Agentic AI In HR: What It Is, What It Isn’t, & Why It Matters
There’s a growing buzz in the tech space around “agentic AI.” Some vendors claim their systems are now powered by autonomous agents that can think, act, and transform the way HR works. But do they? And what does that really mean?
What Actually Is Agentic AI? 🤔
At its core, agentic AI refers to artificial intelligence that acts with agency. That means it can:
- Understand goals
- Monitor conditions
- Make recommendations
- Take proactive steps toward achieving those goals.
Rather than reactive tools that wait for an input, this is AI that operates more like a collaborator: initiating tasks, coordinating actions across systems, and nudging humans when attention or decision-making is needed.
In HR, this could look like:
- Suggesting a candidate for a role before a recruiter conducts a search.
- Noticing a skills gap in a team and recommending training pathways for employees.
- Detecting an attrition risk and kicking off a “retention workflow”.
These aren’t far-fetched ideas. They’re already possible today – when you have the right data, context, and AI model(s) working together.
What Agentic AI Isn’t… ⛔
Right now, a lot of what’s being marketed as “AI agents” in HR is actually something else.
- A chatbot with pre-scripted answers
- A workflow that kicks off based on a rule
- A shiny interface over basic automation.
There’s nothing wrong with these features. They’re valuable. But calling them agentic misleads the conversation – and HR leaders deserve clarity.
How Beamery Is Approaching Agentic AI 🚀
We believe agentic AI has real potential in workforce transformation – and getting there requires more than marketing. It requires:
- Connected, clean data from across your HR systems.
- A deep (contextual) understanding of skills, roles, and organizational needs.
- Human oversight, transparency, and explainability at every step.
In other words: good, clean representative data is king, and you need guardrails and policies in place to ensure correct and fair behaviour.
Our platform is already using AI agents in the background to make work easier for HR professionals: matching people to roles, surfacing skill adjacencies, identifying talent risks, and powering career mobility.
There are two types of AI agents within our system today: those that are workflow-based (i.e pipelining talent), and those that improve the quality of data in our system (such as deduplication or monitoring the quality of our AI models when generating results).
The important thing isn’t whether a supplier is using agents – it’s about the outcomes that such usage can deliver.
Agentic AI is going to be an important part of HR going forward. But it’s not a magic switch you flip, and it’s not a label you slap on existing features. It’s an evolution in how AI supports workforce decisions: moving from passive tools to proactive partners.
As you evaluate AI claims from HR tech vendors, we recommend asking:
- What recommendations can this system make without being prompted?
- How does it connect data across the talent lifecycle?
- What level of oversight and transparency does it provide?
- Which elements should be handled by an agent vs a human?
- How can I ensure the treatment of candidates will not suffer as part of this?
- Am I taking on more business risk by adopting this product?
If the answers aren’t clear, it’s not agentic AI – it’s just marketing (and it’s not going to be transformative in how you manage workforce planning and make better decisions).