AI Onboarding: The Future of Personalized Employee Journeys

For many workers, the rise of distributed, hybrid work has been a blessing for work/life balance and well-being. But these new ways of working have put a serious strain on productivity and employee engagement. The Institute for Corporate Productivity found productivity was at an all-time low in 2023, with worker output dropping at the fastest rate in 75 years in the U.S. One of the best ways to counter this trend in your organization is by understanding how you can use new AI onboarding technology to set your people up for success to work better and faster. 

HR tech analyst Josh Bersin predicts that “With AI every employee now has the potential to become a ‘superworker’ – an individual who leverages the power of AI to dramatically increase their productivity, performance, innovation, and output. Companies that embrace this evolution are set to outperform the competition at every level.”

No where can employee productivity be impacted more than during onboarding. Let’s dive into AI onboarding – what it is and how you can use it to personalize the onboarding experience and dramatically improve productivity.

What Is AI-Powered Employee Onboarding?

AI onboarding is the use of artificial intelligence to automate, personalize, and enhance the onboarding experience so your new hires can reach their full potential more quickly. It often takes a village to get a new hire up to speed – with significant coordination between HR, IT, and hiring managers. AI automates much of the back-end administration between these stakeholders, saving time and reducing the manual workload. Using AI, you can automate onboarding paperwork and compliance, personalize the journey, and deliver adaptive learning with just a few prompts.

Here are the key onboarding processes where AI can save time for your company and drive productivity for your new hire:

• Preboarding workflows: Using natural language prompts, HR can build preboarding journeys in minutes rather than hours. All you need are relevant onboarding documents, such as handbooks, company values, and legal policies. A workflow timeline, sequences, and module content is then automatically created.
• Functional onboarding: Similarly, hiring managers can use natural language prompts to quickly build a functional onboarding journey that introduces their new hires to role-specific tasks, tools, and responsibilities.
• Provisioning workflows: Ensuring new hires have access to the right tools and tech they need on day one is table stakes for maximizing productivity. AI can streamline IT provisioning, deprovisioning, and new technology induction.
• Departmental or company-wide workflows: Sometimes onboarding can mean onboarding your team to a new structure, process, or policy change. AI can help get everyone on the same page and ease change management with a logical journey that shares relevant information at the right time to the right people.

How AI Personalizes the Onboarding Experience

One of the biggest opportunities with AI onboarding is the ability to create customized experiences for each new hire, no matter which team or region they’re joining. Here are just some of the ways AI makes this easier.

Tailored Onboarding Journeys

Gone are the days of a one-size-fits-all approach. AI can analyze an employee’s role, experience level, and background to create a personalized onboarding plan that ramps them to productivity more quickly.

Automated Role-Specific Content Delivery

Starting a new job can be overwhelming AI ensures your new hire only receives information that’s relevant to their specific role so they’re not wasting precious ramp time. For example, your new sales representative could be directed to an interactive product training, whereas your engineer could receive development environment setup instructions.

Adaptive Learning Pathways

Let’s stop directing new hires to generic training libraries (and potentially wasting hours of searching or in the wrong classes). AI can assess your new hire’s existing skillset, determine knowledge gaps, and then recommend a personalized training program. 

Smart Document Management

Now you can finally hand over that daunting compliance checklist! With AI, you can drastically simplify – and in many ways remove – the administrative burden of document submission and tracking. Intelligent systems can auto-fill forms, verify documents, and send reminders for pending paperwork.

The Future of AI-Powered Employee Onboarding

HR teams are under increasing pressure to cut costs and lean into automation. Using AI in onboarding is one strategic way to not only do more with less, but also deliver a highly personalized, effective journey that speeds up new hire time-to-value. You’ll also be in good company. A recent BCG survey found that 70% of CHROs and other senior-level HR executives are “implementing, piloting, or scaling” programs using generative AI to improve HR administrative functions. Just think about all the strategic work your team can finally focus on when all those countless manual onboarding tasks are off their plates!