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HR Brew

Generative AI

Adam DeRose

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It’s pretty safe to say that corporate execs are bullish on AI, and if you’re reading this sentence, it means even the detail-oriented copy desk at Morning Brew sees the ones and zeros on the wall.

 found that enterprise organizations have invested between $30–40 billion in AI—though it would be irresponsible not to mention that the analysis also concluded that 95% of those investments, so far, have 

While AI is top of mind for many in the C-suite, HR pros are more hesitant to welcome the burgeoning technology, according to survey research from employee experience platform Culture Amp.

Culture Amp’s North American people science director, Robert Melloy, told HR Brew that the platform’s found HR pros are more leery of the promise of AI for their function and for employees.

“The primary benefits of AI are to increase your scale, your scope, and your learning,” said Melloy, who also teaches business and organizational psychology. “Increase the amount of things that you’re able to do…increase the types of things that you’re able to do, and then…being able to get feedback faster, to become better over time.”

Execs are frothing at the mouth at the thought of AI because they see the tool as a cash multiplier, he said.

“The whole promise of AI in increasing scale, scope, and learning is that it affords us efficiency gains that allow us to be more productive and therefore potentially more profitable, because we’re doing more with less,” he said. “If we can spend less but do more, profits should increase, so AI is like a beacon of hope in a path toward a higher profit.”

But Melloy said that Culture Amp researchers found that HR pros don’t feel like AI is going to prop up the HR function in organizations.

“They actually feel like AI is going to benefit the company and the company’s bottom line more than, specifically, it will benefit people,” he said. “That’s not to say that, if it benefits people, [thus] it benefits the company; they chose ‘the company’ instead of choosing any individual person-related option.”

Perhaps AI is helping them tackle tasks and duties in ways that save them minutes, instead of being the boon to productivity they were promised and keep hearing about. Melloy told HR Brew that the top AI use cases were mostly administrative: drafting emails or communications, brainstorming ideas, or taking and summarizing meeting notes.

“What you’re seeing is like a lot of administrative use, which is not surprising, because maybe that’s the first thought of how to use AI,” Melloy said. “It’s low hanging fruit.”

People work, he argues, would be more impactful and better deliver on AI’s promise, but those AI use cases are ones that HR leaders haven’t yet waded into with gusto, like automating HR operations, upskilling, and analysing people data and HR metrics.

“All of the kinds of things that I would try to argue are the reasons HR should use AI in order to get the benefits of AI for HR,” Melloy said. “Then it’s not surprising why HR folks don’t think that AI has this promise to elevate the value of HR in organizations, because they’re not using AI in the ways that I’m trying to argue they should use it in order to increase the value of HR.”

That tide should change as more people become proficient with AI, Melloy said, but right now many HR pros are missing the potential dramatic gains available to them.

“Most people in HR were not interested to be owning this—the AI strategy—within their own organization,” Melloy said, but added that HR pros “are best positioned to be shepherds of this technology in your organization and creating the strategy for how it’s used among your people, because you’re the people people.”

Image of a person's head covered by an AI-labeled dark cloud.

Many HR pros see the value of AI for business, but fewer see its impact on HR and people

“You are best positioned to be shepherds of this technology in your organization and creating the strategy for how it’s used among your people, because you’re the people people.”

An illustration of a photo of HR Brew reporter Paige McGlauflin.

Paige McGlauflin

 on AI technology, many companies aren’t having much luck getting their workforce to 

After discovering that its own employees were timid about using AI in the workplace, enterprise software giant Workday spearheaded a program to encourage adoption. Ashley Goldsmith, Workday’s chief people officer, recently spoke with HR Brew about that initiative, and how her own team is using AI.

Internal research revealed that Workday employees weren’t 

 because they weren’t clear on the appropriate use cases. So Workday launched a program called “Everyday AI,” through which it encouraged employees to use and experiment with AI, and learn how it’s already being used within the organization.

To start, Workday held a company-wide meeting in April that CEO Carl Eschenbach opened by discussing his own AI use. Then, Goldsmith said he gave the floor to employees, who shared how they use different AI tools. Workday intentionally focused the event on employee experiences, as they thought these would do more to engage and inspire than a more general training.

“With that, we saw this huge adoption and real enthusiasm,” Goldsmith told HR Brew. The company has also encouraged adoption in other ways, including leveraging a peer recognition tool for AI use, and providing managers with resources (such as prompt cards) to help them gamify AI use within their teams.

