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In our latest report, The State of the HR Landscape in 2025, we explored how AI and machine learning are reshaping HR strategies, with a staggering 95 percent of respondents to our recent survey anticipating increased adoption of these technologies in the coming months.
Particularly, AI is transforming how HR tackles one of its most persistent challenges: aligning workforce skills with evolving business needs. In this sense, the study revealed a growing shift toward skills-based approaches, with organizations using AI to map employee capabilities to emerging roles. In fact, 46 percent of companies already applying skills-first strategies are leveraging them to support internal mobility, helping employees transition into new positions and advance their careers. The result? More agile workforces, and increased engagement and retention.
As AI adoption grows, so do the use cases. While this technology’s potential in HR is broad, it offers great opportunities for talent retention and employee satisfaction that we’ll explore in this article. By strategically integrating AI in employee engagement and talent management strategies, organizations have the chance to create workplaces where people thrive and stay. Let’s dive in.
AI in Employee Engagement: A New Chapter in Understanding and Retaining Talent
Artificial intelligence, with its ability to conduct deep contextual analysis, enables pattern recognition, trends detection and behavioral understanding at a scale far beyond human capacity.
This could have a transformative impact on talent management strategies, particularly when considering the limitations of traditional methods used to measure subjective factors like employee engagement and sentiment.
Take employee surveys, for example: rating feelings on a numerical scale often falls short when it comes to capturing the nuances of human emotions, thoughts and experiences.
Now, AI could contribute to the evolution of engagement measurement from an intuition-based approach to one grounded in real, reliable data. Instead of asking employees to express how they feel in terms of predefined, rigid categories, imagine allowing them to express themselves in their own words and then use natural language processing (NLP) to analyze their responses and uncover insights.
By gaining access to this information, HR teams could gain a deeper understanding of how employees really feel. More importantly, they would be able to detect turnover risk and take proactive measures to strengthen team morale, retain key talent and lessen the impact that turnover has on business performance.
This same pattern recognition power could also enhance mobility processes at scale. Beyond identifying and inferring a person’s specific skills, AI can also suggest positions or projects that better align with their profile and competencies.
At the same time, AI can also support tasks that are deeply human in nature.
According to our report, 42 percent of HR professionals who are already working with AI and automation technologies have seen increased productivity. While we are used to hearing how these technologies can free us from repetitive tasks, the most powerful consequence of this productivity boost is that professionals can now shift their attention to more strategic aspects of their work, those in which human insight and perspective are irreplaceable.
As a result, AI is helping shape workplaces where employees find greater meaning in their contributions, feel more satisfied with their work, and, in turn, become more loyal and committed to their organizations.
How Can You Start Taking Advantage of AI in HR?
With so many potential use cases for AI, from recruiting to employee engagement and retention, knowing where to start can be daunting. This was a topic during a recent panel we hosted with leaders from DHL, Bain and Unifi.
Their advice? Begin with solutions that deliver high impact without requiring large upfront investments. Additionally, launching pilot projects before scaling them across the organization can minimize risk, streamline implementation and ensure real value.
To drive the success of these initiatives, promoting AI literacy and strengthening confidence in its use among employees can make a difference. Educating workers about the limitations of this technology and reinforcing that it isn’t always truthful can help us minimize errors that could entail high costs and risks.
However, the success of AI in employee engagement, retention and any other HR application will ultimately depend on a well-defined strategy that considers the particularities of each organization: its culture, its values, its objectives and the specific challenges it faces.
Artificial intelligence represents the greatest technological leap we have ever experienced, and we are still discovering how to maximize it. Adopting AI effectively requires not only an investment in technology but also a change of mindset within organizations. To achieve this, HR departments and business leaders would be wise to foster a culture of learning and help demystify AI among employees. This will empower them to leverage AI’s full potential to build more efficient, engaging and personalized work environments.
This article was originally published in Spanish by Ejecutivos.
