TL;DR: Deb Muller and Rebecca Trotsky share early insights from HR Acuity’s 8th Annual Employee Relations Benchmark Study, focusing on how AI is starting to shape the ER function. They note a major jump in adoption compared to last year, the potential for AI to identify trends from ER data and the need to protect trust and fairness while implementing new tools.
Three Key Takeaways from the Video: AI in Employee Relations
-
AI adoption in ER has surged: Last year few organizations were using AI. This year the Benchmark Study dedicates an entire section to it.
-
AI can spot patterns in case data: Natural language processing can aggregate ER reports and highlight trends to guide action.
-
Responsible rollout matters: AI in ER must avoid bias, safeguard trust and preserve the human side of the work.
Video Transcript: AI in Employee Relations
Deb Muller:
00:00:08.960 Hi everybody we are back for Two Minute Matters. And hello how you doing?
Rebecca Trotsky:
00:00:11.480 Good.
Deb:
00:00:15.480 Good. Okay we have a good topic today — we’re going to start talking about AI and ER. Why this is of interest to us is we just closed the collection of data for our 8th Annual Benchmark Study.
If you took it — and a lot of you did — we reached the highest number of participating companies ever. It covers over 8 million employees so it’s going to be great data.
We did a whole section on AI in there. We asked a lot of questions about organizations — their interest in it, if they’re using it, how they’re using AI for ER. It’s going to be really interesting to see.
What’s most interesting for us is we’ve asked a similar question in the past — like one question: Are you using AI? Are you thinking about AI? — and we dropped it because no one was doing anything. But now so much has changed in just a year and we have a whole section on it. Really excited. Let’s just chat about AI — we’re going to scratch the surface. All right let’s go.
Rebecca:
00:01:21.880 From our Roundtable discussion in October it was a lot more robust than in prior years. To your point about how quickly the space has evolved — it has. It’s been very rapid as we all know.
It seemed like it turned on a dime. As soon as the technology became available HR was using it more broadly and ER people specifically.
At the Roundtable we talked a lot about using natural language processing to take all your case reporting and aggregate it at a big level to identify trends — things that could be exciting and helpful for ER professionals.
Deb:
00:02:04.479 Yeah it’s certainly more accessible. So now organizations — like we’re doing at HR Acuity — are asking, How can we leverage AI?
The challenge is balancing that accessibility with care. Employee relations is so nuanced — there’s such a people component — that we don’t want to go so fast we introduce bias. We also don’t want to erode the trust we’ve been building with people. Bringing in AI without understanding how it works could easily do that.
Rebecca:
00:02:39.640 Exactly — you don’t want to take your people function and outsource it to a robot. That’s probably not a good idea.
We have a question in the Benchmark Study this year about reasons you might have concerns. I think we’ll learn a lot about where people are right now and what we can do to offset those to get the benefits without the negatives.
Deb:
00:03:02.760 Absolutely. That’s the approach we’re taking at HR Acuity — we’re infusing AI but thinking about it carefully… you’re looking at your clock aren’t you?
Rebecca:
00:03:11.200 No I’m making sure we’re on track in a responsible way.
Deb:
00:03:16.280 We’re out. If anything this just got you thinking about AI, talking about it, or excited about the Benchmark Study results — which will be out in May (oops, don’t want to rush it).
The other thing is we’re going to continue this conversation — what’s the date?
Rebecca:
00:03:35.760 March 13th in EmpowER. You have to be a member of our EmpowER community to join our Two Minute Matters live on March 13th — which will be longer than two minutes.
We want to engage with you in this conversation so join us. Go to EmpowER, sign up, and we’ll see you soon.
Deb:
00:03:53.959 Can’t wait. Thanks, bye.
