Artificial Intelligence (AI) is no longer a hype; it’s a necessity. With increasing pressure on HR teams to automate and improve their services (Josh Bersin) and a growing number of organizations adopting AI to reshape how they support, engage, and retain their people, we don’t want to get left behind.
Organizations that successfully integrate AI for human resources into their daily workflows demonstrate their adaptability and innovation, appealing to potential customers and attracting new talent. (Criterion).
From improving onboarding experiences to handling repetitive queries with virtual assistants, AI is delivering tangible results in the way HR teams operate.
Throughout this blog, we explore the benefits of AI in HR and the key drivers of ROI, with a focus on use cases across employee journeys, content generation, knowledge management, virtual assistants, case management, agentic AI, and employee sentiment analysis.
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Like any tools and technology you integrate into your organization, your journey with AI should start with a deep understanding of HR challenges and employee pain points to ensure the technology addresses these needs rather than adding more complexity.
Get this right, and the return on investment will be greater employee engagement and experience, as well as potentially significant time and cost savings. Let’s explore.
Employee journeys, such as onboarding, internal mobility, and offboarding, often involve numerous manual steps, repetitive processes, and a one-size-fits-all approach.
These journeys often require coordination across departments, timely communication, and access to important information, all of which can be challenging to manage consistently at scale. This makes them an ideal use case for AI.
Onboarding AI, in particular, can automate key touchpoints during a new hire’s first days, ensuring timely, relevant communication and helping employees feel supported from day one.
AI can automate essential tasks throughout the journey, such as sending manager reminders, filling out forms, providing links to contextual information, and enabling a more personalized experience by tailoring content, support, and actions based on role, location, and individual needs.
The benefits of automating employee journeys with AI are more streamlined, personalized, and consistent experiences that are scalable without excessive manual input from HR.
Supporting employees during key transitions in a way that feels personal, consistent, and human helps them feel engaged, confident, and more productive (Forbes). For HR teams, it means spending less time on manual, repetitive processes and creating more time to focus on more strategic, human-centered initiatives (HR Journal).
One of the most common frustrations in modern workplaces is that employees struggle to find relevant and accurate information (HR Review).
HR teams are responsible for maintaining large amounts of knowledge articles, policies, procedures, benefits information, learning content, and more. Traditionally, these resources are stored across multiple platforms and require manual maintenance, making them difficult to keep up-to-date and presenting a challenge for employees to navigate.
AI-powered tools like Applaud’s knowledge management can generate and summarize content in seconds, ready for review, and enable you to publish them to a centralized knowledge base.
Generative AI can create tailored communications, write policy drafts, or review existing content for readability, engagement, and accessibility. Combining knowledge management with intelligent search and virtual assistants creates a powerful self-service solution, making it easier for employees to find resources and reducing their reliance on HR.
In a typical workplace, employees often require assistance with things such as understanding policies, scheduling time off, verifying pay and benefits information, or locating the appropriate contact for a specific issue.
This leads to a high volume of repetitive queries for HR teams to deal with, slowing down response times and distracting HR from more pressing tasks.
AI-powered virtual assistants, such as Applaud’s AskHR, can handle many of these routine queries instantly and at any time. Modern AI assistants interact with employees in a way that feels human as they don’t rely on fixed scripts; they interpret intent and respond in a natural, conversational manner.
Virtual assistants make a practical use case for AI in human resource management as they help resolve the high volume of repetitive queries that HR teams receive daily. The overall benefit is a more efficient and accessible support experience for employees, as well as a reduced administrative burden on HR.
When employees can’t find the information they need through self-service, they rely on HR to deal with more complex or personal concerns such as pay discrepancies, workplace conflicts, or different types of leave entitlements.
Managing these cases involves collecting context, tracking communications, assigning the right people, and ensuring nothing gets missed.
By integrating an AI-powered case management tool like Applaud’s Case Management, HR teams can respond more quickly and consistently to requests. AI can automatically categorize and triage incoming requests effectively by detecting urgency and sentiment.
The overall benefit of AI in case management is a reduction in manual effort, shorter time to resolution, and an improvement in the employee support experience. Over time, insights from AI can also help HR identify recurring themes, enabling more proactive improvements to policies, knowledge articles, and processes.
Whether it's updating employee records, initiating onboarding workflows, or managing multi-step HR processes, agentic AI brings us closer to a world where routine work can be handled autonomously.
