HR champions generative AI: Embrace experimentation, empower people

Generative AI is already radically impacting the human resources function, enabling automated data gathering, elevating the employee experience to higher-value endeavors, and more. Advantages are proliferating—along with disruption. 

One significant opportunity has too often gone untapped: how human resources can serve as the primary champion and driver of generative AI across the enterprise.

While many departments huddle in silos, the human resources influence touches every part of an organization and every employee on the team. Human resources can reshape the performance culture of the organization, encouraging today’s workforce to embrace tomorrow’s skills. Human resources must play its part in creating the innovative, inquisitive, rapid experimentation culture in which generative AI can thrive—as well as the employees who embrace it.

AI-fueled change is occurring at an unprecedented pace. OpenAI’s ChatGPT has been the fastest-growing consumer application in history, with 100 million monthly active users just two months after it launched. (Instagram took two and a half years to reach this milestone.) Enterprise obsession with generative AI has been similarly intense, and how people work is undergoing a dramatic transformation.

Research conducted by the IBM Institute for Business Value (IBM IBV) indicates that 40% of the global workforce will need to reskill due to implementing AI and automation over the next three years. This translates to 1.4 billion of the planet’s 3.4 billion working population, according to World Bank statistics. The tidal wave of reskilling, while challenging, can unleash enormous changes in how work gets done: 87% of global executives surveyed by the IBM IBV expect job roles to be augmented by generative AI. More than 60% of executives say generative AI will disrupt how their organization designs experiences—and personalization is at the core of this evolution.

In this report, we address the top 10 “calls to action” for how human resources can help organizations reinvent the employee experience to keep up with the shifting environment. 

Generative AI
A powerful intersection between people, technology and data.

Part one explores how human resources can facilitate a generative AI-empowered culture—influencing the multitude of disparate systems and business processes that support organizational culture. 

In part two, we’ll demonstrate how human resources can serve as strategic advisor in developing a people-centric operating model that best positions the enterprise—and the employee experience—for the future.