As of June, 79% of Workday employees were using the technology, 

exceeding the goal the company set for itself

 earlier this year. It aims to further increase adoption rates and mandated that every employee set a goal for AI use, whether that be doubling their usage or leveraging it to reduce hours spent on mundane tasks. Goldsmith hopes Workday’s recently announced AI tools and acquisitions will encourage more use as well.

“We want to take full advantage of and maximize all the efficiency and productivity and assistance that we can gain from within those tools,” she said.

Goldsmith’s team has adopted AI more quickly than the rest of the company, and has seen several successful use cases.

Workday’s recruiting agent, for example, has helped streamline the process of sourcing and selecting candidates. Recruiters saw a 12% decrease in their workloads after the agent was introduced, allowing them more time for critical tasks that were otherwise neglected, including post-interview debriefs.

“That 12% was really quickly redeployed into making sure we had these thoughtful, well-facilitated conversations,” Goldsmith said. “We’re hiring faster, we’re getting really good quality candidates. Everybody feels like it was a great use of their time to interview, because they were really heard and their thoughts were heard.”

The team has also used AI to analyze employee feedback gathered through Workday’s employee sentiment tool, Peakon. The technology analyzes thousands of comments and provides insights and trends, giving Goldsmith’s team actionable insights without having to read every individual piece of feedback. The result: initiatives like Workday’s 

“It’s truly game-changing in terms of how you constantly listen to employees,” Goldsmith said. “I think, in the world today, where we know trust is critical and changes at breakneck speed, it’s harder to continue to stay in touch with your employees. To build [and] keep trust at that speed, listening is so incredibly important.”

When spearheading workforce-wide initiatives related to L&D or AI transformation, HR leaders tend to neglect their own employees’ needs, according to Goldsmith. To ensure her team engages with AI, Goldsmith incorporated the technology into a 

style competition, during which HR staff present how they’re using AI for a chance to win $1,000. While the competition is unique to her team, it mirrors the broader push her team has spearheaded to encourage more AI use throughout the company.

“I think if we follow the advice we give others, it really does work,” she said.

A portrait of chief people officer at Workday, Ashley Goldsmith.

Workday’s chief people officer discusses the tech giant’s AI adoption push

After learning that employees were hesitant to use AI at work, Workday spearheaded an adoption campaign.

Workday’s chief people officer shares how the tech giant got 79% of its employees to use AI

Mikaela Cohen

Time to say “out with the old and in with the new,” not just to last season’s styles, but to your approach to people analytics, too.

People analytics are good for more than just “creating facts”—they can help inform strategies and drive innovation, according to Cole Napper, VP of research at labor market research firm Lightcast and author of 

People Analytics: Using Data-Driven HR and Gen AI as a Business Asset

“I’d say 80% to 90% of what is people analytics today is just creating facts. ‘How many people do we have? How many people left? How many people did we hire? What are the demographic characteristics?’ and not much beyond that,” Napper said. “We’ve invested in a space as an HR function to be more data-driven for 10, 15, 20 years, and they don’t have much to show for it.”

Napper chatted with HR Brew about how to get the most out of people analytics, especially in the age of AI.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

I really tried to focus on, “What are the challenges that I’ve had? What are the ways to do HR and people analytics, specifically in HR, effectively, and cutting through all the BS?” Because there’s a lot of talking points where I’ll hear, “People are your greatest asset,” and then companies don’t operate any differently…What does it really mean to treat people as an asset? What does it really mean to use AI effectively in 2025?...What is HR even going to look like in five or 10 years if AI truly proliferates the way we think?

What are examples of shortcomings with people analytics?

Let’s take the hardest one first, and that’s data-driven decision making. I think very few people are making data-driven decisions at all. Now, I think that there are data-informed decisions that get made…A lot of what has been called people analytics, up until this point, was actually what I call “creating a shared set of facts.” So analytics, in my opinion, is focused on the future, focused on diagnosis, focused on prediction, focus on prescription.

There’s a generational shifting of the guard in HR that’s going on right now…You have more of the folks who are digitally-native, and eventually going to be AI-native professionals, in the HR space that are eventually going to be holding chief people officer/CHRO roles, and that’s not really the case today, and it hasn’t really been the case, historically speaking…I think it’s time for fields like people analytics to step up to be the thing that’s driving the future…Being a thermostat, rather than a thermometer that just goes up and down with the temperature.

What else should HR pros know about people analytics in the future with AI?

