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.

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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

According to Job van der Voort, co-founder and CEO of the global 

 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 

. 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.”

 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.

 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.

image of human and robot shaking hands out of computers

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

He’s building an HR platform that attempts to make HR administrative work "disappear" with AI.  

Kristen Parisi

As AI infiltrates most aspects of life and work, many remain hesitant to use the emerging technology or are concerned it may replace them. Employers, meanwhile, are navigating how to deploy AI while continuing to engage employees.

At Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Summit this week, executives from Workday, Microsoft, and Guild shared their approach to AI education, and how to remain authentic in an AI agent world.

AI is as complex as any business function, so companies should create systems tailored to their unique goals and employees, according to Katy George, CVP of workforce transformation at Microsoft. “AI can drive a whole variety of different performance outcomes. And what’s really critical is that the business leaders, not the tech folks…identify what matters, and then drive the connection of AI into their business processes.”

Workday analyzes business tools through three lenses: efficiency, risk mitigation, and talent amplification, Aashna Kircher, group general manager of CHRO products at Workday, told the room of female executives. “The biggest power is in where we amplify talent…it’s giving people access to information or data at their fingertips that they never had before that makes them infinitely better at their particular job,” she said. “The most important thing is anchoring them [employees] on AI as a catalyst for growth.”

Earlier this year, Workday launched Everyday AI, an initiative to encourage AI adoption among employees, HR Brew 

. The program is tailored to employees, in part based on their existing AI mindset, whether all-in on the technology, or skeptical.

George emphasized the importance of engaging workers in the process. “We know from other types of work transformation that you need employees to be the people who redesign their own work,” she said, noting that Microsoft runs AI bootcamps that aim to give employees the tools and exercises needed to gain a new perspective on their role and job function. “What we’re finding is that there’s a set of messaging, but there’s also a way of really engaging employees in a way that really helps them see what’s in it for them.”

As jobs and technology rapidly change, the challenge for Microsoft is creating jobs, career paths, and education that can help workers learn the AI skills they need to thrive. “What you’re trying to do is actually teach the humans the judgment that they need, and really designing jobs thoughtfully to take advantage of the productivity opportunities, but also build cognitive engagement and learning to build a judgment that’s required even earlier than before,” George said.

AI skills shouldn’t just be taught on the job—they should also be taught in the classroom. That’s why some companies are working with academic institutions to prepare students for the AI-enabled workforce. “We meet with employers, we aggregate what their demands are, and then we go back out to our academic institutions,” Bijal Shah, CEO of Guild, said.

 The panelists noted that AI is meant to augment processes, but employers still need to support and engage workers.

Companies should pause before using AI, for example, to write employee performance reviews. “Figuring out the right context and channels that makes sense for AI to completely assume the task versus take a first draft and then have to be tailored in a way that only you can add context, or your voice, both of those things are keeping whatever in the situation,” Kircher said.

“You do have to be really careful about the types of things you communicate, where it’s AI-generated, versus things that you are producing yourself,” Shah said, noting that AI-assisted communication can be received negatively. “People need to know that when I’m communicating things to our company that is coming from me, and that I wrote it and that I took the time and effort to actually sit down and think through what I wanted to communicate.”

A panel of five women in business clothing, sitting on chairs in a small conference room

Tech leaders share how they teach employees to use AI

Leaders were atwitter on AI at Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Summit.

Workday, Microsoft, and Guild execs share how they’re deploying AI with employees

Every once and a while we check the thermometer in the HR tech space and look back on the technology, tools, and programs people pros are turning to that help to ease the burdens of their functions and deliver for their teams and employees.

As part of our Coworking series, we asked HR pros about the tech and tools that have made their lives easier.

AI is enjoying its moment. News headlines touch on AI daily. It’s mentioned in what feels like every meeting. If you haven’t asked ChatGPT to write you a poem about the Baltimore Ravens in the style of Edgar Allen Poe, where have you been for the last two to three years (and do you have room for one more!?)? AI is much more than Ask Jeeves in final boss form—it seems to be changing the way HR pros do their jobs and support the business.

“ChatGPT has honestly become an MVP in my workflow. Whether I’m drafting policy language, prepping messaging for org-wide announcements, or brainstorming engagement ideas—I use it as a collaborative thought partner.”

“The winner of what has made my life easier is ChatGPT. Smartcat rolled out our first ever company-wide Talent Review. ChatGPT analyzed our company-wide talent review results for biases and insights. Within 20 minutes I had a beautiful report out for the executive leadership team, board of directors, and employee population. Without using ChatGPT this would have taken at least a full day of work.”

