Article
28 min read
Has AI Come for Your Job? 7 HR Tasks Humans Must Perform
AI
Global HR
Author
Lorelei Trisca
Last Update
August 13, 2025
Table of Contents
What AI is good at in HR today
What AI can’t and shouldn’t replace in HR
A simple framework for deciding when to bring AI in: Automate, augment, or own
What the future of HR with AI looks like
Key takeaways
- Will AI replace HR? No. AI excels at speed and structure but can’t replace emotional intelligence, cultural fluency, or human judgment. The best HR teams will use AI to enhance, not erase, the human core of their work.
- Not everything should be automated, and HR must decide where to draw the line. From coaching and conflict resolution to strategic decisions and cultural design, many people-centered tasks still demand a human touch. Use the Automate, Augment, Own framework to protect what matters most.
- The future of HR is human-led and AI-enabled, and Deel is building for that future. Our approach blends automation with deep human expertise, so HR teams can move faster without compromising trust, compliance, or care.
Since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, artificial intelligence (AI) has been circling your task list, picking off one HR process at a time. And now, agentic AI in HR threatens to replace your team members entirely, as it removes people from the heart of people operations.
Between 2024 and 2025, AI adoption in HR has jumped from 58% to 72%. But with campaign headlines like “Stop Hiring Humans” (courtesy of AI company Artisan), it’s easy to see why HR teams are concerned.
After meeting with dozens of global companies recently, industry thought leader Josh Bersin remarked, “The overwhelming majority of the conversations were about how companies are struggling, pushing, and agitating about the implications of AI.”
It’s a tricky spot. HR teams everywhere feel the pressure to automate and make productivity gains. Still, by doing so, they risk handing their value proposition to machines. The sad truth is: some leadership teams would be fine with that. If a dashboard can highlight engagement trends and flag attrition risks in real time, who needs people in People Ops?
But that thinking misses the point and the potential. Yes, AI is great at tracking, generating, and automating. But it can’t coach a struggling manager or design a culture people want to stay in. That’s why the best HR teams won’t reject AI; they’ll draw the line between what should be automated and what must remain human.
What AI is good at in HR today
Pushing aside valid concerns about AI, it’s undeniably exciting, too. According to the General Assembly, the most common applications include:
- Analyzing employee feedback (46%)
- Writing job descriptions (46%)
- Designing training materials (45%)
- Onboarding new hires (43%)
- Creating presentations and reports (42%)
- Reviewing resumes (37%)
- Writing employee communications (36%)
- Running talent reviews (36%)
But AI isn’t just handling admin anymore. In a recent Digital HR Leaders podcast interview, Prasad Setty, who founded and led the People Analytics function at Google for 14 years, describes how a startup company called Take2 uses AI to conduct job simulations for early career sales:
“They’re able to use AI to take a first pass at not only creating the simulation but also analyzing the ability of the candidate to communicate clearly, how many filler words they are using, how clear the grammar is, and so on. They’re also able to think about more advanced topics like active listening and whether the salesperson is expressing empathy or they’re able to handle rejection in a thoughtful way.”
Of course, there are dozens of innovative use cases for AI across the employee lifecycle—from talent acquisition to offboarding, and every step in between. But for all the promise and hype of AI, there are still parts of HR no algorithm should touch.
What AI can’t and shouldn’t replace in HR
AI is fast, efficient, and tireless, but doesn’t understand people. And that’s a problem when your job is to do exactly that. The truth is, some HR tasks can be automated. Others can’t and shouldn’t. Here are seven HR tasks we consider irreplaceable.
1. Navigating complex employee relations issues and conflict resolution
AI might catch a heated email thread or flag sentiment shifts. However, it doesn’t understand human nuance like power dynamics or the unspoken history that’s really driving conflict between team members.
The Economic Times makes a stark point: empathy, trust‑building, and emotional intelligence are skills AI still can’t replicate. They form the foundation of handling sensitive cases with care, discretion, and moral judgment.
In these moments, even the most innovative system can’t listen deep enough, and it certainly can’t preserve the delicate trust employees place in People Ops.
2. Building a culture where your employees feel comfortable
Culture has become one of the most powerful levers for talent attraction and retention. Companies that win “Best Place to Work” awards do so because someone, usually in HR, is doing the slow, deliberate work of making employees feel seen and psychologically safe at work.
In companies with great cultures, people feel comfortable speaking up without fear of retribution. They’re willing to admit their mistakes, knowing they’re a vehicle for growth, and they feel comfortable bringing new ideas to the table, without worrying about getting it “wrong.”
In 2012, Google launched Project Aristotle to understand the secrets of 180 high-performing teams, learning that psychological safety is the key ingredient in team success, and is responsible for a 43% variance in performance.
Here’s the thing about psychological safety, though: no algorithm can foster real connection. You might use AI to build employee engagement surveys and parse the results. Or even to flag patterns in team sentiment over time. But at its core, culture and psychological safety hinge entirely on the relationship between employees and their peers, managers, and leaders. Building these requires trust, emotional intelligence, and adaptability; a machine cannot replace these very human skills.
