HR’s enthusiasm for AI is starting to crack right as adoption peaks. Culture Amp’s second annual AI in HR study, based on 264 HR professionals across North America, Asia-Pacific, and Europe, finds 77% of HR professionals express strong buy-in on AI, down from 86% a year ago, while just 24% feel comfortable letting AI act autonomously through agentic workflows. Confidence that generative AI will improve the perceived value of HR expertise has dropped from 47% to 38% over the same period.
The gap is showing up in how HR actually uses the tools. Most of the AI activity Culture Amp measured is still task-level: 86% for content creation, 83% for brainstorming, 81% for information synthesis. Only 39% of respondents have moved AI into HR operations automation, and just 34% are using it for agentic workflow support. That matters for HR leaders because the same data shows a payoff gap tied directly to that gap in ambition: practitioners who have already let AI operate within set boundaries report process transformation at rates two to three times higher than peers, and are nearly three times as likely to say AI made them better leaders (70% versus 25%). HRTech has previously reported on the related gap between HR’s AI spending and its measured returns, and Culture Amp’s findings point to a likely mechanism: spend is outrunning deployment courage, not the other way around.
The sharpest original signal in the data is about company size, not sentiment. Organizations with 11 to 50 employees report higher AI transformation metrics across nearly every measure than larger enterprises, despite having far fewer resources to throw at the problem. That inverts the usual assumption that bigger AI budgets and dedicated implementation teams should produce faster results. It suggests governance friction, not tooling or spend, is the real constraint on agentic AI in HR, and large employers evaluating why their AI investment has not moved the needle should audit approval layers and risk sign-off processes before assuming the vendor or the budget is the bottleneck.
Source: Culture Amp via PR Newswire
