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.

HR Brew

Adam DeRose

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Cassie Kozyrkov, CEO of Data Scientific, speaks at SHRM’s AI + HI Project event

This data scientist wants HR leaders to ask these three questions when shopping around for AI tools

Best known for enhancing productivity, AI tools still need a human to double-check their work.

Technically HR recurring feature illustration

Technically HR: Indeed launches new tool helping TA pros match candidates to job openings

With Smart Sourcing, Indeed aims to make finding the right candidate easier and faster by using AI.

A computer processor icon denoting HR technology

Tech

AI skills aren’t the only urgently needed skills to ready the workforce for the AI transformation. Skilling across workplace technology—not just AI—will be critical to successful AI-enablement projects, new research from Coursera and AWS finds.

The survey of technology leaders across top global firms finds that 88% agree planned AI investments will not succeed without increasing investments in skills development.

“Despite all this technological transformation and automation and speed that you know these leaders…still believe that humans are irreplaceable,” said Coursera’s CPO Marcelo Modica.

But the findings are a bit more complex. While AI upskilling is obviously important to success, technology leaders say cloud, data, and cybersecurity upskilling are also essentially needed, especially in the next three years, or AI initiatives spearheaded by organizations may underdeliver or even fail, 

A workforce with strong cloud skills remains a top priority because cloud infrastructure plays a fundamental role in every digital initiative inside the organization, including AI projects. Data skills are needed as data quality and good governance are required to successfully deploy AI solutions, and cybersecurity responsibilities will grow with expanded cloud and AI infrastructure.

“Those technical skills in themselves are changing very rapidly,” Modica told HR Brew.

 Modica told HR Brew that readying the workforce for this AI transformation calls for a new strategy for employee learning.

Learning in the AI-enabled future will require more “practical skill development, working on real projects, practicing skill assessments,” he said, and importantly “risk-free experimentation.” A culture of experimentation, innovation, and failure, “the louder the better,” will best prepare employees for participating in the future of work.

 has been thought of as something you do separately from 

Employees stop working to participate in a training program, but according to Modica, this new culture always requires learning.

“Now more than ever, these things have to be very tightly webbed together on a day-to-day basis,” he said. “From an HR perspective, this idea of continuous learning is going to be really important…As these new technologies roll out, constantly thinking about that training in a day-to-day workflow as opposed to separate.”

image of a hand pushing a learning button with a stylist pen in a digital space

Cloud, data, and cybersecurity upskilling needed amid ongoing AI transformation

AI upskilling requires foundational technology skills, and maybe a new approach to employee learning.

HCM and enterprise software giant SAP plans to acquire the hiring platform SmartRecruiters.

Execs told reporters on a media call that the move would bolster SAP’s all-in-one suite with additional capabilities. The company announced the acquisition on Aug. 1.

“Bringing in talent isn’t just an HR priority, it’s a business priority,” SAP SuccessFactors Chief Product Officer Dan Beck said on the call. “SmartRecruiters has a robust portfolio with advanced capabilities [that] allows us to move more quickly to serve our customers.”

He pointed to SmartRecruiters’s AI expertise in candidate sourcing and screening, its rich sources of recruiting data that can help SAP further people intelligence for strategic workforce planning, and its robust end-to-end workflows that can help SAP deliver a better candidate experience, as well as a better experience for talent pros.

“Recruiters and hiring managers have really grown to love the brand and the product,” SmartRecruiters CEO Rebecca Carr said. “They’re using it every day in the flow of work, and it’s become not just a module or a bolt on, but really a system that is designed for hiring across all stakeholders in the hiring process.”

Beck said he expects the platform’s AI capabilities and data will help SAP better and more quickly serve its customers amid this moment of rapid technological transformation.

The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

The move is still subject to regulatory approval, which Beck told reporters he expected in the last quarter of this year. The acquisition won’t change up the recruitment workflow for SAP or SmartRecruiters customers just yet. SmartRecruiters will remain an “agnostic vendor” for the “foreseeable future,” according to Carr.

“Whether you’re a SmartRecruiter customer or an SAP customer or both, we’re going to be able to create good value for you, and hopefully not a lot of complexity,” she said.

SAP to acquire SmartRecruiters to bolster its HCM suite and recruitment data

SAP execs say it reflects the increasing business value of successful talent management.

