Strategic workforce planning, AI ROI and compliance: HR’s 2025 mid-year reality check

We’re more than half-way through 2025; and there's no denying it has been a challenging year so far.

The labor market remains tight, there’s significant political and economic uncertainty, and AI has disrupted the current and future of work. Employees and employers alike are in a state of flux.

Despite these challenges and uncertainties, there’s lots of hope. There's optimism that the future of work will learn the lessons of the past. Organizations have continued to see lots of HR success – it seems that some clouds do have a silver lining.

At this point in the year, the UNLEASH Editorial team decided to do a sense check, and ask our readers about how this year is going for them. Where have they seen success, where have they been the most challenged?

Read to get all the insights from our Editorial audience survey – how do your experiences as a HR leader compare?

AI is not the only HR story in 2025

While our audience survey found that AI adoption and implementation was both a top success and a major HR challenge this year, interestingly, future workforce readiness is more top of mind; it hit the top spot for both wins and difficulties.

29% of respondents told UNLEASH that HR and organizational strategy was their biggest challenge in 2025, compared to 21% for both AI and recruitment and hiring, and 17% for budgetary constraints.

By comparison, 50% cited HR and organizational as their largest success this year, compared to 25% for AI and 13% for recruitment and hiring.

HR leaders told us that they are proud of their progress with strategic workforce planning (despite budgetary challenges), and it is allowing them to plan for the future more effectively.

This is good news as a recent McKinsey HR Monitor report stated that if organizations want to get ahead of future disruption, they need to switch from short-term operational planning focused on headcounts, to longer term, more strategic planning focused on skills.

Key to doing strategic workforce planning well is leaning into digital tools and working with the right vendors; our readers are ahead of the curve here.

However, they did signal that they needed more support around HR technology tools, particularly when it comes employee adoption and upskilling HR teams to be more tech savvy.

This is a perpetual challenge, and one that no organization has fully solved.

One solution is to remain human-centric, and really leverage your employee engagement programs.

If you really listen to your employees and read between the lines, they will tell you why they aren’t adopting tools and where they need more support – then you can take the right action for you.

Unfortunately, there’s no silver bullet or no one-size-fits-all answer to these types of HR challenges. All you can do is keep experimenting, and see what moves the needle for your workforce.

HR leaders need support on AI ROI and compliance

AI has, naturally, been a primary focus for HR teams in 2025 – and will continue to be so for the rest of the year (according to 46% of our survey respondents).

There are numerous AI challenges that HR leaders are facing. They are still grappling with conversations about job elimination, especially amid the threat of artificial general intelligence (something which MIT’s Max Tegmark discussed during his UNLEASH America keynote).

Plus, now that AI use is widespread, the next barrier for HR teams is to figure out how to truly get the return on investment (ROI) from AI. This makes sense in the context of 17% of people telling UNLEASH that budgetary concerns were a top challenge this year.

Recent UNLEASH coverage of research from Behave, BCG and Microsoft offer some advice on how to ensure your AI investments are really impacting the business bottom lines.

HR and organizational strategy is also a top priority for the rest of the year with 27% of the vote, while 9% are focused on compliance and regulation challenges.

There’s lots of incoming regulation in the HR space – whether it’s the UK Employment Rights Bill, Dutch pensions reform, the EU Pay Transparency Directive and AI Act, or ongoing Executive Orders out of the US on a range of workplace issues.

UNLEASH endeavors to be on hand to help our readers navigate ever-changing regulation and legislation – stay tuned for more risk and compliance content from us.

Thank you to everyone who shared your thoughts with us in Editorial mid-year survey. We will be running another one at the end of the year – so keep your eyes peeled.