3. Coaching, mentoring, and empathy-driven development
Salesforce is ahead of the curve with its approach to AI-powered coaching. In a 2025 pilot of its AI coach, Career Connect, 74% of employees actively used the platform, 40% enrolled in recommended training, and 28% applied for internal roles. According to Business Insider, half of all open positions in Q1 were filled through internal hires, and AI flagged many of these internal candidates.
It’s a great example of AI doing what it does best: recognizing patterns such as skills readiness and nudging people toward possibilities they may have otherwise missed.
But authentic coaching is more than matchmaking. It’s HR’s conversation with a manager who’s burned out and starting to disengage. It’s walking alongside someone who’s been passed over for promotion, again, and isn’t sure they’re still in the right job. It’s sitting with the discomfort of a high-potential employee who’s suddenly full of doubt. These aren’t tasks you can delegate to a chatbot.
AI might be able to flag a performance dip or suggest a course. But it doesn’t know how to sit in silence and wait for someone to say the thing that’s hard to say. That kind of support requires context, empathy, and a real human in the room.
4. Interviewing candidates
Traditional interviews involve the very human interaction between a candidate and at least one interviewer. These meetings are known for being nerve-wracking for one party, and time-consuming for the other, but they’re a valuable space for job seekers and employers to come together and discover if they’re a good match.
With AI on the scene, companies like Meta are experimenting with AI assistants to schedule interviews, assess their interviewers in real time, and flag any questions that aren’t inclusive. That’s certainly an interesting use case, but when AI takes over the interview itself, as it does in 1 in 5 interviews in the US and UK, the candidate experience suffers.
According to CareerPlug, 33% of candidates have abandoned an application mid-way because it required a one-way video interview. And when asked about format preferences, 70% of job seekers still favor in-person interviews over virtual or phone interviews.
HR leader Emily Fenech shared her experience of testing a popular AI interview tool. The voice was robotic. There was no camera, just a logo. When she cracked a joke about planning birthday parties and ordering toilet paper, the bot praised her “impressive qualities.” It missed her sarcasm and tone, so it wasn’t able to follow the flow of the conversation appropriately.
Interviewing should be about building rapport, reading discomfort, and knowing when to follow a line of thought that wasn’t in the script. AI isn’t a good fit here.
5. Strategic decision-making
One of AI’s strong points is its ability to sift through large data sets and make sense of it all. It excels at building dashboards and spotting trends in workforce data that execs can leverage for an actionable business strategy. When you implement AI to support HR, it can tell you what’s trending, but it can’t tell you what’s right. Some decisions don’t hinge on data at all, but on instinct and values.
Trust leadership coach Mira Magecha shared a story from February 2020, just before the COVID-19 lockdowns began. Her executive team had already planned a major global event, with the spend committed and logistics in motion, when unsettling news started to trickle in.
“There just wasn’t the data,” she said. “It was a complete gut reaction of what’s the right thing to do?” They chose to go ahead, while giving people the option to stay home, a call that proved meaningful in hindsight. Still, as Mira puts it, “I’m also very aware that it could have been an absolutely disastrous decision.”
That’s what real leadership looks like: judgment in ambiguity, accountability in the unknown. No AI can model your company’s values or see the complete picture of what’s at stake, especially when there’s no relevant data to work from.
As Bill Agostini, former Senior Advisor at Strategic Human Resources, describes on the HR leaders podcast, “AI is doing the leathery grunt work, and it’s still learning and pulling from what’s out there. But data and technology aren’t the answer. It’s a way to help us have a conversation and together work out what the right answer is at that time.” AI might bring structure, but HR still brings sense-making.
6. Ethical, legal, and values-aligned decision-making
According to the General Assembly, 41% of HR professionals are concerned about data privacy and compliance when it comes to AI. And rightly so. As more AI tools enter the workplace, HR teams are forced to make quiet judgment calls daily.
- Can you upload a coaching transcript into a generative AI tool meant for HR?
- Can you trust it to offer policy guidance to a confused manager?
- What happens when a chatbot gets it wrong, or when it gives advice that technically complies with the law, but clearly contradicts your culture?
The line between assistive and irresponsible isn’t always obvious. And AI providers rarely spell it out for you. That leaves HR carrying the ethical burden of tools they didn’t build but are now expected to govern.
Even the most advanced AI still lacks context. It doesn’t understand cultural nuance or how legal obligations shift across borders. It can’t weigh values against risks, or apply moral reasoning in moments where precedent doesn’t exist. And without active oversight, algorithmic bias can scale quietly, embedding inequality deeper into the systems we’re trying to improve.
If HR is meant to protect people and culture, it has to lead on how we use AI, not just what it can do. Only humans bring the lived experience, moral judgment, and cultural fluency needed to make decisions that genuinely serve the people behind the policies.
