Conversations in HR circles today rarely take place without a mention of AI. Attendees at last month’s HR Tech saw it for themselves, with AI dominating the discussion, from keynote sessions to the innovation on the expo floor. The big question was, how can people leaders integrate AI in HR in a way that takes advantage of the value of the technology without sacrificing the value that traditional human-led HR has brought to organizations?

That is a question the HR teams at IBM wrestled with, says CHRO Nickle LaMoreaux, the recently announced 2024 HR Executive of the Year.

Since taking on HR leadership at Big Blue in 2020, LaMoreaux has made AI integration in HR a cornerstone of her people strategy. It’s work that competition judge Peter Fasolo, CHRO of Johnson & Johnson, says has made LaMoreaux a “role model”—both for the organization and an HR profession that AI is quickly reshaping.

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Tackling 3 AI in HR misconceptions

IBM’s success with AI in HR, LaMoreaux recently told HR Executive, has highlighted that popular notions about the tech may not be as true as some people leaders believe. Here’s how IBM’s AI strategy turned three AI myths on their head:

1. Integration is expensive.

Like any transformation, the potential price tag related to integrating AI in HR is likely a point of friction stopping some projects from moving forward. However, LaMoreaux found that AI rollouts don’t need to be costly.

Instead, introducing one AI capability at a time—a benefits chatbot or a gen AI-driven verification letter process, for instance—allows HR teams to adopt the tech more quickly and cost-efficiently than in massive tech transformations of years past. This “bite-sized” approach, LaMoreaux says, also allows for frequent iteration and continuous learning that can improve future AI integrations in HR.

Introducing AI in a “building block” style allowed nearly all of the work to be self-funded by HR—with a 40% reduction in the function’s operating budget in the last four years.

2. Employees are resistant to AI.

During HR Tech, a number of speakers explored one of the biggest obstacles to successful AI integration: adoption, particularly as research points to employee fears about AI-driven job losses and persistent change fatigue. “[Tech transformation is] still going to come down to what we do and how we do it,” Oracle’s Chris Havrilla said at the conference.

At IBM, LaMoreaux confronted this potential obstacle by leaning into transparency and letting HR employees be in the driver’s seat for the best ways to integrate AI in HR—with surprising enthusiasm from the workforce. HR team members now pitch use cases through a specific intake channel to be evaluated by a transformation team.

“A lot of the interventions—a lot of where we are infusing AI—are not ideas that come out of my office anymore,” she said. “They are at the ground level. Those who know the work best are in control of transforming it.”

3. AI is taking the “human” out of HR’s work.

Employee involvement in defining how HR utilizes AI is also helping IBM avoid another common fear about the tech—that it could make the delivery of HR services too transactional.

Instead, IBM found, LaMoreaux says, HR professionals are now able to do “higher-value work.”

For instance, IBM shifted its HR operating model, directing managers away from dedicated HR business partners and to the HR digital assistant, AskHR. Before the tool rolled out, HR professionals fielded more than 1.5 million employee questions in one year. Last year, employees completed 765,000 transactions through the tech, with just 6% of more advanced issues being passed along to human HR representatives.

With the more “rote, mundane pieces of the work” taken off the plates of HR, people professionals have been able to focus more on the innately human aspects of the profession—driving HR engagement to an “all-time high”—which LaMoreaux calls “a great, maybe unintended, consequence” of the AI in HR strategy.