Ask The Analyst: What AI question will employees ask that HR can’t yet answer?

Every week for The Briefing, UNLEASH’s weekly intelligence email for senior business decision-makers, we ask our community of analysts – the true HR experts – to solve the biggest workplace challenges.

This week we asked: What AI question will employees ask that HR can’t yet answer?

Here is what the analysts had to say.

Michael Rochelle, Chief Strategy Officer, Brandon Hall Group:

‘How will AI change my job? What skills will I need to remain valuable? What will the organization do to help me prepare for the future?’

There are questions HR will struggle most to answer.

The real challenge is that employees are seeking clarity and confidence about their future, while HR is still trying to understand what that future looks like.

HR's responsibility will be to move beyond managing AI adoption and help employees navigate the transformation with transparency, trust, and meaningful opportunities for growth.

Ultimately, HR will need to shift from reacting to workforce disruptions to proactively shaping how people and AI work together. The organizations that succeed will be those that give employees not only the tools to work with AI but also the confidence, skills, and opportunities to build a future alongside it.

The call to action for HR is clear: It must develop the capability to answer this question before employees lose confidence in its ability to guide them. That means understanding how AI will change individual roles, identifying the skills employees will need, and creating credible pathways for their future development.

HR may not be able to predict every change AI will bring, but it must be able to explain how the organization will prepare and support its people.

The greatest risk is not that HR lacks all the answers today; it is that employees may stop looking to HR for those answers tomorrow.

Jason Averbook, Co-Founder, Now to Next:

‘If AI makes me twice as productive, what happens to me? More pay, more work, or no job?’

When an employee asks their manager. The manager has nothing to say.

HR leaders, that moment is upon us, and it is also a design problem. Nobody can answer because the answer lives in five places that were each built separately around hours: pay, performance, career paths, workforce planning and manager enablement.

Change pay without changing performance and you reward the wrong thing. Free up capacity without a workforce plan and people assume cuts. Pull one thread and the whole thing moves.

HR owns that whole thing. So start where the employee is, in that conversation with a manager who has no words. Design for that moment first, then work back through the system.

Your employees are already writing an answer without sharing. Fear and relevance is drafting it, while we HR should drive the mission and purpose.

Tami Nutt, Principal Advisor, Tami Nutt Advisory

‘How is AI being used to make decisions about me at work?’

Employees are already asking this question, and I don't think HR is fully prepared to answer it.

Organizations are moving quickly to adopt AI, establish governance committees, and develop acceptable-use policies. Meanwhile, AI is becoming part of everyday work, including how managers prepare performance reviews, evaluate information, make recommendations, and support decisions about employees.

Much of this happens through tools people already use, making it difficult for HR to know when AI is involved and how much influence it has on decisions.

While existing employment laws still apply, organizations need a better understanding of how AI is actually being used to ensure they're meeting those obligations.

Now, consider how an employment attorney might ask the same question: ‘Can you explain and document how this employment decision was made, including whether AI was used and what role it played?’

HR may be able to explain the policies and intended safeguards. But can the organization demonstrate what actually happened? Strategic compliance requires HR, Legal, IT, and business leaders to understand how AI is influencing workforce decisions, establish appropriate oversight, and ensure they can account for the decisions being made.

Emily Rose McRae, Senior Director Analyst, Gartner

The question HR will struggle most to answer is a deceptively simple one: ‘What happens to my job after I help you implement AI?’

Many organizations are still working out what their future state looks like, so the honest answer is often ‘we don’t know yet’, and employees can sense that but fear the worst.

When the future of their role is unclear, employees struggle to find the motivation to experiment with new tools, particularly when they are supposed to do so on top of their already busy workloads. They think ‘you want me to use AI, but can’t tell me how you want me to use it or how your strategy around AI will change my job and career.’

No one can reliably, with 100% certainty, say what career paths and jobs will look like at most roles in 10-20 years. Avoiding these conversations, and the process redesign work required to effectively have these conversations, doesn’t make the pain of not having an answer go away.

Companies do already know which technology is currently in their roadmap, and HR should be partnering with the business to figure out what those investments mean for the company’s jobs in the short and medium term.

While HR cannot predict the longer term consequences of a company’s AI strategy, it can at least help provide clarity on the short and medium.