With AI feeling as though it arrived in the workplace overnight, opinions are still mixed— from visions of HAL to your next best pal—with fears ranging from obsolescence to legal and privacy concerns and its genuine effectiveness. According to recent studies, nowhere are those concerns more prevalent in the organizational picture than in the HR function—and for admittedly good reasons. We sit down with Roald Harvey, MBA, CHRL, Senior Director of People with Athennian, to learn more about the potential and perils of AI, as well as its ability to empower not just HR, but the people power in any business.

Key Takeaways:

• AI is a powerful tool for your HR toolkit— empowering you to achieve greater efficiency and maximize your impact.
• Leveraging the advantages of AI allows HR to refocus their energies away from antiquated systems and time-consuming tasks, while providing creative input and consistency for those who iterate.
• With the privacy and content concerns around AI being valid, due diligence and legal counsel are key ingredients for realizing its potential and impact.

And while the road to getting there will inevitably be plagued by pitfalls for the unwary or uncaring, Harvey is already convinced of AI’s ability to elevate the HR profession, based least in part to his own working experience with Athennian.

“We're in a very interesting time with AI and right now it is just about understanding how to unlock its potential to do your job better. In terms of how it's being used in HR, you're already seeing it in lots of places. You're seeing it in recruitment, talent acquisition and employee engagement. In HR analytics, there are tools that can screen resumes and conduct initial candidate assessments,” said Harvey. “At Athennian, we're leveraging AI to help businesses streamline and centralize data for more efficient entity management, eliminating countless hours of manual data entry So there's tons of application that we're seeing both inside HR and across the business.”

AI at Work at Athennian

Harvey has seen the benefits of AI at Athennian run the gamut from the operations to administration, but uniformly defined by genuine impact.

“When I think about the advantages of generative AI, especially in HR, it comes down to productivity, efficiency and time savings,” said Harvey. “There's a significant portion of non-sensitive tasks which traditionally required a lot of time to develop, that simply can be done in minutes now.”

“There are lots of things that you can do with AI. On my own team, we developed like a process document for every HR process that exists, and you can run all your processes through a generative AI model to ensure clarity of instructions,” said Harvey, while pointing to the benefits of such a knowledge bank. “I remember the days of having old job descriptions saved on shared drives just in case you may need them later, but you really don't need to anymore.”

Similar usage, Harvey points out, can be applied to everything from creating and communicating people manager tips and tricks to benefit offerings across a multi-national platform—to say nothing of more savvy recruiting and employee engagement.

“You can also use it to develop agendas or content of any kind,” said Harvey. “I strongly encourage people to use the dictate function on their computers and just kind of brain dump what you want. Then, use ChatGPT to quickly generate an agenda for you. It's an efficient way to conduct effective one-on-ones and create any type of content you need, all while minimizing the time spent on administrative tasks.”

Seeking Proof in 60 Seconds?

From streaming communications to ensuring consistency of tone across platforms to iterating on the fly for tone and clarity, Harvey has on more than one occasion transformed a morning of work into slightly over a minute—and has a head-spinning experiment to illustrate.

“One fun example is to ask AI to create a job description for whatever you need, then either use a link from your website or copy in some basic information. Now, ask it to update this job description for your company. Then, go back to your company web page, copy and paste the values page and ask it to update the job description to now include the values—and make sure it falls with the same sort of tone,” said Harvey. “Then tell it that it’s boring and to update the language so it’s in a more engaging and exciting tone so people are going to feel more excited and fulfilled about joining this company. Now, you have a pretty solid job description.”

It has also taken less than 60 seconds, Harvey notes.

Try Asking AI WIIFM

For those still on the fence as where AI might serve them best, Harvey encourages a simple exercise passed on to him originally by a past co-worker and EVP of generative AI at Klick Health, Simon Smith.

“I don't know anybody else who's more on top of how quickly things are evolving and he gave me really good advice for discovering the impact of AI,” said Harvey. “Take your job description, put it into chatGPT, and tell it to list out 40 to 50 typical responsibilities of this job description. Then, ask it to stack and rank them from the most replaceable to the least replaceable  by AI— and that's where you're going to add your value.”

As for the those responsibilities deemed most replaceable, Harvey notes these are inevitably areas where AI process improvements and automations can yield time savings and renewed focus alike.

Needless to say, all of the above sounds idyllic for HR, but carries a heavy caveat of due diligence and vigilance alike.

