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In this issue, we’re excited to interview Suzanne Lucas, a globally recognized HR expert known for her no-nonsense approach to compliance, leadership coaching, and leveraging AI in HR.
With years of experience helping HR professionals navigate complex challenges, Suzanne now focuses on making HR departments more efficient and effective, especially by integrating AI into daily operations.
In this conversation, she shares practical insights on how AI can support HR professionals without replacing the human touch.
HR teams are always overloaded. What’s one simple way AI can take some of the workload off their plate today?
The answer to this is even easier than you might think. Go to ChatGPT or Perplexity or whatever AI software you want and say, “I have to do A, B, C, D, and E. Can you tell me how you can help reduce my workload?” And it will give you answers and suggestions tailored to your problem.
The nice thing about large language models is you can speak to them like a human and get the information you need to help you!
I use AI to edit, for instance. Everything I write, I write myself, but I’ll put something into AI and say, “Can you tell me anything I’ve left out or mark something that is unclear?” And it will tell me how to strengthen my writing. It works a treat.
How can HR teams use AI to improve employee engagement without making interactions feel robotic?
AI should never replace human interactions and employee engagement is all about humans. The key point of using AI for employee engagement is to allow employees to use AI to make their jobs easier and more interesting. No one likes doing the basic tasks. Have AI remind bosses to send out birthday messages. Have AI create a personalized onboarding process. Set up an AI bot to help answer questions from the employee handbook. Now–a caution: If your AI bot gets it wrong, you’re on the hook, so be careful that your handbook bot directs people to the right place in your handbook and doesn’t just answer the question.
AI tools sound great, but compliance is a headache. What’s one big AI-related risk HR should watch out for, and how do we avoid it?
The biggest concern for HR is bias. We should also be concerned about confidentiality, but we can solve that by keeping employee information out of the system. Never, ever put an employee’s name into an AI powered program. (Yes, I know that your ATS and HRIS are all “AI powered” these days. But don’t put that info into ChatGPT.)
So we can avoid the confidentiality issue easily and focus on bias. Large Language Models–which is what the AI we are talking about is–is built off data written by humans. Humans are biased. Therefore, AI is biased. You need to constantly watch out to make sure that the actions you take are compliant with federal and state law, and not based on a suggestion made by a biased bot.
For HR professionals who are just getting started with AI, what’s the simplest way to integrate it into their daily workflows?
I take this back to question one. Simply tell ChatGPT what your day looks like and ask it. It will give you a personalized answer!