It’s not just AI tools that are impacting HR work. AI requires lots of data and tech infrastructure, to perform high-value duties. But the could is more than just the groundwork for AI. 

 has freed work from the server room and democratized where work can happen.

“That’s easy. Cloud software. The ability to log in remotely to make payroll changes and other HR data is the main thing that's made remote work truly possible. My business relies on it.”

Of course any HR tool would be useless if it wasn’t useful across the department. APIs and product integration are value-adds to the HR team. According to one HR pro, working with platforms and tools that seamlessly transfer data or tasking right into the flow of work saves time and effort amid ongoing HR processes.

“What’s really made a difference is how certain HR tools have become much more integrated into my day-to-day work. I mean tech that’s built right into my workflow, so I can take action in the moment. For example, being able to quickly give feedback through an app and have it automatically logged for the next performance check-in. I’m not stopping what I’m doing to go track something down, it’s right there when I need it. That kind of seamless, embedded functionality has been a game-changer.”

 We’d like to know more about you and the tech you love, and invite you to participate in our 

Computer with "HR" on the screen and a network of employees' profiles

Tech you love: AI tools, cloud, and integrations are making these HR pros sing praise

Oft considered a boogeyman, AI tools are making HR easier for some people pros.

HR Brew is always on the lookout for HR tech easing the burdens that come with the people function. So we asked HR pros about the products that make their lives easier. From HCMs and ATSs to project management and data dashboards, we’re sharing their responses from previous interviews for our Coworking series.

“Workday. Implementing this solution across our organization has allowed for better visibility and an easier partnership, because we all now play in the same sandbox.”

, manager of internal mobility, Cox Enterprises

“One type of platform that’s made my life easier is those that help organize and streamline interview questions, item banks, and job analysis data. Tools like applicant tracking systems are great for managing structured interview questions and aligning them with job competencies, and ensuring we get standard, scored responses. Another invaluable resource are detailed job analysis databases. These platforms help centralize information, ensuring consistency and fairness throughout the hiring process. They save me time by keeping everything organized and easily accessible, which ultimately leads to more effective and transparent talent management.”

“Monday.com helps me with automated notifications and to keep track of my projects and shared projects.”

“We have implemented the use of Power BI in our talent review process. This annual process involves a comprehensive evaluation of each teammate, addressing questions such as where they aspire to grow, their current potential for growth, risk of departure, and the impact of their loss. Additionally, we determine the actions required by the leadership team to support their development into their potential or into different roles.

“Previously, this process was conducted manually using spreadsheets, which limited our capacity and confined the reviews to leaders only. Collaborating with our operations team in talent development and the technical team in EMEA, we developed a Power BI application that replaces all Excel spreadsheets. This innovation allows us to conduct these reviews for every individual in the organization globally, thereby saving significant time—days if not weeks—for my team and myself. This advancement facilitates powerful discussions about our teammates across all levels of the organization, making it an exciting development that benefits every person within the company.”

, VP of culture, engagement, and talent development, Insight Enterprises

“Any ATS system! We currently do not have the budget for one and I am counting down the days until we do! Having a central database to manage candidates, openings, and analytics is vital for a company’s growth. When I was hired with Relay, one of my original assigned duties was to evaluate different ATS platforms to invest in. I was able to test and review five of them and submit my proposal to senior leadership. Based on that resource, we are hoping we will be able to implement Bamboo HR in the next year or two.”

, TA & HR specialist, Relay Fire and Safety

These platforms and tools are helping HR pros do their jobs

HR pros share the tech they use every day.

Business used to be so easy; so easy, in fact, Southpark’s Eric Cartman once boiled the business basics down to three steps. Step one: collect gnome underpants; step two: ?; then, finally, step three: profit.

HR Brew does not endorse Cartman’s business plan, but as AI emerges as the go-to workplace enabler of the future (

), it’s introducing a new paradigm when it comes to how businesses function.

The emerging picture as companies adopt more and more AI tools is an equation that balances the work that needs to be done, the workforce capable of doing that work, and the technology that enables the work to happen.

Draup co-founder and CCO Vamsee Tirukkala and his colleagues at the data intelligence platform are betting on the hypothesis that CIOs and IT pros will deliver on the technology, and HR’s role managing the workforce won’t disappear anytime soon. But who oversees the “work”?

HR teams will also play a critical role in understanding the work that needs to be done within the business.

