Dive Brief:
- Although 86% of HR professionals said artificial intelligence and automation helped them deliver better results, and another 91% said it made accessing information easier, 51% also said they had to spend “at least half of their workweek” on repetitive administrative tasks, according to a new report from Eagle Hill Consulting.
- More than three-quarters of respondents said they frequently had to input the same data into multiple systems, and 70% said that the amount of time they had to spend on routine work kept them from dealing with more important concerns.
- Despite widespread AI implementation, complex organizational workflows continue to present obstacles, the study found. “The findings suggest that technology alone is not solving HR’s biggest challenges,” Eagle Hill said in a statement.
Dive Insight:
The survey of 200 U.S. HR professionals, conducted by Ipsos, found that a significant majority of HR professionals (90%) said they trusted AI to help them with their work to some extent. However, when it came down to working with automated systems, 37% reported recurring challenges with integration, while 36% said they were either “often or always unclear” about how AI-generated results were achieved. Another 32% said they regularly received incomplete information.
“HR’s challenge isn’t a lack of technology,” Melissa Jezior, president and chief executive officer of Eagle Hill Consulting, said in a statement. “In many organizations, it’s the way work is designed. Organizations have invested heavily in AI, automation, and other technologies, but too often those tools are layered onto disconnected processes that were never designed to work together. Technology can accelerate good work, but it cannot fix broken workflows.”
In order to ameliorate ineffective processes, 68% of HR professionals surveyed said they turned to workarounds such as spreadsheets, shared drives and manual tracking to do their jobs. In addition, 91% of respondents said they needed two or more systems to finish a single HR-related task, and 43% needed three or more.
Meanwhile, the study also found a disparity between AI integration and wider corporate governance. Eighty-four percent of senior leaders surveyed said requests from HR teams frequently needed either additional follow up or rework, while 62% of HR professionals surveyed and 67% of senior business leaders cited frequent service delivery challenges, such as “slow response times, too many handoffs, inconsistent processes, unclear ownership, and manual work.”
To resolve some of these issues, the report recommended that businesses identify problem areas and rework internal procedures to better align new technology with HR team needs.
“The organizations seeing the greatest return on technology investments are redesigning work itself,” Jezior said. “They start by understanding how work actually gets done, where friction exists, and how employees experience HR services. Technology becomes far more effective when it supports better ways of working rather than simply automating inefficient ones.”
That said, there’s been disagreement on how quickly companies will be able to modify existing workflows in order to take advantage of AI capabilities, according to research from Adecco Group. A recent report from the organization found that 45% of leaders expected to integrate AI agents into workflows within a year, but only 30% of workers agreed with that timeline.
Another report indicated that HR professionals are also grappling with changes to their own roles. Mercer’s Global Talent Trends for 2026 found that 35% of more than 1,600 HR leaders and 30% of more than 800 C-suite leaders globally said that reinventing the HR model was a priority this year.