Related Solution
HCG HR Solutions
hunel · JaDE · talenx — we propose the right HR solution for your organization.
Solve Complex HR Challenges with HCG
Talk to our experts
Insights
At this year's HR Tech Conference in Las Vegas, the dominant theme was unmistakably AI — roughly 38% of the 160-plus presentations were AI-related. As we enter the golden age of generative AI, the shock wave is already making its presence felt in HR.
The arrival of AI-based data processing technology in HR had already been a major talking point, and was seen as the direction of future innovation for HR systems.
The reason more recent AI convergence technologies are drawing even more attention is this: in the past, the focus was on leveraging "analytical" AI's ability to crunch huge amounts of data, but now "generative" AI is being used in earnest. Many experts predict — and vendors are already releasing products — that generative AI will directly help HR teams fill out various forms and act as an AI assistant that handles HR tasks in natural language.
Moving from an analytical-AI-only environment to one that also includes generative AI means the HR system environment is shifting from something owned by the company and its HR staff to a personalized domain for every user who is connected to the system.
In that process, users naturally accumulate a positive experience of digital transformation as a direct effect.
The analytical AI used in existing systems can be thought of as a form of "infrastructure reinforcement" — it helps process enormous amounts of HR data more quickly and more accurately. But in the end, the interface the user had to deal with did not really change. "Hmm? They said AI was handling it — did it actually get faster?" was about as far as it went.
Now, however, generative AI can deliver its results in language a real human can understand. That gives users effectively their own AI assistant — one that offers development advice about the team members they manage, and one that drafts performance feedback for their employees in advance.
This is exactly how AI ends up contributing directly to the recent hot topic in HR: employee experience.
Digital transformation was a headline topic for many companies in the 2000s, and HR was among the areas most in need of it.
Over the past several years, an explosion of methodologies has promised to revolutionize HR systems: continuous performance management, rating-free absolute evaluation, company-wide 360-degree diagnostics, agile organizations, hiring through social networks. But for any of these to actually work in practice, a full digital HR transformation was the absolute prerequisite.
Even as analytical AI and other technologies advanced to handle ever-larger volumes of data, users still had to come up with huge amounts of input on their own — observations, development notes, organizational RACI, interview questions, and so on — just to operate these new systems.
For employees, the advance of systems and technology showed up as more inconvenience and more overhead.
The arrival and practical use of generative AI finally offers a thread for solving this structural problem through technology itself. Because the benefits can now reach the people who actually use the HR system — not just managers or HR operators — executives who have to decide on major digital-transformation investments will push this to the top of their priority list, ahead of any other technology, specifically because it visibly improves the employee experience.
Beyond that, the very visibility of the effect is pushing HR's digital transformation forward at speed. Many companies are now rushing to simultaneously upgrade their performance management and organizational operating systems — the same upgrades that had been put off because of modest returns or the difficulty of predicting quantitative gains — and introduce the IT systems that would support them. The user-interface revolution created by generative AI has given executives enough confidence to clear even the psychological hurdles around rewriting HR systems and technology.
What is now the hot topic, therefore, is process innovation aimed at introducing new systems that dramatically improve employee accessibility through AI, while also taking advantage of all the strengths leading-edge HR practices offer. What separates this from earlier process innovation is that it is not just about running existing systems smoothly — it actively pushes to implement advanced HR techniques through new systems, and at the executive level it is now a direct request to make active use of the AI technology that makes that possible.
As the need grows for convergence — blending traditional systems-level process innovation with both policy and employee experience — the people leading implementation are also expanding beyond IT staff to cross-functional task forces and executives that cover HR, IT, and employee management together.
One term that has appeared without fail as a 2023–2024 keyword at every major HR conference around the world is "DEIB." DEIB — an acronym for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging — refers to the organizational composition, systems, and culture that allow people of different races, genders, and backgrounds to come together, mutually include one another, and work as one.
