Agentic AI is quickly becoming one of the most talked-about developments in enterprise technology. As AI agents begin to interact with employees, influence decisions and reshape workflows, HR has a central role to play in understanding where this technology can bring real value, and ensuring it’s introduced with transparency, care and strategic alignment.
But where to get started? This article explores the most promising agentic AI use cases in HR, as well as key strategic actions needed to ensure a successful, people-centered rollout.
But first, a quick recap: What exactly is agentic AI?
What Is Agentic AI, and How Is It Different From Traditional AI?
Agentic AI refers to artificial intelligence that goes beyond providing AI-driven insights and recommendations to actually taking action. Unlike traditional AI, which requires human intervention to complete tasks, agentic AI can operate autonomously to execute and delegate tasks, make decisions within predefined parameters and optimize workflows based on context to achieve a predefined goal.
As agentic AI evolves, it’s emerging in two powerful forms. The first is AI copilots: interactive assistants that guide users through tasks via natural, conversational interfaces. The second is autonomous agents: AI systems embedded into workflows that operate behind the scenes to carry out complex, multi-step actions without human prompts.
Rather than a mere tool, agentic AI acts more like a highly skilled virtual employee who needs oversight and guidance, but can also learn from outcomes to improve performance over time with minimal intervention.
To bring this contrast to life, let’s look at a common HR scenario: handling Paid Time Off (PTO) requests.
- A traditional AI chatbot can retrieve PTO policies or check available dates on a calendar. This is valuable information, but it doesn’t save a lot of time.
- An agentic AI assistant can go further—it can check internal policies, verify PTO balances, submit a request, update the calendar and even notify relevant team members.
This chaining capability—where AI autonomously breaks down complex tasks into smaller, manageable steps—makes agentic AI a game-changer for HR. By moving beyond simply surfacing information to accomplishing end-to-end tasks, agentic AI can save hours when multiplied across thousands of employees.
While productivity gains are significant, agentic AI also opens the door to smarter decision-making, better experiences and greater strategic impact. Let’s take a look at agentic AI in action with some real-world HR use cases.
Agentic AI Use Cases for HR
End-to-End Talent Acquisition
While traditional automation is already streamlining many talent acquisition processes, agentic AI has the potential to take this one step further. This could include initial candidate screening based on the requirements for a particular requisition, scheduling an interview with a recruiter, summarizing interviewers’ feedback and then taking appropriate action, such as dispositioning a candidate or progressing them to the next stage with a personalized congratulations and scheduling link.
By automating these multi-step, time-consuming processes, your team can shift its focus from repetitive admin to more strategic endeavors, such as relationship building, all while improving candidate engagement and helping you keep pace in a competitive talent environment.
Onboarding
While many organizations have used workflow automation and configurable portal frameworks to streamline onboarding—enabling new hires to complete paperwork, access key resources and connect with their teams—it remains an area of opportunity for most. Agentic AI in HR practices offers a new level of service delivery, enhancing the new hire experience by acting as a dynamic onboarding assistant.
From the moment a new hire signs their contract, an agentic AI assistant can guide them through preboarding—helping them complete necessary documentation, share it with the appropriate internal teams and ensure tasks like setting up IT permissions are triggered automatically. It can also recommend relevant training based on the role and schedule introductions with key team members. By handling these steps and coordinating behind the scenes, agentic AI not only accelerates integration but also frees HR to focus on higher-impact initiatives instead of resolving onboarding bottlenecks.
Hyper-Personalized Career Pathing
Despite growing demand for clear career development opportunities, HR teams often lack the resources to provide tailored guidance at scale. Agentic AI can help bridge that gap by synthesizing vast amounts of data—from employee profiles and performance metrics to market trends—to identify skill gaps and recommend hyper-personalized career paths.
What’s more, it can go beyond simply recommending courses to enrolling employees in relevant training, nudging them to complete key milestones and adapting suggestions over time as their skills and interests evolve.
By providing highly targeted, ongoing career guidance at scale, agentic AI boosts your employer value proposition while empowering HR teams to build a more agile, future-ready workforce.
Now that we’ve seen a couple of examples of where agentic AI can help HR teams, let’s examine what it takes for human resources to lead this transformation responsibly and strategically.
