AI has moved from hype to HR reality. It’s in our tools, in our conversations, and in the expectations of employees and executives alike.
Visit any HR tech website, talk to any HR consultant, visit any HR conference – AI is just part of the chat now. It’s already been used and abused [that term is very intentional in this context] in recruitment with a myriad of risks identified in bias and transparency. And this over-hype brings a level of institutional stress and anxiety that risks turning AI from an enabling technology into one that makes HR professionals run.
But who cares?
Well, we need to. HR over the years has been stigmatised [oh oh, HR are here, stop talking], blamed [HR told me to fire you], ignored [who said HR are important enough be in a board meeting?], misused [HRs job is to make the drinks and buy the biscuits], and more. But we’ve never stopped caring about the person, the human, at the centre of everything that makes an organisation special.
AI brings another dimension to the age-old HR conundrum of balancing the competing needs to business and people; if a technology very few people understand is now calling the shots, then what do we need HR for? Surely, it’s cheaper to run an AI model for pennies than hire a HR professional for a lot more? And in some cases, this is true, but with clear caveats.
At its core, Human Relations is about human relations. Surprise! In the same way that Ford’s motor car didn’t end up causing horses to go extinct, AI is unlikely to cause HR to go extinct. In fact, in the same way that Ford’s motor car ending up spawning a whole host of new industries and challenges, AI will do the same for HR. Ethics, bias, privacy, accountability, trust, opacity, the list goes on – and our role will be to develop these even more so than has been the case in the past.
Huxley’s Brave New World isn’t a roadmap we should be following at large, but the concept of individualism is one that AI could help improve; imagine HR systems truly attuned to employee needs, demands, wants, drives. Imagine the improvement in engagement and belonging. Imagine the improvements in productivity!
Ethics
It is clear to say that AI is an ethical minefield. From the lackadaisical approach in the US[1], to the rigour of the EU[2], and the wait and see attitude of the UK (Brione and Gajjar, 2024)[3], there is limited global agreement on what guardrails and ethical boundaries should be imposed on AI. This leaves a vacuum that HR is uniquely placed to fill.
Let’s take bias as an example; HR professionals have long looked at how to identify and mitigate conscious and unconscious bias. Often this has taken the form of training, and more recently, lived examples from those at the receiving end of bias. Adegoke et al., 2025[4] reviewed this in a study of black Asian minority ethnic NHS employees where results suggested training helped, but that organisational structural change was the foundation of true improvements.
AI has the potential to level the playing field, removing subjectivity and imposing order on chaos; of course, the converse is true – imagine training a recruitment AI agent on the workforce of a company with a predominantly male base, it is not hard to see how the agent could favour CVs from men over women given the ‘average’ existing employee is male. Good quality data and assurance activity are key.
Transparency is just as important. Article 22 of GDPR[5] protects people from the undeclared use of autonomous decision-making systems; they are not outright banned but require human oversight and the ability to be challenged. And it is right and proper that AI usage is declared – I personally include a note whenever I use AI – and that people are given the chance to understand how it works and what decisions are made.
And this leads nicely into accountability, who is accountable for the decisions of a machine? I would argue that the users of that system have ultimate accountability for ensuring that any resultant actions are a) reviewed by a human and b) fair and consistent. After all, would you want a pay rise rejected because AI cannot quantify the cultural value impact of your work compared to a finance colleague who may have a tangible budget improvement they can point to?
Privacy is the final element in this foursome. We live in a world with masses of data, growing every minute. We carry surveillance in our pockets, are seen on CCTV, are tracked online – this is the modern age and most of the time is the cost of being a citizen – but where we have accountability for data aggregation, we must ensure we are not just gathering it for the sake of gathering. Is it ethical to capture what someone might ask an AI model? Possibly. Is it ethical to use that detail to decide someone’s worth to an organisation? I would say probably not. And these are the issues with which the world is grappling right now.
Fig 1. The four HR AI ethics elements: Bias, Transparency, Accountability, and Privacy
Keeping the human human
AI is clearly a disruptive technology, whether you buy into it or not, it is already infiltrating every aspect of our lives, personally and professionally. And our role has never been more important in helping to shape and guide usage in professional settings, making sure that we guide deployment and usage in a human-in-the-loop way. AI, like laptops and smartphones, is a tool to enhance and augment our abilities – I couldn’t work without the internet and increasingly, I couldn’t deliver much of what I do without good AI models; I am the human in the chain who helps to prompt, research, develop, ratify, and tangibly deliver outputs that come through sources including AI.
Employees must feel that AI enhances their work life, making it easier to offload the basics and return capacity to deliver the larger value-add activities that can really make a difference. But this will only happen if we ensure that employee voice is a core element of AI deployment across organisations; working with people not against them helps to humanise delivery and will increase engagement in new ways of working. No one likes being ‘done to’.
And this will ultimately come down to the guardrails, oversight, accountability, assurance, and governance that HR helps to build. This will not be an easy journey, but the opportunity to deploy a new technology from the ground with humans at the forefront is not one we can afford to miss.
AI is revolutionary. Humans are amazing. That’s what HR Ethix is here to explore: how we can harness AI responsibly, keep people at the heart, and build trust in the future of work.
[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Americas-AI-Action-Plan.pdf
[2] https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/
[3] https://doi.org/10.58248/HS51
[4] https://doi.org/10.21125/edulearn.2025.0197
[5] https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/uk-gdpr-guidance-and-resources/individual-rights/individual-rights/rights-related-to-automated-decision-making-including-profiling/
*AI was used in this article to generate graphics
