How Can CHROs Improve their organisation’s AI strategy?

According to a new survey from Gartner, 65% of employees are excited about the prospect of using AI at work. However, 37% of employees are not using the technology even though the mechanisms are in place – simply because their co-workers are not using it. 

C-suite executives often consider AI’s lack of added business value a result of workforce resistance, but this isn’t necessarily the case.

In fact, Gartner suggests that the root cause of this is often an urgency to roll out AI solutions, leading to a rushed implementation that does not properly consider implications on the overall workforce. 

Eser Rizaoglu, Senior Director, Analyst Gartner HR Practice, says: “Often AI deployment decisions are being made without any involvement from HR. This leads to poor adoption, misaligned expectations between employees and executives and ultimately, organisations not realising significant business value from AI.”

Gartner recommends Chief HR Officers (CHROs) take three steps in order to gain more value from an investment in AI and reimagine organisational AI deployment strategy.

Step one: co-Lead AI governance 

As HR teams are often not included in conversations around AI strategy, Chief HR Officers are having to reactively manage the impact of AI deployment on a company’s workforce. 

While the focus may be on ensuring that compliance and information security processes are followed, Gartner says the HR function needs to work alongside other areas of the business to plan for impacts on employee experience – helping to secure trust and stress-test new technologies. 

Eser adds: “To convince the C-suite of HR’s critical role in AI governance, CHROs should position AI as a workforce issue and communicate HR’s ability to detect risks while serving as a partner that ensures AI tools drive productivity, engagement and retention."

Step two: target collaborative work

When an AI solution is in the proof of value (POV) stage, CHROs should coordinate with HR business partners and business leaders to identify the employees best suited to pilot it. 

Typically, says Gartner, HR teams should seek out employees who are digitally curious and can collaborate easily with their peers. These employees can fall into four distinct worker archetypes:

• Consumer: An employee whose role involves taking in and distilling large amounts of data to gain insights and make informed decisions. 
• Communicator: These employees are often taking information and  crafting messaging through offers, news and targeted actions. 
• Coordinator: For coordinators, much of their role involves organising and prioritising information to information from multiple sources, helping to improve workflows. 
• Creator: Creators are transforming data and information, taking it from one format to another. 

Gartner suggests including a mix of employees across these four groups, encouraging collaboration and individual work to better inform how an AI solution can streamline objectives across business. 

Step three: assess employee’s AI attitude 

Once an AI solution has been stress-tested to provide value to the organisation and it can meet the requirements of the governance team, it is ready to be scaled across the business. 

From here, Gartner says the CHRO should closely analyse the AI usage data, which can be used to assess if quality and timeliness has been improved. 

It is also important for the HR team to monitor how and when employees are using the AI tools at their disposal, to ensure they understand how these solutions can fit within their role.   

Eser says: “To achieve high employee adoption and effective use of AI solutions, CHROs and their teams should segment employees by adoption attitudes and behaviours using surveys and usage data.”