and talent visibility remains a top-of-mind priority for our global organization. Agentic AI is evolving the way we work and forcing our teams to rethink what skills we need to prioritize. As we get ahead of this shift, we are leaning into skills mapping and global emerging skills to offer employees hyper-personalized training and career development opportunities.”—Carina Cortez, CPO at Cornerstone OnDemand

What strategies CHROs are focused on for the remainder of 2025

HR Brew asked four chief people leaders to share their top concerns.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could work less, maybe get paid less, but have access to the same range of benefits? Turns out, AI might actually help us get there, but only after we get over some initial speed bumps.

As AI rapidly changes how employees approach their work, it’s also dramatically changing what work humans perform. While nearly half of entry-level, white-collar jobs could be eliminated in the next few years, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei 

 in a recent interview, jobs in every industry are susceptible to AI disruption. Some 12.6% of roles in the US are at a “high risk” or “very high risk” of being displaced altogether, according to 

 from the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM). The report also found both white- and blue-collar jobs are vulnerable to AI.

 “I don’t think HR and L&D know what’s about to hit them. Some are really dazed and confused,” said Rishad Tobaccowala, author of 

As AI adoption accelerates, people leaders need to reimagine workforce management, he told HR Brew, starting with “removing” how HR thinks about job structures from hiring, job descriptions, and job titles. Instead of a traditional structure where mainly full-time employees complete work, he suggested HR reallocate tasks across various combinations of full-time, part-time, contractual, freelance workers, and AI tech.

It can also be thought of as a human-to-AI continuum, where each job we have nowadays will be done by “a human, a human powered by AI, an agent supervised by humans...or AI,” Bryan Ackermann, head of AI strategy and transformation at consulting firm Korn Ferry, 

“In today’s world, a company will basically say, ‘I have this work to be done. What combination of human beings and [AI]…do we need?’” Tobaccowala said. “That is how work is going to get done, and any company that does not have that agility or flexibility is out of business.”

 technology decreases the amount of work done by most humans, Tobaccowala said, adding “10% to 20% of work, which is currently being done by humans, will be done by AI, so now a company has a choice, either they create new streams of work, or they decide to lay off 10% to 20% of the people.”

, have already conducted mass layoffs to reinvest in AI. But conducting layoffs isn’t the only strategy to reduce talent costs, Tobaccowala said. He suggests moving part of your full-time workforce to part-time or contract roles, but keeping 100% of their benefits. Some employees want benefits, he said, but might not want to work full time at your company.

“The reality of it is, if you actually told everybody in your company, ‘Hey, next year, do you want to work 60%, 80%, or 100%?’ I have a feeling you’ll end up with an average of about 85%,” he said. “You can basically reduce your headcount by 15%, without doing a single layoff…The lack of imagination of people to reinvent this is the key thing that I’m finding really astonishing.”

Another aspect of this strategy is reducing middle management and increasing the number of individual contributors, Tobaccowala said. “We don’t need a whole bunch of people to manage the work, so, in effect, what also begins to happen is this whole layer of what I call ‘bosses’ are going to be replaced by ‘leaders and doers,’” he said.

These actions and strategies require HR to “reinvent” themselves to avoid becoming “irrelevant,” he said. “Managing processes, which is what a lot of them do, is going to matter less and less when the whole process changes.”

Giant robot flicking tiny man illustration

How one strategy could help HR manage its workforce in the age of AI

Stop, duck, and roll out some changes to your workforce management strategy.

An illustration of a photo of HR Brew reporter Paige McGlauflin.

Paige McGlauflin

Business leaders have salivated over the possible transformations the technology can bring to their companies, and 

 into generative AI investments. But one nagging challenge has emerged: leaders are failing to fully think through how to change their workforce amid this transformation, including how job tasks will get done, and the skills required of workers who complete them.

It’s a problem that’s preventing many organizations from seeing real value from AI investments, recent research from Accenture states. Only 36% of 3,450 C-suite leaders surveyed by the consulting giant have scaled generative AI solutions within their organization, and only 13% have gotten real value from those solutions, 

Karalee Close, global lead for the talent and organization practice at Accenture, told HR Brew that the difficulty for most organizations is being able to make whatever big ideas arise actually work as a practical matter.

“Layering on a piece of GenAI technology on someone’s existing work does not change the world, doesn’t really create a whole lot of value,” she said. “It's interesting, and you could do some things faster, but it doesn't change the work.”

The companies that are able to change the ways of working to adapt to AI are seeing the most benefit: Businesses that have seen organizational value from AI, for instance, are 4.5 times more likely to have invested in structured AI agent systems. And organizations that have advanced change capabilities are at least twice as likely to drive successful transformation efforts.

“Those that do scale, get real value, they’re the ones that actually adapt their workforce and invest in the technology in a good way, and yet very few are still doing that,” Close said. In fact, just 35% of executives say they have a roadmap for how generative AI will impact their workforce, the report states. And three times more generative AI budgets are spent on technology than on people.

For HR pros, they’ll need to focus on redesigning workforce strategy, career paths, and what Close calls the “talent flywheel,” or leveraging the skills, learning, and experiences to create the talent that their organization needs to adapt to AI.

 In addition to helping organizations radically change their workflows, HR departments have to invest in restructuring their own functions, Close added. And there are a lot of parts of the HR process that are ripe for reinvention with AI, from more prominent use cases like on recruitment and reskilling or developing existing talent, but also with total rewards and the retirement process.

If HR functions fail to do that for themselves, they could put the organization’s success with AI adoption at risk altogether.

“If you can’t demonstrate that you can do this in your own function, nobody’s going to listen to you on any of the other bits,” Close said. “And if the business gets ahead of you, they are going to be the ones defining some of the jobs of the future, because they’re going to be ahead, you’re going to be playing catch up.”

An employee at an office desk with mouse clicker arrows pointing in different directions with highlighted text boxes. 