There’s a whole section in the book I call, “Is people analytics a luxury? Is it just a phenomenon?” Like I chose some charts that show the relationship between the growth of people analytics and low interest rates…From roughly 2012-ish to roughly 2021-ish, where there was a period of functionally zero interest rates for corporate borrowing…What you see is the second interest rates started to go up, people analytics headcount started to go down, and so the question you have to ask yourself is: “Is this just the new designer purse for HR, that everybody wanted to do it because everybody else was doing it?”...If you only talk about it theoretically, you don’t put it into practice, what does that mean for an organization? What it means is it was a luxury item, and they were treating it as such. When times got tight, they were going to cut back.

People analytics needs to be focused on helping businesses understand their cost structure. If you go to any CEO right now, they’re trying to say, “How do we take costs out of the business? How do we be more efficient? How do we be more productive? How do we be more innovative?” And, people analytics historically has not focused much of their effort in that space, and so one of the ways that AI helps is, you can produce people analytics at a lower cost structure by having AI be that leap frog or be that force multiplier for a people analytics function. So, maybe historically, you needed 50 people and a $15 million budget to do people analytics effectively. Maybe now you could do it with AI technology and five people what 50 people used to do.

Two hands holding on opened book with text highlighted

An interview with Cole Napper, author of ‘People Analytics: Using Data-Driven HR and Gen AI as a Business Asset’

“I think it’s time for fields like people analytics to step up to be the thing that’s driving the future…Being a thermostat, rather than a thermometer that just goes up and down with the temperature.”

People analytics can be a powerful HR tool in the age of AI

Staffbase this week announced a move to transform the employee communications platform into one that leverages agentic AI to build on the concept of engagement to upend the employee experience, allowing employees and employers to communicate in new and more accessible ways.

David Maffei, SVP and GM at Staffbase, told HR Brew that the company’s new Employee AI foundation will help customers on the platform facilitate an enhanced way to deliver content with which employees can interact. How does a personalized weekly podcast sound?

“Communications, as a staple or a backbone, has been what Staffbase for 10 years has been built on, but just like everything else, there’s this evolution upon us in this business,” Maffei said. “There’s an evolution upon what’s happening in technology and what employees expect from communications.”

The company intranet, Maffei contends, is set to radically change its value to employees and businesses with faster resolutions for critical employment- and company-related questions and AI-powered tools that interact with the organization quickly through a single interface.

The company unveiled Employee AI, a new foundation designed to integrate 

 into workflows and transform how companies engage, communicate with, and support their workforces.

The shift in thinking represents a change in what Staffbase looks to offer customers. It’s no longer just about broadcasting communication, but rather creating content that enables employees to be more productive and engaged.

Maffei expects the platform to deliver a better employee experience.

“It’s not just to support communicators to make more content or make it faster. It’s to actually create knowledge and information that doesn’t even need to touch a human hand, but will have a material impact on the way that your workforce gets their job done,” he said.

With new AI tools set for wide release later this year, Staffbase customers can deploy a more relevant and personalized interface to employee communications, “one single pane of glass experience” employees can “literally just talk to” via its AI assistant.

“I can have the interactions that ChatGPT brought to my personal life at work in a way that isn’t the business pushing information down, but rather the business using technology to better connect me to the work I need to do to make a difference for my career and for the enterprise that I’m working for,” he said.

And the new technology is allowing the comms platform to evolve how employees consume company content. Staffbase’s AI-powered personalized employee podcasts feature is set for release later this year. The tool will allow the creation at scale of personalized podcasts for each individual employee that can deliver tailored weekly updates about information relevant to and informed by employees’ overall interaction with the Staffbase platform.

Worried about AI’s end product? Makes sense. Maffei told HR Brew that part of this new foundation includes a governance layer, to ensure that the content is up to date and context relevant for employees.

“This content governance capability, the ability to go in and really make the content relevant and ensure that it’s contextually appropriate, is critical,” he said. “And the fact that you don’t need an army of people that are focused on doing this is going to put you in a situation where the way that this content now flows into an organization’s information architecture will fundamentally change the way information is found.”

image if different symbolic ways to communicate

Move over, breakroom bulletin board: Bespoke employee podcasts are coming to internal comms

Employee communications platform Staffbase leverages agentic AI to transform how companies engage with employees and create content. 

Amid a chorus of promises to reduce workloads and headaches, AI tools have made a loud entry into the world of talent acquisition (TA) and…everywhere else. Recruiters who are no strangers to automation in the hiring process are now discovering 

 employed by their counterparts, job seekers, in efforts to bolster their chances of employment.

