Empowering Your Team: How Innovative Companies Put New HR Technology to Work

BY Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza | January 22, 2025

Ask your nearest HR leader how many pitches they’ve gotten this week from tech vendors promising to make their jobs easier. It’s likely that your company has already shelled out serious money thanks to some of those promises, and all they’ve really gotten is another portal to manage.

There’s a lot of noise in the HR tech sector, said Ardie Sameti, senior director of AI and automation at healthcare tech platform Accolade. The overload of tech tools workers are made to use at work is costing businesses time and money, and generating a lot of frustration. “Don’t get caught up in innovation, although that’s a super attractive and sexy thing. Look for practicality,” he explained during From Day One’s November virtual on how the most innovative companies are using new HR tech.

Before you even evaluate a new tool or product, identify the problem it’s going to solve. You’ll be in a far better position to shop for HR tech that might actually help. Then, commit to rigorous testing. “There are a lot of free pilots out there that you can use to really measure the impact of what you’re looking at,” explained Sameti. Accolade has a sophisticated in-house process that pulls stakeholders from across the business. “Engineering, product, our HR team: Everybody’s very much involved, and we test assumptions in a very controlled manner.”

When vetting new tools, senior director of HR at Sony Interactive Entertainment Ritu Shrivastav asks two questions: First, “what is the lift for the people managers?” And second, “where in the talent journey does this help me?”

How HR Is Adopting Artificial Intelligence

As long as you’re adopting new tools for specific business reasons, there are plenty of possibilities to get excited about. Within the media and entertainment industry, “there’s a leadership-advocated intentional focus on adoption of AI,” said Shrivastav at Sony, where they’ve created a bespoke artificial intelligence training program for engineers.

Panelists spoke about "Empowering Your Team: How Innovative Companies Put New HR Technology to Work" (photo by From Day One)

Of course, she’s quick to acknowledge reticence toward AI and its job-replacing potential. “Keep in mind that technical leaders have carefully curated their careers over several years,” Shrivastav said. “Yes, change is hard, but enhancements are loved and enhancements are easy, so keep in mind that AI is an enabler. It actually enhances your productivity and takes away a lot of that repetitive work.” Once you can get early adopters excited about the potential and evangelizing, that enthusiasm spreads.

Geeta Mahindroo, global VP for finance, HR, and GBS technology at The Estée Lauder Companies, is optimistic about the potential of AI to help employees seamlessly operate the myriad different platforms that exist. “In our personal lives, we have information at our fingertips, but when we go into an organization, we have to navigate so many places to get to the information we need,” she said. Mahindroo is working on a plan to access it all more seamlessly, or what she’s calling “the employee Siri.” By prioritizing experience, she says, “we can say we treat our employees just like our customers.”

Using Tech to Adapt to New Working Models

As career trajectories take new shapes and evolve from job-based work to skills-based work, U.S. Bank is using HR tech to help employees plan their unique future with the company. “It’s important for employees to have the tools they need to have visibility into what’s out there,” said the company’s head of employee engagement Veronika Lantseva. “What are the different roles that could be a potential next step for me, whether lateral or upward, and what are the skills for those roles? And how do I acquire them?”

At Estée Lauder, Mahindroo enlisted a team of tech-savvy interns to update an old employee onboarding process. The team collected feedback from employees across the organization and at all levels, from “interns joining the company for a few weeks to people in mid-career and people who’ve been there a long time.” In just six weeks, the interns had built a prototype.

Their thoroughness “gave me a lot of confidence to say, ‘if we were to take this approach and bring that insight and deploy it, it would have much better adoption within the organization because it factors in the insights from everybody,” Mahindroo explained. It was energizing for the interns and the leadership team as well, she said, “to learn how different generations think about technology, how they thought about enabling it–and how fast.”

To Ensure ROI, Hold Vendors Accountable

Of course, being successful requires a pragmatic, and even ruthless, commitment to numbers. Jeff Williams, CEO of benefits administrator Aptia, encouraged HR leaders to hold their vendors accountable to their pitches. “Many times I talk to clients who just don’t know where they’re at relative to their original assumptions,” he said. “Being a strategic HR leader requires us to talk in real economic terms, and not as much in narrative, to get our fellow executives invested,” he said. “And anyone who’s actually tracking their case on an ongoing basis and revisiting their ROI: They’re in the top decile of heavy HR tech implementation.”

Measure your outcomes unflinchingly, and if there’s some tool collecting dust on a shelf, use it or get rid of it,” Williams said. “Drive toward success-based outcomes, not only getting the thing installed, but getting up to the adoption levels that they committed to and they were helping you with your business case.”

HR leaders must be active tech evangelists, said Sony’s Shrivasta. A lot of leaders talk about why they’ve adopted some tool, “but very few can showcase in their behaviors, embracing it and using it and holding their [direct reports] accountable to saying, all right, we’re going to embrace this as well.”

Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is a freelance journalist and From Day One contributing editor who writes about work, the job market, and women’s experiences in the workplace. Her work has appeared in the Economist, the BBC, The Washington Post, Inc., Quartz, Business Insider, Fast Company, and Digiday’s Worklife.

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