There is a pattern forming across organizations right now, and HR departments are caught right in the middle of it. The people responsible for managing how workers adapt to AI are themselves struggling to adapt to AI. A new survey from Culture Amp, released July 22, makes this visible with data.
Of 264 HR professionals surveyed across North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific, the vast majority are using AI for writing, brainstorming, and summarizing. These are genuine time-savers. But they are also the most basic things AI can do. The more meaningful step, where AI is set up to complete multi-step processes on its own within defined rules, has been taken by only about a third of HR functions surveyed.
This distinction matters because the results are not comparable. Culture Amp's data shows that HR teams operating with these more automated workflows are seeing improvement at rates two to three times higher than those still using AI primarily as a drafting tool. The gap is not small.
What makes this especially worth paying attention to is the confidence trend running in the wrong direction. Belief that AI will significantly improve how work gets done dropped nine percentage points in a single year, from 86% in 2025 to 77% in 2026. Confidence that AI will boost the perceived value of HR expertise fell from 47% to 38% in the same period. The more HR professionals claim responsibility for AI strategy, the less optimistic they feel about it. That is a sign that early expectations met the friction of real implementation.
There is also a visible gap between seniority levels. Among C-suite leaders overall, 54% are already using AI in a more automated, agent-style way. Among C-suite HR leaders, that number drops to 37%. Among HR staff doing individual contributor roles, it falls to just 16%. The top of the organization is moving faster than the function that is supposed to be setting the example.
A joint study from KPMG and the University of Texas at Austin, which analyzed over 1.4 million real workplace AI interactions from 2,500 employees, found that the most effective AI users were not those who used it most often or who had the best technical knowledge. They were the ones who engaged with AI as a collaborator: framing problems clearly, guiding the AI's reasoning, and reviewing its outputs critically rather than accepting them wholesale. The skill is not technical. It is managerial.
This connects directly to what SHRM's president and CEO, Johnny Taylor, told roughly 20,000 HR professionals at the organization's annual conference in June. Taylor warned that HR faces "extinction" if it cannot demonstrate the return on investment of people with the same rigor that technology investments demand. He called for HR leaders to reframe their role as "Chief Work Officer," responsible not just for human employees but for overseeing all work, whether done by people or by automated systems.
For any business operator outside of HR, this carries a practical signal. If your company's HR function is still treating AI purely as a convenience tool for drafting job postings or summarizing meeting notes, it is probably not yet in a position to guide your broader organization's AI adoption either. The function that is meant to manage workforce transitions is navigating its own.
The organizations doing better right now are the ones that have moved from asking AI to help with tasks, to building processes where AI carries out defined sequences of work and humans check the results. That shift does not require deep technical expertise. It requires deciding which repetitive, rules-based processes exist in your organization and setting up AI to run them within boundaries your team controls. HR is a good place to start because many of its core processes, onboarding steps, policy queries, scheduling, performance review cycles, fit exactly that description.
The confidence gap in this survey is a useful warning. Enthusiasm for AI that is not matched by a change in how it is actually used tends to produce disappointment, not results.