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AI in HR: Top use cases and benefits

AI in HR is helping make employee service more efficient and personalised throughout the entire employee lifecycle. Discover more in this full guide.

Last updated October 21, 2024

A support agent interacts with a large keyboard, showing the benefits of AI in HR.

What is AI in HR?

AI in HR is the application of artificial intelligence technologies to streamline and enhance human resources functions. By leveraging machine learning (ML), natural language processing (NLP), and other AI tools, HR departments can automate repetitive tasks and gain valuable insights into their workforce. This enables them to make data-driven decisions, improve efficiency, and offer more engaging employee service.

For years, HR teams have struggled to streamline workflows, ensure employees have access to critical information, and deliver fast and personalised employee service. Now, with advanced AI at the ready, these challenges are all solvable. And according to the Zendesk EX Trends Report 2024, 81 per cent of HR and IT leaders agree that AI enables employees to work more efficiently and effectively.

In this article, we’ll explore the top use cases, benefits, and challenges for AI in HR, as well as how it can help improve the overall employee experience.

More in this guide:

Top use cases of artificial intelligence in human resources

HR teams are talent cultivators, organisational culture architects, and strategic partners for business leaders and decision-makers. AI in the workplace acts as HR’s own strategic partner to ramp up efficiency and deliver more intelligent, empathetic employee service. These are the six top use cases for AI in HR.

1. Improving the onboarding experience

Onboarding can be a hectic time for new hires and hiring teams—unless they use AI to improve the process. AI makes employee onboarding more efficient with automations that take over administrative tasks and help new employees find the relevant information they need to be successful. For example, an AI-powered digital agent can direct new hires to key resources and relevant training materials and answer common questions 24/7. This means your new hires are ready to get started faster and feel more supported throughout the hiring process.

2. Streamlining offboarding processes

When handling employee offboarding, HR teams have many boxes to tick to ensure compliance, confidentiality, and civility. AI can ensure this process is streamlined and consistent so nothing gets overlooked.

A chart shows the benefits of using AI to streamline the onboarding and offboarding processes.

HR teams can leverage AI to accelerate responses to offboarding tickets and streamline the entire process. For example, an AI agent can schedule exit interviews, provide 24/7 answers to employee questions, and effortlessly escalate issues between HR and IT as needed to facilitate smoother employee turnover.

3. Standardising management of benefits, leave, and life events

Juggling several requests is fundamental to effective human resource management. AI standardises the management of these requests by automating benefits enrolment, eligibility checks, and benefit changes.

AI can help HR representatives respond to these more critical requests, such as life event leaves, in a more personalised manner. This is crucial when employees need to leave for sensitive and unpredictable circumstances. With AI-powered copilots, HR reps can better anticipate employee needs with insights into their emotions before they submit a request. Then, AI can customise suggested responses unique to that employee’s situation.

4. Providing fast and personalised employee service

With AI for employee experience, employee service is faster, more personalised, and more effective than ever. Intelligent bots, like AI agents, use conversational AI to give real-time assistance when employees have questions about internal resources or processes.

AI can also assist HR reps in real time as they respond to requests. For example, AI copilots can suggest resolutions, while generative AI tools can surface macros. These suggestions are tailored for the employee so that communications are unique and engaging, not generalised and unhelpful.

5. Enhancing self-service offerings

In this hybrid work world, it’s not uncommon to have employees spread across time zones, countries, and even continents. Employee self-service is the best way to overcome this challenge. AI enables 24/7 HR support so anyone can find help whenever needed, even if your HR team is in a single time zone. An AI-powered knowledge base makes information easy to access for employees and simplifies knowledge management for HR professionals.

With Content Cues, AI can identify gaps in a knowledge base and suggest new article topics, keeping the resource bank fresh. AI can even help replenish the knowledge base by creating entire articles out of a few bullet points so HR teams can focus more on people, not publishing content.

6. Boosting operational efficiency

In addition to its role in helping employees, AI-powered employee service leads to better operational efficiency. It can reduce operational costs with self-service tools like AI knowledge bases and AI agents that answer FAQs. These, in turn, lower ticket volume—which gives HR reps time back for more strategic activities. And it even takes on repetitive manual work like ticket tagging and routing. Plus, it can suggest what to automate to help continuously improve efficiency.

AI quality assurance (QA) tools can also review employee support tickets and scan for potential issues or pain points. Those might indicate an operational bottleneck slowing down employees, allowing HR to step in and optimise the process. Then, QA can provide HR teams with feedback on how to improve employee service.

5 benefits of AI in HR

Examples of AI in HR exist in nearly every facet of day-to-day work. It’s a tool to increase productivity, decision-making, and employee satisfaction, all while keeping costs from ballooning.

79 per cent of IT and HR leaders say AI helps employee work quality, according to the Zendesk EX Trends Report.

Leadership agrees, too. According to our EX trends report, 79 percent of HR and IT leaders agree that AI enhances work quality. Here are the top ways AI enhances HR.