“You need to imagine the work,” Tirukkala said. “The work has to happen. Now what can be done by a person or can be done by a machine, or it could be done by a machine and a human.”

As companies reimagine and redefine work, the question becomes: Can this work be done by technology? And then the business must assess if AI can do the work, if doing so is compliant with relevant regulations and laws, if the budget allows for it, if it fits in the company’s approach to AI or existing processes, and if it’s even possible to actually develop and/or deploy it.

“It’s not all HR, but I’m saying that HR has a big role to play in it,” he said.

 Data is how HR teams and businesses will “earn” their seat at the table in the age of AI enablement.

Tirukkala and his co-founder, Vijay Swaminathan, founded the early talent planning and intelligence solution TalentNeuron (then Talent Neuron) in 2011. What the pair learned since was that more data was needed to better address actual HR issues.

“What we realized is supply-demand and understanding your people doesn’t help you in solving a lot of HR problems. Of course, it’s very important…but unless you understand that entire talent ecosystem, you are only solving bits and pieces of the puzzle.”

For many decisions in HR, more data is required to make informed "multidimensional" decisions. Recruitment strategy decisions, for example, involve the available skills in the market, the talent’s location, the talent’s industry, what competitors are doing, cost to hire the talent, and much more, he said.

Draup’s data reach goes even beyond that, surfacing data and insights on skills strategy, workforce planning, and recruitment intelligence, he said, focusing on offering people teams multidimensional data in real time to help them make more comprehensively informed decisions.

“Companies have realized that perception and experience alone is not preparing for the future,” he said. “Even the guidance that they are getting from the consultants are getting so outdated so fast, that they need to have their hand on the pulse to make the right decision.”

AI is changing the equation for the future of enterprise

Don’t like algebra? Here are the variables HR needs to consider amid the AI transformation. 

It’s 2020, Covid-19 is raging across the globe, and insurance provider Unum, like most organizations, needed to adapt its business to a rapidly changing environment.

In the early days of the pandemic, very few people were making vision and dental appointments, leaving the firm’s vision and dental claims specialists without much work and facing layoffs, according to Kimberly Bowen, Unum’s SVP of global talent and inclusion.

At the same time, the company’s benefits business was shortstaffed and working in overdrive to process the many short-term disability claims being filed due to the Covid-19 outbreak. Hiring during this period was challenging, so the HR team reimagined the workforce, she added.

“What if we can use these individuals? Maybe they need a little bit of upskilling from a product knowledge perspective, but the fundamentals of claims processing are the same,” Bowen said. “Let’s redeploy. Let’s do a quick upskilling, and let’s shift that workforce over.”

The team set out to understand the skills relevant for both groups of workers, identify which skills specialists working on vision and dental needed to acquire to support disability claims, and train accordingly.

It was a “very manual process of identifying” skills and competency gaps and training, but the work saved the livelihoods of 400 workers, met an urgent workforce need, preserved institutional knowledge, and set the organization on a path to focus on skills-based talent.

“We’ve got to really lean in here, and we’ve got to go figure out how we do this in a much more efficient way, because if we’re going to be doing this more frequently, we can’t be doing it manually,” Bowen said.

Similarly, the company redeployed recruiters—with a pandemic-limited scope of work—to support other units by identifying skills associated with their job description and determining which could be leveraged in other parts of the business.

“When you’re thinking about talent and you’re thinking about who’s equipped or who’s qualified to move into a role, your natural inclination as a leader is not to think, ‘Oh, my recruiters could be…a pipeline for my sales organization,’” she said.

As the organization began to understand the impact and potential of this work, it leaned in, so to speak. Unum teamed up with Workday and enlisted its skills cloud to organize and structure all of the operation’s skills by role.

“We realized we needed a mechanism with which we could actually do skill collection. That was the first step,” she said.

It was a big endeavor, but Unum was aided by Workday in designing a process that was “automated, but it walks the employee through exactly how to input their skills” in order to bring some 11,000 Unum employees into the skills journey.

Each employee ID’d a set of technical and “essential skills” (how Unum refers to what many call “soft skills”). The process paid off: 90% of employees participated in the skill-collection endeavor.

Armed with a fuller picture of the skills involved in Unum’s work, the HR team was able to use skills to thread together different siloed HR tech systems, bolstering its career development and learning and development offerings for employees.

“Everyone has an individualized experience when they go into our internal career side to look at job opportunities,” she said. “Not only can they better see what they’re qualified for based on their skills, through that AI, they can also identify skills gaps.”

