How AI Agents Let HR Teams Focus on People, Not Paperwork

Is AI coming for your HR job? 

Cautiously, no. But it may be coming for your paperwork. 

As anyone not currently living in a mountaintop cave has noticed, artificial intelligence (AI) is popping up everywhere in the workplace — and that includes human resources. By taking on the tedious, repetitive tasks that eat up a surprising amount of HR’s day, AI agents clear a path to more valuable and, frankly, more interesting strategic work. 

To quote performance consultant and Lattice partner Faye Almeshaan, “Like any major shift — email, cloud storage, Slack — AI is just the next evolution in how we get work done. If you embrace it, it’ll likely make your job better.”

In this article, we’ll cover what AI agents can do in HR — and what they can’t. We’ll examine ethical applications of AI for HR teams and explore how tools like Lattice AI could make your workday more productive and more satisfying. 

AI Agents for HR: What They Can and Can’t Do

Our 2025 State of People Strategy Report found that high-performing HR teams were significantly more likely to experiment with AI; 51% of the top-performing teams we surveyed told us they were trying out AI, versus just 18% of the low-performing teams.

AI can have a significant impact on how productive you can be. While our research showed that just 15% of HR teams have implemented AI, those who have implemented it usually reported that it met or exceeded their expectations. 

Think of AI agents as tireless, highly efficient assistants who’re great at handling tedious or repetitive tasks, but also capable of helping with strategic work. “It’s like having a smart, reliable teammate who doesn’t sleep,” said Almeshaan.

Soon, agents will move from efficient and accurate automation to autonomy, where agents start making micro-decisions independently — choosing actions, not just executing instructions. Consider it a shift from oversight to orchestration, from doing the work to coaching the system.

And, while many HR leaders are familiar with AI chatbots, the new generation of AI agents can be far more proactive. For instance, where an older HR chatbot might have just told an employee how much vacation time they had left, today’s AI agents could walk them through the process of submitting a time-off request — or do it for them. 

Agentic AI vs. Generative AI 

Quick sidebar here to clarify some common AI jargon: 

Generative AI: These are large language model (LLM) tools that you use to create content based on prompts (ChatGPT is the most widely used). In HR terms, you might use generative AI to write performance reviews, create a first draft of a job description, or summarize survey data. It’s basically a smart writing assistant.

Agentic AI: AKA AI agents, these are more proactive and sophisticated AI tools that can be trained to perform tasks and interact with users or other systems. They don’t just respond to your prompts — they actively help you improve workflows and achieve your goals. They’re more like an extra HR team member. You might use them to process your people data, company policies, and internal knowledge base to flag at-risk employees, answer employees’ questions, or suggest that a staff member might be ready for a promotion. 

What AI Agents Can Do for HR 

So what can AI agents actually do for HR, and where do they fall short? 

AI agents can:

• Act as the best HRBP you’ve ever had. Your AI agent can surface employee sentiment trends proactively, so you can spot problems before they arise, offer support to employees who need it, and help managers navigate complex employee dynamics. 

• Serve as a personalized career coach for employees. Your AI agent can use data from career tracks, performance reviews, and feedback to create an individual development plan for every employee. Employees can chat with the agent to uncover growth areas needed to move to the next level, identify opportunities for learning based on feedback, and source learning content recommendations.

• Field employee queries. AI agents can answer all those endless, repetitive HR questions that take up so much time for HR departments, like: “How many days of PTO do I have left?” “When will I be eligible for a raise?” “How do I request parental leave?” 

• Analyze complex data sets in seconds, not days. Imagine being able to pull together survey results and open-ended feedback almost immediately instead of spending days crunching the numbers. Even better: AI can give you a detailed breakdown of what the data is telling you and recommend next steps. 
  
  “For example, take a compensation manager who currently spends 40 hours pulling data from payroll, benefits, and performance tools just to produce total rewards statements,” said Almeshaan. “With an AI agent, all of that can be automated — data pulls, formatting, even sending the final product out. Instead of grinding through admin, that same person can now focus on how to make those statements more meaningful and retention-driving.” 

• Offer skilled editing services. AI can help managers write better performance reviews and recommendations, so you get better HR data, and employees get fairer and more useful performance feedback. 

• Manage your team’s workload. AI agents can use up-to-date data to understand your employees’ workload and capacity, so you can make better workforce planning decisions and cut down on employee burnout. 

And this is just the start. Soon, custom AI agents could help automate repetitive work across your org, freeing people up to focus on the stuff that actually matters.

What AI Agents Can’t (or Shouldn’t) Do

AI agents can be a great help, but they aren’t HR professionals — and they shouldn’t be treated like they know what they’re doing. 

“Just like we double-check Excel formulas, we need to validate what AI is doing before relying on it, especially in HR where decisions affect people’s lives and careers,” said Almeshaan. 

AI agents can’t: 

• Make HR management decisions. You shouldn’t be relying on an AI tool, no matter how sophisticated, to make the final decisions on hiring, firing, or promotional readiness.

• Communicate about sensitive matters. AI agents can make mistakes and may get the tone wrong. Don’t let them answer sensitive questions, or use them to write reviews without checking and editing carefully. 

