Dive Brief:
- Employees are using artificial intelligence to tackle work that falls outside of their typical job duties, and HR practitioners are a professional cohort who most often use the technology to do so, according to an OpenAI analysis published Monday.
- The company analyzed more than 800,000 messages submitted to its ChatGPT chatbot by U.S.-based users. It found that about 44% of all occupation-specific messages involved tasks not included in the user’s occupation, a share that rose to 69% of all such messages submitted by HR professionals This represented the third-highest share of all occupational groups studied, behind only design and customer experience roles.
- Drilling down further, OpenAI found that HR professionals most often used ChatGPT for outside work involving marketing, engineering and finance tasks. OpenAI said the report’s findings demonstrate how AI can change the division of work within an organization by allowing users to perform work using the tool themselves rather than handing it off to others.
Dive Insight:
HR teams have long been tasked with performing work that falls outside of HR, often on a frequent basis. This trend accelerated after the COVID-19 pandemic, when organizations frequently called on HR to stand up diversity, equity and inclusion strategies, remote work policies and well-being programs, among other initiatives, sources previously told HR Dive.
The transformation largely has not let up, if past studies are to be believed. In data published March 2025, Perceptyx found that more than 40% of surveyed HR leaders said their jobs had become more difficult during the preceding year. This dynamic escalated to the point that 30% of respondents had considered leaving the profession altogether. Moreover, a SHRM report released at around the same time found that 57% of HR professionals believed their departments were understaffed.
OpenAI reports HR professionals used ChatGPT primarily for marketing tasks, which constituted 23% of occupational messages submitted by practitioners. Engineering and finance tasks followed closely behind at 18% and 16% of messages, respectively.
The company said its results show how AI may change occupations like HR as workers experiment with the tech to combine aspects of different functions within their own jobs. Task crossover within ChatGPT also more frequently appeared among users in small businesses, OpenAI noted, which may be reflective of the tendency of workers in such environments to take on a given problem rather than delegate it.
A growing share of core HR functions have been affected by AI as well, from setting employees’ pay to synthesizing multiple employee handbooks in a merger or acquisition scenario. And more broadly, the function could play the role of Chief Work Officer, tasked with deciding which tasks are best performed by automated technologies and which should be left to human beings.
HR also may need to be aware that simply prompting AI is distinct from the ability to direct AI systems to perform complex tasks, according to a study by University of Texas at Austin researchers and KPMG. Workers who excel at collaborating with the tech and providing direction, oversight and judgment rather than solely delegating tasks to it tend to perform better than their peers, the study found.