HR Labs Season 4: Reexamining the role of HR in the age of AI

AI is all around us.

Still, there’s untapped potential in how organizations can leverage the technology, which means HR leaders have the opportunity to see even more of a benefit.

In episode 5 of HR Labs, Chief Research Officer, Author and Podcast Host Ben Eubanks joins host Summer Salomonsen to help us unpack opportunities for AI to support HR functions now and in the future.

Together, they explore AI’s role in not only taking on rote and repetitive tasks but also helping HR teams become better “people” people by giving us the ability to ask the right questions and execute better judgments.

Listen to episode 5 on Apple or Spotify (or anywhere fine podcasts are given away for free)

Eubanks begins by exploring the question, “If I ask someone, 'Hey, do you need some AI?' Maybe, maybe not. 'Do you need to do a better job of selecting the right candidates for your roles? Do you need to do a better job of making sure that the compensation you're doing is fair and equitable across the organization? Do a better job of predicting which people are likely to leave your organization, so you can not lose them in the first place?' All those are problems that we need to solve, and the tools can help us to do that better.”

How AI works at work

Eubanks explains, “So the most common way [AI works] is around the prediction of what content someone might be interested in, very similar to the example I gave a minute ago with the streaming video. So we look at the kind of role you're in. We look at what people similar to you are consuming and what they also rate highly. We look at all these kind of factors like that and start making predictions for you about what your next thing needs to be that you are going to learn. What's really interesting though is, it's not just those signals that the system is gathering about you but also overt things you might be telling it, very discrete signals you're sharing.”

How AI empowers managers to be better "people" people

“The tools can help them by helping them understand a track to run off from a career mobility standpoint, and then you as a manager get to have really informed conversations with them about where they want to go and what they want to do, instead of being a completely blank slate and try to figure out how to start and how to drive them in that direction,” said Eubanks.

There are so many more enlightening insights in this episode!

Subscribe to HR Labs wherever you get your podcasts for all the latest episodes and to listen to past seasons. If you liked the show, go ahead and leave us a rating and review. Thanks for listening.

HR Labs Season 4 episodes