Agentic AI in HR: Steering the Shift
While HR hasn’t always been synonymous with technological innovation, Seán Morris, Principal and US Talent Transformation Leader at Deloitte US, believes there is “no better place in the enterprise structure” to start exploring and integrating AI than HR. After all, HR’s decisions around AI don’t just shape its own function—they influence the entire organization.
With agentic AI in particular, the implications run deeper. As AI agents begin performing tasks once handled by people—and in some cases, augmenting or replacing roles—there are clear ethical, cultural and workforce considerations. That’s why it’s essential for HR to help guide how this technology is introduced and managed. From strategy and structure to oversight and governance, HR has a critical role to play in ensuring adoption is both effective and responsible.
How HR Can Prepare for the Shift to Agentic AI
1. Create a Responsible Agentic AI Framework
As the custodians of organizational culture, HR leaders have a vital role in overseeing how agentic AI aligns with organizational values. In the same way that human employees need to adhere to company policies concerning legal issues, data privacy and ethics, organizations also need a clear framework and guardrails for responsible agentic AI use, not just within HR, but across the entire organization.
Frameworks is an area that HR has to focus on in order to make sure they don’t just end up with a lot of AI scattered throughout the tech stack. […] We live inside frameworks. It’s not something that just people in technology can use. It’s great for when things are highly dynamic and changing and you’re allowing lots of people to do lots of different things, but that somehow have to work together at the end of the day.”
Dimitri Boylan
Avature Founder & CEO
This isn’t the sole responsibility of HR and tight cross-functional collaborations with IT, legal and other departments will be crucial. Here are some key questions to get you started:
- Where are you comfortable with Agentic AI acting autonomously? Clear guidelines should be established for AI-human collaboration, outlining which tasks are appropriate for AI agents and which are better left to human judgment. For example, while agentic AI might be well-suited to scheduling interviews or drafting candidate communications, final hiring decisions should remain firmly in human hands.
- Which data will AI agents be able to access and how can they use that data? By aligning your AI framework with international standards, you can remain compliant with regulations like the EU AI Act and the NYC AI regulation.
There are a lot of guardrails and guidelines that we’re putting in place around AI, just to make sure that we’re legally compliant, to make sure that we’re not letting it make decisions for us.”
Erica Rutherford
Director of Technology, Bain & Company
2. Evaluate Your Tech Stack and AI Partners
As HR continues to take on a more strategic role—often operating like a product owner—its influence on technology decisions is growing. In fact, our State of the HR Landscape 2025 survey found that 60 percent of HR leaders now consider HR technology and systems a core part of their role. To successfully leverage agentic AI in HR, that strategic lens must include a thorough evaluation of your existing tech stack.
Legacy tech stacks with overly siloed systems can severely limit your ability to extract meaningful value from AI. When data is fragmented across platforms, AI lacks the holistic view needed to generate insights or drive effective action. For agentic AI specifically, these silos pose an even greater challenge. Agents are designed to carry out multi-step processes across workflows, but if they can’t access the necessary data or systems at each step, their ability to deliver impact is significantly reduced.
Whenever you’re exploring the use of AI agents in HR operations, it’s essential to assess whether your underlying tech stack can support it. It’s not just about adding new capabilities—it’s about ensuring your existing tech stack offers the right architectural foundation to enable seamless data flow and integration across platforms. Without that, even the most advanced agents will be unable to deliver.
Next, assess your technology providers carefully. What’s on their roadmap concerning agentic AI? Do their AI solutions align with your organization’s unique goals and strategic vision? Choose vendors whose AI offerings are transparent, flexible and built to scale—so your organization can grow with the technology, not around it.
3. Address Concerns and Build AI Confidence
We conducted an AI survey across our entire associate population to get a sense of how people are feeling about it. What’s the sentiment? How are they using it? What tools are they using? Just to kind of get a baseline. And it was all over the place. It was 50/50, ‘I use it’ or ‘it’s evil, it’s going to take my job.’”
Rachel Raymond
Director of Talent Acquisition, People Technology & Analytics, Jack Henry
While the long-term impact of agentic AI on roles is still unfolding, it’s natural for employees to feel uncertain, especially as AI agents begin performing tasks that overlap with their own. Rather than downplaying those concerns, HR can play a key role in guiding the conversation, focusing on where agentic AI can enhance work, create new opportunities and open doors to growth.
