HR tech and AI agents: 5 actions CHROs should take now

Why AI agents are an HR breakthrough

Even after decades of automation and outsourcing, day-to-day operational demands still weigh you down — limiting the value you can create for the business. But now, from recruiting to payroll, benefits administration to workforce planning, AI agents can take on high-volume tasks that legacy technologies couldn’t reach.

The power of agents is that they don’t just perform structured tasks. If you give them high-level goals, they can interact with their environment, with each other and with people to get the job done. They can reason their way through difficulties, create plans and execute.

Agents can be designed to retain past actions and outcomes, enabling them to adapt and improve over time. Like HR specialists building expertise, they can learn, improve and uncover new ways to solve problems. Humans remain central to HR. They must be at the helm for decision making and risk review. But under human supervision, agents can automate or augment large parts of almost every HR workflow, lifting many burdens from people’s shoulders.

Where AI agents deliver the most HR value

Building on our expertise in implementing AI agents and transforming work, we leveraged PwC’s HR taxonomy (our Global People Process Framework) to analyze 300+ subprocesses across the hire-to-retire lifecycle. While select tasks remain human-led, more than half of the operational work can be agent-assisted or fully agent-driven. Let’s take a look at some of our findings.

Most strategy work (shaping talent programs, workforce design and culture, etc.) will remain human led. But AI agents can help drive or assist roughly 50% of advisory work (guiding leadership on talent opportunities and workforce risk). Agent-automated or agent-assisted work can rise to over 60% for day-to-day (functional) HR processes. And for administrative work (routine transactions, forms and reporting), AI agents can enable over 88% of HR workflows.

Reimagine HR: How agents change talent acquisition, development and mobility

Consider some of HR’s most important responsibilities like candidate sourcing and talent development and mobility. In an AI-driven talent acquisition workflow, a hiring manager initiates an AI agent to start a requisition. The agent drafts the job description, checks it against existing roles, aligns it with the organization’s job architecture and sends it to the hiring manager for review and approval. The agent then posts the role across internal and external job boards. It looks for candidates based on algorithmic assessment of fit, screens candidate profiles, ranks them and gives the hiring manager a shortlist for review. Another agent reaches out to candidates, schedules interviews and engages with the candidate. Yet another prepares interview materials for the hiring manager. Agents are also showing early success in conducting agent-facilitated screening interviews, complete with standardized evaluations, candidate consent, adverse-impact monitoring and human oversight in decision-making.

Agentic solutions can save hiring managers and recruiters up to 70% of their time spent on sourcing activities — freeing them to focus on personalized outreach, coaching internal candidates, delivering customized communications and preparing for interviews.

Another area seeing meaningful impact? Talent mobility and development. Employees share their aspirations with an agent that then evaluates the employee’s experience, identifies internal opportunities, pinpoints skills gaps and creates a learning plan with employee and manager input. As employees acquire new skills, other agents update profiles, recommend roles and notify recruiters. Managers can now focus on coaching employees. With these agents orchestrated into a seamless process, the time savings for HR professionals can be significant, giving the company a more productive workforce with less turnover and more internal advancement.

5 actions CHROs should take today

Talent sourcing and development are just two examples of how agents can automate high-value, repetitive HR work and assist with more complex tasks. AI agents are also reshaping benefits administration, payroll, performance management, workforce planning, succession planning, employee relations and other functions.

AI agents can deliver value quickly because they scale smoothly, reusing proven workflows, integration patterns, and agent architecture, enabling measurable impact in weeks and a new AI-powered operating model within months.

1. Find your quick wins. Assess your current state and determine the best places for agents to deliver value quickly. In some cases, ROI can come within 30 days.

2. Start small, design for reuse. A few impactful buildouts that deliver value fast and win buy-in are the way to go. But you should be ready to scale. Adopt an approach that lets you reuse agents and the underlying tech. That can help you scale quickly and keep costs down.

3. Show people their new value. Our 2025 Global AI Jobs Barometer indicates that AI makes employees in HR and throughout the organization more valuable. That’s especially so if they have new skills, like how to oversee AI, and a culture of working in teams with AI agents.

4. Make your own job easier. As an HR leader, a big part of your job will soon be overseeing and coordinating agents and hybrid agent-human teams. A platform like PwC’s agent OS can make that part of the job more intuitive and straightforward for you and your team.

5. Reinvest your new capacity. When your HR specialists have half of their current workday freed up, thanks to agents, you’ll want a new operating model where your people can focus on enhancing experiences and on providing strategic guidance — especially on how AI will soon redefine what workforce your company needs.