Reengineering HR with AI
Week 1
I watched a senior director spend 45 minutes in a goal-setting meeting with her manager, both of them staring at a blank document, trying to figure out what she should actually work on this year.
They knew the company priorities.
They knew her role.
But connecting those two things?
That’s where the meeting died.
They ended up copying last year’s goals, changing a few words, and calling it done.
This happens in every organization, every January, and we pretend it’s fine.
The worst goal-setting outcome isn’t bad goals. It’s no goals at all. I’ve reviewed employee files where the goal section is blank, not because anyone refused to do the work, but because no one could figure out how to make their daily work connect to the business strategy.
The manager didn’t know.
The employee didn’t know.
HR sent reminders, held training sessions, provided templates.
Nothing changed.
We ask employees to set goals that ladder up to business objectives, but we give them zero tools to actually make those connections. We hand them a strategy deck full of corporate language about “driving operational excellence” and “fostering innovation,” then we’re surprised when they write goals like “complete projects on time” or “improve communication skills.” These aren’t goals. I hate to say it but they’re participation trophies in document form.
The manager-employee conversation that’s supposed to solve this?
It usually starts from zero because both people are equally lost about how the employee’s actual work connects to what the CEO talked about in the all-hands. We’ve been running this same broken process for decades, just moving it from Word docs to performance management systems, acting like the problem is the software.
Let me tell you what happens when employees don’t have real goals connected to real business outcomes.
An account lead spent six months building a program that the team and client was excited about. Beautiful execution. On time. Under budget. Then it launched and no one cared because it didn’t connect to the actual problem the business was trying to solve. In her year-end review, her manager said “great work, but not quite what we needed.” She left three months later.
The exit interview was polite. She talked about wanting new challenges. But I’d seen her goals from the beginning of the year. They were generic. “Deliver high-quality work.” “Collaborate with cross-functional teams.” Nothing about the client or the retention problem that was actually keeping executives up at night. Her manager had approved those goals because they sounded fine, and neither of them had a way to test whether they actually mattered.
We lost someone talented, not because she couldn’t do the work, but because we never helped her understand which work to do. That’s a failure of process, not people. And it’s expensive. The cost of rehiring, the lost productivity, the institutional knowledge that walked out the door. All preventable.
I know why we’re stuck here. Goal-setting is subjective, and HR hates subjectivity because it creates fairness problems. If we give employees tools that generate different suggestions based on their role and the business context, what happens when two people in the same job get different guidance? What if the AI suggests something that conflicts with what their manager thinks? What if there’s a legal risk we haven’t considered?
These concerns are real. But they’re also excuses for inaction. We’re so afraid of the edge cases that we’re accepting a process where the median case is failure. Most employees struggle to set meaningful goals. Most managers don’t have time to help them properly. Most HR teams spend January through March in an endless loop of reminders and check-ins that don’t actually improve the quality of anyone’s goals.
I’ve started building something new, and it’s changing how I think about this entire process.
I created an AI agent and fed it my 2025 goals and the 2025 business priorities to test it. Within minutes, it asked me questions I hadn’t considered.
“You said you want to improve employee engagement, how does that connect to the company’s focus on operational efficiency this year?” It pushed me to be specific.
“What does ‘improve’ mean in measurable terms?” It surfaced connections I’d missed.
“Based on the strategic priorities, have you considered how your work on engagement could reduce the time managers spend on performance issues?”
This isn’t theoretical. This is a working tool. And it completely reframes what the manager-employee conversation should be.
Instead of starting from scratch, trying to translate corporate strategy into individual work, the employee shows up having already explored the connections. They’ve tested different versions of their goals. They’ve seen how their work could ladder up to different business priorities. The manager’s job shifts from “help me figure out what I should do” to “here’s what I’m thinking, help me choose the right focus.”
The time savings for HR are real. Fewer employees asking for help. Fewer managers escalating confused employees. Fewer rounds of “please update your goals” because people actually understand what they’re supposed to write in the first place.
This doesn’t replace the manager-employee relationship. It makes it productive. The AI doesn’t decide what the goals should be. It helps employees think through the options so they can have a real conversation about priorities instead of a guessing game about what words to put in the boxes.
Next week, you can try this. Take your business strategy document, your team’s priorities, and build a simple prompt in the AI chat where you explain your role role and what you want to accomplish. Have it question your assumptions. Have it suggest connections. See what happens when AI can help employees come to goal-setting meetings prepared.
How are you using AI to reengineer your processes, not just digitize them?
Because if your answer is “we’re still figuring out the legal implications” or “we’re waiting to see what other companies do,” you’re already behind.
Your employees are using AI anyway. They’re just not telling you about it. The choice isn’t whether AI gets involved in your HR processes.
The choice is whether you’re going to shape how it happens or let it happen to you.
What are you actually reengineering?