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Talent intelligence teams will become a key player in recruitment, AI tools and platforms for L&D will transform traditional learning systems, and more.
Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies and platforms have permeated every area of HR — from recruitment, to development, to employee experience. Such powerful new tools can effectively assist with creating job descriptions, communications, emails, and lesson plans. For instance, generative AI tools are being integrated in learning systems, recruiting platforms, and EX systems.
As further explored in the latest HR Tech 2025: AI Redefines the Landscape report by Josh Bersin, here are the key changes happening in this space for HR leaders to take note.
As a basis, major vendors in the HR technology market are building AI platforms into their core offerings. This includes
- Using large language models in various applications for more efficient and productive systems
- Human capital management (HCM) vendors are also developing chat-based front ends
As AI innovations continue to expand, the market is entering a consolidation phase. This results in significant growth amongst many AI startups, generously funded by investors.
2025 outlook: More core HCM platforms will incorporate intelligent agents into their user interfaces, with generative features embedded across many modules.
AI in recruitment and talent acquisition technology
While AI in HR arguably started in talent acquisition, vendors today have become highly sophisticated at data collection and model-building, making recruiting platforms increasingly smart at sourcing and selection.
That being said, the concept of “skills-based hiring” remains a challenge. While it is possible to identify candidates with relevant skills, employers still can’t always determine if they are a culture fit or have the specific experience needed. In this regard, the future of AI-based sourcing is moving beyond single-minded skills inference to AI models that look at richer data sets.
AI has also transformed other areas of recruiting. For example, an end-to-end recruitment process through conversational AI. With this, the AI system engages candidates, assesses their fit for a job, schedules interviews, and answers questions from candidates, managers, and interviewers about the job, the process, and the candidate.
As highlighted in the study, this is where talent acquisition tools are headed — deep into the domain itself, including sourcing, evaluating fit, and managing candidate relationships.
Other innovations include interview intelligence, which help identify the best questions and interview team. New assessment technology enables skills evaluation during the screening process.
2025 outlook: Talent intelligence teams will become a key player, and most of the ATS/recruitment tools will include AI agents and enhanced talent intelligence features.
L&D tools and platforms heating up fast
While still slightly behind recruiting on the AI adoption front, learning and development (L&D) is poised for a revolution driven by generative AI. These tools will not only make training easier but also fundamentally change how it is delivered.
Considering L&D is a “content-centric” part of HR, the roles and opportunities will inadvertently shift significantly.
"Simply explained, AI will change content development, content delivery, and the overall learning experience for employees."
More specifically, in the areas of content development, tools are enabling dynamic content creation from documents, including synthetic voice and video. Soon, virtual people acting as coaches, teachers, or assistants may be available.
Apart from the above, expertise in content management will become essential for L&D teams. Tools can build course materials in almost real time, which allows L&D to become far more sophisticated in knowledge management.
2025 outlook: AI tools and platforms for L&D will transform traditional LMSs, LXPs, and other development tools. As a result, L&D teams will increasingly integrate knowledge management into their employee-facing systems.
Stronger but fragmented employee experience
While the opportunities for AI advancement in employee experience are endless, the most obvious use case is an employee chatbot to answer questions. A variety of vendors are competing in this space — assistants integrated into platforms manage diverse user experiences. In doing so, the varying levels of information and intelligence may pose a challenge.
For now, such AI agents only excel at specific tasks they are trained for. Still, more AI application use cases in EX are also emerging. For example, in the realm of employee surveys, AI agents could regularly collect information on sentiment, benefits, culture, and safety. In people analytics, systems enable employees to ask questions about data and reduce the time spent to find reports, create spreadsheets, and aggregate data across systems.
Even with the above, human oversight remains essential — humans are still required to monitor inquiry patterns, fine-tune responses, and train the EX systems to get smarter.
2025 outlook: The EX and employee assistant space will be crucial in 2025. The study projects that now is a good time for people leaders to develop a strategy and build a team to manage these agents. In doing so, it is important for IT to be involved, considering the EX agent will likely be used across many other applications, including IT help, security, and facilities.
Having set the background of emerging technologies, the study also provided guiding questions to get people leaders started on the fundamentals.
- What is AI, and how does it work?
- What causes hallucination, drift, and other incorrect answers?
- How does prompting work?
- How do we manage the quality, governance, and real-time updating of content?
- How will we manage security?
- How do we train and monitor our systems for bias?
- How do we organise our HR and IT teams to innovate and scale?
Lead image / 123rf.com
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