7. Designing an equitable, values-aligned culture
Culture is built through shared decisions, rituals, and values, shaped by what companies reward and what they walk past without comment. That’s why the idea of outsourcing it to AI should make every HR leader pause for thought.
63% of HR professionals worry that AI could lead to unfair personnel decisions. And that fear isn’t misplaced.
AI may reveal trends in inclusion and satisfaction, but it doesn’t know your values. It can’t tell when a process feels extractive rather than empowering, nor when your DEI efforts have become box-ticking exercises, or when the lived experience on your team doesn’t match the data.
Speaking on the HR leaders podcast, Stacia Garr, Co-founder and Principal Analyst at RedThread Research, said, “Certainly in the people space, one of the key dimensions of responsible AI is going to be around fairness and bias… and I don’t think it’s something we can take for granted.”
If HR wants to build fairer, more inclusive workplaces, that work has to be done intentionally, by people who understand the stakes.
A simple framework for deciding when to bring AI in: Automate, augment, or own
Not every task needs a human. But not every task deserves a machine, either. As AI becomes embedded across the employee lifecycle, HR leaders need a clear framework to decide where it adds value versus where it crosses a line. Here’s a simple way to think about it:
| Definition | Examples | Benefit | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Automate | Tasks that are structured, repetitive, and low-risk. Ideal for end-to-end automation. | Admin, interview scheduling, workflow routing, nudges, notifications, reminders, summaries. | Frees up HR time and increases operational efficiency. |
| Augment | Tasks that benefit from AI support, but still require human oversight and final judgment. | Drafting policies, analyzing engagement surveys, highlighting team skill gaps. | Speeds up insights and prep work while ensuring ethical, contextual decisions. |
| Own | Tasks that rely on emotional intelligence, strategic judgment, and cultural nuance, where only a human should lead. | Coaching, conflict resolution, performance conversations, strategic decision-making. | Protects trust, ensures people-centered leadership, and preserves cultural integrity. |
What the future of HR with AI looks like
The best HR leaders won’t be replaced, they’ll be amplified.
The strongest HR teams won’t be the ones who resist AI altogether, or the ones who hand off everything to it. They’ll be the ones who experiment, learn fast, and figure out where it genuinely makes them stronger. That’s exactly how Stacia Garr approaches it:
“In our weekly all-company meeting, we have a spot about AI experimentation. Everyone on the team has to bring an example of how they’ve experimented with AI that week and share it. We’ve had a lot of conversations about what doesn’t work, but some things have been dramatic efficiency gains.”
For Garr, a process that once took eight hours now takes two and a half, thanks to her use of custom GPTs. The result? Having more time and energy to focus on what matters, such as thinking, editing, and leadership, no machine can replicate.
And that’s the point. AI should free you up, not edge you out. Chris Raines, host of the HR Leaders podcast, explains:
“Most of the time, people are so rushed to do everything else that you never actually have time to match the data with your years of experience, your insights, your gut, and your common sense. That’s where you add the real value. Because data never tells the full story. Let’s be honest, you can make data do, look, and sound however you want.”
This is the essence of why Deel believes humans must stay at the heart of an AI-backed HR function. We’ve built our platform to include AI that delivers insights, paired with human oversight that preserves trust and culture. Our proprietary Knowledge Base, which powers our AI, is built on 30,000+ curated, jurisdictional guides and backed by 350+ experts. It’s an infrastructure that delivers fast, accurate answers, while preserving the benefit of real-world expertise and ethics.
If you’re curious about how Deel blends automation with human expertise, and where AI can actually work for you, book a demo to see it in action.
Deel HR
FAQs
Will AI replace HR jobs?
No, but it will reshape them. As AI takes over more admin and analysis, HR roles will shift toward strategic decision-making, relationship-building, and culture design. The best HR pros won’t be replaced, but they’ll enjoy more freedom to focus on the work only humans can do.
What HR tasks can be automated?
The following HR tasks are ripe for automation: scheduling interviews, sending reminders, pulling reports, routing workflows, and answering routine policy questions. These are structured, repeatable tasks that don’t require emotional intelligence or context. When you automate in these areas, your team has more time to plunge into value-adding work.
How do I know what’s safe to automate?
To determine what’s safe to automate, try using this framework: if the task is low-risk, rule-based, and doesn’t rely on judgment, it’s probably safe to automate. But if it affects people’s wellbeing, involves ethical nuance, or shapes culture, keep a human in the loop. AI can assist, but it shouldn’t lead.
What should HR focus on to stay relevant in the age of AI?
Hone the skills AI can’t replicate, such as emotional intelligence, ethical reasoning, change management, and trust-building. HR’s value lies in making sense of complexity, supporting humans through uncertainty, and designing cultures people want to be part of. That’s not something you can outsource to a tool.
Lorelei Trisca is a content marketing manager passionate about everything AI and the future of work. She is always on the hunt for the latest HR trends, fresh statistics, and academic and real-life best practices. She aims to spread the word about creating better employee experiences and helping others grow in their careers.
