Perspectives on AI in HR: Seven-Part Series

Editor’s Note: This is the first article in a seven-part GrowthBits series on AI in HR, exploring how leaders can preserve human judgment and embed AI responsibly as work evolves.

The Wife of Bath is your workforce, and she is not going anywhere.

Every AI-in-HR strategy document talks about keeping humans in the loop, preserving the human element, ensuring human oversight. But what does that actually mean?

Human behavior is ancient, universal and stubbornly itself. Chaucer’s Wife of Bath—bawdy, shrewd, and power-hungry who uses wit and persistence to get her way—was written at the end of the fourteenth century but she still feels familiar today. You may have worked with her, or even been her.¹

The greatest art—from Gilgamesh² to Chaucer to Toni Morrison—endures precisely because it captures something about human nature that no era, no technology and no organizational chart has ever successfully engineered out of us. Before deploying AI in any human context, this is the first thing to understand.

People in your organization will respond to AI tools the way people have always responded to being measured by systems they didn’t design: with anxiety, a need for fairness and the desire to be seen as more than a data point. The Wife of Bath is your workforce, and she is not going anywhere.

Human behavior is beautiful, complex and enduring. AI strategies must embrace and account for this.

This post kicks off a series of seven GrowthBits in which we share our perspective on a sequence of questions: What is the “human element” in HR? Where should AI automate versus support? How should hiring evolve as AI improves candidate outputs? What capabilities become more valuable over time? And how can HR teams implement AI responsibly?

We outline four cognitive capacities that constitute human judgment at its highest level that AI cannot replicate for structural rather than temporary reasons, and that determine whether your organization develops people well, hires for the right things and builds a culture worth belonging to. We then explore various angles of the question: how do you protect and develop these four capacities as AI absorbs everything else?

A quick note: throughout history, humans have made sense of the world through the stories we tell ourselves and the art we create. As we grapple with what AI means for the future, and how we apply AI in an HR context, we draw on stories and art throughout this series as analogs for how to understand our current inflection point. We hope you find them useful as well.

Up Next: The Four Capacities of Human Judgment to Protect as AI Enters HR