To Make AI Work For HR, You Need True HR Judgment

Jim Barnett is the CEO and Co-Founder of Wisq, an Agentic AI platform for HR.

​HR can be messy work, full of context that doesn’t fit neatly into a form and judgment calls without clean, documented answers.

Take, for example, an employee who has been late three times this month. Her manager wants to know if that’s grounds for a written warning. Before anyone can answer that, HR has to find out whether tardiness has come up before and whether any circumstances explain it. Only after asking a few questions does anyone know if the situation amounts to a performance issue or something else. Whoever signs off on the decision owns it, including if it gets challenged later.

Simple Requests Don’t Need Judgment. They Need A Rule

HR teams can look to IT as an example of a department that has been there, done that with routine question-answering. “Reset my password.” Done, here’s the link. “Send me a new laptop.” Done, it’s on the way. “Update my dependent count from two to three.” Done. None of those needed much context. They mostly needed rules.

HR has requests like that, too. “Where can I find our travel and expense policies?” “When is the next company holiday for my team?” Both questions are pretty easily answered. Neither one needs investigation. Both just need a lookup, and many AI solutions built for HR today can already handle that part well.

But an attendance pattern is much more complicated than a password reset. So is a leave request that depends on a state law and a set of personal circumstances that aren’t documented. Those requests don’t have a rule to match against; they have context to weigh and a decision someone has to own, which is a different kind of problem than IT ever had to solve. These complex HR inquiries can also be multiparty, multi-day and long-horizon, or require a handoff to the appropriate person on the HR team.