Five use-cases for AI in HR service delivery

Read on to discover genuine applications of AI in HR service delivery that produce real savings.

"63% of HR leaders stated whilst they recognised the need to adopt AI, they couldn’t visualise potential use-cases and opportunities when it came to implementing."
- Gartner, AI in HR: The Ultimate Guide to implenting HR in your organisation.

HR leaders are continuously seeking innovative solutions to enhance their service delivery and streamline operations.

Amidst this quest for efficiency and effectiveness, Artificial Intelligence (AI) emerges as a transformative force, revolutionizing traditional HR practices and redefining the employee experience.

While many HR professionals recognize the need and the potential with AI, they often find themselves at a crossroads, unsure of where to start or which applications of AI will yield the best results.

This uncertainty is understandable in a field where the stakes are high, and the choices are plentiful.

Nevertheless, the journey towards AI-enabled HR Service Delivery is not one to be postponed but embraced with strategic foresight and a clear understanding of its potential impact.

This report delves into the dynamic intersection of AI and HR Service Delivery, unveiling five compelling use-cases where AI technologies can catalyze significant improvements.

5 use cases for AI in HR service delivery:

• Knowledge content creation and curation
• HR operations and administrative tasks
• Search and retrieval
• 24/7 support
• Data analysis and insights

Playbook: AI for HR Service Delivery
Learn how HR leaders can leverage AI to increase workforce satisfaction, minimise HR ticket time and improve employee experience at every stage. Read Now.

1. Knowledge content creation and curation

Typically, knowledge bases need constant attention.

Between new content creation, updating existing articles and fielding complaints about content employees can’t find - they represent a huge suck on HR resources.

How AI can help

AI-powered knowledge bases can absorb vast amounts of HR content: documents, policies, procedures, best practices and pull them into one hub, in a uniform pre-formatted state even when dealing with multiple sources (eg shared drives, pdf documents or intranets).

Going one step further than this, AI can curate a personalized content feed for each employee based on their role.

AI can process the context and semantics of the HR content, enabling accurate tagging, categorization and retrieval of information when called upon, whilst simultaneously identifying potential gaps in your content library.

Once gaps have been identified, AI can be used again to generate new content at the click of a button.

AI-powered recommendation systems can suggest relevant resources to employees based on their role, interests, and past interactions, fostering continuous learning and skill development.

"Generative AI capabilities not only benefit HR per se, but also give managers superpowers when it comes to HR topics (e.g., managers can better access HR data, write job descriptions) with less tactical intervention from HR"
- McKinsey & Company

The breakdown

• Use AI to generate a personalised knowledge hub for every employee tailored based on their role, location and aspirations

• Pull in content to your knowledge management system from multiple sources and use AI to present it to your employees in a clean, unified format

• Identify gaps in your existing content database using AI

• Generate new content at the click of a button all in your tone of voice

• Old, erroneous content automatically flagged for you to retire or update

💡Did you know
AI-powered personalized content recommendations will account for 
12% of generative AI value potential in HR. (McKinsey & Company)

Check out the Applaud knowledge base to see this AI in action:

2. HR operations and administrative tasks

The HR function of the future will look completely different than it does today. Employees will spend significantly less time — estimated up to 60 to 70 percent — on automated, administrative work with the help of generative AI.

Administrative tasks have long been a significant burden on HR depts, consuming valuable time and resources that could otherwise be directed towards strategic initiatives.

Valuable HR team members spend time answering repetitive questions from the workforce, completing basic tasks (sending payslips or resetting benefits passwords, or directing employees towards existing policies and articles).

However, with the advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI), the paradigm of HR operations is undergoing a profound transformation.

AI technologies, ranging from natural language processing (NLP) to machine learning algorithms, offer unprecedented capabilities to automate and streamline various administrative tasks, alleviating the administrative burden on HR professionals and enabling them to refocus their efforts on strategic endeavors.

The breakdown

• Use AI chat bots to answer employees repetitive questions instantly

• AI-powered search can direct employees towards useful resources that divert them away from needing further HR support or raising cases

• Automate repetitive tasks by integrating key systems with AI chat bots that will enable them to complete requests and push relevant data back into the respective systems

💡Top tip
Make sure you build in human quality checks at least to help AI learn efficiently.

3. Search and retrieval

Ensuring employees have fast access to relevant information is something many organizations battle with. And the impact of these struggles causes all manor of delays. When employees come across the wrong information, e.g. a leave policy for Mexico when they’re based in England, it could result in them wasting time acting under the wrong information, or if they recognise that they haven’t found what they’re searching for and after a frustrating couple of attempts they give up, this can result in resentment which overtime builds up to cause much larger issues.