If an employee is interested in a role but perhaps doesn’t possess all the needed skills, the integrated LMS can automatically “serve up learnings or courses that they take that will bridge those skills gaps.” It also offers employees more transparent insights into the hiring process, so they can better understand how the company selects talent.

“We tend to tell employees you need to be the CEO of your own career development. We can actually say that and mean it now, because we put the tools in their hands,” she said.

It’s not just a resource for employees—it can help managers identify the skills they need on their teams and consider different ways to acquire them, aside from hiring new talent.

Unravelling the old way of doing things has revealed some challenges. Like many orgs, Unum has a rigid jobs architecture that’s connected to salary banding, so the HR team is working on injecting some fluidity into that infrastructure to better align with this skills-based approach.

“That view then changes the job infrastructure,” she said. “Career architecture will be our next big shift, because ultimately, job descriptions, job titles, scope of responsibility, expectations for performance, all of those things need to evolve so that it really fits what we’re doing with skills.”

Pivoting to a skills-based talent strategy helped this insurer save jobs and connect siloed

Pivoting to a skills-based talent strategy helped this insurer save jobs and connect siloed HR processes

“We tend to tell employees you need to be the CEO of your own career development. We can actually say that and mean it now, because we put the tools in their hands.”

It’s pretty safe to say that corporate execs are bullish on AI, and if you’re reading this sentence, it means even the detail-oriented copy desk at Morning Brew sees the ones and zeros on the wall.

 found that enterprise organizations have invested between $30–40 billion in AI—though it would be irresponsible not to mention that the analysis also concluded that 95% of those investments, so far, have 

While AI is top of mind for many in the C-suite, HR pros are more hesitant to welcome the burgeoning technology, according to survey research from employee experience platform Culture Amp.

Culture Amp’s North American people science director, Robert Melloy, told HR Brew that the platform’s found HR pros are more leery of the promise of AI for their function and for employees.

“The primary benefits of AI are to increase your scale, your scope, and your learning,” said Melloy, who also teaches business and organizational psychology. “Increase the amount of things that you’re able to do…increase the types of things that you’re able to do, and then…being able to get feedback faster, to become better over time.”

Execs are frothing at the mouth at the thought of AI because they see the tool as a cash multiplier, he said.

“The whole promise of AI in increasing scale, scope, and learning is that it affords us efficiency gains that allow us to be more productive and therefore potentially more profitable, because we’re doing more with less,” he said. “If we can spend less but do more, profits should increase, so AI is like a beacon of hope in a path toward a higher profit.”

But Melloy said that Culture Amp researchers found that HR pros don’t feel like AI is going to prop up the HR function in organizations.

“They actually feel like AI is going to benefit the company and the company’s bottom line more than, specifically, it will benefit people,” he said. “That’s not to say that, if it benefits people, [thus] it benefits the company; they chose ‘the company’ instead of choosing any individual person-related option.”

Perhaps AI is helping them tackle tasks and duties in ways that save them minutes, instead of being the boon to productivity they were promised and keep hearing about. Melloy told HR Brew that the top AI use cases were mostly administrative: drafting emails or communications, brainstorming ideas, or taking and summarizing meeting notes.

“What you’re seeing is like a lot of administrative use, which is not surprising, because maybe that’s the first thought of how to use AI,” Melloy said. “It’s low hanging fruit.”

People work, he argues, would be more impactful and better deliver on AI’s promise, but those AI use cases are ones that HR leaders haven’t yet waded into with gusto, like automating HR operations, upskilling, and analysing people data and HR metrics.

“All of the kinds of things that I would try to argue are the reasons HR should use AI in order to get the benefits of AI for HR,” Melloy said. “Then it’s not surprising why HR folks don’t think that AI has this promise to elevate the value of HR in organizations, because they’re not using AI in the ways that I’m trying to argue they should use it in order to increase the value of HR.”

That tide should change as more people become proficient with AI, Melloy said, but right now many HR pros are missing the potential dramatic gains available to them.

“Most people in HR were not interested to be owning this—the AI strategy—within their own organization,” Melloy said, but added that HR pros “are best positioned to be shepherds of this technology in your organization and creating the strategy for how it’s used among your people, because you’re the people people.”

Image of a person's head covered by an AI-labeled dark cloud.

Many HR pros see the value of AI for business, but fewer see its impact on HR and people

“You are best positioned to be shepherds of this technology in your organization and creating the strategy for how it’s used among your people, because you’re the people people.”