The Future of HR: How Oracle Is Putting Agentic AI to Work

On this episode of the Gen AI Breakthrough podcast, Harry Osle, Chief Human Resources Officer at The Hackett Group®, speaks with Laura-Elizabeth Ware, Senior Vice President of AI and Agentic Applications at Oracle, about how AI is reshaping the future of human resources. They discuss the shift from HR as a support function to HR as a strategic driver of business transformation, where AI helps organizations automate routine work, improve decision-making, enhance employee experiences and enable a new human-agent workforce model.

Welcome to the Hackett Group’s Gen AI Breakthrough Podcast, where top experts give actionable AI insights and expert advice on how to achieve breakthrough business performance. In this episode, Harry Osle, Chief HR Officer at the Hackett Group^®, is joined by Laura-Elizabeth Ware, Senior Vice President of AI and Agentic Applications at Oracle, to discuss the rapidly changing HR landscape.

Laura-Elizabeth describes how HR is shifting from supporting business operations to actively shaping how work gets done, with AI agents handling routine coordination, analysis and administrative tasks and humans focusing on judgment, empathy, leadership and accountability. She explains that successful AI adoption requires contextual understanding of employees and business processes, integration into existing workflows and strong foundations of trust, security, privacy and human oversight. AI is already improving productivity, decision-making, recruitment and employee experience; one organization reduced recruitment time by more than 48%, while another resolved 85% of over 20,000 open-enrollment questions without HR intervention. These developments allow HR professionals to spend less time on repetitive tasks and become more proactive in addressing workforce needs and supporting employees and managers.

Harry highlights Oracle’s AI Explorer tool, which identifies opportunities to automate individual work steps across HR platforms and helps organizations implement AI throughout entire processes. The speakers stress that realizing these benefits requires more than introducing new technology. Organizations must rethink how work is divided between people and AI, identify where human expertise remains essential and prepare employees to develop the skills needed to work effectively alongside AI agents. This transition sets the stage for a broader discussion about becoming a skills-based organization.

Laura-Elizabeth explains that becoming a skills-based organization is essential to succeeding in an AI-enabled workplace, where workforce planning must focus not only on job titles but also on employees’ capabilities and the skills businesses will need in the future. As AI automates and augments tasks, organizations must identify skill gaps, invest in employee development and determine how human expertise and AI capabilities can work together effectively. Harry describes this shift as a move from strategic workforce planning to strategic capability planning, with HR responsible for ensuring employees can take full advantage of AI. Laura-Elizabeth recommends beginning with an assessment of existing workforce capabilities and business processes, identifying opportunities where AI can improve productivity, decision-making and employee experience and establishing trusted data, governance and technology foundations. Rather than treating AI as solely a technology project, organizations should approach it as a workforce transformation, starting with targeted use cases, measuring results and continuously developing employees’ skills as work evolves.

To show AI’s practical value, Laura-Elizabeth walks through customer examples, including a retail organization that reduced payroll reconciliation time from 80 hours per pay period to just 15 minutes and another workflow that resolved 300 to 400 weekly timecard exceptions before they reached payroll. She also introduces Oracle’s Workforce Operations Command Center, which coordinates scheduling, timekeeping and absence management while identifying risks, anticipating downstream impacts and guiding workforce coverage decisions. These examples demonstrate how AI can do more than automate routine tasks; it can help organizations proactively address operational problems, improve accuracy and deliver better business outcomes. The conversation concludes with Harry and Laura-Elizabeth emphasizing the partnership between Oracle and The Hackett Group^® in helping organizations assess AI readiness, measure efficiency gains and prepare HR teams for the future.

Timestamps:

1:24 – HR’s shift from business support to shaping how work gets done.

3:34 – Preparing HR for AI through responsible adoption and work redesign.

7:49 – AI’s practical effects on productivity, decision-making and employee experience.

10:17 – Supporting managers and redesigning work around human strengths.

15:09 – Preparing employees for an AI-enabled, skills-based organization.

16:24 – Becoming a skills-based organization in the AI era.

19:23 – Moving from strategic workforce planning to strategic capability planning.

21:09 – Three priorities for beginning the AI journey.

24:49 – Practical AI applications in payroll and workforce operations.

26:30 – Proactive workforce operations and the value of customer feedback.