I would like to speak about the idea of the new human resources, and how HR is moving from administrative functions to more strategic partners. In lecture $1,$ we learned that HR is going more into becoming change agents, employee champions, and strategic partners and that all of this is done through evidence$-$based research $($Chowhan$,2024).$

Firstly, HR has rapidly been developing into a strategic role within the workplace. It is explained in an article by Bonnie Monych that It is very important to have not only a business plan, but a strategic vision, and this includes an HR plan $($Monych$,2023).$ AN important role in HR being a more strategic role is becoming more "agile" in the workplace. In my own work experience, in an HR internship, I have noticed the fact that HR needs to become more proactive, instead of reactive. an example of this would be when I noticed while working in the internship, that we had a policy of only giving a certain amount of time off for personal reasons. There was an issue that arose, that people were calling in sick a lot more, and we were confused as to why. Something that the HR department was failing to see was that we needed to research and use what the professor taught us; "evidence$-$based research," to diagnose problems and actually promote change in the workplace. In this example, the HR manager explained that we needed to figure the issue out and so what ended up happening was that we gained statistics on the amount of people calling in sick per month, and got more information on which departments. This led us to get to the root causes of the problem, that there was an underlying issue with the amount of time off we give employees, which is forcing these employees to be dishonest and call in sick more than needed. When it comes to the organization being "change agents," the manager then asked if we had any suggestions to improve this issue, now that we had root causes with data to actually prove it$.$ We ended up coming up with the idea of incurring regular check$-$ins with employees using AI$,$ which would allow us to use real$-$time data in order to make better decisions in the future.

An example of how strategic HRM has worked for other companies is the example of Google. After doing further research, I was able to find that Google has been using strategic HRM in terms of people management to improve work processes like turnover, satisfaction, and more. Google initiated something called Project Oxygen, which is a study that is still going on into managers at Google, finding the $10$ best traits that they have, asking employees what they find the best for them, and they ended up finding those traits and training managers at google, which in turn helped with satisfaction, turnover, and people management as a whole $($Miles$,2022).$ What this shows us is that HR being more strategic actually helps the company, that by being more proactive, companies can improve their work processes, and all of it is done by using evidence$-$based research.

Question: Given that HR is headed into more of a strategic role in the future, what kind of role do you think Artificial Intelligence will play? HOw does AI relate to the idea of evidence$-$based research?