As our latest AI for Work Top 100 report shows, Generative AI is everywhere.

The technology can boost productivity by up to 50%, is already taking away jobs, and may lead us to a three-day workweek or full post-labor economics.

Yes, it's all AI these days, from writing emails to creating images, arranging your schedule, and thinking along to solve your biggest conundrums.

Even in HR, AI has made its mark. Our Top 40 HR for AI shows that the technology has made its way to all facets:

• Recruiting: AI recruiting software like Eightfold, HireVue, Paradox, Phenom and Sapia can interview candidates and match them better with the right role (For more, see our detailed guide to AI Recruiting.)
• Talent Management: Beyond Eightfold and Phenom, from the list above, Beamery, Pymetrics, and Workera help companies be smarter in managing and developing employees.
• Learning & Development: Diving deeper into development, L&D platforms like Axonify, EdApp, and hot new kid on the block Sana use AI to tailor learning programs to each person.
• Employee Support: Leena AI, Moveworks, Simpplr, and others give people answers that may be quite repetitive and bog down HR teams unnecessarily.

In short, AI is making its way into every element of the talent journey – see the full chart below:

Where is AI in HRIS Software?

The above may raise a question: where is AI in HRIS software?

The HRIS is a foundational system for every company. It facilitates employee administration, pay, benefits, and often much more.

But besides a few trailblazers, AI is found more in blog posts than in the actual HRIS platforms many companies run on.

Let's look at a few of the leading HRIS platforms and see if and how they're adopting AI:

Rippling

Rippling has taken a slow approach to implementing AI.

Founder Parker Conrad shared insights on why following a $200 million funding round at a $13.4 billion valuation:

"We are a company that is relatively free of any AI products right now. There’s some stuff that we’re working on. But I am always very skeptical of things that are, like, super trendy in Silicon Valley." – Rippling founder Parker Conrad

The only AI feature Rippling seems to have released is candidate feedback summaries in its recruiting product.

In the announcement of this feature, the team echoes Parker's sentiment:

"Unlike other companies that have rushed to release AI features and ride the wave, at Rippling, our engineering team is focused on building AI into our platform in intentional ways. We’re tapping AI to further reduce the time-consuming admin work and repetitive tasks that Rippling set out to eliminate, and introduce new opportunities for automation and efficiency—so your team can focus on what really matters."

Workday

Workday seems to be taking the opposite, and very AI-centric, direction.

In its recent "Innovation Summit," the company announced not only taking a more platform approach but also investing heavily in making the platform more AI-centric.

AI features Workday announced include:

• Job Description Generation
• Contract Analysis and Correction
• Knowledge Management Article Creation
• Automated Collections Process
• Employee Growth Plan Creation
• Text-to-Code for App Development
• Statement of Work Generation

Workday CEO Carl Eschenbach in particular highlighted that it has a huge amount of data that it can build upon and deliver great AI benefits:

"The output of your AI is only as good as the data you're putting into it in the data model when you think about Workday our data is highly curated it's 65 million users on a common platform and that's where we're training our AI model off of so it's very secure it's protected, highly curated so it's very different than do an AI where you're training off the internet so I think we are different in how we think about it." – Workday CEO Carl Eschenbach

Workday added that those 65 million users generate over 625 billion transactions annually.

Read more in our detailed guide to Workday HRIS

Deel

Deel, the EOR which only recently launched an HRIS, has two AI features under the banner "Deel AI":

• Remote Knowledge Base: Ask questions about managing remote teams including payroll, onboarding, immigration, and compliance, digging from Deel's legally vetted knowledge base.
• Workforce Intelligence: Get answers on questions about payroll and other HR data, like how many new people joined in a month.

In a blog post announcing the feature, Deel said the AI tools would allow HR and leaders to work more effectively:

"Effortlessly access reliable global HR information and insights pulled from your workforce data. Simply ask your questions and tap into the information you need to make well-informed hiring decisions without the hassle of searching for information across multiple tools, documents, or platforms. It's one place to help you keep up with ever-changing local laws and regulations and seamlessly expand your global team."

To make accessing Deel AI even easier, the company launched a Slack integration in February.

Paylocity

Paylocity launched AI Assist in March 2023, an OpenAI-powered communications generator, as a part of Community, Paylocity’s "social collaboration hub."

AI Assist lets HR professionals, leaders, and employees prompt effective announcements in Paylocity.