To do so, HR will need to adopt a range of measures, including:
- Creating safe spaces for discussion and addressing fears of job displacement openly.
- Clearly communicating how AI is used to inform decisions, especially in high-stakes areas such as hiring, promotions or performance evaluations.
- Sharing employee success stories, highlighting how AI has positively impacted their daily work. By demonstrating AI’s practical benefits — how it saves time, reduces administrative burden and unlocks opportunities for professional development — employees are much more likely to see AI as a powerful tool for growth rather than a threat to their roles.
4. Invest in AI Training and Workforce Resilience
Beyond addressing fears of job displacement, the most forward-thinking HR leaders will go a step further by proactively anticipating how agentic AI might reshape roles, skills and workforce composition. Preparing employees to thrive amid this transformation demands deliberate investment in AI-related training and continuous learning.
This investment is essential for future-proofing workforce capabilities and a strategic lever for talent attraction and retention. A recent survey from global staffing giant Adecco found that 57 percent of workers want AI training, signaling a clear expectation: employees want to grow alongside the technology, not be left behind by it.
The depth of AI training, however, should match each employee’s role. While it might be wise to deliver foundational training to every employee to mitigate risk (for example, you wouldn’t want someone unwittingly uploading personally identifiable information to ChatGPT), extensive training won’t be necessary for everyone. In fact, many agentic AI tools are so intuitive that they can even reduce training requirements.
Yet, certain roles, particularly within HR or other corporate functions, will require deeper knowledge. For instance, talent professionals must develop expertise in data analytics, AI fundamentals and emerging trends. Continuous learning, whether that’s through industry publications, webinars, podcasts or events will be essential in this regard. Additionally, hands-on experimentation will help HR teams better understand what agentic AI can and can’t do, allowing them to confidently evaluate the technology and craft well-informed policies about how to best leverage it.
While the responsibility for organizing AI training and upskilling initiatives typically rests with HR and L&D teams, agentic AI can be an invaluable ally. For example, agentic AI could support upskilling efforts by recommending relevant learning opportunities, identifying skill gaps and offering timely, role-specific guidance to keep employees progressing with confidence. In short, agentic AI doesn’t just require training; it can power the training too.
5. Prioritize High-Impact, Low-Risk Use Cases
Don’t create the big bang straight away, but find the right use case and find the right opportunities to test these hypotheses before you go out and make a bigger investment.”
Salma Rashad
Talent Thought Leader
Last but not least, just because you can use agentic AI doesn’t mean you should. Fully autonomous agents remain aspirational in many business contexts, so starting small and staying grounded is key. To get started, HR leaders should focus first on low-hanging fruit—non-controversial, high-impact use cases closely aligned with strategic business goals. Demonstrating clear ROI through these quick wins will build confidence, driving greater buy-in and paving the way for broader adoption.
Large enterprises are leveraging Avature’s agentic AI to significantly enhance user experiences across key touchpoints in the talent lifecycle. For example, knowledge agents reduce HR’s workload by responding to employee queries based on company-specific documentation and routing more complex issues to the right people when needed, giving teams more time for strategic work.
Content and code generation are other promising areas for quick wins. Avature writing agents help global recruiting teams rapidly craft clear, consistent job descriptions and emails aligned with their organization’s unique tone of voice and style, while coding agents enable non-technical users to effortlessly build branded portals and landing pages using simple, natural language prompts.
By strategically selecting such high-impact, practical applications, you can quickly showcase agentic AI’s value, strengthening support across your organization and laying the groundwork for broader, more ambitious initiatives in the future.
Leading HR Into the Agentic AI Era
While the road ahead may be complex, with both opportunity and disruption on the horizon, HR is uniquely positioned to help shape how agentic AI is introduced into the workplace. As AI agents take on more responsibility across workflows, some roles will inevitably change, making it all the more important for HR to guide this transformation with clarity and care.
Doing so means helping organizations understand where agentic AI can bring real value, how it should be governed and what it means for the people whose work will evolve alongside it. By stepping into this role, HR can ensure that adoption is thoughtful, inclusive and aligned with long-term workforce resilience.
If you’re ready to explore how agentic AI can add real value to your organization, get in touch today to discover how Avature’s AI-powered platform for strategic HR can help you bring your AI vision to life.