How AI Is Transforming Talent Management
In an uncertain market, HR and business leaders are faced with many challenges – tightening budgets, attracting and retaining the right talent, identifying and filling skills gaps, and developing the workforce for the future. Each of these challenges can be difficult to tackle on their own, but in today’s market, leaders are taking on all of these challenges at once.
The good news is, AI has already transformed many aspects of talent management – improving both efficiencies and outcomes – and now, with the rise of generative and agentic AI, there’s even more to come... at each stage of the talent lifecycle.
"More than half of organizations in our survey provide their employees with access to Generative AI tools to support HR and roughly one-third use AI Agents for HR service delivery. Most organizations that do not currently use Generative AI or AI Agents plan to within the next two years." – UNLEASH & Talent Tech Labs (Inside the Minds of Global HR Leaders: Top Talent and AI Priorities for 2025)
AI now plays an important role in everything from sourcing candidates and improving recruitment, to reskilling staff and enabling internal mobility, to strengthening workforce planning. Has your organization found the right ways to embrace AI within HR?
Unlocking new efficiencies across the talent lifecycle
As HR and Talent leaders are being asked to do more with less, if you aren’t already using AI to find new efficiencies, now is the time to consider how AI can help.
A McKinsey survey found that, when considering how generative AI affects spending across a variety of core business functions from IT to marketing, organizations saw the most meaningful cost reductions in HR.
One of the biggest opportunities lies in reskilling and internal mobility. AI can assess the skills your workforce already has, uncover hidden strengths, and reveal the gaps that remain – enabling leaders to redeploy people quickly, target reskilling initiatives where they matter most, and reduce dependency on costly external hires.
By automating previously manual tasks that slow your talent team (and your business) down, AI not only frees up team members to focus on more important work, but can also save the organization time and money.
Generating better talent insights
With better data, HR leaders and talent teams can make better decisions faster. When you deploy the right AI-driven tool, you are able to gain greater confidence, as well as tackle some of your toughest talent challenges.
AI talent platforms (like Beamery) allow you to gain better insights around skills and your workforce in general by simply asking questions. What skills do I need to get this work done? What is the potential of my existing workforce and how can I unlock it? And what external factors might affect my workforce and how can I prepare?
These greater insights help HR leaders and business decision-makers make the right talent choices the first time, avoid costly missteps, and build a dynamic workforce for the future, with smarter strategies for hiring, reskilling, and redeploying talent as skills needs evolve.
Improving the overall talent experience
While some commentators bemoan the role of AI in removing the human from interactions, applied in the right way AI can actually help build better, stronger relationships between people... and connect talent to the right person (recruiter, mentor, manager) more effectively.
Attract and engage talent through more personalized experiences: AI can help you create personalized recommendations for external candidates looking to find a new role on your careers site, or send individualized communications that include content tailored to each candidates’ interests and preferences, as well as what they are already good at.
And for existing employees, AI-driven tools can generate personalized suggestions for on-the-job training, development opportunities, or even internal roles, projects or gigs that they would be a good fit for.
AI can also build out potential career paths for individual employees, and show them the steps they need to take to get there.
With AI, you can take your talent experiences to a whole new level. For example, you could reach out and suggest training courses an employee would be a good fit for, projects or gigs they might be interested in based on their preferences, or even internal roles that they could apply for based on the skills they have already developed recently. An AI co-pilot can nudge you to do that.
AI tools have the potential to completely transform HR and Talent processes because they can act as an assistant to both existing employees on their career journeys, but also to sourcers, recruiters and hiring managers looking to fill roles and skills gaps.
These highly personalized touches help improve the overall talent experience, which in turn, helps attract excellent (and relevant) talent, and also keeps your existing talent more engaged.
Creating diverse and inclusive teams
Building a diverse and inclusive workforce has truly never been more important, and ensuring that your HR practices are equitable in nature is a large part of that. With an HR tech solution backed by explainable AI, you can effectively reduce bias (both conscious and unconscious) in the sourcing, recruiting, and talent management processes.
