AI in HR Tech: A New Era in Human Resources Technology

The next generation of HR software is here, powered by artificial intelligence (AI). Now, your business can harness the transformative power of AI in HR tech.

Small and midsize businesses (SMBs) are no strangers to technology: according to the 2019 Top Technology Trends survey by the software review company Capterra, 80 percent of U.S. small businesses use human resources (HR) software or plan to within the next two years. The meteoric rise of remote and hybrid work has accelerated business adoption of HR technology, including intelligent digital assistants designed to make work easier and self-service platforms that allow employees to access HR-related information, wherever and whenever they need it. These tools are smarter and faster than ever before, brimming with new capabilities made possible by generative artificial intelligence (GenAI). HR technology use cases for small businesses include managing, streamlining, and improving payroll, benefits, recruitment, onboarding, training and development, company communication, and employee engagement. When it comes to embracing AI, specifically, Megg Withinton, vice president of enterprise analytics at Insperity, a leading provider of scalable HR solutions, finds that SMBs tend to reside on one of two ends of the spectrum: they are either all-in on AI, or they are waiting, watching, and slowly starting their experimentation. No matter where your business falls on the continuum, deepening your understanding of the HR tech market—a market expected to reach $35 billion globally by 2028, according to Fortune Business Insights—will help you evaluate potential solution providers. Furthermore, understanding best practices for choosing and deploying the right HR software, including keeping the employee experience at the center of decision-making and never losing sight of the value of human connection, will help you get the most value possible from your technology investment.

Steamlining HR tasks

SMBs use HR technology to simplify and automate HR-related tasks for both HR practitioners and employees. Withinton and her team at Insperity have observed that SMBs mainly use AI-enabled HR technology across two areas: workflow management and insights. “There’s an enormous amount of administrative work that goes into managing HR. Using AI can help with both efficiency and accuracy,” she says. “The second piece is insights—being able to mine data. HR is a data-intensive function, and being able to leverage AI to ingest that data and serve up insights to the HR practitioner, or even employees, is incredibly valuable.” HR and employee data has near limitless use cases, from helping managers design optimal teams, to empowering employees to better manage their time. Andrew Chimka, director of product at LinkedIn, notes that HR professionals at SMBs have “an incredible opportunity to use AI to take on some of the heavy lifting so that they can focus on growing their business.” He adds that the skills required to excel in an HR role continue to grow more complex. “This complexity is further exacerbated by the fact that at most SMBs, the HR roles are sometimes done by the SMB owners or internal business leaders themselves.” Owners and business leaders are almost certainly juggling critical responsibilities, beyond HR, making the time-saving capabilities of HR tech even more important. “HR technology is automating administrative, transactional tasks— thereby removing the drudgery of work and simultaneously freeing people up to do what only humans can do,” says Marcus Mossberger, future of work strategist at Infor, a provider