This cohort of already understaffed and over-burdened HR pros is navigating a tsunami of applications for open roles, and

 to get ahead are impacting the candidate experience, time to fill, quality of hire, and even poses real security and privacy concerns.

“It’s getting easier and easier to apply for jobs and harder and harder to get a job,” said Dan Chait, the CEO of recruiting platform Greenhouse. “I don’t look at a job seeker—who’s trying to get a job and really needs a job—as the villain.”

Chait told HR Brew that the rise of pandemic-era remote work and the ability to employ talent untethered by location, a cooling market for job seekers, and, of course, AI, have all contributed to this new set of problems facing recruiters and TA pros.

“Generally speaking, they’re in a doom loop that’s all making stuff worse,” he said. “Job seekers are applying to many more jobs, and they’re like, ‘I’m never gonna get a job. I’m gonna use AI and automation to apply to hundreds of jobs instead of dozens of jobs,’ and then employers are turning around and saying, ‘This is ridiculous. I’m not gonna read a thousand résumés; AI, tell me the five I should pay attention to.’ And that’s getting worse, not better.”

, job seekers are increasingly turning to AI tools to help apply for more jobs, to tailor their résumés more closely to job postings (sometimes with information or skills that are untrue), or skirt past knock-out questions in applications. Behaviors start to cross the line when job seekers employ the tool to make its own decisions on their behalf in order to move forward in ways that can border on dishonesty or be outright false, he added.

Applicants are using AI tools in interviews (45%) to help aid their expertise, and in some cases this is not malevolent behavior. AI company 

, is “looking for candidates who excel at collaborating with AI,” and outlines ways candidates are encouraged to work with the tools ethically during the hiring process.

Others are even injecting code into their applications to prompt the AI tools to surface up a positive response to the particular application. Greenhouse internal hiring data reveals that this is indeed happening, he said.

“All these places where AI tools are showing up. People are figuring out ways to try to trick the AI,” he said.

, a new product designed to help recruiters cut through the spam and fraud in the hiring process, to better surface up quality candidates. The platform partnered with CLEAR, the identify verification vendor you can spot at the airport.

But TA orgs don’t need the Greenhouse infrastructure to guard against the slop.

“Some of them are quite rudimentary,” he said of the ways TA pros are addressing this. “What companies are doing today, absent Real Talent, literally, I’ve had a company say, ‘We’re having job seekers show their ID on an interview with a recruiter.’”

Talent organizations can also collect and review ATS data for signals of fraud, including the device that submitted the application, the location of the IP address, the email the applicant used to apply, whether the content in the application matches or mirrors other content from other applicants.

Some TA pros are developing a system to assess the onslaught of applications as they come in. Chronological is illogical now, but some organizations are developing ways to better understand the skills and needs of a role and “analyze the inbound applicants” to surface different signals about “who may or may not be a more likely fit,” he said.

Additionally, Chait pointed to efforts the platform is working on to deliver a new set of relevant hiring signals to recruiters that look different than bygone norms. Earlier this year, 

, allowing job seekers on the platform to submit one “dream job” application per month. TA pros can pay special attention to those applications, which would likely signal an increased level of care and intentionality by the applicant, due to the scarcity of the option.

“You might be using automated tools to send a thousand résumés out; that’s up to you,” he said, “But you get one dream job a month, and so as a job seeker you better think carefully…our customers are seeing that those people are passing through at about four times the rate.”

TA teams are looking to new hiring strategies to address “doom loop” of overreliance on AI

“It’s getting easier and easier to apply for jobs and harder and harder to get a job.”

For many professional services and consulting outfits, college and early-career recruitment have historically made up a large portion of hiring strategy. Entry-level positions offer early-career professionals opportunities to learn the business under the guidance of more senior peers and, in turn, support their work by performing the more monotonous, rote task work associated with the profession (think deep research, data analysis, numbers crunching).

It just so happens that those are the same sorts of 

“The AI piece is becoming more integrated, which is requiring a redefinition of what an entry-level role looks like and the types of skills that might be needed,” Handshake’s chief education strategy officer, Christine Cruzvergara, told 

 earlier this year after telling Axios that AI could eliminate half of entry-level roles. In fact, Big Four consulting firm PwC plans to shrink its entry-level recruiting by nearly one-third over the next three years, according to reporting from 

“We are being prudent by decreasing our campus hiring goals in certain parts of our firm and leaving space for us to reevaluate our needs as necessary to meet the evolving demands of our business and our clients,” the firm told BI in a statement.

