A Brave New World of Human Resources Research: Navigating Perils and Identifying Grand Challenges of the GenAI Revolution

This paper reviews the transformative role of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) in Human Resource (HR) management, from a practice perspective, highlighting both opportunities and challenges and laying out a use-inspired future research agenda. This scoping review is grounded in insights from a unique Summit held in Spring 2024, which brought together HR academic scholars with dozens of Fortune 500 Chief Human Resource Officers (CHROs) and their top technical leaders to discuss the workforce implications of GenAI. The paper identifies six key themes from the Summit practitioners: GenAI as disruptive and transformative, data as competitive advantage, adoption challenges, potential ethical abuses, the experimentation imperative, and the critical role of CHROs. These six themes provide a foundation for future research directions, which are discussed regarding six functional HR areas: recruitment and selection, training and development, performance management, job and work design, talent management, and compensation and benefits. The research agenda in each area emphasizes the need for academic researchers to understand and address the practical challenges posed by GenAI. Overcoming these substantive challenges will demand meaningful effort and a keen willingness to learn, on the part of both HR leaders and scholars. The paper concludes with a call to action for management scholars to engage in use-inspired research that bridges the gap between academic knowledge and practical HR challenges.