At the start of a Wednesday presentation at the HR Tech Conference in Las Vegas by Forrester’s Betsy Summers and Katy Tynan, the presenters told attendees they were giving them a break from hearing about generative AI—to wide applause.
Gen AI has been a frequent topic at this week’s conference, and for good reason. However, the principal analysts at Forrester sought to redirect the conversation elsewhere: What else is HR thinking about? And how can they cut through the gen AI noise to solve those problems?
Ultimately, however, AI still played a significant role in that conversation.
10 HR challenges that aren’t gen AI
Summers and Tynan presented attendees with a list of 10 non-gen AI HR challenges, leveraging interactive tech to have the crowd place them in order of importance to their respective organizations.
The ranking revealed the following challenges:
- Siloed teams within HR (tied with below)
- HR’s data, AI and technology capability gaps
- Increasing pace of change (tied with below)
- Low trust in HR and executive leadership
- HR burnout
- Hyper-politicization of everything
- Low investment in leadership development
- Purchase complexity (tighter budgets, larger buying groups)
- Changes in the employee/employer social contract
- Shadow HR (other functional leaders doing their own learning, recruiting and workforce planning)
Siloed teams and tech gaps among HR challenges
The analysts said the top two challenges naturally go hand-in-hand.
HR professionals are so used to working in their specialties—recruiting, onboarding, performance development, rewards—that they have created boundaries around HR processes and data.
“Each functional team is using their own tools, their own data sets, and they don’t really connect,” Summers said. HR organizations need to lean into shared data sets to start to break down these silos. It’s an imperative that will be particularly impactful during large-scale change projects, she added—like HR transformations, culture shifts and efforts to become skills-based organizations.
“People are frustrated because of silos and they don’t know how to fix silos so they just keep beating them with technology,” Tynan said. “And that’s not working.”
Many HR tech vendors offer the promise of a “unified journey” across HR and they aren’t necessarily misleading organizations, she noted. Often, the problem is that organizations just aren’t mature enough to remove the silos before incorporating the tech.
While some organizations have seen “positive progress” toward creating a more unified HR experience and data set, Tynan said, she has never witnessed an organization truly master this task.
“It’s still elusive to get that whole promise out of this tech,” she said.
Not only isn’t HR working off of shared data across the function, HR professionals aren’t even confident in their ability to use data—which is why Tynan said she’s not surprised data, AI and tech capability gaps tied for the top HR challenge.
In recent research with HR Executive, Forrester explored HR professionals’ confidence in their capabilities across various focuses. Respondents were most confident in their ability to lead compliance, recruiting and talent strategy; however, at the bottom of the list was data analytics, automation and—in very last place—AI.
Between 2021 and this year, confidence in data analytics and automation skills didn’t move up at all—and, for AI, it actually decreased.
Summers said the findings are “pretty alarming.”
“I do see this as a big risk for any function within HR,” Summers said. “If they are not developing skills around AI, how can they be included in those governance conversations, those big decisions about use cases, how to get more magic from the AI and not the mayhem?”
Tynan urged conference attendees to use the event to expand their peer circle, share their own experiences with data and AI, and learn how other HR professionals are enhancing their capabilities.
“People are [using AI] more,” she said, “and really realizing where their gaps are.”
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