Mikaela Cohen

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.

 and eager investment has many workers anxiously wondering, “Will AI take my job? And are my bosses secretly salivating at the idea of reducing headcount to basically zero and running a productive team of superintelligent agents at a fraction of the cost?”

Maybe it’s not all so simple and sinister, but without a clear internal communications strategy related to the ongoing AI transformation, it’s possible employees may wonder

“This topic, actually, has taken on its own identity because people make the association to literally, like, Will Smith’s 

and they hear what Elon is saying out in the market and there’s this assumption that the machines are going to come in and literally start doing the jobs,” said David Maffei, SVP & GM at internal communications platform Staffbase.

Maffei suggested that technology has, historically, upended the workplace. He pointed to the adoption of the mainframe computer or the cloud as recent examples of tech that led to some worker displacement–—though at the time, anxiety over robots replacing human jobs wasn’t so pronounced.

“No one at that time was saying that the mainframe was stealing their jobs. No one was saying that Microsoft’s tooling in the early 2000s was stealing their jobs,” he said.

 like it could take our jobs because its capabilities are evident to us in our personal life as much as our professional life.

 more than half of employees are worried about the future impact of AI, and 32% believe the technology “will lead to fewer job opportunities for them in the long run.”

While clear data on AI’s present and future impact on jobs remains inconclusive, an 

Q2 2025 layoffs in the US by outplacement services firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas found of the 76,214 tech jobs lost this year, 20,000 were explicitly related to “technological updates.” And of those, only in 75 cases was AI officially cited. “DOGE impact” and economic conditions were the top culprits, according to the agency.

“Being able to communicate things that are happening transformatively inside of an organization is very similar to being able to communicate things that are transpiring in [a] crisis situation,” Maffei told HR Brew.

 for speaking to this, and some are doing it better than others.

 to focus on becoming an “AI-first” company, phasing out contractors and hiring only if a team cannot automate the work. Maffei called it “one deaf,” telling HR Brew that it sent the message: 

We will use trendy buzzwords to capture sales at the expense of our workforce. 

 delivered a better analysis of what the company anticipates will happen moving forward, but Maffei suggested there was room for more details about the company’s plans and fallout to employees.

 “I actually think that the lack of communication is almost worse than poorly communicating,” Maffei said. “I think that as soon as you decide that you’re going to sit quiet on a topic that has this much impact across your entire org, it has impact on the way that employees interact with each other. It has impact in the way that the employees interact with the business, and maybe most importantly, it impacts how the business interacts with the employee.”

Without any information from leaders about AI strategy, employees are left to make their own assumptions about what might happen, and “those assumptions are never positive,” Maffei told HR Brew. The silence signals two possibilities to employees, he said: either the company is pursuing AI technology discreetly behind my back or company leaders have no plans at all.

“You’re on a rudderless boat, or you’re fearful the bottom is going to fall off. Neither are good if you’re in the middle of the ocean,” he said.

 Maffei returned to crisis communications, suggesting that leading as a human with honesty, authenticity, and a willingness to communicate through uncertainty is the right internal comms strategy.

“Too often the fear of saying, ‘We don’t know exactly how this is going to play out, but here’s our anticipation, and if it goes left, then we’re thinking this way, and if it goes right, we’re thinking that way, and if it goes into way, and if it goes in another way, we'll figure it out,” he said. “That comes off as authentic. It comes off as real.”

Communications with employees about AI strategy and adoption should be as clear as possible while acknowledging that there are unknown factors yet considered, and share what impacts are known or anticipated, even ones that might impact headcount.

“That’s such a different message than, ‘AI is going to change the future. We’re now AI-first…and by the way, you guys are all on the side of the road when we’re done with this,’” he said.

gif of a company email saying "i dont know"

Companies and executives are addressing headcount woes associated with AI adoption

How you communicate what’s happening with AI to employees matters a lot. 

We’ve entered the part of the AI hype cycle where we’re starting to more accurately understand the value and limitations of the tech—which spent much of the last two years basking in the lime light. Move over, Blu-ray disc.

While AI perhaps has longer staying power than Blu-ray, last month Gartner predicted more than 40% of agentic AI projects will be canceled by the end of 2027. The firm cited rising costs, unclear business value, and inadequate risk controls as potential hurdles for the tech.

