Nearly every HR leader in the UK is carrying a heavier workload than a year ago, and the push to adopt artificial intelligence is a central reason. A recent survey found 95% of HR leaders report rising workloads, while 91% say their responsibilities have expanded as AI workforce planning, employee upskilling, governance and recruitment redesign pile on top of existing obligations. Despite this, only 24% of organizations have a documented AI workforce strategy.
"It can lead to work intensification and overload for HR professionals, and managers - but more so when you don't plan for it and you don't manage it well," said Parbudyal Singh, professor of human resource management at York University.
Often, HR departments are asked to use systems like ChatGPT to help transform work without fully understanding the programs. IT handles the technical side, but HR is expected to train employees, decide whether work needs redesign, and determine if workflows should change. "A lot is expected of us, and the resources and training are not there," Singh said.
The cognitive cost of automation
Nita Chhinzer, associate professor in human resources management at the University of Guelph, points to a shift in the nature of work itself. When HR professionals spent hours manually updating databases or reviewing files, that work carried a lower cognitive load. AI has not reduced the workload - it has changed what kind of thinking the work demands.
"When we use AI for data analysis, our familiarity with the data actually drops," Chhinzer said. "I have to now go and reverse engineer the justification, the rationale and the understanding. And that's a greater disconnect between us and our work."
Heba Farid, director of HR at Second Harvest, sees the same pattern. AI has meaningfully cut the time she spends on administrative tasks such as drafting emails, summarizing documents and developing first drafts of policies. But it has not reduced her overall workload. "Instead, it has changed the nature of my work. I still need to review, validate and tailor AI-generated content to ensure it is accurate, compliant and reflects the organization's values and culture," she said. "AI has become a helpful partner that improves productivity rather than replacing the need for human judgment."
The review and verification burden
Singh identifies a growing source of strain: the time spent checking AI-generated material not just for accuracy, but for embedded bias. HR professionals once trusted well-trained employees to produce documents using established practices. Now they receive material from sources that are sometimes questionable and must double-check everything.
On the governance side, 62% of HR professionals worry about AI governance and compliance risks, while 54% of organizations have no formal policy governing how employees use AI tools. Singh notes that legal exposure is becoming a real factor. "We're beginning to see court cases where AI was used inappropriately and it opens the organization up to liability," he said.
Chhinzer adds that even when AI policies exist, they go stale almost immediately. A policy governing where private information can be stored may become outdated the moment a platform updates how it handles links. "We have to go and update the policy and retrain people on that," she said.
Pressure from above and the fear of obsolescence
Expectations have soared as AI makes it easier to produce data-rich deliverables - and upper management has responded by demanding more of them. Where a recruiter once tracked a simple selection ratio, AI now enables demands for demographic splits, educational splits, and average cutoff scores across multiple levels. HR professionals are being turned into repositories of information whether or not that information is needed.
"Just because you were able to get a pretty dashboard doesn't mean it's actually conveying anything of value," Chhinzer said.
She also identifies two psychological stressors rarely named but widely felt. The first is "FOBO" - fear of becoming obsolete. "We're doing the work with this recognition that we're training systems that could tomorrow replace us," she said. The second is what she calls the Grim Reaper problem: HR's position as the face of workforce restructuring and job loss means professionals in the field are often isolated. "Management thinks we represent the employees, employees think we represent management. We're the bad guys in everyone's story during periods of decline, during periods of job loss, during periods of restructuring."
That dynamic intensifies when AI is involved, because HR is being asked to lead transformation while managing the anxieties that transformation creates. Employees are increasingly bringing concerns to HR about job security and the handling of their personal data - conversations that did not exist at this volume before.
The strategy gap
While 78% of HR leaders expect AI to significantly change workforce skills requirements within three years, only 24% of organizations have an AI workforce strategy. Singh believes even that figure may be generous. "A lot of organizations - especially those outside of the technology sector - are depending on their employees to actually use some of the free software and free systems to help them with work," he said. "It's almost incremental to their central plan, rather than being central to the plan."
Singh frames the gap in terms of two distinct uses of AI that organizations are conflating: making current work more efficient versus transforming how work gets done. "That strategy is missing because we're just zooming in on the first part," he said.
The training burden compounds the problem. Employees are spending four hours learning AI tools to save two hours of time, Singh points out, citing Statistics Canada data that shows productivity gains can be quite low. Chhinzer completed a 40-hour intensive AI training program in June. By September, three of the six tools she trained on had already been updated enough to require retraining. "We're constantly in a learning cycle," she said, "and it feels like a lot of us are on a rat race to try to stay abreast with all of the different ways to do work."
For HR leaders navigating these pressures, structured guidance on AI for Human Resources can help bridge the gap between ambition and practical strategy. Senior HR executives looking to build organizational readiness may also benefit from an AI Learning Path for CHROs that addresses workforce planning, governance, and the human skills AI cannot replicate.
Why this matters for HR professionals
The workload increase is not temporary, and it will not resolve itself through better tools alone. Singh is direct about what would make a difference: AI must be embedded in organizational and HR strategy, not treated as a side project. Leadership has to provide resources and support for training on organizational time, not as extra work employees are expected to absorb on their own. And organizations need to actively address anxieties about job displacement rather than leaving them to fester. "Training needs to be on organizational time," he said. "It shouldn't be extra work for employees. And we need to address anxieties and insecurities about AI in terms of replacing employees."
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