Workday's new AI product got me thinking. Apparently, I'm 25% redundant

At its recent Workday Rising conference, the HR technology giant announced something called Work Intelligence. Sounds like some fancy new business intelligence tool, doesn't it? Not quite.

Work Intelligence uses AI to help organisations identify which parts of their employees' jobs could be automated using AI.

So, just to be clear. Workday is selling AI that tells you where you need more AI.

Outstanding. It's a bit like asking an estate agent whether now is a good time to move house. Or asking the bartender if the £25 signature margarita is worth the money.

Joking aside, their new technology actually sounds quite interesting. Rather than looking at jobs as a whole, it breaks them down into individual tasks, identifies which could be automated or supported by AI, and helps organisations understand what skills their people might need in the future.

Interesting that Workday is essentially giving HR the tools to identify where AI could replace human work. If there's one department that's already seeing significant amounts of its work being automated, it's HR itself.

So HR could end up using AI to recommend automating large parts of HR by using AI. I wonder how enthusiastically that particular recommendation is going to be received.

The whole thing got me thinking about how employees might feel when their employer announces that an AI system has been analysing how much of their job could be done by a computer.

So I decided to try it on myself.

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Apparently, I'm 25% redundant

As CEO of Applaud, I spend my time doing all sorts of things. Working with customers, developing our strategy, shaping our products, supporting our team and making decisions. The usual stuff involved in running a technology business.

I also use ChatGPT quite extensively, so it already knows a fair bit about the sort of work I do so I asked: “Which parts of my job should you do for me?”

Apparently, it thought it could take over around 20–25% of my working week. Thanks very much!

It identified quite a few things it could help with. Researching markets, preparing presentations, drafting communications, analysing data, reviewing commercial options and generally doing much of the preparation that goes into making decisions.

Fortunately, it stopped short of suggesting that my board could save themselves an entire CEO's salary. In fact, it recommended keeping me, which I was delighted by. Thing is, it was probably right about the workload it can, and already is, saving me on a daily basis. So I asked another question.

“If you do all that work for me, what should I do with the spare time?”

It suggested spending more time talking to customers, developing our products, exploring opportunities to grow the business and helping our people become more effective. In other words, less time preparing for things and more time actually doing them.

It was an answer that demonstrates how we’re thinking about AI productivity gains in the wrong way.

Are we really just trying to get rid of people?

Almost every conversation about AI and productivity seems to end up in the same place.

How much work can we automate? How many hours can we save? How many people will we no longer need? It's understandable. Businesses invest in technology because they expect a return, and reducing costs is an obvious way to achieve one.

Here’s the thing - HR Leaders have spent years telling everyone that people are our most valuable asset. Now we've got technology that could make those people dramatically more productive, and our first instinct seems to be working out how many of them we can get rid of.

It’s a depressing way to look at what could be an extraordinary opportunity.

At Applaud, we spend a lot of time talking to HR leaders, and there's something we hear repeatedly. Their teams are overwhelmed. Employees asking questions about policies. Managers needing guidance. Requests for letters and documents. Payroll queries. Absence management. Cases that need investigating. Chasing people who haven't provided the information HR needs. Much of this work is important, but a lot of it is also repetitive.

At Applaud, we've built an AI-powered HR Service Delivery suite to tackle exactly this problem.

Our software helps employees and managers get answers, complete HR tasks and resolve straightforward issues without having to wait for somebody in HR. And when something does need human involvement, AI can help collect information, prepare case summaries and take care of much of the administration.

The result? A better experience for employees and managers, and less repetitive work for HR.

We often talk about the time this saves. The more interesting question is what HR could do with that time instead. So let's imagine AI could take 20% of an HR team's workload away.

That's roughly one day a week.

What if we gave HR its Fridays back?

Now, I can imagine a CFO looking at that and rubbing their hands together.

"If we've reduced the workload by 20%, surely we can reduce the HR team by 20%?"

Before reaching for the redundancy calculator, I'd hope the HR director might offer another suggestion.

"What if we used that time to make the business better?"

Think about how many employee relations problems might be avoided if HR had more time to coach managers through difficult situations before they escalated. Or how much better the experience might be for an employee dealing with long-term illness, bereavement or a difficult workplace situation if HR had more time to support them personally. And what about fixing the problems that generate so much HR work in the first place?

If hundreds of employees are asking the same question every month, perhaps the problem isn't that HR takes too long to answer it. Perhaps the policy is confusing or the process is unnecessarily complicated.

AI might be brilliant at answering those questions. But wouldn't it be even better if employees didn't need to ask them?

Let's not forget the employees and managers themselves. Every hour they don't spend searching for information, filling in forms or chasing HR is an hour they can spend doing something more useful.

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Surely we should be aiming higher?

Despite my initial cynicism, Workday is asking an important question.

Understanding which tasks AI can perform, which require human judgement and how jobs might evolve is a sensible thing to do. I hope organisations don't stop at working out which tasks they can eliminate. I'd rather we spent more time thinking about what people could achieve if they weren't bogged down by all that work in the first place.

We're already seeing some of that within Applaud. AI isn't making our people less valuable. It's helping them produce better work, develop better products and achieve more than they could before.

That's the future I'd like to see for our customers too.

If you're interested in how AI can take routine work off HR's hands while improving the experience for employees and managers, you can explore our HR Service Delivery suite here.

How Applaud Helps You Make It Happen

At Applaud, we believe employees are a company’s most important customers. That’s why our technology is built entirely from the employee’s point of view—delivering more human, intuitive, and rewarding HR experiences that empower HR teams to do more for their people.

If you’re ready to turn employee-first HR from vision to reality, we’re here to help. Get in touch to see how Applaud can transform your HR Service Delivery and create a workplace where employees truly thrive.