Reshaping the Workforce: How AI and HR Technology Change How Things Get Done

“What’s fundamentally changing in how work gets done in your organization because of AI?” asked moderator Subadhra Sriram, founder and host of Workforce Observer. The answer? Well, almost everything. Leaders explored this topic during an executive panel discussion at From Day One’s Silicon Valley conference, moderated by Sriram. One of the most marked differences AI has made in the workplace already comes down to scale. “Every individual’s impact has changed a lot. So what one person could do before, it just means something very different with all the tools that we have now,” said Maggie Zhu, people partner at Anthropic. The tools allow employees to compound their work so that the pace of output is ever-increasing.Samanntha DuBridge, SVP, chief talent officer a t HPE, says AI isn’t necessarily replacing work, but instead allowing workers to focus their attention in new ways. “It’s an exciting time to take some of the more mundane tasks kind of out of the way, and think about data and what you want to spend your time on a little bit differently,” she said. The big changes come with mixed emotions, says Dutta Satadip, chief business operations officer at Pebl, “It’s this interesting balance of excitement and fear,” he said. LLM’s, large language models, are changing workflows for so many people in the office, not just with writing but with coding. “Whatever is in your head is going into AI, into code, and you’re seeing the application,” said Allan Brown, VP of total rewards at Snowflake. “Excel is going to be a thing of the past for presenting something to a senior leader.”Panelists spoke about "Reshaping the Workforce: How AI and HR Technology Change How Things Get Done"This is a good way to frame AI adoption for people who might be afraid of it, says Seema Daryanani, people and culture partner, Gemini App, Google DeepMind. “It will cut down these manual tasks so that you can spend more time innovating and creating,” she said. Fortunately, employees are generally not yet in danger of being replaced. “The efficiencies are being shared by both employees and the company,” Brown said. “The company gets more productivity, but the people are having work-life balance. You start reducing the amount of work you can do, and you’re suddenly going to find yourself a little bit of time.” Communications strategies promoting AI adoption can be built around this notion, encouraging employees to think about their mental health and how they would best like to use their time, both at work and at home. The Future of HR For HR professionals in particular, AI is helping them save time, especially when it comes to attaining, sorting, and delivering reports on data. “We do our annual voice of the workforce survey, and it used to [be] you’d get the summary data pretty quickly, but all the sentiment would take a really long time. [With AI], it’s the same day,” DuBridge said. “You can get things [instantly] that would take a team of people to review, analyze, [and] categorize a couple months.”Daryanani finds that AI handles the “how” of the presentation, the layout and structure, so we can focus on the “so what”: the deep-dive analysis and the story the data is telling us. For a practical example of how AI technology can ease the HR process, Brown shares how his organization used AI agents to answer questions about a new payroll system. “We’ve got 35 locations all over the world. The [number] of questions that were probably going to come in was insane. Somebody came up with the idea: let’s take all these payroll documents and policies, and the health benefit documents, put them all into Notebook LM, and they created a little AI agent that employees could just ask their questions,” he said. “And it answered all the questions. It eliminated that work. Those questions didn’t even come in.”Contrary to popular belief, AI is actually managing to make the hiring process more personalized, DuBridge says, as tools and systems take over a lot of the boring, menial back-and-forth of reviewing resumes and scheduling interviews. “It’s more about building that relationship with the applicant, trying to find out more about them, sharing more about the company, and finding that right fit in the right team,” she said. “It’s more about that person in that role, and it’s less about, ‘Are you available at three o'clock on Friday?’”With AI causing rapid changes across all aspects of the workforce, HR needs to keep adaptability,  upskilling, and growth in mind when hiring. “What you thought you were hiring for six months ago could be different from what you’re hiring for now,” Zhu said. “Thinking about what their role might be today and how it might evolve is changing how we’re thinking about hiring in general. [It] needs to be an active conversation.” That means employers may start to value foundational abilities above all else, Satadip says. These include “core problem solving, general cognitive ability, curiosity, he said “because those will persist regardless.” Willingness to experiment is also key. No matter the changes to come, people can, and should, always be prioritized. “I think it’s really important to remember that your organization is composed of people and to be human first,” Zhu said “It comes down to values—you have to keep those values at the forefront.”Katie Chambers is a freelance writer and award-winning communications executive with a lifelong commitment to supporting artists and advocating for inclusion. Her work has been seen in HuffPost, Top Think, and several printed essay collections, and she has appeared on Cheddar News, iWomanTV, On New Jersey, and CBS New York.(Photos by Josh Larson for From Day One)