Industry leader says businesses can face compliance risks and missed opportunities for upskilling talent
A growing number of HR teams are struggling with understaffing, leading to widespread challenges for organisations, employees, and overall business performance, according to an industry leader.
This shortage forces HR teams to spend significant time on repetitive administrative tasks, rather than on strategic initiatives that drive business growth, says Aaron Goldsmid, Head of Product at global HR platform Deel.
“Understaffed HR teams cause challenges that have a broad-reaching effect across an entire organisation,” says Goldsmid.
“Because of this, organisations experience a ripple effect: workers don’t receive the attention or learning experiences they need, leading to reduced retention and engagement. For businesses, this can translate to slower hiring processes, compliance risks and missed opportunities for upskilling talent.”
Currently, more than half of HR professionals believe their teams are understaffed, Deel notes, citing a Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) study.
How can AI be used to solve understaffing problems?
Goldsmid says artificial intelligence (AI) can help address these challenges.
“AI allows HR teams to provide personalised experiences for every employee. This can be nearly impossible to achieve manually when teams are understaffed – and stressed. This includes creating customised onboarding plans, career roadmaps and training content tailored to each employee's needs,” he says.
He adds: “AI helps managers have more time, too, so their efforts can be spent on things that benefit their downstream teams, like talent development and business growth. The key is enabling HR teams to focus on what matters most – the human elements of their role, not the rote tasks.”
Both generative AI (GenAI) and AI agents can help HR teams, even though many organisations and users are still trying to navigate the difference between the two, he says.
He explains that GenAI refers to systems that create new content—including text, images or other outputs—based on patterns learned from training data. “It's excellent for content creation tasks like writing job descriptions or generating training materials,” he says.
On the other hand, AI agents are “more sophisticated systems that can take actions, make decisions within defined parameters and interact with multiple systems to complete complex workflows”.
AI agents “go beyond just generating content to actually executing tasks and processes autonomously”.
“AI agents represent a huge leap toward organisational efficiency because they can handle multi-step processes while maintaining context and learning from interactions,” says Goldsmid.
In the HR context, generative AI might help someone write a better job posting, while an AI agent could potentially manage entire recruitment workflows – from posting jobs to scheduling interviews to updating candidate status across multiple systems, says Goldsmid.
Workload pressure is the leading cause of stress for HR leaders, according to a previous poll.
Best practices for employers
To fully maximise the benefits that AI can bring, employers should maintain human oversight “of the most impactful decisions they make,” says Goldsmid.
“Human maintenance, checking and verification of data is essential in the HR space.”
Companies must also ensure not to overlook the importance of data security and privacy, he says.
“Companies should build AI systems in sandboxed environments and restrict them to the company's own data to prevent information leakage between organisations.
“Lastly, company leaders should focus on augmentation, not replacement. Through AI, HR leaders can uplevel their teams and guide their employees to use AI for routine tasks so that they can focus on more meaningful strategic initiatives.”