"AI-powered search engines can sort large amounts of data from structured and unstructured data sources, which ultimately enables employees to find the information they need quickly"
- Forbes

Companies who have prioritised offering their employees upgraded search systems with the latest AI attributes are effectively centralizing all of their knowledge but filtering it to make it more manageable for employees to locate whatever they’re searching for: FAQs, role-specific guidelines, payroll packets and training videos. The employee doesn’t have to do anything different except enjoy more accurate, faster results every time.

The advantages

• More personalized results for the employee
• Continuous improvements in answers served
• Real-time assistance never breaking the flow of work
• Access to all knowledge content through one channel
• Time reduction spent searching for answers
• Improvements in productivity

Implementing AI-powered search is difficult to do in isolation and needs to be considered as part of a broader project/digital transformation initiative.

4. 24/7 support

AI chat bots can provide the kind of support for employees that simply isn’t possible with traditional HR Service Desk.

Chat bots can be trained instantly, absorbing entire knowledge bases and in some cases employees personal data as well (leave balances or pay dates etc).

They are available to employees 24/7 and advanced bots can also complete tasks on employees behalf right there in the chat window.

💰Cost saving potential
The capacity to redistribute resources away from conventional HR service teams, leading to significant cost savings, is immense. Each employee can now enjoy continuous access to HR support through a chat bot.

Above: Example of Applaud’s Next-Gen AI Assistant, which can pull information from multiple data sources to answer employee inquires. 

The breakdown

• HR queries handled instantly, never breaking the flow of work

• Simple HR tasks completed right inside the chat window

• Conversational style and vibe all aligned to your brand

• Connect to your knowledge base, pdfs/documents or other systems without updating or formatting a thing

• If a query requires a human touch, it hands off to a human or raises a case

• Your assistant lives where your employees live, whatsapp, teams or slack

• Use conversation analytics to understand what’s really going on with your people

Gartner predicts that 75% of HR inquiries will be managed by bots or other conversational AI platforms.

STOP: Time to get real about ROI 💸💸💸

At the end of the day, whilst HR departments care about people retention and employee experience, the c-suite are concerned with bottom line. 

Here's 3 quick stats to share with the stakeholders who hold the purse strings.

💸 After implementing next-gen AI assistants, organizations saw an average of 55% ROI* within 6 months and 400% ROI within 24 months (LinkedIn) 💸

💸 Next-gen AI assistants process (on average) as many enquiries in one hour as a human HR service desk employee can handle in one week (UI Path) 💸

💸 For every message sent via a HR AI assistant, organizations save approximately $40 in resource. (Applaud analytics) 💸

5. Data analysis and insights

AI-driven analytics not only empower HR professionals with actionable insights, highlighting patterns and trends to enhance the overall employee experience but also play a pivotal role in shaping the overarching strategy of the HR department

By leveraging cutting-edge applications of AI analytics, HR departments can proactively anticipate workforce needs, optimize HR content and task completion processes, foster employee engagement and retention, and ensure compliance with regulations.

These strategic uses of AI analytics enable HR departments to align their initiatives with broader organizational goals, drive efficiency, and ultimately contribute to the company and talent acquisition processes, foster employee engagement and retention, and ensure compliance with regulations.

These strategic uses of AI analytics enable HR departments to align their initiatives with broader organizational goals, drive efficiency, and ultimately contribute to the company's success.

💡Project Oxygen
Google's Project Oxygen is an instance of data-driven decision-making in HR. The project aimed to identify the characteristics of effective managers within Google.

By analyzing data sets, the project identified the key characteristics of successful managers and then developed specific training programs and feedback mechanisms to improve management quality across the company.

The breakdown

• Chat analytics: As well as traditional conversation analytics that can tell you popular topics or how helpful a conversation has been, advanced chat analytics can now also tell you how much time has been saved by employee questions being handled inside the chat vs going via the HR Service Desk
  
  
• HR can use this intel to review knowledge content and make improvements if necessary
  
  
• Knowledge management: AI analytics can be used both to review entire knowledge bases and point out gaps as well as providing a scorecard or effectivness rating of individual articles
  
  

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About the Author

Rachel James is the Chief Marketing Officer at Applaud, responsible for elevating the brand and creating market demand. With international experience spanning Asia, the Middle East, and Europe, she brings a global perspective to our product offering and an acute awareness of widespread market trends.