ChatGPT and HR: Great support tool but not a replacement for human judgement

Talent experts feel factors like passion, culture and synergies between employees are attributes of humans and not bots/AI.

There is much chatter about ChatGPT. From cracking MBA exams to writing an upcoming Union budget speech, the AI-powered chatbot is showcasing glimpses of future tech.

But it has also given rise to fears of jobs being made redundant, including in human resources management, due to ChatGPT's strong suits of modifying its answers based on human inputs.

However, While ChatGPT and other chatbots can automate certain HR tasks, Sourabh Deorah, CEO and co-founder of Advantage Club, an employee engagement platform, is confident that they cannot replace human judgement or decision-making. It is a great support tool but not a replacement for human judgement or decision-making capabilities, he believes.

Due to its interactive nature, leaders in the HR technology industry feel the chatbot can quickly provide excellent employee support and help HR professionals to do away with some mundane regular tasks, and let them focus on more strategic work.

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“It can parse through large information sets and bring out basic insights, such as common grievances raised by employees, which HR professionals can then consider to find the right solution,” said Deorah.

Replacing humans in HR?

At present, ChatGPT does not have access to the internet, which means its database is limited to what it has learnt prior. The one area where ChatGPT can potentially excel is routine work, like maintaining databases or creating synopses of meetings or even basic advertisement pitches.

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While ChatGPT can achieve a lot in writing, it still isn't capable enough to replace human writers. What it can do is automate repetitive tasks.

Talent experts feel factors like passion, culture and synergies between employees are attributes of humans and not bots/AI. Sumit Sabharwal, CEO at TeamLease HRtech, feels generative AI will only improve efficiency and effectiveness.

“For example, during talent acquisition, it can be used to ask the right questions in initial interview rounds. It can record and analyse the candidates’ responses and report the results and suggestions to the hiring managers—which depends on the accuracy of the AI model,” he explained.

HR should analyse this without any bias and then take decisions rather than completely relying on the tool, Sabharwal added.

Not without challenges

There’s no denying that ChatGPT has captured the public imagination. Microsoft Corp recently said it is deepening its association with OpenAI, which developed the chatbot, with a $10-billion multiyear investment.

Speaking about the chatbot, Infosys CEO Salil Parekh said that the company had supported the initiative with a donation. "We see the progress and a huge congratulations on what they have done. We have examples where we are using ChatGPT with client situations and that is starting to further increase productivity and automation," he said.

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While it would still need qualified HR professionals to perform the best HR practices and leverage ChatGPT, some believe it still poses a threat to certain HR roles by performing a multitude of HR tasks that are currently done manually by professionals.

“For example, to perform multiple tasks like handling employee queries, drafting HR policies, writing job descriptions, analysing databases, conducting employee surveys, etc., would require multiple employees to perform these tasks,” said Sarvesh Agrawal, founder and CEO of Internshala, a career-tech platform.

However, with the help of ChatGPT, he said a smaller number of HR professionals may be able to perform the same as efficiently.

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Since the technology is mainly more intended to automate repetitive tasks, there is a possibility of biased decisions creeping in. Advantage Club’s Deorah highlighted that ChatGPT is trained on an existing dataset and if the past dataset has certain skews, it may inadvertently make prejudiced recommendations.

“For instance, if a company has a skewed gender ratio and the tool is fed with majority profiles of successful candidates from a particular gender, it can build bias towards the other gender and reject specific applications at the screening stage,” he said, adding, “This could lead to a lack of diversity in the workplace and gender discrimination.”