Building Trust in the Age of AI-Driven HR

Successful businesses proclaim that their most valuable asset is their people. Building and fostering an engaged and motivated workforce has always been a hallmark of such organizations. This is even more important as we better understand how positive employee experiences help drive better customer experiences. 

The emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) is fundamentally changing work across employees and organizations, and the HR department is no different. AI can continuously monitor performance, help track goals, identify skills gaps and recommend supporting learning modules and even alternative career paths.  

Supervisors can offload repetitive administrative tasks to AI and tap it for real-time insights and reporting to help gauge employee performance more frequently than traditional quarterly or annual reviews. AI can help discover micropatterns in behavior and flag potential concerns or potential leadership qualities, enabling proactive managerial coaching and encouragement. 

HR leaders are faced with maintaining a difficult balance. They must embrace and extend, and not impede, innovation on the whole within carefully set guidelines. They must understand and communicate AI’s benefits to the workforce. And they must continue to champion the core values at the beating heart of any organization: the “H” and “R.” 

The Human Side of AI in HR: Trust Matters More Than Ever

Trust is central to everything that HR departments do and touch. And trust matters more than ever in AI-enabled workplaces. HR must ensure that there are rules and boundaries when implementing any kind of AI, that the technology respects the boundaries set for it, and continues to provide accurate information (no hallucinations or misrepresentations) and avoids biases. 

Organizations need to not only map out how they will use AI but also address employee concerns about fairness, bias and data surveillance. Agents hear about AI’s advanced analytics and monitoring capabilities and infer that they’re under constant surveillance, or even a blanket of suspicion.  

They may feel increased pressure to perform, leading to anxiety and reduced morale and even active resistance against AI. Managers might view AI for recording and analytics as intrusive, undermining their decision-making and coaching. They might question the strength of guardrails and audits to prevent bias from creeping into AI. 

All of these concerns, perceived or real, point to the very first role of HR: Educate and be transparent. AI isn’t meant to replace any person, but it is ideal for certain tasks that lend toward automation.  

Instead, HR must communicate to employees that AI is just another tool the company evaluates to help workers change and improve the way work gets done. It has always been and always will be the case that organizations seek ways to evolve and improve. It is HR’s responsibility to emphasize that this will always be done mindful of creativity, empathy, and authenticity, human element that technology cannot do and foreseeably so. 

Addressing AI bias can be tricky because it’s often not explicit. All stakeholders in AI initiatives, including HR, must have technical literacy about AI bias, constantly thinking about guardrails and security challenges, locking down data and systems.  

Ask questions at every step: Is this still safe? Can we still do this? Have a regular cadence to review these questions and policies. No department is an island; partner with legal teams to help ensure there are no missteps or oversights. 

Data Privacy: Protecting Employee Data and Upholding Ethical Use 

HR is the central hub for various types of sensitive personal, behavioral and performance information that must be protected not only from security events and data breaches but also any unauthorized use. Growing use of AI tools exacerbates the need to manage that data’s protection. This requires approaches to direct the entire data lifecycle, from acquisition to eventual deletion.  

These steps cover some basics of data security when using AI in HR: 

• Implement a structured framework that safeguards customer and company data and adheres to regulatory requirements, with rigorous controls and external audits. 

• Monitor who has access and to what specific types of data, based on need and at a minimal level. 

• Encrypt data as it moves between systems. Anonymize data before it used to train models. 

• Beware of drift: a deviation from the continuous data an AI model encounters in practice versus the data it was trained on. This leads to performance degradation, and possible bias in output data. 

• Conduct annual compliance training that covers the types of data, in particular personally identifiable information (PII), as well as acceptable uses of it. PII includes more than personal information such as social security numbers; it could include how long agents work and how many agents are on the system. 

• Understand how to protect data across multiple AI tools at use within the company, not just for HR but anywhere where protected or personal information is being shared. For example, an in-house version of ChatGPT must protect and shield your company’s data from exposure to anyone external. Do that for every AI tool in use. 

Above all: Be transparent with employees about AI use involving data.  

Consider how to communicate data privacy steps to employees that AI is there, but the company is also protecting data. And be prepared to explain that it’s safe, fair and transparent before you ask them to engage with it. Once employees feel their trust is broken, or even worse that data has been or is being exposed, that opens up problems that cannot be easily solved. 

Human vigilance must guide how AI is built and implemented. Don’t let the urgency of innovation overrule how data is acquired to train AI, how and where to use the results and the permissions for its use. 

The Human-AI Balance: Insight Meets Empathy 

AI is only as good as the data and information it’s trained on. There will always be a need to focus on what humans are really good at, things that can’t be (foreseeably) replaced: creativity, integrity, empathy and trust. 

As with any AI-based initiative, ensuring an AI system accommodates the organization’s company values starts with a governance team and guardrails. Understand ethical boundaries and don’t cross them with AI.  

Ensure transparency so employees know when AI is involved with an interaction or process and where humans are in place. Some people might not want to leverage AI for whatever reason, so consider providing options for them.  

Maintaining a human-AI balance means avoiding the risk — often, a temptation — to use AI for automation in roles it shouldn’t occur, such as conflict resolution and career development. Nobody wants to arrive at a point where all work feedback is through AI. 

Finally, preserve those human checkpoints. Employees and managers still need occasional communication to talk about goals, where a worker might have missed the mark, where to succeed and do better in the next year. Foster moments where employees and managers connect, real people talking about real goals and results. 

Building Trust for AI in HR 

AI has no moral compass. HR leaders must preserve and emphasize human elements of empathy, inclusion and wellbeing alongside any AI usage. If roles are presented to an inquiring employee, the AI should know to present them with no basis on the employee’s identity, such as race or gender or sexual orientation. If an AI technology under evaluation cannot accommodate that, don’t pursue it or don’t use it for that aspect. 

Determine what the AI itself was trained on. Can your organization personalize its version of that AI? Train it on the company’s values, such as empathy and inclusion, aligned with what your company stands for publicly and internally. 

Share ownership of AI. Whatever an HR is using an AI tool for, IT and legal are probably involved as well. Work with these teams so everyone and everything is aligned with agreed-upon guidelines. 

Use AI for insights that support decisions, not to assess. For example, at a six-month point AI calculates and sends employes an update: “You’ve completed 50% of your goals for this year! Here are ways you can pick up the pace and finish strong.” Use AI to provide statistics about progress, not the evaluation. 

Communicate sensitive topics person to person. Be explicitly clear: AI is part of the preparation for those conversations, not to conduct them. Judgments still belong to managers or an HR representative. 

Reinforce the culture. Providing employees a healthy work environment starts with company leadership tying directly to organizational values. Lead with empathy, attentive listening and compassion. 

Human-Centered AI as a Competitive Advantage 

In some ways, AI is the latest technological shift that has people wondering how it will affect their day-to-day work life. But AI is here, offering measurable benefits both specific and broadly across organizations. HR leaders must take a central role to embrace AI but also preserve the human values and abilities that no technology can reproduce. 

Read the 2026 Buyer’s Guide for AI and CX to see how you can evolve your employee experience with AI-powered technologies.

Khayleia Foy, Business Value Specialist at Genesys, also contributed to this article.