“I’m not surprised,” said Sam Dorison, co-founder and CEO at ReflexAI, an AI-powered training and quality assurance platform that designs agentic solutions to support human workers rather than replace them. “Where you get impact in professional settings, particularly enterprise settings, is through clarity and clear goals, and if you’re implementing AI, because you think AI can address everything, you do not have clear goals.”

The Gartner report cautions against “misapplying agentic AI in business use cases” warning it can lead to a use case failure. Before procuring or deploying agentic AI in the workplace, it’s important to evaluate if agentic AI is the right solution for the intervention or if something else is more appropriate, according to the report.

“Everytime there’s something new, we’re just so excited about the potential of it and tend to quickly judge it by the wrong things,” said Sagi Eliyahu, cofounder and CEO of Tonkean, an AI orchestration and integration platform.

It’s important to think through the roadmap of an AI project and outline its goals, understand what a vendor is really able to offer to cut through the hype, and work out the business value for the technology, the report recommends. Organizations also need to be equipped with a workforce ready to adopt the solution.

“It is really important to be clear eyed about not just what you want to accomplish, but do you have the team to do it?” Dorison said, adding that it’s not just AI engineers, but also leaders who have experience driving large transformation projects, executive buy-in, and a workforce that’s culturally ready and excited about AI. “A lot of those fundamentals, or things that I would consider to be fundamentals, within a high performing culture get pushed to the side in the sprint to do a new AI thing.”

Eliyahu pointed out that agentic AI, like other new tech, only works if the tech is the right intervention for the problem.

“There is a false expectation with a lot of organizations, they think they can just parachute those agents in and then things will just happen,” Eliyahu said. “In reality, it’s not different than most technologies, and it’s definitely not different than hiring people. You just have access to very smart [tools that are the] equivalent of people in certain specific ways.”

 HR pros aren’t generally considered IT procurement professionals, but they do play a crucial role in helping organizations successfully deploy agentic solutions to the workforce. Dorison noted HR leaders can assume a role in transparent employee communication on the AI transformation, recruiting and hiring an AI-ready workforce, designing L&D programming that train employees and build the culture that’s AI-ready, and lead compliance and governance efforts.

“Clarity of use—and this is something that HR is uniquely positioned to [support]—they need to provide clarity to the workforce,” Dorison said. “If HR teams can say: here’s the red lines, here’s the green lines. If you’re on either side of those, the decision is clear. Here’s your red flags and your green flags. If those pop up, your decision should be mostly clear, but maybe check with your manager. Most things will fall into a way that can be litigated.”

But because most organizations have not outlined a company-wide framework to govern how AI is used, each use case is independently assessed for ROI or risk.

“[HR] can provide guidelines for the entire organization, leadership and teams,” he said. “And they can provide training teams on how to interpret those guidelines.”

 Beating the AI hype: 40% of agentic AI projects will be cancelled, Gartner predicts

“There is a false expectation with a lot of organizations, they think they can just parachute those agents in and then things will just happen,” one tech CEO tells HR Brew.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed a new bill into law last month regulating the use of AI in the Lone Star State.

The Texas Responsible AI Governance Act (

)—sponsored by Republican State Rep. Giovanni Capriglione—attempts to govern the development, deployment, and use of AI in the country’s second largest state.

In some ways, the Texas law mirrors other notable AI legislation in its scope, including the 

, which prohibits algorithmic discrimination and 

. But it stops short of those other measures.

John Rood, founder and CEO of Proceptual, a firm working at the intersection of HR and AI, told HR Brew he was surprised to learn the details of this legislation emerging from Texas.

“The earlier drafts of the Texas regulation were much more stringent and much closer to Colorado and much closer to European Union AI act, and those protections have been substantially watered down,” Rood said.

 The Texas law bans businesses from developing or deploying AI systems with the intent of unlawfully discriminating against a protected class under federal or state law. This provision makes clear that demonstrating a “disparate impact” of the technology would not meet the requirements of a violation under the law, and note that an “intentional and substantial modification” is also needed.

Additionally, the measure creates a sandbox program allowing developers to create and test AI systems in a safer environment before going public. On a broader, regulatory scale, this aspect 

 that some companies have found useful for testing and deploying AI systems in the workplace.