At first glance it can feel like a very American concept, and in Korea it tends to be overlooked or treated as overseas news. In fact, though, it amounts to a playbook for the direction Korean companies should take in the ESG agenda they are pouring effort into — particularly the Social and Governance pillars. Its implications are all the larger for Korean companies that are increasingly aiming to be global.
For a company with global ambitions, diversity is certainly a value that has to carry more weight in overseas operations. Within Korea alone, it may not be quite the flashpoint issue it is in the United States. But fairness in rewards and treatment, and transparency in evaluation and HR operations — these have become social common sense, and are impossible to ignore.
Most jobseekers and potential switchers no longer rely only on their network and HR departments to evaluate their career options. On most job portals, you can find anonymous opinions from current employees at each company, and they are hardly flattering about how the company actually treats people. Reward information and the way rewards are actually structured
are also easy to find, and comparing several companies side by side — the pay you would receive and the employee experience you would enjoy — is now a routine thing to do from the couch.
As a result, it has become common for current employees to demand greater equity and transparency as well. A short search on a job portal tells them what level of rewards they should reasonably be receiving, and that in turn empowers them to ask the company more pointed questions about how those rewards are determined.
Now that the lifelong-employment concept is gone, current employees are not easily persuaded on equity and transparency. If they are not convinced, they are ready to leave in search of better rewards and a better employee experience.
In this new working environment, what matters is no longer the old loyalty and top-down command ethos — what matters is a sense of belonging that forms naturally.
As many companies come to understand that belonging comes from contributing together as an employee and being properly recognized for it, a new concept is emerging: "participatory decision structures," in which employees are directly involved in decisions across HR — movements and assignments, rewards, benefits, and more.
Historically, we only had indirect or representative participation — through employee reps or labor unions — which left no room for individual participation.
Now, especially at smaller and younger companies, we are starting to see setups in which employees negotiate their own rewards directly with the company based on the market value of their job,
and in some cases even colleagues are given a fixed budget and the authority to distribute a share of performance-based rewards. The old principle of unlimited secrecy and the tenure-based pay curve — built on the assumption of lifelong employment — are now giving way to transparent reward conversations and reward structures grounded in the market value of the job.
During the pandemic, our working environment went through a massive upheaval. Many companies had to build out remote-working setups just to keep operating, and the way work was done shifted from gathering to meet and work collectively toward clear individual ownership and more granular jobs.
The pandemic has passed and daily life has largely recovered, but the change a flexible work environment brought still sits vividly in our memory.
Rather than a return to the old model, "Hybrid Work" — a compromise between in-person collaboration and semi-mandatory remote work — has become one of the dominant keywords in post-pandemic HR trends.
With the tools for remote work — video conferencing, messaging, task management in the cloud — already generalized, what makes hybrid work more truly possible is an agreement between the company and its employees about flexible work arrangements. Drawing on years of remote-work research, scholars have found that when ownership and expected outcomes are clear, hybrid work actually raises productivity by offering employees a positive experience.
At the same time, research has also found that development through work, serendipitous discoveries that come out of face-to-face interaction, and the spread and sharing of methodology tend to be disadvantaged by remote work.
In the end, it comes down to this: depending on the factors that drive productivity in each job, how do we apply hybrid work, and how transparently and equitably do we run the process of building employee consensus? Those questions will have a major effect on whether the result is a positive employee experience.
New technology, new values, and new work arrangements — three trends that at first glance seem hard to reconcile — share one common destination: how to provide a positive employee experience that raises productivity and attracts and retains top talent. In an era of VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity), where companies can no longer promise steadily rising compensation and lifelong job security — an era in which top talent, not the company, is doing the evaluating — these keywords are the collection of what the moment is asking for.
AI, transparency and inclusion, flexible work arrangements — each of which might sound at first like its own curious novelty — ultimately come back to the same core question: what will employees experience through them, how attractive will the company look as a result, and how far will their potential be pushed?
As we prepare for these new changes, there is one thing to keep firmly in mind: "In the end, all roads lead to employee experience."