• Address workplace changes or issues. Similarly, AI agents are not well-suited to communicate major changes or give people bad news. 

• Act on their own. Agents may make recommendations for humans to act on, but humans would make the final call on workplace decisions that affect employees, such as approving time off or promotions. In fact, legislation has been proposed that may make human oversight of AI at work mandatory. Lorena Gonzalez, president of the California Federation of Labor Unions, commented, “No worker should have to answer to a robot boss when they are fearful of getting injured on the job, or when they have to go to the bathroom or leave work for an emergency.” 

AI Use Cases for HR Teams

Curious about how you could start putting agentic and generative AI to work in your HR operations?

Our research found the following use cases were the most popular for HR teams: 

Performance Management 

Performance reviews have always been one of the most time-consuming HR processes. AI is making them faster and clearer by: 

• Writing and summarizing reviews: In our 2025 State of People Strategy Report, over half of HR teams using AI for reviews said the results met expectations, and more than a third said they exceeded expectations. Tools like Lattice AI can help managers turn vague notes into clear, actionable feedback.
• Identifying promotion-ready talent: This was one of the most satisfying use cases for AI. In fact, 96% of HR teams using AI to identify those overdue for a raise or promotion said it met or exceeded their expectations, though adoption is still low at just 20%. As these tools mature, they may become a standard part of equitable career growth. But while AI tools can surface data about who might be ready for a promotion, HR team members should make the final decisions.

Data and Analytics

AI is a great way to uncover insights in your data that you might otherwise miss. 

• Detecting bias and employee engagement trends: AI agents can uncover hidden biases, track employee satisfaction shifts, and even point out burnout risks.
• Sorting job applications: In our survey, 94% of the HR teams using AI for talent acquisition said it delivered on or exceeded expectations, helping them home in on qualified candidates faster and more fairly.

Communication and Feedback

HR teams talk to a lot of people. AI agents can help you support more people, faster, without needing to grow your team. 

• Writing job descriptions and maintaining the employee handbook: These use cases are currently among the most popular — and successful. More than half (56%) of respondents to our survey said they used AI to write their job descriptions, and 44% used it to save time on writing or updating employee handbooks. In a large company, this could result in hours a week of time saved. 
• Summarizing interviews and reviews: Instead of spending hours rewatching job interviews or reading reams of feedback, you can use AI to distill the most important information to help you take action more quickly. 

Questions to Ask Yourself Before Implementing Agentic AI

Adopting AI agents in HR isn’t just a tech decision — it’s a people decision. Here are a few questions to ask yourself before you make the leap: 

Are you ready from a technical and organizational perspective? 

• What are the main pain points you’re trying to solve?
• Do you have a mature HR tech stack in place? 
• How will these AI systems interact with your existing HR systems? 
• Are your teams open to change?

How will you manage the change process? 

• Have you discussed the implications with your managers? 
• Do you have a communication plan to roll AI out across the workforce? 
• Do you have the necessary training and support in place? 

How will you measure the impact of your AI agents? 

• Do you have a system in place to track: 
  
  • How much time you’re saving
  • How accurate and satisfactory the outputs are
  • How the AI agents are impacting the employee experience
• Have you identified the right metrics to measure success? 

Lattice AI: Transforming HR but Keeping It Human

AI should make work more human, not less. That’s the guiding principle behind our AI Agent, which was designed to help employees and HR teams alike spend more time on the work that matters.

Built with responsible AI principles like transparency, empathy, and accountability, Lattice AI is carefully evolving to support people-first organizations. 

Lattice AI for HR Functions

HR was never supposed to mean admin work — but let’s be honest, that’s where a lot of the time goes. Lattice’s new AI capabilities streamline those time-consuming, repetitive HR tasks, so you can focus on the big-picture work that actually drives change. 

Key features include:

• One-on-one summaries: Automatically generate summaries of one-on-one meetings, so you get reliable, detailed updates. 
• AI-generated employee onboarding videos: Make sure every new employee has the same consistent, high-quality onboarding process they need to hit the ground running. 
• Feedback trend analysis: Spot patterns across teams or individuals to inform your next talent management strategies. 
• Workload and capacity insights: Analyze employee updates to make sure work is fairly distributed and nip burnout in the bud. 
• Engagement insights: Quickly pull together survey results and open-ended feedback, and then benefit from automated employee data analysis and recommendations. 
• Performance review assistance: Help managers optimize performance reviews, write them more efficiently, and minimize bias. 
• Team health monitoring: View team sentiment trends based on survey data, one-on-ones, and updates, with recommendations to improve participation and reduce attrition.

Lattice AI for Employees

The Lattice AI Agent isn’t just for HR — it’s designed to make life easier for the rest of the company, too. 

Employees, new hires, and managers can:

• Get instant, self-service answers to common HR questions, like how to request time off or where to find performance reviews — no more waiting for HR to get back to them. 
• (Coming soon) Benefit from personalized coaching by chatting with the AI Agent to identify their growth opportunities, uncover learning needs based on past feedback, and explore tailored content recommendations.
• Receive real-time writing recommendations to improve the quality of performance reviews or feedback, with checks for grammar, clarity, and bias.

By giving employees tools to own their development, Lattice AI helps create a culture where growth is continuous and accessible to everyone.

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