Paylocity CEO Steve Beauchamp said at the time:

“Every company I talk with is searching for more intelligent and personalized ways to improve employee engagement so they can stay ahead of an increasingly competitive and uncertain labor market," – Steve Beauchamp, co-CEO of Paylocity.

In January 2024, Paylocity announced further AI integration in employee scheduling, learning & development recommendations, and suggestions for employee recognition.

According to Paylocity, the integration of AI is already driving impact: "Early adopters report a 63% success rate, with AI-driven recommendations resulting in actual course enrollments and enabling employees to tailor their professional development journey to their career goals."

Its CEO said in the announcement:

"The driving force behind our AI approach at Paylocity is, and always has been, the business value it delivers to our clients, with the ultimate goal of enhancing the success and well-being of businesses and employees alike.” – Steve Beauchamp, co-CEO of Paylocity.

UKG

UKG has been one of the more AI-vocal HR platforms, announcing multiple features over the past year, including:

• The Great Place To Work Hub with UKG Bryte, a generative AI 'sidekick' trained on three decades of benchmarks, insights, and best practices from Great Place To Work, coaching and nudging every leader to build a better company. (Note: from the demo, it's unclear what the generative AI part here is.)
• A conversational assistant to replace manually searching handbooks, intranet sites, and other resources.
• Job Genius, a resource for hiring managers to write effective job descriptions and interview questions.
• A strategic collaboration with Eightfold AI to support AI-powered recruiting.

At an event, UKG shared that its AI focus reduces complexity, makes work more efficient, and helps companies improve.

It aims to have these features generally available in the first half of 2024 and share they have a detailed approach to AI and data:

• A rich data set for model training. UKG AI models are trained on decades of UKG work, HR data from its scheduling and HR applications, and employee sentiment data from Great Place to Work.
• The FleX People Fabric platform. Built on Google Enterprise Cloud AI, FleX ensures scalability, privacy, and security. Its capabilities include data isolation, role-based access control, encryption, auditing, tracing, and a data dictionary.
• A tiered approach. UKG combines general models from Google for tactical AI-driven automation, UKG-trained models for more complex HR-specific recommendations and content generation, and custom models that a customer can further train on its data. This approach allows customers to adopt AI that delivers tactical and strategic benefits while reflecting their AI comfort level, data expertise, and risk appetite.

More HRIS Platforms' AI Features

Other HRIS platforms that have embraced Gen AI include:

• Paycor uses AI for talent sourcing and integrates with Vizier to provide its users with an AI analytics digital assistant.
• BambooHR launched its first of several planned AI features in February: an AI analysis of employee open-response survey feedback. 

• Gusto is implementing ways to streamline payroll to make accounting work easier and tap into AI to create reports faster. (If you're an accountant, check out our detailed guide to AI in Accounting.)
• Lattice, originally employee management software, is now offering AI automations in its new HRIS product, but didn't specify what and how.

Other leading HR Software platforms, including TriNet, HiBob, have not announced any AI features.

The Bottom Line: AI in HRIS

Exceptions aside, AI is far from commonplace in HRIS systems, and there doesn't seem to be a huge rush among players to change that.

Not only is building AI applications not in the DNA of these companies, they often have other and larger priorities, said Josh Bersin in our recent interview:

"They're too busy expanding what they already have. The transactional part of HR is still massive. If you look at Oracle, SAP, and Workday, they have way more things to do than HR, so their engineers can only do so many things at a time. None of them have been able to really grapple with this in a significant way. Yet they're all obviously working on it, but most of the innovations are coming from smaller companies." – HR Tech guru Josh Bersin

This may eventually lead to HRIS platforms acquiring AI platforms. As Anthony Onesto, Chief People Officer at Suzy and advisor to Lattice and ADP told me:

"Especially with the proliferation of AI, you're going to see some of these larger players definitely making acquisitions. Some of them have tried to do a marketplace-type scenario where they have pre-approved vendors. I will tell you that the first time I tried it, the vendor did not work." – Anthony Onesto, Chief People Officer at Suzy and advisor to Lattice and ADP

It's clear that more change is to come, but it may not be from the big platforms themselves.

As from an HR and Employee Experience perspective, AI can be one of the biggest benefits of HRIS, make sure you take the above into account when choosing new HRIS software.

(Thanks David Hanrahan for the inspiration to write this article.)