Boosts efficiency and productivity

HR tasks can be tedious and time-consuming unless you utilise AI to speed things up. AI can automate recruiting, onboarding, operations, and more tasks, giving HR professionals time to invest in tasks that require a human touch. AI can also help spot inefficiencies in HR processes to help organisations make changes to improve productivity.

Make data-driven decisions

AI allows organisations to instantly analyse vast amounts of data for insights into employee performance, satisfaction, and turnover. When faced with frequent employee inquiries, AI can suggest the requests best suited for automation. This gives your HR team time back for more meaningful work. Similarly, AI-driven quality assurance (QA) tools monitor employee sentiment and flag when your HR support team is missing the mark.

Enhances employee satisfaction

It should come as no surprise that employee satisfaction goes up when employees receive better support. AI steps in to help HR teams give fast and hyper-personalised support, boosting satisfaction. For example, it can give HR reps key insights into employee sentiment so they can tailor their resolutions accordingly. Plus, AI can help HR teams identify and address employee concerns before they escalate into larger problems by flagging support tickets with negative sentiment, fostering a more supportive work environment.

Reduces internal support costs

We already mentioned how AI-driven automation can speed up operations, which also means it saves businesses money on internal support. AI gives HR the capacity to handle high numbers of simultaneous inbound requests, which means you can easily scale operations without bringing on additional support.

Beats competition through continuous improvement

One of the greatest benefits of AI is that it helps your HR team continuously improve employee service. For example, AI quality assurance (QA) tools like Zendesk can review 100 per cent of employee interactions to monitor for problems and help your team correct them.

AI can also help you improve employee experience management by suggesting support topics to automate for better efficiency.

Challenges of AI in HR

Let’s break down the common pitfalls of using AI in HR and how to easily overcome them.

  • Privacy and security: HR handles sensitive employee data, such as names, Social Security numbers, performance reviews, and more. AI security must be airtight to protect this information from data breaches or compliance violations.
  • Integration with existing systems: The tools your HR team uses might vary based on the task they’re working on, and AI needs to integrate seamlessly with all of those tools. This fosters a fluid working environment and speeds up issue resolution.
  • Ease of use and lengthy training timelines: Most HR team members don’t have technical expertise, and that’s perfectly fine. The solution is to seek out tools that are quick to set up and easy to use, so no technical knowledge is needed.
  • Cost and budget constraints: New tools cost money, and it’s understandable for some businesses to be hesitant about adopting them. However, the right AI tools can actually help save money by enabling businesses to scale without overspending on internal support.

More than one-third of HR and IT leaders are prioritising cost-effective, efficient employee service solutions, according to the Zendesk EX Trends Report.

These challenges aren’t a dead-end—you can avoid them by choosing the right AI partner to guide you and with careful and thoughtful implementation.

How to get started using generative AI in HR operations

Generative AI uses existing company knowledge and resources to generate new content, responses, and more. It helps teams update resource banks faster and ensure self-service content is fresh so employees always have access to current information. To implement a generative AI tool, adhering to a strategic approach is essential.

  • Set the metrics that you want to improve: Whether you’re looking to reduce time-to-hire, increase employee satisfaction, improve retention rates, or even all three, define your goals so you can tailor the tool accordingly.
  • Pick tools that level up productivity quickly: Prioritise a tool that can automate time-consuming tasks and give you tangible benefits. It should help your existing HR team deliver faster, higher-quality support to more employees. Opt for tools that are easy to implement without technical resources for a faster time to value.
  • Define realistic expectations with leadership: Keep company leadership updated on the roadmap for the AI tool. Loop them in on changes so everyone has a complete understanding of what to expect.
  • Keep things transparent with your HR team: The people who will use the tool need to have a seat at the table when it comes to planning and implementing it. HR can help you identify the most critical use cases so you don’t miss any opportunities to improve and your team feels involved in the process—if your HR team isn’t using your AI-driven HR tools, your strategy won’t have an impact. Get their point of view and listen to their feedback about the AI they’re using.
  • Offer training for AI tools: Training ensures that you maximise the benefits of AI and avoid confusion. This can be in the form of workshops, one-on-one meetings, or stocking your knowledge base with tutorials in case someone needs a refresher. And by picking tools for your HR team that are easy to use, you’ll minimise training time down the road.

What does the future hold for AI and automation in HR?

It’s not a stretch to say that the future is now—AI can already handle complex employee enquiries and provide hyper-personalised service. However, as AI continuously evolves, you can anticipate increasingly sophisticated applications in HR.

For example, all employee service interactions will likely soon involve AI in some form, meaning faster support and more empowered HR reps. This leads to confident, next-level support while giving HR teams even more time to devote to other critical business-driving initiatives.

Frequently asked questions

Learn how AI can supercharge your HR support

HR teams need the right tools to help streamline their workload and give them insights to provide more effective employee service. AI in HR empowers internal support teams to deliver more personalised service at scale and streamline operational processes.

An AI-powered employee service solution that’s ready out-of-the-box, like Zendesk, means that HR teams of any size can implement it without needing costly developer teams. Zendesk provides you with leading artificial intelligence to enhance your internal support operations, saving you time and money and helping you expand.