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AI Could Give Human Resources ‘More Than Human Power’

“We can keep the human part for the value-added things, meaning building relationships,” said Maki CEO.

Photo of a hiring interview
Photo by Sora Shimazaki via Pexels

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Do human resources departments need to rely entirely on human labor? 

As AI adoption ramps up among enterprises, CIOs are looking for ways that automation can transform every department – HR included. Though “human resources will remain human,” AI agents and automation could help departments make better use of their data and their time, said Maxime Legardez Coquin, CEO  and co-founder of AI talent acquisition firm Maki. 

“We want to give human resources more than human power,” said Legardez Coquin. 

Maki was founded in 2022, offering personalized conversational AI agents for talent acquisition. The company announced a $28.6 million Series A funding round in mid-January, and its client roster includes large companies like H&M, BNP Paribas, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Deloitte, FIFA and Abercrombie. 

Within HR departments, useful data is often “lost as soon as it’s created,” said Legardez Coquin. Employing AI in HR contexts could allow organizations to collect and utilize data from thousands of candidates and interviews to make better decisions with hiring and talent. “What we want to become is a kind of AI data layer that can help get data of talent pushed to the right place, to the right person at the right time.” 

The startup’s focus represents a growing enterprise use case for generative AI, especially as automation with agentic AI continues to capture the tech industry’s attention. “If we can automate plenty of things, we can keep the human part for the value-added things, meaning building relationships,” said Legardez Coquin. “I think it would be amazing.”

And the rush to adopt AI is already well underway: In hiring and recruitment alone, use of AI doubled between 2023 and 2024, from 26% to 53%, according to a survey of HR professionals by HR.com. A report from HR Brew found that just 13% of survey respondents hadn’t incorporated AI into their HR workflows. 

However, when using AI in HR contexts, it’s important to be aware of its risks – namely, models’ tendency to take on and amplify biases from their training data. Research from the University of Washington released in October found significant racial and gender discrimination in how large language models ranked resumes based on names.

This is why AI hiring tools shouldn’t rely just on resumes or “subjective criteria,” said Legardez Coquin. Maki’s tech instead relies on “assessing skills” of candidates that are relevant to any particular job, he said. “I think bias will always exist – with or without AI,” he said. “Over all the experience, what matters is the skill.”