Introduction
I’m Raheel Saqib, HR Manager at The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf in Lahore, and I’ve spent the last couple of years deliberately learning how AI tools actually fit into HR work, rather than treating it as a buzzword to nod along to in meetings. I’ve gone through formal training specifically on this, receiving a certification on generative AI in HR, and another on using Claude for professional work. The honest takeaway is that most of the value isn’t where people expect it to be.
The conversation around AI in HR tends to jump straight to automation replacing recruiters or performance reviews. What I’ve actually found useful is much less dramatic than that, and much more specific.
Where AI Tools Genuinely Help
The clearest wins are in the parts of HR work that are necessary but repetitive. Let’s say, drafting a first pass of a job description, summarizing a long policy document into something an employee will actually read, or getting a structured starting point for a difficult conversation before I walk into the room. None of that replaces judgment. It removes the blank-page problem, which is a bigger time cost in HR work than people usually admit.
Managing end-to-end HR operations, from workforce planning to compliance to employee engagement, means constantly switching between very different kinds of writing and thinking. AI tools are genuinely useful for handling the mechanical part of that switch, getting a rough draft of a compliance summary or an onboarding checklist quickly, so the actual HR judgment goes into refining it rather than staring at a blank document. A five-minute draft that needs fifteen minutes of editing is still faster than starting from nothing, and in a role that involves this much writing, that adds up over a week.
Where I Don’t Trust It
Anything involving a specific person’s employment situation whether it’s a performance issue, a disciplinary case or an employee relations matter. It’s where I stop relying on AI output past the drafting stage. Employee relations work depends on context an AI tool doesn’t have: history with this specific person, the tone of previous conversations, what’s actually been said in the room before. Using AI to help structure how I communicate a decision is fine. Using it to help make the decision is a different thing entirely, and I don’t do that.
That distinction matters more than most general advice about AI in HR captures. The tools are consistently good at helping organize and articulate a decision that’s already been made through actual HR judgment. They’re not a substitute for the judgment itself, and treating them as one is how an HR professional ends up defending a decision they can’t fully explain, because the reasoning behind it never actually happened in their own head.
What Formal Training Changed
Before going through structured training on this, I was using AI tools the way most people start out, informally and inconsistently, without much sense of where the reliable uses stopped and the risky ones began. What the training actually added was a framework for that boundary: understanding what these tools are genuinely reliable at producing versus what requires enough scrutiny that using the output directly would be a mistake.
That’s a different skill than knowing how to write a good prompt. It’s closer to knowing which categories of HR work can absorb an AI-assisted first draft safely, and which categories including anything touching a specific employee’s record, standing, or treatment need a human doing the actual thinking from the first sentence, not just the editing pass at the end.
What I’d Tell an HR Professional Just Starting to Use These Tools
The mistake I see most often isn’t overusing AI tools in HR. It’s using them without a clear sense of where the line is, so they end up either avoiding the tools entirely out of caution, or leaning on them in situations where that caution was actually warranted. Both are worse than having an explicit rule for yourself about where AI assistance stops and your own judgment has to take over completely.
Building a people-first HR practice with these tools in the mix means treating AI the way I’d treat any other efficiency tool: genuinely useful for the mechanical parts of the job, and completely beside the point for the parts of HR that are actually about people. The tools will keep getting better at mechanical work. That doesn’t change where the line sits, it just makes it more tempting to blur it, which is exactly why having a clear rule for yourself matters more over time, not less.
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Frequently Asked Questions
How do HR professionals actually use AI tools in practice?
Most practical value comes from AI handling repetitive drafting work first-pass job descriptions, policy summaries, structured starting points for difficult conversations while judgment-heavy work involving specific employees, like performance or disciplinary matters, stays with the HR professional rather than being delegated to AI output.
Who is Raheel Saqib?
Raheel Saqib is an HR Manager at The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf in Lahore, Pakistan, with over 10 years of experience in talent acquisition, employee relations, performance management, and organizational development.
Where did Raheel Saqib get formal training on AI tools in HR?
Raheel Saqib completed formal certifications on generative AI in HR and on using Claude for professional work, both through LUMS.
Why shouldn’t AI tools be used for employee relations decisions in HR?
Because employee relations decisions depend on context an AI tool doesn’t have access to, such as a person’s history and prior conversations, so AI is better suited to helping communicate a decision that’s already been made through human judgment rather than helping make the decision itself.