In Applaud, our latest capabilities enable AI to complete an increasing number of tasks on behalf of employees, managers, or HR professionals. This goes far beyond answering questions; it includes triggering actions, completing forms, escalating issues when needed, and even resolving certain case types entirely without human involvement.
The business case for this evolution is huge. It unlocks enormous efficiency by automating a greater share of the HR workload. It frees up HR teams to focus on more strategic, creative, and people-centered work. And while it may be uncomfortable to acknowledge, many AI business cases are built around headcount reduction, highlighting just how significant this shift really is.
Just as the Industrial Revolution marked a turning point in manual labor, agentic AI is reshaping the modern world of work. The scale and pace of this disruption are unlike anything most of us have seen and may not see again in our careers.
For HR teams and organizations, this presents an opportunity to reevaluate service delivery and explore the potential of human and AI collaboration to achieve better outcomes for everyone.
Traditional feedback methods, such as annual surveys, offer some insight into how employees are feeling, but they often miss important shifts in morale, engagement, and wellbeing that can happen between survey periods.
Using AI in HR for sentiment analysis enables continuous monitoring of a range of data sources, including pulse surveys, open-text responses, chat interactions, and internal communications, to identify patterns in employee mood, tone, and concerns.
Greater sentiment analysis provides HR teams with deeper, more human-centered insights into what’s working and where employees may need additional support.
For example, AI can identify a dip in morale following an organizational change or detect rising frustrations around a particular policy or process.
These insights can prompt HR to take proactive action, whether that’s initiating a conversation, adjusting communications, or introducing new support systems.
The return on investment when implementing AI in HR is more than just reducing costs; it’s about delivering better employee experiences while making HR operations more efficient, responsive, and strategic. Below are the key ROI drivers from the use cases above, along with suggestions on how to measure their impact.
The most immediate and measurable benefits of AI are the reduction in manual, repetitive tasks (Business Insider). Virtual assistants, content generators, automated workflows, and agentic AI significantly reduce the time HR teams dedicate to responding to queries, processing requests, or updating content. This translates to fewer support tickets, shorter response times, and less administrative burden.
📊 How to measure
- Reduction in time spent on repetitive queries and processes
- Lower HR operational costs (e.g., fewer support tickets, reduced need for additional resources)
- Increase in queries resolved through self-service options
- Time saved per HR team member per month
AI tools such as sentiment analysis, journey automation, and knowledge and case management improve the experience employees have when interacting with HR services. When support is accessible, fast, personalized, and relevant, employees are less frustrated and more likely to stay engaged and productive (Deloitte).
📊 How to measure
- Improvement in employee satisfaction or experience (e.g., eNPS)
- Reduction in average time to resolve cases
- Increased adoption of self-service tools and internal knowledge bases
- Improved retention following AI deployment
AI enables a more consistent HR service through accurate knowledge delivery, automated workflows and responses, and personalized journeys and interactions. This helps reduce errors, ensures policy alignment, and provides a more consistent and inclusive experience across global teams.
📊 How to measure
- Decrease in HR errors or compliance-related issues
- Consistency in service delivery across departments or locations
- Policy adherence rates or employee understanding of policies
By reducing time spent on repetitive tasks, AI frees up HR professionals to focus on strategic priorities such as workforce planning and employee development. The move from administrative to strategic work increases the overall impact of the HR function.
📊 How to measure
- Increase in time allocated to strategic initiatives
- Number of new initiatives started as a result of extra capacity
- HR team productivity metrics before vs. after AI adoption
Artificial intelligence in human resource management is changing the way teams support their people, not by replacing human interaction but by helping make it more consistent and meaningful.
It simplifies complex processes, such as onboarding and internal mobility, reduces the burden of repetitive questions, and allows HR teams to focus more on human-centered work and long-term planning.
The benefits are practical and measurable: reduced costs, improved service quality, and a better overall experience for employees. However, beyond that, AI can help create a workplace where support is easily accessible, information is clear, and employees feel heard and informed.
As expectations grow and resources remain tight, organizations that thoughtfully integrate AI into their HR services will be better prepared to meet evolving needs and build a more responsive, people-centered workplace.
Ready to unlock the potential of AI in HR?
Discover how to streamline service delivery, reduce HR workload, and deliver more personalized, intuitive support, without adding complexity. Download the AI in HR Service Delivery Playbook for expert insights, practical strategies, and real-world examples that show AI in action.
Michelle Donnelly is a technical writing manager with nearly twenty years of experience in design, communication, training, and enablement. She brings a unique blend of creativity and clarity to technical writing, product enablement, and customer education, ensuring that complex information is both accessible and engaging.