Unless you’ve been living off-grid for the last two years, you’ll know that AI is the hot topic in the HR and L&D world right now. Businesses are using AI to do everything from creating elearning courses to summarising PDFs to engaging in smart conversations with learners, and it’s not showing any signs of slowing down.
For HR and L&D teams in small businesses, AI might sound exciting... but you may also worry that you don’t have the technical skills to make it work for you. If you’re a one- or two-person team trying to spin a million plates, adding AI to your to-do list can feel way too daunting.
But the good news is that it doesn’t have to be! In fact, there are plenty of quick wins you can put in place right now that will make your HR and learning management efforts significantly faster, easier and less stressful.
Let’s take a look at just some of the ways that small business HR teams are experimenting with AI, and how you can replicate their results in your organisation.
SurveyMonkey Genius AI survey builder
If you’ve ever sent out an employee engagement survey, chances are you’ve used a survey creation tool like SurveyMonkey or Typeform.
These tools now feature AI-powered survey template builders, which automatically suggest questions based on what you want to find out.
For instance, with SurveyMonkey Genius, you can write a short prompt for a survey (such as ‘I work for a small business called MiniBiz. I want to find out how our employees feel about our current L&D offering’) and with the power of AI, it will automatically create you a survey, ready to be edited by you. It can also recommend the type of question you should use, ensuring you get the most out of your employee survey.
When considering AI for HR, it’s important to remember that most HR professionals won’t have any coding experience. But this shouldn’t stand between you and the benefits of AI for HR teams!
In the last couple of years, there has been a flurry of no-code AI agents, such as Mindset AI, designed to allow users to create a ‘DIY agent’ to answer questions. HR and L&D teams can create their own AI agent to act as a platform guide or a curator to help users find what they need, helping save time for HR professionals who tend to deal with the same questions day in, day out.
Opting for a no-code AI agent for HR means you can enjoy a self-service setup process. You’ll be guided through the chatbot setup step by step, including feeding it the right information and embedding it on your LMS, intranet or other relevant platform.
Find out what our CEO Philip Huthwaite has to say about the benefits of AI agents:
Interested in using a plug-and-play AI agent in your own LMS? Then you need to hear our very exciting news, coming soon... subscribe to our Take 5 newsletter to be the first to hear!
Calendly AI-enhanced virtual scheduling tool
A massive part of any HR or L&D professional’s week will be scheduling, whether that’s training workshops, onboarding sessions, interviews or general meetings. The HR team is often stuck navigating multiple calendars (such as interview candidates, hiring managers and other panel members), which can be frustrating and time consuming, with a lot of back and forth.
An AI scheduling tool, like Calendly or x.ai, takes the pressure off HR teams by automating the scheduling process, which can save hours of wasted time. These tools also integrate seamlessly with calendar tools like Google Calendar or Outlook, so you don’t need to constantly amend and delete calendar entries for multiple people.
For instance, instead of the HR team suggesting a bunch of random times for a job interview, they can simply send the candidate a Calendly link which syncs up with the hiring manager’s work calendar. The candidate can then choose a time that suits both them and the hiring manager, and they can amend the time themselves if they need a different slot.
Grammarly AI language editing tool
If your HR or L&D role requires a lot of internal comms, you may find that you spend a lot of time going round in circles getting your comms reviewed, making edits, getting approvals etc.
A plugin such as Grammarly will automatically review all of your written communications, whether that’s emails, documents or even instant messages, for spelling, grammar and tone, and will make smart recommendations based on what you’re writing. If you’re not a confident writer, it’ll help you get your message across clearly and succinctly, and even for great communicators, it can suggest ways to clarify your points, which is especially important for HR professionals dealing with sensitive topics.
You can also use AI summary tools like Scribbr or QuillBot to quickly summarise long documents or reports. This can be useful for summarising meeting notes or lengthy resources, helping you pull out the key points everyone needs to know to ensure that the most important information is surfaced.
Effy AI employee analytics tool
For HR teams, employee analytics will always be important, while for L&D, learner analytics will be a strong focus. While your LMS or HRIS platforms may provide some of the information you need, it will often be up to the HR team to interpret it and draw conclusions from the data.
AI for HR tools like HiBob, Visier or Effy AI offer useful HR analytics with built-in AI features, allowing your HR team to track and understand things like employee engagement, performance and learning progress in a highly visual, user-friendly format.
This can help a busy HR team spot trends they might otherwise miss, or the very early signs of challenges that need to be addressed, such as small downturns in employee engagement, stalled progress towards learning goals in specific teams or high turnover in certain parts of the business.
Contrary to popular belief, you absolutely don’t need to be a developer (or even especially tech-savvy) to make the most of AI for HR! There are already so many off-the-shelf tools, many of which are free, that will help you accelerate and streamline your processes, without needing the input of your IT team. 5app's own development team have been getting to grips with the latest in AI for HR, and they're brimming with ideas to bring you the AI features you need to make your life easier.
If you’re an HR or L&D professional looking for an AI-powered LMS, we’re excited to share that 5app is working on some much-requested AI features right now. We'll be sharing our progress very soon, so stay tuned for more info!