As more companies expect artificial intelligence tool use to go beyond simple tasks, HR departments continue to mull how AI agents will be implemented — and who might lose their positions because of them.
A report from The Josh Bersin Co. released in June projected that, by 2030, HR departments could see their head counts reduced somewhere between 30% to 50% due to the HR capabilities that AI agents could undertake.
But the inherent complexity of HR complicates these matters, the report noted. The HR function includes more than 250 specialized roles and 400 skills, the company said — and while that paves the way for usage of more than 100 types of AI agents, “agent sprawl” is not the goal. An entirely new HR architecture is.
And that architecture will require humans.
While CEOs have pressured their companies to use AI to drive productivity, including to perhaps cut head count, those cuts have not really come about, said Eser Rizaoglu, VP analyst in the Gartner HR Practice. Layoffs that have occurred have largely been due to the inflated head counts propagated by hiring during the pandemic, Rizaoglu noted.
Even as AI agents proliferate, HR will still lead strategy, Josh Bersin told HR Dive. But the real truth may be even simpler: Someone has to instruct and manage the AI agents for them to be effective in the first place, and most companies are still figuring out how that looks in practice.
Where will jobs go?
Despite flashy headlines, companies are not wiping out their HR departments, Bersin said. Aggregate job postings for HR roles are flat, he noted, which indicates a “rebalancing” rather than a recession of the profession.
AI agents are predicted to take on tasks that are easy to automate, such as helping a worker find information on their pay stub or adjusting their payroll to accommodate tax changes — operational work that many HR people don’t particularly enjoy, he said.
Instead, as AI agents take on administratively heavy jobs that once may have required quite a few people, HR professionals can spend time doing “more valuable things,” Bersin said, such as discovering where the “actual problems” are in a process or in an employee experience.
Such a shift may particularly change junior or entry-level jobs, Rizaoglu said, but in HR, AI agent models will most likely hew to a “human in the loop” approach that keeps a person available to check outputs and maintain the system when a machine inevitably breaks.
Employers will also want to keep a modicum of “purposeful friction” in certain interactions, Rizaoglu added. A person should remain responsible for helping employees navigate questions around bereavement leave, for example.
The importance of institutional knowledge
Employers also would not save much money in choosing to replace HR with AI, Bersin said — in part because doing so would eliminate the institutional knowledge that employees hold, including the understanding of which tasks would actually be streamlined by an AI tool or where data may live to enable AI use.
And while AI tools can ostensibly learn from such inputs, Bersin said, that still does not necessarily lead to job elimination.
When AI makes an error, for example, people who have the product and workflow knowledge will be crucial to fixing it, Rizaoglu said. “When people with that knowledge leave, who can sort that out?”
Even if a company decided to slash its HR department entirely, “all that stuff would still exist and then managers would still have to do it,” Bersin said.
A slash-and-burn approach to tasks simply would not pan out, even for companies or functions that seem primed for automation, such as call centers, he continued.
“I think the bigger, more diverse companies have no choice but to have some kind of human support available for certain issues,” Bersin said. “There are people pushing this stuff to the limit, and it’s not good for the employer brand.”
The systems still have to be taught
Companies have more options when it comes to AI tools these days, both experts said, but AI agents specifically “are only as good as the systems they have access to,” Rizaoglu said. When Gartner surveyed HR leaders toward the end of April, many reported that internal data quality remained an issue regarding AI adoption as well as poor system interoperability, insufficient training and general resistance from staff to the changes.
Additionally, older forms of software could be bought and used essentially out of the box, Bersin explained, while the newer AI agents require actual training and teaching to ensure it can function within the intricate inner workings of each individual company. “You’re training it for a while,” he said. “You’re constantly taking care of it to make it better as it learns new things.”
But while AI tools promise great personalization and boons to productivity, many HR leaders “do not have an AI strategy” to accommodate those learning requirements, Rizaoglu said. Many have simply “dived into the deep end” and hoped for the best — even when various studies show that poorly run AI could exacerbate certain problems, including ingrained biases in hiring.
That is exactly why HR departments still need people, Bersin said.
“These are not implementation projects,” he said. “These are training projects.” And that will be an ongoing process requiring the human touch.