While the law does not allow individual complainants to bring lawsuits, it authorizes the Texas attorney general to bring actions against employers and levy steep penalties, including:

$10,000–$12,000 fines for “curable” violations following a period of noncompliance for 60 days after being notified by the AG’s office;

up to $200,000 fines for “uncurable” violations, as determined by a court; and

up to $40,000 per day for continuing violations.

Root said the emerging regulatory framework means that organizations need to start implementing a “fairly robust system of AI governance, and that the governance system should comply pretty closely with a recognized standard.”

, a framework developed by the International Organization for Standardization, as well as the the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST) 

 as two guideposts for developing a strategy for AI governance and compliance with the emerging patchwork of legislation.

The Texas law, much like Colorado’s, points to the NIST framework as an affirmative defense against violations to the statute.

“All of these regulations that we’re seeing have a clear off-ramp for companies…which is: just do AI governance,” Rood said. “It’s relatively clear what that set of activities would be for someone trying to comply.”

The Texas AI Act goes into effect January 1, 2026. Rood suggested that employers doing business in the Lone Star State begin developing risk frameworks aligned with NIST or the ISO immediately.

“The HR leader right now faces a task that at first seems monumental because they’re dealing with a number of very complicated regulations and multiple jurisdictions,” said Rood, “but the action that they must take in order to comply is simple, but not easy, which is implementing a system of AI governance.”

Everything’s bigger in Texas, except the scope of its new AI law

Texas approved a new law to regulate AI tech, but it lacks the teeth of other notable AI regs.

New skills research from HR advisory firm the Josh Bersin Company reveals that skills velocity, how fast employees acquire new skills, affects business performance more than skill depth.

The report examined top-performing companies across six industries over four years and showcases how top-performing companies are outpacing their peers, especially as it relates to AI transformation.

“Technical skills are changing quickly, but then also human skills and interpersonal skills, all of those skills are actually changing pretty rapidly,” said Kathi Enderes, global HR industry analyst and SVP of research at the Josh Bersin Company.

The new report focuses on the importance of skills velocity and its connection with success.

“It’s not so much the depth of skills, that’s certainly important, but it is what we call skills velocity: how adaptable they are, how quickly you can recalibrate into new skills, into different skills,” Enderes said.

The report highlights “pacesetter” companies that learn, adapt, and adopt new technologies, practices, and models faster than their peers.

These “pacesetters” are performing well financially, their customer satisfaction is recognized, they’re known as leaders in innovation and market share by others in the industry, and they have a strong employer brand and talent strategy, according to Enderes.

The findings revealed six key components to a skills strategy shared across “pacesetter” companies regardless of industry. These companies believe in:

AI for growth, not just efficiency: AI’s true value isn’t just cost-cutting, but it can also help boost customer and innovation outcomes.

Continuous innovation as standard: Skills must constantly evolve to reflect the ongoing need for innovation in every role in the organization.

Work redesign for productivity: Redesigned workflows with better alignment to skills and skill needs is shaking up traditional hierarchies.

Talent density over quantity: Teams with “complementary, evolving skills” help employees move from entry-level roles to more skilled ones.

Change management to agility: Forward looking orgs change fast and leverage skills velocity to be more agile in the market.

AI-powered systemic HR: Companies must deploy AI-powered HR systems that bring agility to talent, skilling and recruiting strategies.

 AI technology is evolving at such a rapid pace that even 

 don’t know exactly what’s coming or what’s even possible.

Concerns or skills needed to best leverage generative AI were quickly supplanted by those relating to agentic technology. Earlier this year, 

 moves to ship AI agent subscriptions for knowledge worker agents, coding agents, and PhD-level research agents, at a fraction of the cost to employ a human, unleashing a whole new 

AI execs have invested resources into developing (currently) theoretical Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) technology. Social media giant Meta, for instance, invested billions in a 

 staffed by top talent from AI companies from Silicon Valley.

“Skills velocity is getting more important, because the speed of change is increasing more than ever,” Enders said. “We all know that the AI that we have today is the worst AI that we’ll ever have because it’s gonna get better and better and faster and faster. We don’t even know what’s coming.”

characters running across a crevice with a hand of "skills" helping them cross