How payroll giant ADP practices AI governance and human oversight

For the human capital management and payroll company, embedding AI in its products and maintaining strong AI governance practices are not mutually exclusive.

While ADP uses AI internally within its IT team for coding and to automate tasks such as AI image and video generation, it also has included generative AI features in its ADP Assist tool. ADP Assist is a suite of AI agents that work across HR and payroll workstreams. The agents help reduce pressure on HR and payroll teams.

As an organization with a pervasive presence in enterprise HR and payroll, it has made responsible AI a key ingredient in the tools it releases to its clients.

In this Q&A, Helena Almeida, vice president, managing counsel and AI legal officer at ADP, discusses the company’s responsible AI practices and principles, at a time when much public attention is focused on AI risk and safety.

How has ADP’s responsible AI shifted as generative AI has become more mainstream?

Helena Almeida: ADP's been using different versions of AI and machine learning for years. We have had a responsible AI program for a long time. We have had a set of ADP AI and data ethics since 2018 that govern how we develop and deploy AI.

Around the same time, we formed our AI and data ethics council, comprising internal subject matter experts and external experts, spanning legal, privacy, ethics, HR, and product expertise from both internal and external providers. We have a team that is always looking at uses of technology and AI to make sure we have the right perspective.

We have always been thinking about responsible AI. As AI technology has shifted to include GenAI uses, we keep looking at our processes, we keep looking at our cross-functional teams within ADP to look at AI governance, and we keep updating them. The essential premises are making sure it is fair, transparent, secure and that a human is involved. The key decisions that affect people have stayed the same.

Some are obvious, some are harder to anticipate upfront.