Balancing HR tech trends with HR priorities

“Move the needle.” That expression dates to the steam gauges of the Industrial Revolution, but it lives on as a way to denote constructive, measurable change. In the age of AI, steam doesn’t drive gauges anymore, but machines and algorithms are putting steady pressure on HR leaders to keep pace. Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is getting closer to reality, and as it matures, it has the potential to reinvent work—and to usher in a new ecosystem of human-machine interaction.

Generative AI (GenAI) continues to make headlines for its potential to emulate human creativity and disrupt work, but it’s only one of the HR technology trends for leaders to explore. They also have many HR priorities to balance, organizational goals to achieve, stakeholder expectations to meet, and investments to allocate. The technology itself isn’t what will move the needle; it’s the outcomes technology can make possible.

Our Human Capital leaders regularly engage with CHROs, CIOs, and CTOs from top Fortune 500 companies and conduct extensive external research to track the technology vendor landscape. What we’ve learned from them, we have consolidated here, to help HR leaders as they grapple with questions of HR priorities and focus. Our findings are distilled into six focus areas that hold potential for progress—but none is without its caveats.