The right talent management solution evaluates candidates based on their skills (and potential to learn new ones), as opposed to the university they attended, their professional connections, or protected characteristics such as their ethnic background.
By applying explainable AI to skills data, organizations can uncover more suitable candidates (internal or external) that would be able to perform a role they may not even have applied for – and likely boost the diversity of their teams.
Moreover, AI can ask questions that you may not have even thought to ask when building out a requisition; it can ensure that the language used is inclusive, and formed around the skills that are actually relevant to your team and company.
(Our AI has been independently audited to ensure that the technology does not generate bias. And you can get all of this personalized assistance seamlessly right within your flow of work, without having to log into a separate platform.)
Enabling workforce agility
It’s no secret that organizations have been struggling to adapt to changes in the market. The last few years have underscored the importance of talent agility and being able to adapt quickly and efficiently. Building an agile workforce doesn’t happen overnight, but the right AI-powered tools can set you on the path to success.
If your business is one of many that struggles to adapt to rapid change, consider investing in AI to power more internal mobility, which is the practice of filling open roles or short-term projects with internal talent, as opposed to hiring external candidates. Many companies have discovered that with internal mobility, they are able to hire much quicker (and at a much lower cost).
Smart AI can help leaders easily visualize the skills the organization has internally at any given time, which allows them to make quick decisions about redeploying talent with key skills to other areas of the business, should an urgent need arise.
Generative AI tools can enhance your ability to make good decisions around redeploying talent, quickly and at scale. Managers can staff projects by simply asking the question: what skills do I need to complete this project? And then they are able to easily identify employees who have those skills, all within one connected platform.
This lets teams and organizations be much more agile and adapt to changing business needs seamlessly and with ease.
Managing compliance and data protection
Business leaders are being asked to do more with less, especially in the areas of talent and HR. AI has huge potential to help by automating tasks that are necessary to keep the business compliant, but aren’t necessarily the best use of an individual’s time and effort.
There are so many benefits of having AI running in the background of our souring, recruiting, and talent management processes. For instance, different regions have different laws about data privacy (i.e. the EU’s GDPR) and other regions are beginning to enact strict regulations around how AI can and cannot be used in the hiring process (i.e. New York City).
With ethical, explainable AI from a trusted provider, it becomes much easier to keep track of these rules and regulations as they change. The technology ought to be able to manage things like candidate consent, and exactly how a particular hiring decision was made and what factors were considered, ensuring that the processes are compliant and fair.
Fostering greater collaboration
HR professionals have come to recognize the importance of involving leaders from across the organization in talent strategy discussions. It’s no longer sufficient for HR and Talent leaders to have full ownership of the talent strategy – leaders from every single part of the business must collaborate to build this, to make it effective and sustainable.
AI helps foster this kind of cross-departmental teamwork by making once complex, time-consuming tasks quick, easy, and collaborative. Business leaders who use AI are now able to make decisions quickly and confidently, by simply asking an AI assistant the right questions. And as this technology becomes smarter, fewer tools are needed to come to the same conclusions faster.
This allows leaders to collaborate on a whole new level – helping them make quicker and more confident decisions together, level-up workforce planning and proactive skills-based hiring efforts, and deploying talent from one team to the next as needs arise. Each of these benefits help business leaders to collaborate and create a holistic, skills-based talent strategy that will help them build the workforce for the future.
Despite what skeptics of AI have to say, the truth is, it can be a game changer for HR when approached correctly. With compliant and ethical AI-powered technology, organizations are able to increase efficiency, make better (and fairer) decisions, improve the talent experience, and manage talent, while still keeping the “human” in human resources.
AI doesn’t replace the need for humans in HR – it’s a tool that can help businesses achieve the goals they have set quicker, by automating the manual tasks that take up too much of your valuable time.
With AI, talent leaders and HR teams can focus their time and energy on the work that requires a human touch: supporting employees, guiding workforce transitions, and making smarter talent decisions that unlock human potential.