What we’ve learned putting AI to work in HR.
Notes from our engineers and HR practitioners on permissions, provenance, pay transparency and the rules that govern AI at work. 18 notes since November 2025.
Skills became infrastructure. Judgement didn't.
In October 2026 the two largest HR suites moved skills and task data into the core of their platforms. Inferred skills are now a commodity. The evidence says the bottleneck was never the taxonomy; it was what anyone did with it.
Latest: Perspective № 194 min readSkills, Industry
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- № 17“Potential” is where the promotion gap hides.In a study of 29,809 management-track employees, women were rated 8.3% lower on potential despite higher performance ratings, and were 14% less likely to be promoted. Their lower potential ratings did not predict their future performance. Every HR system has the two columns needed to check this.Research3 min read
- № 16Works councils and robots: the evidence the pilot needs.German plants with works councils kept more of their workers through robot adoption, trained more of them, and did not adopt more slowly. Finland's mandate raised productivity. For an AI rollout that starts with the works council, the numbers are now on the employer's side.Research3 min read
- № 15A skill you cannot verify is a missing figure.Self-rated skills are accurate about one time in ten. Inferred skills score 0.36 to 0.81 on public benchmarks, depending on the task. Neither is a fact. Here is how a Coworker should treat a skill it did not see demonstrated.Research3 min read
- № 14The first pay-transparency request will be a payroll question.Four member states met the June 2026 deadline. The requests will not wait for the others. Most employers will succeed or fail on job architecture and payroll data, not on the report. Here is what to fix first, and where an assistant helps.Perspective4 min read
- № 13What an HR record can and cannot say about who leaves.A century of turnover research says intentions and attitudes drive resignations. The records in an HR system hold neither. Here is what the research says a record can and cannot show, how to test any retention analysis honestly, and why the useful output is never a list of names.Research6 min read
- № 12The policy is not the practice.Every HR team runs on rules that are not in any document: how the review calendar is really dated, which exception is always granted, what a job-code reference means in this company. An assistant that reads only the documents will be fluent and wrong. Here is how we write the practice down.Perspective4 min read
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