But according to Ty Beasley, principal and chief talent officer at mid-sized accounting and consulting firm RSM, the product, in consulting, is the talent: their expertise, their experience, their ideas, and their ability to help clients identify problems and design and execute solutions for them. So replacing people with AI doesn’t feel like the right talent strategy.

Unlike its larger rivals, RSM’s early career program “hasn’t changed pre- and post-AI,” according to Beasley. The firm is instead developing its entry-level talent as the future “products” the firm sells to its clients, meeting this digital native cohort where they’re at in terms of AI skills, and focusing on growing “soft skills” and exposing them earlier to clients.

 “We bring people on; we give them early development so that they can develop their technical skills,” Beasley said. “We sell skills. We sell [the] knowledge of our people. The first thing we focus on…is the development of technical skills, because we have to bring value to our clients through people, and it comes through their ability, or their technical capabilities to solve clients problems.”

Beasley told HR Brew the company teaches employees role- and industry-specific knowledge. Then, as they grow inside the organization, their L&D pathways expand to include more and more training on “durable skills,” like communication and leadership, to grow relationships.

Account reconciliation, for example, could become a task that is better suited for AI than a human accountant. But those accountants using the AI tools in the future to perform the task will still need the knowledge and skills to apply the information to strategy in service of the client.

“You still have to know account reconciliations: why it needs to be done, what’s the importance of it,” he said. “When the tool does it for you, you are now being crafted and skilled and developed to now provide the insights to what the tool is giving you.”

 Early-career employees at RSM also work more closely with clients, partly because of the firm’s size. Though at 18,000 strong, RSM focuses on services for midsized clients, and to serve them, it’s all hands on deck.

“The way we work with our clientele is such that our people get in front of our clients much sooner than let’s say the Big Four. You might be a manager before you’re face-to-face with a client of the Big Four,” he said, but as RSM works with midmarket firms, “You can’t hide staff from the client.”

RSM is also meeting Gen Z entrants where they are. Graduates today come to the profession with native tech knowledge and are looking to grow and contribute, so the firm is tapping this hungry cohort to help shape the work.

“We got people coming into the firm now, from an entry-level perspective, they’re already interacting with these tools,” Beasley said. “So when they come to us, they’re not being introduced to AI tools. They’re looking at us saying, ‘Okay, how can I continue to be upskilled with these tools?’”

 The firm is fully embracing AI, but it’s focused on leveraging AI tools to improve employees’ ability to serve clients, improve the ways employees interact internally, and help grow employees.

“We view AI [as] the force multiplier,” he said “What it is for our talent, it augments their human capabilities. It unlocks their productivity. It enables them to be smarter, but it puts them in the position [of] faster decision making. So this transformation is…a tool we invest in so that we can continue to invest in our people, so that we can continue to serve our clients with more and more excellence, more efficiency.”

A human crushed by giant letters A and I.

This firm is bolstering, not trimming, its early career program as AI automates rote tasks

For RSM, an emphasis on growth and training early career associates is core to success.

When it comes to AI, Gen Z workers may be the teachers, rather than the students.

Nearly all (89%) of KPMG’s Gen Z interns use generative AI weekly both in their professional and personal lives, according to 

“They come in from day one, just already used to, on a daily basis, almost having some level of technology at their hands” said Derek Thomas, KPMG’s national partner-in-charge of university talent acquisition. “They [have] these tools that’s just helping make their job a little bit easier and helping them to get some more experience doing probably some more challenging things than we did when I first started out.”

Companies have an opportunity, Thomas told HR Brew, to lean on their Gen Z workers, who can use this technology to pursue more complicated tasks and projects than previous generations of entry-level talent. In return, however, they should consider Gen Z’s priorities for their workplace and careers.

Many of KPMG’s Gen Z interns reported finding value in in-person interactions with coworkers, Thomas said. As AI speeds up the pace at which work gets done, he suspects employees will be eager to dedicate even more time to these sorts of opportunities—they ranked hands-on learning as number one as well as observing colleagues in-office for “navigating expectations.”

Thomas said he was surprised to see how many Gen Z workers value stability: 59% of respondents said they want to spend their careers growing at just one or two companies, while 35% want to spend their careers in one industry.

“As a generation, they want to go deeper and wider, so in order to do that, they want to be in that one place where they could try to grow and learn,” he said. “Not necessarily always have to be that jack-of-all-trades and do 100 different things, but where can I best get that focus, and really learn my craft, and really get good at it?”

A photo collage of two coworkers looking at a digital tablet in an office and and a young man with colored hair using laptop in foreground.