The key to modern business success is reliable data. Data about your people and how they impact your organization is, perhaps, the most important data of all when it comes to making critical business decisions amid today’s work challenges. Now, a historic 75% of business leaders are navigating a talent shortage (double from one decade ago) while facing a significant drop in productivity growth rates. This difficult landscape requires reliable people data insights, in real-time, to stay on course.

While leaders are looking at the impact of emerging solutions like AI to scale data across all departments, it seems obvious that a key area of focus should be HR and people data. In a poll we recently conducted of 750 people managers globally, we found that nearly half (47%) say their decision-making process is still greatly influenced by intuitive insights and practical experience, not hard facts. That means we’re leaving managers without real-time insights to make data-informed decisions, optimize talent management and respond quickly to organizational needs that have a big impact on business outcomes.

But they need that data in a format that makes it easy. Enter generative AI. The ability to ask questions, in natural language, of the proprietary people data any organization owns provides a degree of empowerment that hasn’t existed previously. And employees are ready for it—87% are excited about the potential of generative AI tools to improve their role as people managers, according to Visier’s research.

Of course, such golden insights don’t come without challenges. People data is extremely sensitive. Organizations need to ensure it remains secure and private, yet still provides the information managers and HR need to be effective. Barriers specific to privacy, ethics, and security are paramount. Securing robust data within a reliable framework, queried by generative AI, is the only way to democratize and scale these insights safely while unveiling the truth about every employee.

So, knowing HR and generative AI are primed to make a valuable connection, what’s the holdup?

5 ways generative AI is ready to transform HR processes

To get the best out of your people and processes, leaders must be able to first understand the impact of their people on the business. The way we, as humans, typically learn is by asking questions, digging deeper into data by expanding on our initial query. Generative AI provides the tools to do just that, in natural language, of the people data already aggregated. That data, when put in the hands of both HR and the rest of the organization, offers powerful insights and capabilities that revolutionize HR practices—from improving productivity levels and elevating manager effectiveness to ensuring more confident decision-making and planning.

Here are five ways generative AI can help transform your HR function if you let it:

Drive improved performance management

Lean on generative AI tools to boost productivity — and to ensure employee potential never goes untapped. By analyzing the connection between employee activities and outcomes, you can pinpoint specific areas for workflow and process improvements and enable employees to concentrate on activities that stand to add the most value.

Similarly, generative AI can help identify and bridge skills gaps by comparing workforce competencies with project outcomes, offering targeted recommendations for improvements. This level of data-driven analysis encourages a continuously evolving and competitive workforce.

Moreover, generative AI enables your organization to connect employee performance metrics with key business outcomes such as revenue growth, customer satisfaction and market expansion. This integration supports informed strategic workforce planning and ensures that employee contributions are aligned with organizational goals.

Boost manager effectiveness

Ninety-six percent of people managers agree that improved access to people data would help them make people-related decisions with more confidence. Putting the right insights into the right hands at the right time is critical, especially considering the multitude of micro decisions made about people that have the potential to have a big impact on business goals.

Rather than waiting on your data team to compile and analyze reports, with generative AI, you can immediately harness data and understand workforce dynamics, trends and potential issues.

With easy access to actionable insights gained from generative AI, managers can gain deeper insights into their team’s performance, even visualizing its impact on the organization given different “what if” scenarios. Managers can then facilitate individual and targeted skills development and career progression that serves both the team and the business.

Amplify recruitment and talent acquisition strategies

Worker scarcity is a real challenge, worse in some industries than others but impacting everyone. Recruiting new talent takes time—a resource many organizations can’t afford to waste. Thankfully, generative AI is poised to optimize talent acquisition, streamlining the resume screening process to efficiently identify top candidates and finding key skills and qualifications that match specific job requirements to ensure a faster and more objective screening process.

Position HR as a strategic partner

By providing more immediate access to business-critical insights, generative AI shifts the availability of crucial data from days or weeks to mere seconds—driving more informed, fact-based decisions across the organization. Bringing AI to managers and to people data positions HR as a strategic partner in accelerating AI and creating increased productivity.

Generative AI can also leverage all the collective knowledge of recruiting practices to ensure that every recruiter can operate as efficiently as possible and maximize their impact.

Streamline user experience

With gen AI for HR, you don’t have to be a data scientist to extract meaningful insights about your workforce. If you have good people data, generative AI can help you pose the right questions of that data.

Intuitive, user-friendly interfaces allow even the most non-technical staffers to ask questions as they would in a conversation. In natural language, your managers can ask and find answers to questions like, “What are the current trends in employee turnover?” or “Which skills are most needed for upcoming projects?” removing the need to learn complex query languages, navigate complex databases or complete extensive training to surface the right information.

By providing generative AI capabilities within an easy-to-use, question-based interface, you can promote broader adoption and empower decision-making at every level. This degree of data democratization enhances agility and responsiveness across your entire organization, benefiting all employees.

Embrace generative AI to support HR, just as HR supports everyone else

Workforce data holds immense potential, but HR will never fully harness its value without the right tools. By aggregating your people data and leveraging generative AI capabilities to deliver that data in a secure and scalable way, you can overcome the limitations of traditional data analysis processes and quickly access the insights and strategies required to drive informed decisions and increased productivity.

That’s why leaders can’t overlook HR as a department ready for the type of transformation generative AI is poised to facilitate. If anything, given how central HR functions are to the rest of the organization’s success, it’s the best place to start.