AI delivers.
At least, that’s what a new report from the Josh Bersin Company found after researching its tangible impacts on HR.
The human capital advisory firm used a combination of quantitative and qualitative analyses of organizations using various AI and decision support tools from enterprise software leader SAP from, the study confirms, tangible AI-driven improvements oft boasted by platforms and software companies about the impacts of their new AI-powered tools.
The research found that there were marked improvements to efficiency, which was largely expected, but also a positive impact on the employee experience (EX), effectiveness, and overall productivity.
“Everybody wants to know whether this is worth the money they’re going to spend on it,” Bersin told HR Brew. “This stuff isn’t free, and the vendors are starting to charge premium prices for all these products. The number of use cases is so expansive that people don’t know where to start. So there needs to be a business case around: Is this worth the money from an IT standpoint? Where is the big return on investment? And how do we prioritize which projects we work on first?”
Among its key findings, the report notes:
- AI copilots “accelerate employee search speeds by 95%” for HR-related queries
- Using AI assistants in career development tools can boost employee satisfaction by 25% in respect to their career opportunities
- Bias in candidate selection shrank by 25%
- Using AI to deduce employee skills from performance data showed a 25% increase in their performance
The report, Bersin said, supports the company’s earlier analysis of AI’s impact on the workforce and the rise of what Bersin has called the AI-empowered “superworker.”
The SAP ecosystem. The Bersin Company researched specifically how SAP customers are evolving their workforce into superworkers, leveraging AI to improve performance, productivity, and creativity.
“They’ve spent a big investment in AI,” Bersin said. “I actually think they’re ahead of the other vendors in their space at the implementation of AI, because they not only have all sorts of AI use cases in the core products, but they have this product called Joul, which is a very much best-of-breed agent that people can use for business transactions…they’re willing to disrupt their whole business by starting over with an AI front-end, as opposed to just adding AI to the current stuff they have.”
Bersin also noted that SAP is a mature company, and with that tenure comes experience in what he called “value engineering,” noting that SAP can “help you quantify what the benefits are” of deploying its solutions. He also pointed to the company’s large customer base and myriad case studies to research.
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The report found AI tools have streamlined the routine, transactional HR work that can drive efficiency, such as processing leave requests or managing benefits enrollment. AI has also been shown to reduce time to hire and enhance the candidate experience and quality of hires, the report found. It is also a boon for talent mobility and retention strategies.
At the same time, the study found no gains through workforce reductions or replacing employees with AI, which remains a top concern for employees and the border public.
What’s HR to do? While the study explored SAP tools specifically, Bersin suggested HR, HRIS, or IT procurement of new vendors and AI tools focus on answering three questions:
Does the vendor possess the expertise in your industry, company size, geography, and use cases?
“These systems have to have data and training that’s relevant to what you do,” Bersin said. “So [if] you’re a manufacturing company, and you’re buying some AI thing for workforce scheduling or pay optimization, and the company that you’re buying it from specializes in healthcare, it may not actually work correctly in your manufacturing plant.”
Is the vendor big enough to build out the data management system and provide the needed data security to address issues your company might face?
“Even though the new vendors might have really cool stuff, you’re going to have to figure out how you’re going to integrate it into all your old existing systems, so that would tend to favor the incumbents to some degree,” he said, noting that companies may prefer to assess their preferred HCM or ERP software’s AI updates, especially in terms of data security, and deploying a new solution inside an existing ecosystem..
Finally, Bersin suggested asking vendors to explain where they think the market is going and see if that vision is consistent with your company. Bersin contends that even in the vendor space there are different levels of sophistication when it comes to actually understanding the potential of this technology.
“We’re in this more pragmatic phase now,” he said. “Where do we spend our money to get the biggest bang for the buck, because we already know this stuff’s gonna work?”
