AI has the power to automate administrative tasks and free up HR leaders to focus on what matters most to them—but they must be intentional about their strategy.

By Gillian Manning

AI is changing how HR teams work. Instead of spending hours sorting through resumes, they can now let algorithms do the heavy lifting by combing through hundreds, if not thousands, of applications in just seconds. For some, that may instill fear about the future of job availability in the field, but, Chet Seely, vice president of AI Strategy at WSFS Bank, says it doesn’t have to be that way.

“AI is automating a lot of the administrative tasks that we see around us. But the core function of what HR is is going to become much more present and center, and it’s going to become much more important in the future.”

Rather than replacing strong leaders, automation can take over scheduling, initial resume screening, and basic transactional queries, leaving strategy and organizational accountability in human hands, he explains.

The Shifting Landscape

A major driver of this change is a technical shift from external vendor platforms toward proprietary, internal AI builds. With that, HR departments have a unique opportunity to gain structural ownership of these internal models rather than relying entirely on public, generalized third-party platforms.

This technical shift places a heavy emphasis on the need for role dimensionality. According to Seely, single-dimensional jobs are highly vulnerable to automated displacement. “If you define your entire job as a photographer doing head shots, for example, that job has zero dimensionality,” he says. “But if you had just one other dimension to that job, let’s say you were doing weddings, there’s zero chance that one of these delivery robots is coming in to shoot your wedding. That little incremental dimensionality secures their job for the future.”

For HR executives, long-term relevance requires strategy, managing complex organizational dynamics that automated systems can’t replicate.

The Accountability Mandate

A major point of risk for organizations is the algorithmic “black box.” In other words, AI systems whose internal workings are a complete mystery to their users; while users can see the inputs you feed in and the outputs it returns, the complex logic between is hidden. Software tools like this have the potential to increase efficiency and free up HR’s mental load, but they can’t take legal liability or defend decisions before executive leadership.

“Software is never going to be able to own the ethical tradeoffs or make decisions in a way that we can be accountable for,” Seely says. “It’s very, very efficient, but it’s never going to be accountable to your board or to your C-suite.”

Legal precedents are already reinforcing this new reality. Under the legal theory of agency, employers face direct liability for discriminatory automated outputs, as seen in the ongoing Mobley v. Workday litigation involving an applicant over the age of 40 whose resume was filtered out by automated tools. Statutes set across Pennsylvania, Delaware, New Jersey, Colorado, New York, and the EU are converging on the fact that corporate leaders can’t rubber-stamp automated decisions, Seely says.

From Processor to Steward

Managing this oversight requires changing the daily workflow of HR. While a human-in-the-loop framework ensures verification, requiring a manual checkpoint for every transactional decision can create a bottleneck. “If you’re in the loop all the time, you’re slowing everything down tremendously,” Seely says.

The solution is transitioning to a human-on-the-loop architecture where automated supervisor agents monitor primary transactional bots and flag anomalies. Human executives step in only when structural boundaries are crossed. This allows the administrative tasks to move at maximum velocity while human authority retains control.

Ultimately, this evolution transforms HR from an operational processor into an organizational steward.

“The role of evolution in the future is that we go from being a processor to being a steward,” Seely says. “When I hear that word, I think about the implication of stewardship, it just feels great, it feels right, it feels natural. It also feels like we’re accountable to the workforce that we work with.”

To prepare for this shift, strategic HR leaders must focus on new capabilities—like automated system auditing, data literacy, predictive analytics, and change management — to build an empowering organizational chart by 2028 and 2030. The business value of this human baseline remains clear.

Seely highlights a recent personal interaction within his own firm. While trying to navigate complex benefits to secure a second home, an HR professional personally resolved his inquiry in a couple minutes.

“For a guy who lives all day in agents and bots and in machine learning, it feels amazing to be able to connect with a human and have that humanity brought front and center to the future of human resources,” Seely says. “There’s no way that HR is going away; it’s going to evolve and become the best sense of itself.”

As AI takes over an increasing number of administrative tasks, HR professionals will have more time and energy to dedicate to human interactions, like what Seely experienced.