Iteration and Oversight Key to Success

“In general, when people ask for advice on this kind of stuff—diving into chat GPT or Claude or Gemini—I always say to make sure that you state your purpose very specifically. Make sure that you're being very clear about what exactly you want to happen. Be specific. Provide your details because it doesn't know everything. The more that you provide it, the better the result,” said Harvey, though he discourages taking any first output at face value.  “The most important is to be iterative. I think the biggest part when I see people fail to get traction on AI is that they'll ask for a job description and just copy it.”

Instead, Harvey encourages putting AI through its paces for calibre results.

“AI is a supportive tool, but there absolutely needs to be oversight as to what you're putting forward. So when I talk about AI generated communications, there's always a human reviewer who's going to read through them to make sure that these things are on point, share the right information and land the right way,” said Harvey. “There will be times when it will make a mistake or say something it shouldn't, but that is where, you, the human professional are key. AI is not there to do your job for you. It’s a tool that will make you more effective in your role, but you still have the absolute responsibility of making sure the output is going to land.”

As mentioned, vigilance is key, but curiosity and command are quintessential for quality collaboration with AI.

“You should be asking it more questions, telling it that it's not doing a good job and steering it in the direction you want,” said Harvey. “From job descriptions to template creations, there are some things that are really easy to implement that can bring HR some quick wins, which is great, but then allows you to start building more complex things like career paths or comprehensive talent acquisition plans.”

Five Caveats for Activating AI Potential

As for the caveats and concerns held by HR and others, Harvey lays out the primary pitfalls to avoid:

1. Make Privacy Paramount: Data privacy is the number one concern staring everyone in the face. If your company isn't using an enterprise grade AI platform, be very cautious about putting anything sensitive into it, because it then becomes part of the AI training model. So make sure to use placeholders for sensitive data or don't use it at all for certain activities. Just be very mindful of what you're being putting in and be respectful of your company's confidentiality. Exercise legal caution.
2. Do Your Due Diligence: In terms of AI, it's kind of the wild west right now for a lot of us. There are so many companies popping up that are talking about AI this and AI that. When you're engaging with these new partners, make sure that there's somebody in your company that is doing their due diligence to make sure they understand where your data is going, how it's being used, where it's being stored and what protections are being put in place to secure it. Don’t just put the things into this big black box and just hope that everything works out okay, because we've seen what can happen.
3. Keep Legal in the Loop: You can generate some pretty great, first draft knowledge when you're trying to create a clause or a document for an employment agreement or something of the sort. That said, my giant asterisk is always to have your legal counsel review it—bring it back to the human side. Don't trust that ChatGPT or Gemini is going to be able to make sure your document is  reasonable or even legal because there's so much context for geographical location, DEI sensitivities and the ever changing nature of workforce and employment law. 
4. Avoid Bias with Human Touch: HR needs to remain mindful about the biases that can show up in algorithms and affect the kind of content that you could create. It just helps when somebody is there to take a step back and look at it and see if this is actually at the right tone or sending the right message to the organization or on behalf of it.  As HR professionals, you bring a lot of contextual awareness to the work space—empathy and experience—and those are not easy things for an AI learning language model to comprehend.
5. Up Your Change Management Game:  We’re moving so fast that there needs to be a heavy amount of thought around change management. Processes and jobs are going to change so quickly that we need to be asking, ‘How are we going to help get people from point A to point B?’  This is what the new world is going to look like and demand. As human resources leaders, it's essential to stay ahead of how roles are changing and proactively ensure individuals are acquiring the skills that continue to add value in an increasingly automated and AI-driven world. Embrace AI to further develop career pathing and learning plans, enabling individuals to grow and thrive in these new areas.

As all of the above should indicate, AI is a powerful tool that will help unlock productivity and enable you to achieve more with less, Harvey emphasizes. While it will undoubtedly bring changes in the years to come, Harvey sees HR at the forefront of harnessing AI's potential to enhance both business outcomes and employee growth.

“I think that there’s something interesting here to be said about the future of HR when we start to explore how this role, function or department can help accelerate its people and equip them with AI and tools and resources to make them even more effective within their roles,” said Harvey.

“Using AI to build that kind of synergy is something I find incredibly interesting and think is going to be increasingly popular for heads of HR looking at their internal terms and finding entirely new ways of amping up their productivity to make them more successful within their roles,” said Harvey. “We can think of it in terms of HR tapping the full spectrum of ‘cognitive resources’ available and I believe it's going to be incredibly exciting.  That is what’s coming, but a big part comes down to investment.”

Nonetheless, it is a future for HR that Harvey sees limited only by current perceptions—and those pesky license fees.